Today, I wanted to share with you a poem made by a participant in a writing workshop I ran the other day for a group of hypnotherapists.

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.