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.

This week I cleared out a tiny studio space at the top of our house. It’s the eyrie where I perched to write the last pages of my PhD, the summer that we had just moved into this house. I remember feeling hot and bothered up there and wishing I could be downstairs in the rest of my life again. Perhaps because of that, the space soon got overlooked in favour of the much bigger downstairs room where I work with clients or the kitchen table where I like to sit in the mornings. The poor, old abandoned roof space had become a bit of a dusty dumping-ground.

But last week I cleared it out. I was craving a new space – a light, airy private space that has something to do with making things in secret. And I realised that I already had just that space. Time to reclaim it.

On Saturday, I went up there and unwrapped a new canvas and some acrylics. I had decided that I would make a painting to go in a space above our bed and I felt full of zizz  and spark at the idea of getting the paint on the canvas – and my fingers.

Now, can I just add that I have never really painted before. I have no idea about technique. I just knew that I wanted to do it. And what did I discover? That painting is just like writing.

Yes, the small square of blue sky framed in the window above my head. Yes, the white clouds passing, the sound of birds, the sunlight on the table. Yes, the thrill of mixing a colour and experimenting with different sized brushes.

There was a moment when it was just right – the bluey-green seemed just the right shade of bluey-green, a little hazy, letting the paint underneath show through. Everything was flowing – my hand, the sun on my shoulders, the smell and feel of the paint.

And then I thought something like, ‘Now, I just need to get more texture here and add in something with a finer brush here… and what is it that I’m making, anyway? Does it need more of this here? Does that look a bit clumsy?’

Gone! My painting suddenly more thought than felt. Over-thunk. Bang. Gone. In one teeny moment!!!

And I thought, this is just like making a poem. The minute I catch myself saying, ‘Oooo, I’m writing a poem about X, Y, Z ,’ I might as well get up from my desk. Because I’ve already left the process. I’m sitting outside of it going ‘Oooo’ and ‘Errrr’ and ‘Not good enough’ and ‘That would be better.’

I looked at my painting – you know, the one that was supposed to go in that space waiting in our bedroom, well, that is if I’d actually been capable of doing it right - and I heard myself starting in on more of this, just for a second, ‘See, not as good as you thought you would be, are you? What did you even try for? Why didn’t you just stick to writing?’

And then I realised. And I laughed. I had a good old chuckle at myself.

I think I’ll be painting over the canvas and beginning again – some parts, anyway. But at least I know that I can.

And I had so much fun painting.

Even now, I’m looking at my painting and thinking, I’m going to be kind to myself about it and curious about what will happen next. And I feel a big surge of joy for this new process I’ve discovered.

It seems that painting, like making poems, is all about the process. Surrendering to it. Rolling around in it. Loving it. Laughing about it. Knowing you can start all over again and make something even better. Remembering to trust that there’s so much more where that came from.

Funny, that. Who would ever have thought it?

One of the participants in my afternoon workshop asked me a very interesting question. We were talking about using writing to ‘dialogue’ with feelings, emotions or physical sensations when he observed, ‘But to do that, wouldn’t I have to be a creative person?’

So what is a ‘Creative Person’?

Who is this person, so different from most of us, who is Creative with a capital ‘C’?

When we begin to become more consciously aware of the stories we tell ourselves about creativity and creative people, we can begin to question and challenge some of the myths around creativity and what makes people creative.

In his book,  Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihalyi Csikszentmhalyi interviews creative people from many different fields: the arts, mathematics and science, inventors, educators, thinkers, therapists. He concludes that creative people are not people who simply happen to connect with and express their own innate abilities but people who combine their abilities with disciplined practice. They actually invest time in finding and developing their flow experience – through activities which actively nurture this.

Many of our ideas about the messy, crazy, slightly chaotic or even brilliantly tortured creative soul are simply not true – and probably extremely limiting to us.

To create, we need not only to be able to allow our ideas to emerge, but we also need to work at our particular skill, through consistent disciplined practice.We need to combine playfulness with emotional intelligence, nurturing creative freedom and discipline.

When we talk about ‘creative people,’ we often leave ourselves out. I loved helping people to rediscover yesterday that, using self-hypnosis and writing as self-hypnosis to find our flow or optimal state, we can create something out of an apparent nothing; that, by connecting with the feelings and emotions that are always going on for us, beneath all our ‘busy-ness,’  we can remember and reconnect with our innate creativity.

And when we practice a few simple self-hypnosis and free-writing techniques, regularly and with consistency, we can enjoy experiencing ourselves as Creative People every day.

Next time you catch yourself wistfully wishing that you were ‘more creative’ or that you could be more creative ‘if you only had the time/ the right space/ could leave your current job, etc, etc,’ it might be helpful to ask yourself if that story is holding you back in some way.

Take a few deep breaths. Learn and practice a self-hypnosis or free-writing technique. Invest a little time each day in finding your own flow.

In fact, OK, what I’m probably saying here is that I really hope that you have noticed.

Because, you see, I am doing a thing here. My thing. The thing I think I always wanted to do but never quite felt brave enough or free enough or perhaps never slowed down enough to notice that I wanted to do it.

I am Letting Go.

You see, I’m writing this from the Sophie I really feel myself to be right now, in this moment, rather than the Sophie I think perhaps I ought to be. Yep. I’ve let go of the ought to.

It’s a funny thing. When I’m working with clients, I actively choose to be present in the moment as it happens with them. Someone please bonk me over the head with a shovel (tenderly, affectionately of course) if I ever start trying to be a persona – some scary concoction of what I think that they think that a therapist or coach should be, for example. Because I find that just gets in the way of what we can do together.

When I’m working with my clients, I am here. Right here. Connected to my own deep sense of who-I-am-as-I-experience the words, the images, the metaphors of what is happening for that client. I’m saying, ‘Yes! Come into this space with me and let’s experience this together with our minds and our bodies and let’s find out what exciting, wonderful, surprising thing can happen next…’

And when I’m working with people in the Word Sauce Online Programme,  we’re always talking about how we can let go of all those old narratives, metaphors, stories – the ones someone else keeps trying to dump on us, or the ones that just don’t fit who we are anymore – to make space for stories and possibilities that feel so right.

In fact, come to think of it, I even wrote a PhD thesis in which the second chapter was called Letting Go. I wrote a book and now I’m writing a bigger book that begins with Letting Go.

And, you know, I’m doing all this and even then, oh yes, even then, there comes a time – and it’s in most weeks, to be honest – when I realise that I’ve accumulated a couple of fairly new stories that just aren’t helping me, or maybe it’s a new-old story that emerges into my conscious awareness: ‘Oh, there’s that thing I do, that story I tell myself…’

So I’ve been re-Letting-Go. As I do. From time to time. And I notice that this time I’m doing it with a little more kindness to myself. None of that ‘Oh, here we go. When will this ever stop and when can I just stop doing this?’ kind of talk. Because that’s not really letting go.

None of that wrestling, that ‘Can I?’ and ‘Do I deserve to?’ and ‘Am I really willing to let go of this one?’ No, none of that, thank you.

More of a gentle, vaguely amused noticing. A kind curiosity.

It feels gooooood.

And so, as much as I can, I’m beginning to write these blog posts from this new place where I find myself. I’m writing them from a place of really bringing together all the things I do – the therapy, coaching, work with writing, the workshops and online programme – into something that feels so much more me.

I’m writing as me. I’m loving being more of me here on this blog, not feeling that I should point you to the latest celeb story about hypnosis or the latest news and research on brain science to get the Google love, SEO, key-word-kind-of-stuff in.

Nope. None of that.

Just me. Just what it feels like when I feel I have something to really say, to really share. (And the funny thing I’ve noticed is that suddenly I have ooodles, heaps, dollops of delicious, deep-down, cool and sometimes a little bit crazy and also very, very exciting-to-me ideas that I just want to shout out.)

OK. So maybe I should do it gradually. Or your ears will be aching.

Now I’m not necessarily saying that there won’t be more research and hypnosis stuff on this blog. I love the hypnosis and hypnotherapy stuff, the debates and the questions. I want to spread the good research around.

And it’s not that I wasn’t being me before. It was just a different kind of being me. If you know what I mean, which I’m sure you do.

I’m just going to do it from this place here, where I feel I am now with my work and my life. It’s time to let go again. Because I’ve changed, I’ve grown  from where I was when I began this blog three years ago.

I may not always get it ‘right’ here. But I will be as much myself as I can be. If I catch myself thinking how I ought to do it, I’ll gently notice and then listen to how I really want to do it.

So, I’d like to ask you, what can you let go of today? What story or belief or idea or ‘should’ or ‘ought’ are you ready to gently, kindly notice and let go of?

Go on. I double-dare you. Let me know what happens next.

‘I don’t have time to do this daily self-hypnosis.’

‘I don’t have time to be creative.’

Even, ‘I don’t have any time for me.’

Who was it who said that you don’t ‘find time’; instead, you ‘make time’?

When I think about it now, I don’t really have the time to write this blog post but I really want to do it. I can think of lots of things that I should be doing right now, but I want to do this. I want to share a very creative and motivating idea with you. It’s this:

Over at Robert Lee Brewer’s ‘Poetic Asides’ blog, you can write a poem a day for the month of April. It’s part of the Poem A Day Challenge. Here is how it works: Robert will post a new writing prompt each day on his blog; you write a poem in response to it and then you post your poem in the comments for that day’s blog article. Wonderful!

How’s that for a way to kick-start your creativity and make some regular time for you?

I am doing it every day for the month of April. Come and join me!

Because we are almost a working day in front of Robert here in the UK, I may be doing it retrospectively, responding to his previous day’s prompt, because I know that the best time for my poem-making is first thing in the morning before I start working with clients. But that is OK because Robert is very kindly extending the deadline for the last day of April to make room for us ‘international’ writers.

You get a certificate too… and there are prizes!

There are already over 160 poems in the first day’s blog comments. How’s about that!

As Robert says: ‘I say I’ve almost always got time, because I make time for my writing. And I improvise. If you really want to write, I’m sure you’re always ready and able to do the same.’

Of course, I would add that a little regular self-hypnosis helps too.

Create your own snowflake, set it spinning in 2D or 3D and then allow it to hypnotise you. This image really does not do it justice.

Gorgeous!

The article in Science Daily , reports new research on hypnosis and synaesthesia: 

‘Hypnosis can induce synaesthetic experiences – where one sense triggers the involuntary use of another – according to a new study by UCL (University College London) researchers. The findings suggests that people with synaesthesia, contrary to popular belief, do not necessarily have extra connections in their brain; rather, their brains may simply do more ‘cross talking’ and this can be induced by changing inhibitory processes in the average brain.’

We tend to think of synaesthesia – for example, feeling colours, tasting shapes – as being a rather unusual ‘condition’ and yet past research has shown that highly creative people often have a certain degree of synaesthesia. Cross-sensory experience is surprisingly common to some degree in poets and musicians. Rather than being an on-off kind of neurological state, it is probably more like a continuum. 

Interestingly, this latest research by scientists at UCL ‘used posthypnotic suggestion to show that people who are not synaesthetes can be induced to have synaesthetic experiences.’

Here’s how they did it: 

‘After inducing digit-colour synaesthesia, the volunteers reported similar experiences to those undergone by real synaesthetes in their everyday life. For example, one participant described seeing the numbers on car number plates in specific colours, while walking around under posthypnotic suggestion. Moreover, hypnotized participants failed trick tests which were also failed by real synaesthetes: in one test, when subjects were hypnotized to experience seven as red, they could not detect the number when a black seven was presented on a red background.

Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, says: “Our study shows that posthypnotic suggestion can induce synaesthetic experiences in people, suggesting that extra brain connections are not needed to experience cross-sensory interactions and that it is more cross talk within the brain that causes these experiences. This takes us one step closer to understanding the causes of synaesthesia and abnormal cross-brain interactions.”

Very interesting to see hypnosis being used in this way. We still understand so little about the brain and particularly about the subconscious mind. However, I know from my own work and research that, when we are in the particular state of awareness that is self-hypnosis, our ‘inhibitory processes’ calm down and relax. This may be why we are more open to suggestion – such as seeing the number seven as red.

However, even without hypnotic suggestion, the state of self-hypnosis itself enables our brains to make all kinds of connections and learnings – the kind of ‘cross-talk within the brain’ that is proposed by this study. Perhaps it is this ‘cross-talk’ that helps us to access more and more of our natural ability to create change, find solutions, make things happen. 

As Albert Einstein famously said: ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’ Cognitive scientists studying ‘intuition’ have found that people tend to describe it as a more bodily, felt kind of state, a state of expansion, relaxation or opening outwards… 

Perhaps this new study of synaesthesia is showing us this kind of shift at a neurological level.