This morning I will be moving my teaching at the University of York to the City Art Gallery. I’m taking the students from my Developing Creativity module to look around the Gallery and I have a task for them which is designed to get them thinking about the ways that artists and gallery educators engage people in creative responses to the art in their collections.

I’ve talked many times before on this blog about how hypnosis is all around us and trance is a very natural state of awareness that we move through many times in a day. The moment that you walk into a gallery, someone is attempting to build rapport with you, to provoke a reaction of some kind or ask you to look closer, to open your mind and body to an experience.

Similarly, you may have come to associate galleries with a certain kind of trance-state in your life – either positive or negative – often depending upon your feelings about art or the attitudes of your parents or teachers or of the cultural, social and political groups to which you belong.

So the moment that we walk through the doors of a gallery, we enter a particular trance that is about our expectations and associations around this environment. Personally, I have always found that galleries give me a space for reflection and contemplation. They urge me to pause and open my mind and body in a certain way, to simply be for a while with my own thoughts, reflections and emotions…. which is a little like the environment that I like to create in a hypnotherapy session, a place where people can simply be and experience what that feels like and notice any thoughts or feelings that are helpful or unhepful… and then learn how to let go of the unhelpful ones.

Like my consultation room, a gallery can be an exciting place of experimentation and possibility, if we know how to open our minds to that.

So here’s my question for this cold December morning. If galleries can be therapeutic, is therapy a kind of art of possibility? Is therapy, when practised in this way, like painting or sculpture or poetry? What do you think?