This photo perfectly encapsulates my holiday in the sun.

I spent a week in my beloved Portugal, east of Faro, in the places that are becoming an annual ritual for us.

I swam – in the sea and in the pool – ate delicious pasteis de nata and spent time generally hanging out with my love and my three gorgeous ’step daughters,’ relaxing in the sun and shade, playing their favourite card games (the game ‘Cheat’ seems to feature heavily) and gathering shells on Barril beach.

One highlight of the holiday was my rediscovery of the pleasures of the hammock. I last encountered hammocks of many bright colours strung between the trees in the grounds of a hotel on the shores of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. This holiday, the hammocks were white (courtesy of the owners of the stylish Quinta do Anjo, possibly the best holiday house in the sun that I’ve ever encountered – and believe me, I’m picky).

This holiday, I remembered just how good it feels to surrender to the gentle rhythm that is hammock relaxation, the ropes gently swaying, the light filtering through the cut-cane canopy and dappling my face, the crickets chirruping somewhere above my head.

Is this a kind of self-hypnosis? I think so. I can just close my eyes and be there now.

It’s good to be back in my beloved Yorkshire – via the Edinburgh Festival, where we were guests of the fabulous Dean Parkin (more on this later) – and to work with wonderful hypnotherapy clients this week.

I’m also returning – slowly, gradually – to the blogging thing and the Facebook and Twitter thing – but with  a new insight into how my break from the world of social media reinvigorated my creativity in many ways. More on this in days to come too.

In the meantime, thank you to those who noticed I was gone and enquired after my well-being. (I forgot to say that I was going away!) I so appreciate your kindness and caring.

It was good to be away-but-at-home-in-myself and it’s good to be home-and-fully-present-here in that way that taking some time out always creates for me.

Thank you for being part of it and connected with me.

Because over the past few months now, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what it is that I do as someone working in the field of well-being or personal and professional development or whatever term you prefer for it. OK, I am constantly giving it thought but lately I’ve been giving it extra turbo-charged thought and asking myself, rather frequently, whether all my stories about being a therapist sit easily with me.

Is being a therapist really congruent with who I feel I am? Are the particular stories I’m telling myself about what a therapist does and how I think a therapist might be perceived by others really helpful to me? (You know, at parties, when people ask me what I do, I have two things I can say: “I’m a therapist’ or ‘I’m a therapist and a poet.’ Yes. Exactly.)

But seriously. Passing on advice that might be helpful to people in living their lives is not exactly a new phenomenon. We’ve been doing it since ’society’ as such began. It used to take place in a tent or a hut or a cave or around a camp fire. Women or men passing on their knowledge and experience to one another, sharing stories, offering advice about everything in the human experience from how to bake the best bread or make the best tools to how best to deal with particular emotions – grief, loss, anger, love -  or care for a sick family member or deliver a baby.

Now we have the internet. And self-help books. If we’re lucky, we also have access to good medical and health care professionals and a supportive network of friends and family to help us to process our experiences as we move through life in progressive ways.

We might even enlist the support of a therapist or a coach. Because sometimes we don’t have that support network or it fails us in some way – by judging us or some bit of our experience or by just not being there for us in a way that is helpful.

And if, like me, you find yourself in this simultaneously completely natural (see ancient tribal systems, support networks, your granny) and also rather odd (see the Popular Psychology  section of any major book store) role of offering support to people, people who are challenged by something in their lives, whether that is fear or sickness or anxiety or the temporary  break-down of their ability to make meaning out of their life, that is one weird thing.

If you then blog or write about it too, perhaps you do open yourself up to the possible accusation that you might be telling people what to do, raising yourself above others in some way or claiming to have all the answers.

At this point, I am chuckling into my keyboard. Because, oh my goodness, the extent to which I just don’t have all the answers (whatever having all the answers might mean).

There are people who do appear to set themselves up as gurus, who appear to cultivate (consciously or subconsciously) a sense of status around who they are and what they do in the field of personal development. It may be fair to say that some people are attracted to this field for reasons other than trying to be of benefit to others.

But I don’t want this post to become all about How I Am Not One of Those People.

I want to share with you the script in my head that goes something like this: ‘I have discovered a few things, a few tools and approaches that are really helpful to me in my life and for my clients and I read all kinds of research that seems to hold some promise for what we are discovering all the time about how to develop the skills of happiness and resilience, but if I blog about them or write about them, people are going to think I am a Great Big Know-All. They might even attack me because they might think that I think that I am somehow better than them. Which I am not. They might think that I am claiming to have all the answers. Which I clearly don’t have. So I’d better just shut up and not try to share this stuff. In fact, maybe I shouldn’t be a therapist. Because who do I think I am?

Do you know that script? Or maybe you have something similar that applies to your stuff? You know, something like ‘I won’t send this poem out because then people might think that I think that I’m a really good poet, when actually I don’t think I am. And how embarrassing if it really is a bad poem and then they’ll think I’m stupid.’

I catch myself having these sorts of conversations with myself from time to time. Better shut up. Better not say anything that might make people think you are somehow better than them. Who do you think you are? It happens a lot less than it used to – and it’s usually a sign that I’m tired and need to rest.

And then a couple of days ago, Paul sent me (thanks, Paul) an excerpt from an interview in The Telegraph with the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The Telegraph calls him ‘the world’s hippest philosopher,’ which is another example of how the media loves to create a persona for someone.

The article is about Zizek’s new book and the excerpt Paul sent me reads like this:

‘When I ask Zˇizˇek if there are any pointers I’ve missed, he explodes one final time: “I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep s— you are in!” ‘

Hmm, I thought, as I read that. Tell that to the people with clinical depression who want to work with a therapist because they feel they have nowhere else to turn. Tell that to the young 19-year-old boy who can’t even leave his house or create friendships or do meaningful work because he is so incredibly anxious. Tell that to the client who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. What if we just said to these people ‘Go away. We’re all in deep s— anyway.’

Would that be helpful?

The interesting thing about Zizek’s argument is that he seems to be on the side of impossible dreams. Earlier in the interview, he argues against what he calls ‘the standard liberal-conservative argument against communism’ which says that ’since it wants to impose on reality an impossible dream, it necessarily ends in terror.’

Zizek argues that we should be able to build something new, maybe a new kind of communism. He asks: ‘What, however, if one should nonetheless insist on taking the risk of enforcing the Impossible onto reality? Even if, in this way, we do not get what we wanted and/or expected, we none the less change the coordinates of what appears as ‘possible’ and give birth to something genuinely new.”

Well, yes. Exactly. Reach for the moon. Travel joyfully. It’s not about arriving but about the journey, the process. These are central tenets of most personal development systems and approaches.

It seems that Zizek isn’t personally in deep s— after all. He has hope, he has ideas. He has a sense of purpose and passion. He sees that the impossible really can become possible.

I hope people realise that I don’t presume to tell anyone how to live or make themselves happy. But I do passionately believe in the value of the camp fire (virtual or otherwise), in story-telling and sharing. I believe that people have a right to as much information and discussion as possible about what might be helpful and what seems to work for others.

It’s easy to scoff, to say ‘why bother?’ or to talk about the ‘luxury’ of so-called developed world psychological problems. You might as well say to someone ‘Pull yourself together.’

In the end, we do need more and better ways to help people to feel good and live ordinarily every-day wonderful, even ‘impossible’ lives.

Zizek has reminded me why I continue to write about them.

Exactly. Which is why a new study led by Chien-Ming Yang from the National Chengchi University in Taipei, and reported here in the wonderful Mindhacks blog, is so interesting.

The new study investigates the early phases of sleep, the transitions between wakefulness and sleep often referred to as the hypnagogic state.

The way that our mind works in this phase is, as yet, poorly understood – just as the phenomena of hypnosis are poorly understood from anything other than a phenomenological level. As yet, neuroscience can’t explain hypnosis, just as it can’t yet fully explain the complex mechanisms of sleep and dreaming.

This new study took a very small sample size – 20 people – and asked them to take an afternoon nap in the lab whilst wired up to an EEG monitor measuring electrical activity in the brain, eye movement,  heart rate and muscular movements. It combined this data with accounts from the participants themselves about their experiences. Here is how Mindhacks reports the study:

‘As the participants drifted off they were awakened at different times: either just after eye-closing, the onset of ’stage 1′ sleep where you’re still aware of the external world, the onset of ’stage 2′ sleep where awareness starts to diminish, and after five minutes at ’stage 2′ where awareness should have largely disappeared.

After wakening, participants were asked questions about their perception of being asleep and the experience of their own minds: “Did you fall asleep?”, “Did you see any visual images?”, “Were you able to control your perceptual experiences?”, “How real did any of the experiences seem to you?”, “How well were you able to control your thoughts?”, “Were your thoughts logical?” and several questions to try and capture the conscious experience of sleep onset.’

The study found that the experience of having control over their own thoughts, and how coherent and logical these thoughts appeared to be, began to change almost as soon as the participants closed their eyes. As time went on, the thoughts appeared increasingly unusual and autonomous.

However, as soon as ’stage 2′ sleep began, participants seemed to experience a marked change into a state of mind where thoughts became much more freewheeling and seemingly illogical, almost as if they took on a life of their own.

Participants’ awareness of the outside world remained largely present until ’stage 2′ kicked in, at which point it quickly dropped off.

It seems that, when woken, people largely reported the experience that ‘I was asleep’ when they felt that they no longer had control over their increasingly illogical thoughts and not when their awareness of their surroundings was reduced.

This is very interesting on a number of levels for a hypnotherapist. Firstly, as hypnotherapists, we will have experienced our clients returning to full conscious awareness of the room, reporting things like: ‘That was weird. I know I wasn’t asleep. I could hear everything you were saying but it was as if my thoughts kept drifting around.’ Or ‘I was aware of everything and I could hear your voice but I can’t quite remember now what you were saying. I went to all kinds of places.’

If I were to guess, I would say that the ’stage 1′ phase of hypnagogia certainly seems quite similar to that of hypnosis – with the marked difference that the hypnotherapist is using language and suggestion that is designed to enable the client to  experience a more focused quality of awareness, with their thoughts directed towards particular imagery, ideas, feelings and sounds.

Another way of interpreting the test data might be that thoughts become less consciously directed as participants drift from ’stage 1′ to ’stage 2.’

I often feel that these fascinating studies are just barely touching the surface of some of the richest and most mysterious experiences of our inner life: thought, day-dreaming, fantasy, creative imagination, trance.

What I like about this small study is its methodology – correlating EEG data with interviews with the participants themselves. I think it’s only when we start to put the two kinds of research together  that we begin to get a picture of what happens when we turn our attention inside ourselves.

I’m passionate about it because it seems to me that so much can be done with some very basic information and resources that can make very positive changes in the experiences of so many women and babies. And it could result in huge costs savings to the NHS.

Athough there is a lot more information now available about using hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis to prepare for the birth of your baby, many women still do not pursue this approach and one of the reasons that I think tends to put them off is the perception that hypnosis for childbirth is all a bit ‘hippy’ and ‘alternative’ – in other words, that there is enormous pressure on women choosing this approach to have a totally natural and drug-free delivery.

So I want to dispel this myth right here and now. Because any well-trained hypnotherapist will adhere to a strict code of ethics in working with women to help them to prepare for the birth of their baby in a way that supports the client’s choices, views and desires. This is all about using modern tools of hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis to enjoy the birth that you want to have.

The women I’ve worked with have used the hypnotherapy sessions and self-hypnosis audios that I give them to let go of fear, unwanted emotions, unhelpful stories and associations around birth and to access the powerful natural resources they possess to have a safe birth in a way that works for them.

The work we have done together has helped them to enjoy more control and calm over their birth experience and to make choices that feel right for them.

There is now a growing body of research to suggest that the use of simple self-hypnosis techniques can reduce length of labour and the need for medical intervention.

This is not really rocket science. It makes perfect sense that anything that helps to minimise the adrenaline response – therefore minimising muscular tension, production of other stress hormones and sensitivity to pain and discomfort – is going to be enormously helpful in childbirth. We are beginning to discover that consistent practice in self-hypnosis can enable people to minimise or interrupt the the ‘fight or flight’ or adrenaline response and increase production of ‘feel-good’ chemicals such as the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin.

Regular practice with self-hypnosis audios, use of simple ‘anchors’ to reinforce positive, progressive feeling states and develop calm and confidence and looking at the way that you talk to yourself inside your own mind are all part of this process.

Then there are other interesting applications of hypnotherapy – working in session with a trained and experienced practitioner – that can provide other sorts of powerful benefits. A couple of weeks ago I was delighted to be able to assist a first-time mother in helping her baby, who was breech position, to turn. We achieved this together through simple visualisation and breathing techniques in hypnosis – and this client felt justifiably proud that she had been able to achieve this. There is lots of anecdotal evidence of using hypnotherapy to help breech babies to turn – I’ve witnessed it quite a few times in my practice now – and I think we need more research into this fascinating application of hypnotherapy.

For me, the most important aspect of my work using hypnotherapy for childbirth  is that my client feels supported and able to make the choices she wants to make with informed advice from her other health care providers. For me, this isn’t an ‘alternative’ treatment but one that beautifully complements the work of doctors, consultants, nursing staff and midwives.

Whether you opt for a homebirth in a birthing pool or a birth in hospital – and whether these plans change over time – self-hypnosis and hypnotherapy help you to prepare and develop valuable tools that can help you at every stage.

In amongst all the many messages and pieces of advice that seem to be targeted at expectant mothers from every angle these days, hypnotherapy for childbirth is about finding and strengthening your way – by developing trust in what your body can do so wonderfully and finding what is most helpful for you personally.

Hypnotherapy for childbirth – not just for drum-banging advocates  of ‘natural childbirth’ but a powerful modern complement to the very best health care.

This writing is a piece of free-writing, produced very quickly, without pausing to edit or cross-out or ‘think’ things through. Free-writing is about letting go of our expectations of ourselves, the ’shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ through which we think rather than feel our writing. It’s about letting go of or slipping past that internal critic that sits waiting to judge us before we’ve even opened our mouths or made our mark on the page.

I asked participants to use free-writing to write a ‘praise poem’ to their clients  – or perhaps to a particular client that came to mind, perhaps even a client who had been challenging to work with in some way.

What emerged for this participant is, we all thought, so beautiful and already so naturally formed and it really spoke to all of us, and so I asked her permission to share it with you here:

Praise poem to my clients

You who want something different, different from this, different from before;

you who have been carrying, hauling, dragging;

you whose hands spin dinner plates to a song heard once on the radio in that restaurant in Mykonos, so many years ago now but still as new; and you whose feet dance tango to a different tune;

you who shriek, who whisper; and you who don’t yet know the words.

Put down what you are carrying,

put down your plates, whole and broken, your whispers, whole and broken,

put down your feet, one in front of the other.

See that different is where you already are, when you tilt your head in that particular way,

when you look over my right shoulder and see the future.

I love this poem. It so perfectly sums up for me the spirit of what the hypnotherapist, Stephen Brooks, calls ‘working from the heart.’ I thank the person who allowed me to share this with you all. I’m deeply grateful that I get to work with such wonderful people.

I have been so busy planning various new projects including new work with the University of York in Writing for Personal and Professional Development, my new Hypnotherapy Training Diploma in York in 2011 with Adam Eason and a new peer support group for all hypnotherapists in the Yorkshire area.

The new peer support group is this Wednesday 19 May at 7pm at the York Novotel. Please do get in touch if you’re a professional hypnotherapist in Yorkshire and would like to come along.

So myth-busting. Well, actually, it’s not exactly myth-busting today but more a discussion about a term. This term ‘hypnotherapy/ist.’ What do we mean by it?

For example, in my own mind these days, I tend to think of hypnotherapy as a form of solution-focused, brief psychotherapy that utilises hypnosis to help people to make positive and progressive changes in their lives. When I’m working with someone, I might use an entire range of approaches that a solution-focused brief therapist would use together with hypnotic language patterns and hypnotherapy ‘techniques.’

I might use tasking and journaling and draw upon ideas from the Human Givens approach or Stephen Gilligan’s Self-Relations model of psychotherapy. I will always, without exception, teach my clients self-hypnosis – because, really, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis (according to my own research and understanding, anyway) and I believe that self-hypnosis is a very powerful tool for increased calm, confidence and the ability to manipulate our own internal states in helpful ways.

However, one of the issues which I think we face in the field dof hypnotherapy today is the public understanding of the term ‘hypnotherapist.’ For example, some people might immediately think about past life regression – although I never use this in my work – or that a hypnotherapist will help them to ‘remember something they’ve forgotten.’ Or they say ‘Don’t look into my eyes…’ as if I have some kind of power over them…

These are all concepts that are surrounded with controversy, mystery and, yes, comedy in the public awareness and need careful consideration if you want to be an effective hypnotherapist.

For me, becoming an effective therapist of any kind is about developing a style of therapy – and my style happens to incorporate hypnosis, self-hypnosis and Ericksonian approaches, along with some CBT (which has a long history of association with hypnosis) and some more broadly brief therapy approaches.

What do we mean when we talk about ‘hypnotherapy’? We know that there is nothing intrinsically therapeutic about hypnosis as a state (or non-state, depending upon your point of view) in itself.

I don’t like calling myself a ‘hypnotist’ because for me that has connotations of stage hypnotism and the idea that there is a person doing the hypnotising to someone else – whereas my personal model of hypnotherapy is a kind of self-hypnosis that two people co-create. Something like that. I don’t think someone can go into/access the feeling of hypnosis unless they agree to and want to do so. (But there will be hypnotists out there who disagree with that statement.)

There are colleagues of mine who are equally happy with both the term ‘hypnotist’ and hypnotherapist.’ There are others who want to distance themselves from the least possible whiff of ‘New Age’ jargon. There are probably as many ways of doing therapy as there are clients out there looking for it.

But it seems to me that we do need some kind of framework – especially if we are going to continue developing standards of training and CPD and incorporate research – qualitative and quantitative – into the field of hypnotherapy.

So I am really interested to hear what you think? What does the term ‘hypnotherapy’ mean to you?

I was browsing a bookshop in Helmsley at the time and she came up behind me and said, ‘Is that you, Sophie?’ Apparently, the fact that I was looking in the poetry section was the give-away. Ha.

Anyway, this very nice person had spotted that I have been talking in recent weeks about the new Hypnotherapy Training Diploma that I’ll be launching in 2011 here in York and which I’ll be co-training with the hypnotherapist and author, Adam Eason.

She wanted to know all about the Diploma and why I had decided to work with Adam in this way.

I thought this was a very good question. So here are the reasons why I’ve chosen to get involved in this fantastic Diploma course and co-train it with Adam.

Number One: Adam Eason is, in my opinion, among the foremost hypnotherapists working in the world today. Not only is he like a walking encyclopedia of hypnotherapy but he is also a very skilled communicator of this knowledge… and a darn fine therapist too. So I couldn’t resist the opportunity to work with him in this way an help to bring top-class training to the North of England.

Number Two: As you will probably know if you read this blog regularly, I’m passionate about working to improve the quality of information out there about hypnotherapy and therapy in general. I believe that, as a therapist, I have a responsibility to help improve understanding of best practice in my professional field, to disseminate the latest research and to help potential clients to make informed choices about whether my style of therapy is most likely to be helpful to them.

Part of that is also contributing to high-quality, evidence-based training in hypnotherapy. And that is exactly what this Intensive Diploma provides.

Quite frankly, it offers the kind of training that I wish I had been able to access at the very beginning of my career as a therapist. It’s taken Adam and I years to accumulate the knowledge and experience that we’ll be sharing with you – about precisely what does and doesn’t work – and also about how to have a successful practice that will enable you to keep working with people to make changes to their lives.

Number Three: It’s going to be lots of fun. These days, I am committed to only getting involved with projects that I know I will enjoy. And I know that I’m going to have so much fun spending focused time with a group of highly-motivated people in a lovely room by the river in my beautiful hometown of York, talking about and giving them hands-on experience of the work that I love.

Plus, I get to work with Adam, one of my favourite people (but don’t tell him I said that).

I’m not going to fib. It’s going to be hard work. We are going to challenge you and push you in all kinds of ways to develop all the skills you will need – but we’re going to have lots of fun in the process. I love running training. I always learn so much myself. And I get to meet some amazing and personally very inspiring people.

If you’d like to find out more about the Intensive Hypnotherapy Training Diploma in York in 2011, accredited with all the major hypnotherapy bodies in the UK, the States and Australiaclick over to Adam’s site here and all the information that he’s posted for you about the course content and what you can expect from working with us.

Because we want you to get a flavour of our approach as therapists, we’re offering some freebies, including one of Adam’s amazing self-hypnosis audios, just for requesting the prospectus. (In my opinion, Adam’s self-hypnosis audios are simply the best around – well, perhaps apart from mine, of course. Ha ha ha.)

So if high-quality, comprehensive hypnotherapy training in the North of England is what you’re looking for, this just might be the course for you. Did I mention that it also includes an NLP Practitioner certification too?

OK, I am heading off to put the finishing touches to my planning for an exciting new Writing for Personal and Professional Development workshop later this week at the University of York. It’s all go here. Have a great Monday.

In 1926, Milner decided to keep her own journal (a sort of close self-analysis) of the movements of her own mind, which she later published under the name of Joanna Field as a little-known but fascinating book, A Life of One’s Own (1934).

Milner’s motivation for keeping a journal was in order to understand more about the background feelings of anxiety and dissatisfaction with herself that she had experienced for as long as she could remember. In particular, she wanted to understand why:

‘in certain moods the very simplest things, even the glint of electric light on the water in my bath, gave me the most intense delight, while in others I seemed to be blind, unresponding and shut off’ (p.68).

Using a method that would now be widely recognised by the field of positive psychology, Milner decided to track her moods and to identify what was helpful and unhelpful to her well-being. Her approach was not psychoanalytical but practical and behavioral, focused not on analysing the past but on noticing more consciously what is happening in the present.

In fact, her journal became an impressive piece of qualitative research as well as a practice of self-care. She kept it faithfully for seven years, at the end of which time she concluded that the single most important aspect of the way in which she experienced any one event or situation was the quality of attention that she brought to it.

She wrote: ‘I found that there were different ways of perceiving and that the different ways provided me with different facts. There was a narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from blinkers and with the centre of my awareness in my head; and there was a wide focus which meant knowing with the whole of my body, a way of looking which quite altered my perception of whatever I saw’ (p.15).

Although, initially, Milner was only able to access this more bodily awareness when she was ‘too tired to think’ and so able to ‘let go of the idea that one ought to have thoughts’ (pp75-76), she gradually developed the ability to induce this state by making what she describes as ‘an internal gesture of the mind’.

For example, when listening to an orchestra in concert, Milner noticed that ‘direct trying’ did not enable her to really listen or to still the chatter of her own thoughts; but by making an internal gesture by which she ‘seemed to put my awareness into the soles of my feet,’ or sent ‘something which was myself out into the hall’ she enabled intent listening to ‘just happen’ (pp.69-70).

Milner describes the series of small, barely perceptible movements through which she arrives at this wider more bodily awareness. Among them, she notes a pressing of her awareness ‘against the limits of my body until there was vitality in all my limbs and I felt smooth and rounded,’ and ‘the
spreading of some vital essence of myself…like the spreading of invisible sentient feelers’ (pp.73-74).

Over time, she realised that she could learn to control this ‘internal gesture’ so that she could move from a more narrow focus to a more bodily ‘wide attention’ at any time she chose.

I cannot think of a relevant piece of research for the practice of personal development today. Milner’s experiements in attention seem to me to be  fascinating descriptions of discovering the benefits of self-hypnosis and how these can be applied consistently over time.

In fact, if we look at the latest research in cognitive science, we might even suggest an underpinning for the kind of ‘internal gesture’ that Milner describes. There is growing evidence from developmental psychology that, as children, we possess interpersonal body schemas (an awareness based on self-other) and a rudimentary sense of proprioceptive self – from birth.

If this is the case, then Milner’s idea of ‘wide attention’ – based on a more bodily and felt self-experience (rather than our more habitual conceptual and thought experience) -  might be fundamental to the way that we experience and develop in the world.

It’s possible to see Erickson’s work as building upon this ‘indirect’ approach. By practising wider attention ourselves as hypnotherapists and by helping our clients to learn how to let go of more ‘direct trying’, we may be accessing something that is crucial to our sense of well-being.

Marion Milner – a woman ahead of her time and bold enough to depart from the ideas of her contemporaries to seek ways of undestanding how to acquire the attitudeand skill of happiness. Her writing is perhaps more relevant today than it ever was.

References:
Maron Milner [Joanna Field] (1934) A Life of One’s Own. London: Virago

R D Laing

This, from one of the most influential psychotherapists of the 20th century, merits further reflection, I think.

When we slow down enough to notice, to become more consciously aware of, a feeling or a response and how we are doing that response, we can begin to let go of it or enhance it, do more or less of it, depending upon the effects that we now notice it has on our well-being.

So much of what I do as a hypnotherapist is about helping people to notice, right now, how they’re doing this thought, this feeling.

What is that film you’re running inside your mind, right now, and what effect is it having on the way you live your life?

Sometimes your body is desperately trying to tell you something. When you slow down enough to notice – not just with your head but with your body and your breathing – what is happening for you and how you’re doing that response, it is so much easier to begin to recognise what is helpful and what is unhelpful to you.

It can be interesting, surprising – and fun – to notice, with a kind curiosity towards yourself, what you’re doing in any one moment.

You may want to spend the next hour or so just experimenting with that and notice what you notice.

Our first meeting will be in central York on Wednesday 19 May, beginning at 7.30pm.

There will be an opportunity for us to learn new approaches to hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis through informal short presentations and workshops and to do some peer supervision together and discuss issues relating to our business and practice in a friendly and supportive environment.

The first meeting will be on Wednesday 19 May at 7.30pm.

I’ll get us started with a fun workshop on ‘That Self-Care Thing I’m Supposed To Do: New ways to nurture your well-being and creativity as a hypnotherapist.’

If you think this group sounds like something you would enjoy being a part of, or if you’d like to come along to the first meeting and decide if it’s for you, please do drop me an email or give me a call and I’ll confirm details and venue.

Have a fabulous day – the sun is shining here in York, the daffodils are nodding away…