Not only do we all have a story, we all need to tell our story. It is a powerful, natural way to let go of emotional buttons and integrate our lives. Just telling your story can lessen the emotional load of a trying time. My younger daughters, ages 11 and 9, both keep diaries and write in them faithfully. This is a great age to encourage your children to begin their biography. But even if you are 75, it's not too late to begin.

As a spiritual teacher, I have taught many people personal growth tools and principles to help them heal their lives and actualize their potential. One of the most powerful techniques I know is journal writing. Writing down a record of your life and then reading the account you wrote days, weeks or years later is a powerful form of therapy you can do for yourself. How easy it would be to heal our inner children if we had written an account of their traumas as they were happening and kept this record to learn from later!

I started my first adult journal in a writing class 30 years ago. I was told there was a writer inside everyone. At the time, I didn't really believe that. Unfortunately, because of cleaning sprees and moves across country a couple of times, those old journals were lost. I never really valued them until I wrote my book, "One Miracle After Another."

It was 15 years ago, when my son's illness began, that my journal entries took on an entirely different flavor and intensity. I found myself writing down details in a way I hadn't done before. I was in the habit of writing down an ongoing dialogue of my feelings interspersed with questions I wanted answered from God. There were few actual details of my life and these entries I rarely read later. They didn't seem important enough to even hold onto. But when the roller coaster of having a child with cancer began, I changed inside. Writing down descriptions of the day and encounters with others became more important than what I was feeling. Something within compelled me to take detailed notes. It could have been the fear that my Toby might not live to grow up and I had to somehow capture him between the pages of my journal. It could also have been that what we were going through was not something that most people would ever go through.

Instilled with an outpouring of emotion, the new journal entries took on a life of their own. Three years later, when I decided to begin a book about Toby's experience with cancer, these journals proved invaluable. The skeleton of the book was in the daily entires of my journals; all I did was fill in the flesh as the book began to take form. Writing the book became a powerful tool for healing the trauma of my life and returning my sanity.

"One Miracle After Another" took 12 years to write from start to finish. When I first began the book, it seemed so important to finish. Knowing that I had experienced a cure for cancer with Toby made me push myself, force myself, even browbeat myself into finishing the book, though to no avail. I followed a pattern of intensive, short bursts of writing followed by an abrupt stop, when I would feel compelled to shelve the manuscript. Every few years, however, the energy of the book would bring it out of the closet and I would read it all over again. I would cry and integrate, cry and integrate all over again, and then write some more. It was a wonderful and cathartic healing.

The last three chapters of the book kept me hung up for years. I had stopped keeping a journal toward the end (the most important part) of the spiritual journey. There was no place to start the ending for I had no journal to work from, and1988 kept slipping farther and farther into the past. I wasn't sure if I could remember -- or even wanted to remember -- the end, even to save people dying of cancer. By this time, I had myself convinced that people wouldn't believe it anyway so sharing a cure for cancer didn't matter. Maybe the book was only for my healing and I didn't have to traumatize myself again by remembering. I was healed enough. If not for my editor, who encouraged me to finish it and told me how to break through the writer's block, it might still be in the closet.

The healing of your life is a funny thing. I can see now that completing the book and finishing the story was the biggest part of my healing. Completion is such a powerful thing. Although we all have a "never ending story," our chapters do need to be finished. If you are involved in a very heavy traumatic time in your life -- any time of big change -- do yourself a favor and write down all the details. Heavy trauma times are when our soul lessons are rapid, abundant and intense. Many lessons are missed until it is therapy time - time to make sense of it all. We see things in retrospect we could never see at the time.

The making of a soul is a lifetime process. Your story is important. Try journal writing to release pent-up feelings and to clarify your viewpoint. Don't forget to write down your perspectives and all the details of your life; it makes for more interesting reading later on. In addition, you just may have just the information that others need to hear. Living in the age of information, we are now able to share our stories easily and quickly with friends, family and even those we don't yet know.

Jackie Kosednar is a holistic health practitioner combining spiritual counseling, hypnotherapy and energy work. She is the publisher of Alaska Wellness magazine and the author of "One Miracle After Another." For more information, see www.healingtoby.com.