I had no idea what I was going to say.

There is so much uncertainty in the world right now. Things feel as if they’re changing and changing fast – and that can be so challenging for us human beings.

The financial system, the weather system, ways of thinking and living that we’ve know for a long time, all seem to have been tossed up in the air like a bundle of pick-up sticks.

Who knows where they’ll fall?

But something new will happen. It always does.

One of the things I’ve been spending some time thinking about recently is, where do I, one small person, fit amidst all this change in the world?

What is mine to do?

I can only make a difference in my own tiny corner of the universe. How do I do that to the very best of my ability? How do I best use my resources?

How can I really continue to enjoy and relish this precious life that I’m so lucky to have been given? Because I really think I have a responsibility to do that, to have fun, to live as well as I can, to learn as much as I can, in addition to being as responsible as I can.

And then, of course, there’s the voice that creeps in, whispering, but isn’t that frivolous? Amid all the devastation and suffering right now, how is this even important?

And, as I listen deeply, as I write, as I share my process with the wonderful people who do my e-courses and workshops and come and work with me one-to-one, I’ve begun to get very clear that my work with writing is absolutely central to all this.

I’m still going to be working with my hypnotherapy clients here in York. I love doing this work. It’s where everything – my research, my passion, my interest in so many areas of personal development – comes together for me.

And I’m going to be developing more and more of my work over at Word Sauce.

It’s time.

I do hope you’ll join me on this next stage of the journey. It feels like a very natural evolution for me. If you’ve been following this blog over recent months, you’ll know that I’ve been writing less about techniques and interventions (that way of working was never truly mine anyway) and  more about acceptance, surrender, mindfulness, allowing our light to shine.

Writing more about less.

My work with Word Sauce – the e-courses, the workshops, the community -  is growing. I’m working on a book about writing and being.

It all feels right. It feels time.

Over at my new blog wordsaucery.com, I’ll be writing about writing and living and everything that the process of writing continues to teach me about mindfulness, self-hypnosis and simply being in the world.

I may still pop back here from time to time for the odd reflection on self-hypnosis. I might not. I haven’t really decided yet. We’ll see where it all takes me.

I hope you’ll follow me on this next part of the journey. I’m curious and excited about what it will bring.

Whether we meet again or not, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for being such wonderful readers and friends to me over the last four years. Every comment, every email I’ve received has been important to me in some way.

I wish you well on your own journey.

Do come and put your head round the door at wordsaucery.com

You’ll always be so welcome.

And thank you again. Heartfelt thank you.

I’ve just been tweaking this week’s materials for Word Sauce, and I thought it might be fun to give you a little glimpse of one of the exercises that I suggest Word Saucerers play around with this week.

It’s based around the idea of the kinds of internal conversations or ‘dialogues’ we so often get stuck in, where apparently conflicting parts of ourselves get locked into endless conversations.

In these sorts of dialogues, we often end up splitting-off parts of ourselves, perhaps calling one aspect of ourselves ‘good’ whilst another is ‘bad.’

You probably know the particular conversation that goes: ‘I really should be writing/painting/working on my business plan/making those calls today. If I were really good at this, that’s what I’d be doing. I’m so annoyed with myself because I’m being really rubbish today. In fact, I’m totally useless at all this stuff…’ and so on.

The part of ourselves that really doesn’t want to be ‘good’ gets demonised. We ignore the energy in it. We ignore what it’s trying to tell us about ourselves because we don’t really want to look. We beat ourselves up, push this stuff down – until the next time it comes up to give us a hard time.

Sometimes we don’t even notice this is happening until we really slow down and listen to how we’re talking to ourselves inside our own minds.

So this ‘dialoguing’ exercise (which I’ve developed over the years from an idea I first came across in a workshop with Cheryl Moskowitz)  is a way of encouraging people to use all of their creativity to tap into the conversations between two conflicting parts or ‘selves’ – with paper, pens, glue and scissors, images gathered from magazines, doodles, words and found objects.

Then we explore a series of writing exercises around these ‘good’ and ‘bad’ selves in which they get get rounded out into characters with separate names and lives who can then meet, talk and perhaps exchange something with one another.

Those of you interested in therapeutic models will recognise elements of ‘parts therapy’ (Gestalt, Virginia Satir’s ‘parts party’) in this approach.

Most importantly for me, the exercise is a playful way of exploring our different expressions of self and getting internal conversations and conflicts out onto the page so that we can look at them, write from them, use them in more helpful ways.

In the picture above, you’ll see the early stages of my imaging of Victoria (actually my middle name) and Amelie. Victoria is very sensible and hard-working. Amelie wanders around Paris, sipping espresso in pavement cafes and watching the world go by.

Victoria plans everything. Amelie loves to be spontaneous. She’s what my Grandma would have called ‘a bit flighty.’

Victoria has a well-paid job with a respected international training company. Amelie doesn’t really know what she’s doing from one day to the next, but it always seems to work out somehow.

I’m chuckling to myself as a I write this.

I’ve seen people have some amazing shifts and ‘letting go’ moments whilst working on their dialogues in the Word Sauce courses. It’s just one of the reasons, I love doing this work.

You can read more about Cheryl Moskowitz’s ‘Self as Source’ exercise in this book here.

‘It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone.’

I’m working on rising early these days and using the time to read quietly, write in my notebook, think things through.

This morning I made a cup of green tea (I love this warming Green Chai from Pukka), dipped into the notes I’d made before falling asleep  yesterday evening, and read from a beautiful book, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World, by John O’Donohue. This is the opening paragraph:

‘It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No-one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through our voices, we bring out sounds from the mountain beneath the soul. These sounds are words. The world is full of words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio, in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. We take each other’s sounds and make patterns, predictions, and blasphemies. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the ‘world’ together. Yet the uttering of the word reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.’

I love this. Don’t you?

‘A world lives within you. No-one else can bring you news of this inner world.’

We only have to listen deeply for a moment, let go just a little, enough to allow the first sounds to surface.

Today, another wonderful group of Word Saucerers are starting their process of ‘Letting Go.‘ I had to share this quote with them and I hope it speaks to them as it did to me this morning.

If, like me, you hadn’t come across Anam Cara before, I do recommend it. There are so many passages of reverie and wisdom, such as this one.

I want to always remember the strange mystery of being here. This a reminder of what a gift it is.

And I’d like to thank the lovely Helen for recommending Anam Cara to me.

‘yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.’

- James Joyce, Ulysses

I’ve always loved this passage from Molly Bloom’s reverie in Ulysses, where she remembers her first meeting with the man who is her husband.

It’s one of the earliest examples of what was to become known as ‘stream of consciousness’ in literature, where we get a sense of a character’s free flow of private, internal thoughts.

It’s a window into a time when psychology and the understanding of the subconscious began to change the way that writers wrote. It fascinates me.

And Molly’s monologue – which spills thrillingly over pages and pages – both begins and ends with ‘yes.’

Joyce is said to have described yes as ‘the female word’ that indicated ‘acquiescence and the end of all resistance.’

But Molly isn’t a passive or receptive character. She’s central to the book. Her physicality shapes the narrative and, over and over,  Joyce contrasts her sensual pleasure in and curiosity about the world with the dry intellectualism of her husband Leopold and his male friends.

‘ yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know…’

Molly Bloom embodies yes. The end of all resistance for Molly is not saying ‘yes’ to a man – or to anyone else – but saying ‘yes’ to herself.

Yes.

What happens when you say ‘yes’ – to that project you’re toying with, to writing, to a relationship, to life?

What happens when you say ‘yes’ to yourself as creator of your own life?

Maybe is a different feeling. When I say ‘maybe’ to something, it feels vague, hard to get hold of. It drifts, it wobbles, it feels timid or fearful. It occupies too much space in my mind whilst I compute possible scenarios, rehearse pros and cons.

Maybe I’ll sit down to write this evening, but I haven’t really made up my mind. I’ve been thinking about what I need to do to move forward but I’m not sure I want to figure it all out right now. It feels too big, too difficult.

Sometimes ‘no’ is better than ‘maybe.’ It can free you up.

But I don’t think we have to be certain – that is, without all uncertainty – to say ‘yes.’

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what it is that you’re writing yet or what it is that your new project or relationship might ultimately become.

You can still begin with ‘yes’ and feel that ‘yes’ reverberate deep inside you. You can say ‘yes’ to letting something unfold, with all its patterns and possibilities, let ‘yes’ ripple up through you, finding its own form.

Yes to discovery. Yes to finding out more. Yes to asking more questions. Yes to not knowing yet and allowing, feeling somewhere in your body. Yes.

Perhaps yes really is ‘the feminine word,’ the connection with the feminine in us all – the unpunctuated, curious, rhythmic expansion and contraction of all possibility.

Yes.

So begins the poem ‘Peonies’ by Mary Oliver, a poem I’ve always loved because it reminds me that everything, everything is there each morning to be fallen in love with, over and over again, as long as I’m willing to keep an open heart.

This morning the sun shines across the kitchen table. The tomatoes in the bowl glow like lamps. I watch the shadows on the floor spill like water.

I’m feeling the happiness that always comes from taking a few moments to slow down and really look at my world, the little details. The world can be incredibly soft and yielding to us, even on the harshest of days.

I’m thinking that this is what Mary Oliver might mean when she writes in another poem, ‘Wild Geese,’ that:

‘Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.’

‘Do you love this world?’ she asks us, in ‘Peonies.’

‘Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?’

Today, whoever you are and wherever you find yourself in your life, the world is waiting for you. It’s waiting for you to fall in love with it all over again.

So this is my Valentine to you.

Blaze open.

Love deeply. Yes, even ‘the terror beneath.’ (And I’m thinking that the greatest challenge of my life, so far, is learning especially to love ‘the terror beneath.’)

Please know that, just by being here, you bestow the beautiful gift of your gaze, your unique loving on the world. What you create, each day, is powerful beyond even your wildest imaginings.

Only you can do this. In your way.

The world is waiting for you.

Take your place.

Love.

Everything.

Let it be.

What I rediscovered and re-membered last week when I visited the wonderful Andrea Franzi for an osteopathic treatment.

Let it be.

Sometimes, with all of our techniques and processes, it’s easy to forget that all that is necessary in a practice of meditation, mindfulness or self-hypnosis is to simply notice what arises.

To drop into our bodies. To be with what we experience there, embody it, be it – without judgement, analysis, interpretation.

Sometimes that is enough.

Sometimes that’s so difficult too. Hard to be with the breath when the mind is chattering away. Difficult to simply notice and be with images, colours, thoughts that arise without asking why, wanting to understand further, make connections, find meaning.

Frightening to connect with parts of ourselves that feel painful, not good enough, this flesh that we think is too saggy or baggy, this pain that we’ve somehow split off from ourselves because ‘it’  is too much for us to bear.

It’s hard when we both are a body and also have a body, all at the same time.

And yet, being with, being in, being… This is where I keep returning.

I move into my body, remembering what it feels like to inhabit it from the inside out, I notice, with curiosity, a little line of red moving up from the midpoint of my stomach, a pulsing in my right shoulder.

This is where I am right now. This is what I am. Right now.

Such peace in this. Light streams through the window, moves over my eyelids, moves through me and around me and it’s as if I’m breathing with my entire body, every cell of my body opening to receive it.

Sometimes we need techniques, visualisations, processes.

Sometimes we need to be the process.

There are many things in my life right now that I can’t change. And, as I acknowledge that, there comes a point of stillness, of peace.

Surrender.

This is the word I chose last month as my word for 2011. (You can see it here on the altar I created for Amy Palko’s beautifully supportive Bloom By Moon programme.)

I’m very grateful to Andrea for reminding me that surrender begins with the body, with the breath.

Let it be.

‘It is very appropriate, at certain times of the day or night, to look deeply into objects at rest…’

- Pablo Neruda

In fact, it’s probably fair to say that Celia invented the field of creative writing and personal development (although she would never lay claim to this herself).

In 1996 she set up and ran the unique MA programme in Creative Writing and Personal Development at the University of Sussex which, until her retirement last year, recruited students from all over the world and inspired an entire movement of teachers, therapists, healthcare practitioners and workshop facilitators with Celia’s combination of passion, theoretical grounding, creativity and rigorous research enquiry.

Celia was a founder member of Lapidus, the UK-based organisation for the literary arts in personal development. She has pioneered research into writing and wellbeing, has published many papers in the field and is the editor and/or author of three seminal texts: The Self on the Page and Writing: Self and Reflexivity (each with Fiona Sampson) and Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing.

Celia lives in Lewes in Sussex where she enjoys the beauty of the old town, with its castle and ancient houses, its proximity to the Sussex Downs and the sea.

She’s currently working on her next book, Creative Life Writing as a Tool for Transformative Learning, to be published by Routledge in 2012.

So, pull up a chair and get to know a little more about the wonderfully inspiring  Celia Hunt.

Where did it all begin? How did you become interested in creative writing and personal development?
It all began through my own quest to know myself better, to go right back to the beginning. I guess I could say that it began with my reading of Marion Milner’s book A Life of One’s Own, which I must have read in the 1970s. That has always been such an inspiring book for me and, I know, for many other people too. It’s a sort of self-analytic autobiography, in which the author tries to find out through diary writing what makes her happy, presumably because she isn’t happy much of the time. It very much spoke to me about my own dissatisfaction with my life at the time and it encouraged me to start exploring myself through writing autobiographical novels.

That was in the 1980s and early 1990s. Around the same time I went into psychotherapy, so I suppose you could say that I was exploring myself through two different methods: the writing and the therapy. And sometimes they came together because I would take bits of writing into therapy to discuss with my therapist. This was very helpful and stimulating.

Also around that time I started studying the MA in Language, the Arts and Education at the University of Sussex, run by poet Peter Abbs. This involved doing a combination of academic and creative work, so I was able to continue my autobiographical fiction writing for that purpose and also to write some reflective essays on my writing process and that of well-known writers such as Franz Kafka, all of which helped to deepen my thinking about the self in the writing process.

The most important piece of work I did for the MA, from the point of view of my subsequent development, was devising a way of using autobiography as a basis for teaching creative writing, which I subsequently put into practice in a course for the Centre for Continuing Education at Sussex University.

What I found in teaching this course was that using autobiography in this way had the potential to open people up to deep feelings and memories. Some people found this very helpful, but it could also be very upsetting, which made the learning environment very challenging.

All the work I’ve done since, for example in setting up and running the MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development, involvement in setting up Lapidus, and the research I have undertaken, has flowed from the experience of teaching that first course.

How would you describe your creative process? Do you have a routine? How do you like to work?
Because I became a creative writing teacher, and also perhaps because all of my creative writing was a way of understanding why I hadn’t managed to find a meaningful way of being in the world, I stopped doing creative writing when I began to develop a career. Since my retirement in September 2010, I’ve begun to go back to my fiction and poetry, and I’m delighted to be writing creatively again.

But this is a fairly small activity at the moment, because I’m deeply involved in writing another academic book. And now that I have a lot more time at my disposal I do have a regular writing routine: I try to work on the writing for about four hours every morning, with just a short break in the middle. In the afternoons I go for a walk or swim in the local pool. In other words, I try to do body-work rather than mind-work at some point during the day, otherwise I just seize up eventually.

What I have learnt about my writing process is that I have to pace myself, which isn’t always easy, as there is a very impatient part of me that wants to do everything in one go and move onto the next thing!

Sometimes I read in the mornings instead of writing, and I’ve recently discovered the joys (and frustrations) of the Kindle software on my computer, which allows me to download books, some of them free. Wonderful, as long as one doesn’t get carried away!

What are you working on right now?
As I said, I’m writing a new book, Creative Life Writing as a Tool for Transformative Learning, which I’m hoping to finish by the end of the year. It’s going very well now, although it’s taken me a long time to be able to focus on it, and I’m very much enjoying having the time now to work on it at leisure.

Tell us more about the book…
Well, during the early years of convening the MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development lots of students taking it were telling me that they had undergone major change as a result of it, for example, that they had had a breakthrough in their ability to write or to think of themselves as writers or learners, or that they had found the courage to leave their jobs or their partners, in order to find a more meaningful way of being in the world. The word ‘life changing’ came up a lot.

At the same time I was becoming increasingly aware that the programme was very challenging, both to students and tutors, and that the tutor team — in the field of creative writing and personal development generally — needed a deep understanding of how this kind of teaching and learning worked. So I was keen to do an in-depth research project on the MA to explore all these things in more detail.

The opportunity arose in 2004, when I was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, with a sum of money to undertake a project of my choice. I was also fortunate enough to be able to raise further money from the British Academy to cover the costs of a research assistant.

So the project began in 2004 with the following aims: to understand better the kinds of changes in sense of self which students of the MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development experienced, the elements of the programme that gave rise to these changes, and the nature of the challenges of this kind of teaching and learning, so as to inform not only creative writing teaching, but other areas of adult, further and higher education where creative life writing might be used as a tool for learning. The book will present the findings of this research project.

What’s your favourite word?
That’s an interesting question! I’ve always felt words bodily, somewhere between my ribs, and sometimes it takes me quite a while to get hold of a word even though I can feel it strongly. A word I have loved for a long time is opprobrium, just for its sound really, not so much its meaning, something about all those hard consonants coming together, I think.

Its literal meaning is an atmosphere of disapproval or bad odour surrounding someone or something, so it’s not a very happy word, but I used it once in a poem set in ancient Greece, which talked about ‘an opprobrium of virgins’ — make of that what you will!

What/who are your three favourite books/writers of all time?
Well, in view of what I said above, Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own would have to be at the top of the list. A close second would be Karen Horney’s Neurosis and Human Growth — well actually anything by Karen Horney, as she has been so helpful to me in understanding myself and other people — she was a second-generation Freudian psychoanalyst who emigrated from Germany to America just before the Second World War, and the first woman to take issue with Freud on his views on women.

As to literary writers, my absolute favourite is Joseph Conrad, whose novel Lord Jim I am currently rereading — or rather listening to on audio book — but I also very much like his shorter stories, ‘The Secret Sharer’, ‘Typhoon’, ‘Heart of Darkness’, etc. He has such a wonderfully flowing and visual style of writing.

I have a strong visual imagination, so I particularly like writers who stimulate it without over-stimulating it. I’ve always said, as a creative writing teacher, that writers need to leave space for the reader’s imagination and Conrad does exactly that, in my view. I’m also a great fan of the early Doris Lessing books, The Grass Is Singing, the Children of Violence trilogy, and some of her science fiction books. I would say something very similar about her style as I said about Conrad.

What inspires you?
Generally, rural landscape inspires me — I walk along the top of the South Downs quite a lot — sunshine and blue sky whatever the temperature — the persistence of the natural world and its creatures even in extremes of heat and cold (I am an avid watcher of wildlife programmes!) — human beings’ capacity to change in positive ways — the way creative life writing has the power to bring people closer to themselves, again in positive ways — the human mind’ s capacity for understanding.

How would you write your autobiography in 25 words?
Had potential as a child, but was unable to develop it until she discovered the therapeutic potential of creative writing; since then she has never looked back!

What do you think are the most important issues and challenges for the field of writing and wellbeing in the future?
- Developing programmes of study for people wishing to work with developmental creative writing in education, health and social care, and other areas; since the discontinuation of the MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development at Sussex University, an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes has been set up at the Metanoia Institute, which I’m delighted to see, but there is scope for more such programs at universities and other institutions; good training, including immersion in both theory and practice, is crucially important for the field.

- Developing a formal accreditation for people wishing to work as therapeutic writing practitioners.

- Continuing and strengthening Lapidus: the Association for the Literary Arts in Personal Development.

What’s coming up for you in 2011 and beyond?
I shall be busy with writing my book for the remainder of this year, as well as continuing to supervise a number of doctoral students at the University of Sussex and running, at Sussex and elsewhere, workshops on creative writing for academic purposes, i.e. using creative writing techniques to help people develop their academic and research writing (see my upcoming website at www.celiahunt.com).

I’m also just starting a three-year Visiting Research Fellowship at the Education Faculty of Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent, which I’m much looking forward to. When the current book is finished, I am hoping to be able to apply myself again to my fiction and poetry writing, not just for personal development this time!

Thank you so much, Celia. I look forward to reading your next book and I wish you all the very best for these new exciting projects.

Go to www.wordsauce.com to find out more about ‘developmental creative writing’ and writing for wellbeing.

Funny how we seem to think of ‘imperfect’ as not perfect, not good enough, could be better or with something missing.

Here’s the etymology of ‘imperfect’:

From the Latin imperfectus ‘unfinished.’

The imperfect expresses an ongoing, uncompleted action. (The Ancient Greek term was paratatikós ‘prolonged.’)

Something ‘imperfect’ is something that is unfinished, still happening, still evolving, unfolding, awakening… A work-in-progress.