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.

You might have seen the advert I’m thinking about. It starts with a rather beautiful cow, standing on an empty beach, and the voice over says ‘This is Molly. She’s always dreamed of being a horse.’

(Or the cow might be called Mary – I can’t remember.) The point is that this is such a hypnotic concept, isn’t it? A cow that has always dreamed of being a horse.

Just the idea of this cow having an inner world that might be rather like our human one, with dreams and longings and aspirations, is powerfully hypnotic. It gets our attention and we start translating that experience into our own wanting and yearning and longing and what that might mean for us.

And then Molly, or Mary, begins to canter along the beach, her hooves splashing through the shallow water, her body rippling, her udders swinging, whilst the soundtrack surges to something that stirs our own sense that, hey, perhaps we too could do anything we dream of… (And also, isn’t it a bit funny too? What do we ourselves  dream of that is a bit funny or even ridiculous?)

And all that is going on beautifully, we’re engaging with it all and then…

WHAM! The voice over starts talking about other stuff, starts spelling out to us what is going on and what might actually happen and telling us what to think. The camera cuts to a girl with beautiful red hair and a far-off expression who just happens to be poised perfectly on a rock eating a spoonful of yoghurt.

At this point, for me, the ad’s hypnotic effect just ebbs away. I’m being told what to think. It’s overdone. It’s ruined.

I sat in the cinema thinking, ‘Why didn’t you just leave us with this delightful Molly (or Mary) cantering on the beach? Why did you overcomplicate it?’

And the flow of my own thoughts began to move to how true this is of life in general, of what I do as a therapist, making use of hypnosis and hypnotic principles, to help people to experience changes in their own inner states and private worlds.

I know that if I try to do too much in a session, it won’t be as effective as if I keep things simple.

I meet people from time to time who seem very pleased and proud that they know sixteen different NLP techniques for a phobia ‘cure’ (and how I hate that word ‘cure,’ as if there is something ‘wrong’ with the person in the first place, which they have to be somehow ‘cured’ from rather than just some unhelpful habit or way of thinking they’ve got into that it might be helpful for them to unlearn).

Yes, we may know five techniques for helping people to see things from a different point of view but, probably, we only need one – and that is the one that is right for that particular client at that particular time.

You know, I think it is so easy to overlook sometimes that the most powerful and effective ways of working with our clients might often be the simplest.

For example, you could use an all-singing, all-dancing method with all kinds of complicated visualisations for helping someone to let go of their spider phobia but, first of all, why not just take them through a very simple desensitisation process and find out what happens?

And, even more hypnotically, why not allow them to really own that process as their process rather than showing-off your language patterns and your fifteen complicated techniques?

And I think that if we have a a cow-who-wants-to-be-a-horse for a client, we need to help them to check out whether wanting to be a horse is the most helpful wanting that they can be doing right now. And, if it isn’t, why not help them to find the experience that is most helpful for them, right here, in the here and now, and how they can begin to connect with that and allow it? In their way, a way that makes sense to them.

Then we need to get out of their way.

Oh, but eat lots of yoghurt too. It’s supposed to be good for you.

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.

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.

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.

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

It’s all about making time for self-nurture or, as Abby describes it, accessing the ‘deep river’ within us all, the inner resources we all have for nurture, creativity, calm and revitalising rest.

I love Abby’s metaphor of the deep inner river. It’s so much more powerful for me than, say, the image of a reservoir or a deep well. I like how the idea of an  inner river feels. It’s flowing, quickly or slowly, it’s both continuous and ever-changng and it feels as if it connects me somehow with an endless source of beauty and wonder, with the rich resources of the world around me and those of other people as well as with my own inner self. (The deep river is the perfect metaphor for psychologist Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow experience.’)

In her book, Abby talks about some of the blocks that can hold us back from spending time dipping into the deep river. One of these blocks is our own ‘busy-ness’ and another is our fear that time alone will be, well… lonely.

I know that I do the busy-ness one. You know, all that ‘faffing,’ as one of my clients put it recently. It’s late, you know you should be winding-down but there is always More To Do. You’d be so much more productive tomorrow if you just allowed yourself to rest now, make the transition to calm, prepare for a night of deep sleep, but somehow you find yourself still ‘busy’ Doing Very Important Things. Just noticing how I do that has helped me to stop doing it. It’s helped me to place a clear boundary around my evening, my resting time. It feels good.

And then there is the fear that so many of the people I work with experience – the fear of feeling alone in their alone time. This can feel particularly poignant at times of change – after a relationship break-up, or when the children have grown-up and left home, for example. What do we do with ourselves now that we have some time and no excuses left to prevent us from truly being with ourselves? Who are we, when we’re not being partners, lovers, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, daughters, sons? Who are we really?

Self-hypnosis can be a wonderful way to begin to spend some time alone with yourself. When I give my clients one of my self-hypnosis audio programmes, for example, they are often concerned about making the time to listen to it regularly or concerned that their mind will flit all over the place and they ‘won’t be able to relax’ or they are worried about ‘what will come up for me when I go inside myself.’

And then they find that it is very helpful to have the structure of an audio – just twenty minutes or half an hour – to being to enjoy the process of connecting with themselves, noticing how their body feels, noticing sensations and images and sounds inside them and around them, noticing their breathing.

Self-hypnosis can be the entry-point for a reconnection with our own resources – or the deep river – within ourselves. It’s exciting to see people discover that, rather than feeling lonely, they begin to look forward to some alone time and they begin to feel more confident about slowing down, taking a walk alone, writing in a journal or just gazing out of the window and breathing in the view.

This weekend, I wish you time to breathe, to slow down, to be with yourself. If you haven’t done that for a while, why not begin with, say, ten or twenty minutes? Find out where it takes you.

It is a wonderful thing for me to witness and learn from: the way that so many things can become more possible as people make the initial changes that they wanted to make and then continue to grow in confidence.

What I also find interesting is that some of the people around this friend of mine have expressed their concern at the speed and momentum of what he is doing. They are saying things like, ‘Ooooo, be careful. Don’t take on too much,’ and ‘If you do too much at once, you’re setting yourself up for failure.’

And when I hear that, well-meaning as this advice might be, I find myself feeling really rather cross.

Because that kind of talk can really get to a person. Sometimes we need to actively choose to protect ourselves from this well-intentioned but ultimately flawed advice.

Now, when I’m working with clients, it is important to have some structure to our work, some clearly defined outcomes. And, yes, it’s certainly not advisable to begin making changes all over the place in a scattered and frenzied fashion.

However, it’s my experience that once we discover how to use the amazing power of our mind to, for example, stop smoking, we then realise that we can build on that focused success and, say, begin to enjoy regular exercise or develop our confidence in new situations. Our first successes can propel us forwards into new successes.

Just as it can take enormous initial energy to get a stone moving from a static position, as the stone starts to roll, it picks up more speed. It takes less energy for the stone to keep on moving now.

So when we find ourselves making changes and others say to us, ‘Oooo, isn’t that a bit too much?’ perhaps they’re really talking about their own fear of failure, their own worries and doubts. When we start to change our way of being, it often demands of other people that they change too – or highlights to them their own desires and fears around change.

Sometimes we need to protect ourselves a little from the hypnotic power of other people’s unhelpful self-talk.

Sometimes we need to surround ourselves with people who unreservedly support our change and are happy to cheer us on from a position of excited curiosity.

Only you can know the pace and speed of change that feels exactly right for you in this particular moment. Sometimes it’s about taking powerfully small steps, sometimes it’s about huge leaps.

And if someone else expresses their fear or worry for you, that may just be their own fear talking.

‘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.

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.