About Bridget

Bridget Holding is a published writer, university degree level tutor and lecturer (University of Exeter, Open University). She's also an arts and body-based psychotherapist, and holds an MA in the therapeutic uses of the arts. Her theoretical basis is Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Psychodynamic Theory and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. She’s a non-dual practitioner, lay ordainee in the Tiep Hien zen buddhist order of Thich Nhat Hahn and a member of The Society of Friends (Quakers).

She began her career as an award winning short filmmaker and screenwriter. She worked on The Fully Monty, and was a winner of the Sky Moviemax Short Film of The Year Award.

Born into a Quaker family, and a practitioner of mindfulness meditation, yoga and Non-Duality since her teenage years, she has a long held interest in comparative spirituality and religion.

As a qualified psychotherapist and member of the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapists, she's worked in private practice with clients presenting with, among other things, stress, trauma, and creative block. She’s worked with serious mental issues for the charity MIND, as well as in secure psychiatric hospitals.

This work, and witnessing the utter determination of the human organism to survive emotionally and physically, against all the odds, underpins her detective novel Phoenix: The Delusional Detective.

In a certain phase, she unchained myself from her desk and broke out of the office, living and writing for extended periods, in nature. Seeking more wildness, she moved from Devon to the mountains of the Pyrenees in France. This gave rise to her project Wild Words, via which, she is, according to the London School of Economics, ‘revitalising traditional creative writing teaching’.

She’s given talks and facilitated workshops at venues throughout the UK, including at The London School of Economics, Penzance Literary Festival, Swindon Festival of Literature, Chipping Campden Literary Festival, Dartington Ways with Words, Swanwick Writers' Summer School, Uppingham Summer School, and Lavenham Literary Festival.

Articles written by her, or about her work, have been published in The Telegraph Newspaper, The Psychotherapist Magazine, Psychologies, Writing Magazine and Saga Magazine, among other publications.

She's currently working her way (slowly) round the world, reading beautiful poetry from all traditions, on the very ground on which it was first written or spoken. Her criteria is this: they must be words that transcend the common misuse of words to define and reduce us. They must show us a path to freedom; more than that, they must remind us that we’re already free.

Whenever Bridget’s at home in southern France, she welcomes wordsmiths to the stunning Pyrenees and bombards them with beautiful quotations.

More about Wild Words here.

More about the novel Phoenix: The Delusional Detective.