‘It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone.’

I’m working on rising early these days and using the time to read quietly, write in my notebook, think things through.

This morning I made a cup of green tea (I love this warming Green Chai from Pukka), dipped into the notes I’d made before falling asleep  yesterday evening, and read from a beautiful book, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World, by John O’Donohue. This is the opening paragraph:

‘It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No-one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through our voices, we bring out sounds from the mountain beneath the soul. These sounds are words. The world is full of words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio, in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. We take each other’s sounds and make patterns, predictions, and blasphemies. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the ‘world’ together. Yet the uttering of the word reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.’

I love this. Don’t you?

‘A world lives within you. No-one else can bring you news of this inner world.’

We only have to listen deeply for a moment, let go just a little, enough to allow the first sounds to surface.

Today, another wonderful group of Word Saucerers are starting their process of ‘Letting Go.‘ I had to share this quote with them and I hope it speaks to them as it did to me this morning.

If, like me, you hadn’t come across Anam Cara before, I do recommend it. There are so many passages of reverie and wisdom, such as this one.

I want to always remember the strange mystery of being here. This a reminder of what a gift it is.

And I’d like to thank the lovely Helen for recommending Anam Cara to me.

Funny how we seem to think of ‘imperfect’ as not perfect, not good enough, could be better or with something missing.

Here’s the etymology of ‘imperfect’:

From the Latin imperfectus ‘unfinished.’

The imperfect expresses an ongoing, uncompleted action. (The Ancient Greek term was paratatikós ‘prolonged.’)

Something ‘imperfect’ is something that is unfinished, still happening, still evolving, unfolding, awakening… A work-in-progress.

I came to my work as a therapist through my fascination with stories – the stories we tell ourselves inside our minds, the stories that get passed down to us from our parents or respected teachers and the stories we need to tell someone else so that we can be listened to, witnessed, heard.

Some of these stories can be unhelpful or, over time, we outgrow them. If we keep telling ourselves the same unhelpful story over and over again, we can get stuck in it, temporarily losing our ability to embrace new possibilities.

When I was first studying on the creative writing for personal development programme at the University of Sussex, I began working as a volunteer ‘writing mentor’ with clients of this amazing organisation.

I met people who wanted and needed to process painful experiences by getting them out onto the page, shaping their stories in some way, giving them form and meaning. I learnt so much from the people I met and worked with that I decided to research the area of writing and healing for my PhD thesis and then to train as a therapist.

The tradition I now draw upon in my work as a therapist and coach includes the work of Milton Erickson, father of modern hypnotherapy (although, to my knowledge, Erickson never called himself a ‘hypnotherapist’). Erickson was passionate about the hypnotic power of story – the way that stories can work on an unconscious level, drawing us into the narrative, helping us to gain new insights into our experiences, sometimes without us even needing to know consciously that anything is happening.

Erickson loved to craft therapeutic stories for his clients.

When my father recently moved from the acute ward in the hospital to a smaller ward to begin his recovery, he was cheered by being able to swap stories with the other patients he could now meet and talk with, people who’d had similar experiences to his own.

And I too have reached for a story to guide me through the last week or so – because I believe that we can choose and shape the stories we tell ourselves about everything and anything that is happening in our lives.

Before my father’s collapse, I had already signed-up for Bloom by Moon, a beautiful space held by Amy Palko about crafting a relationship to the goddess myths and lunar cycles.

For this January Moon, Amy shared with us her re-telling of the Persephone myth. In Amy’s telling, Persephone grows into her full womanhood by accepting and integrating the world of darkness, eventually reconciling her life above ground for half the year with her life beneath the ground, shining her light into the dark tunnels of the underworld as a guide for lost souls and bringing the fruit of her knowledge of death and darkness upwards with her into the light.

This is the story I choose.

It’s a powerful story, one that reminds me, at this challenging time in my family’s life, of the gifts inside the darkness and our ability to shine light, wherever we are.

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.

“Memory is continually created, a story told and retold, using jigsaw pieces of experience. It’s utterly unreliable in some ways, because who can say whether the feeling or emotion that seems to belong to the recollection actually belongs to it rather than being available from the general store of likely emotions we have learned? Memory is not false in the sense that it is willfully bad, but it is excitingly corrupt in its inclination to make a proper story of the past.”

Jenny Diski

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.