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.

Tags: hammock, holiday, self-hypnosis
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The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.

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.

Tags: Hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis, R D Laing, self-hypnosis
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Yesterday, I ran two Word Sauce workshops and read my poems at the 6th Annual Writers’ Festival at Leeds Trinity University College. How wonderful to see so many enthusiastic people experimenting with writing of all kinds and developing their creativity.

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.

Tags: creativity, Csikszentmihalyi, flow, free-writing, hypnotic journaling, self-hypnosis, writing
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I am reading a wonderfully nurturing book right now by Abby Seixas called ‘Finding the Deep River Within: Gentle Wisdom for Women in a Hurried World.’

Men, out there, stay with me. This is most definitely not a women-only situation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: alone time, journalling, self-hypnosis
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I was talking to a dear friend of mine the other day who is making some changes in his life. In fact, he is on ‘a bit of a roll,’ as they say. As he makes one change and understands how he can let go of unhelpful thoughts and behaviors in one area of his life, he then begins to discover that he can also do that in another area.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: fear, self-hypnosis, self-talk
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One of the things that I hear most often in my work with people is that they don’t have time.

‘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.

Tags: creative writing, creativity, self-hypnosis
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Well, the media is abuzz today with ways of banishing the effects of so-called Blue Monday – apparently the most depressing day of the year.

According to this article at The Daily Mail, for example, ‘unpaid Christmas bills, nasty weather, and failed New Year’s resolutions combine to make January 22 the gloomiest in the calendar.’

The history of what is claimed to be the unhappiest day in the year all began with a researcher called Cliff Arnall and a marketing campaign. In fact, Blue Monday now even has its own entry on Wikipedia which reads:

‘Blue Monday is a name given to a date stated, as part of a publicity campaign by Sky Travel, to be the most depressing day of the year.

This date was published in a press release under the name of Cliff Arnall, at the time a tutor at the Centre for Lifelong Learning, a Further Education centre attached to Cardiff University. Guardian columnist Dr Ben Goldacre reported that the press release was delivered substantially pre-written to a number of academics by Public Relations agency Porter Novelli, who offered them money to put their names to it.

The Guardian later printed a statement from Cardiff University distancing themselves from Arnall: “Cardiff University has asked us to point out that Cliff Arnall… was a former part-time tutor at the
university but left in February.”

Arnall says the date was calculated by using many factors, including: weather conditions, debt level (the difference between debt accumulated and our ability to pay), time since Christmas, time since
failing our new year’s resolutions, low motivational levels and feeling of a need to take action. Writing about the calculation, Goldacre stated: … the fact is that Cliff Arnall’s equations … fail even to make mathematical sense on their own terms.

This date typically falls on the Monday of the last full week of January…’

The authors of the wonderful Mind Hacks blog are so scathing about the science involved in Blue Monday that they have been running a competition for the last couple of weeks to come up with the best alternative spoof equation.

Apparently, the good news is that we Brits are a nation of optimists and 85% of us believe that the future will be better than things are now, according top a survey on behalf of Standard Life Bank, also reported in The Daily Mail article.

There is even an Optimist Society that, as this story at BBC News tells us, is planning a special cheer-up celebration and even intends to cheer-up Jeremy Paxman:

James Battison, founder of the “loose-knit social-action group” said: “As an optimist you get to bathe luxuriously in your own good-feeling, while also sparking some fun and laughter in others. It’s a win-win way to live. I highly recommend it!

“The key to feeling positive lies in taking action and making other people smile. Remember, life could always be worse, but with positive action things will always get better.”

Cheer packages are also being sent to Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys, famously straight-faced comedian Jack Dee and the cast of the BBC soap
EastEnders.

In London, a free lunchtime comedy show will be held at the Comedy Store, featuring a motivational session from comedian Neil Mullarkey.

The Optimists Society describes itself as “a social-action group promoting positivity and helping people make a difference to themselves and others through simple actions”.

So the message is clear. However hypnotic a term like Blue Monday might seem, we can always make the conscious choice to feel good – and making others feel good is a great way to start.

It is pouring down and freezing cold here in Yorkshire but I am feeling as warm as toast thinking about the lovely people in my life who help me to feel good. I am very lucky indeed.

I wish you all a fabulous and happy Monday.

Tags: Blue Monday, self-hypnosis
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