Introduction

I am passionate about harnessing the power of words to say what is outside words, as well as their fundamental, animalistic role in our surviving and thriving.

After twenty years of investigation into conceptual metaphor, and comparative psychotherapy and spirituality, I remain enamoured by the process of taking the smallest signs – words – and using them, tailored to the audience, to express the vast, the unsayable.

Words should, in my opinion, support an expansive and positive view of our embodied, feeling selves and the world around, rather than limit, pathologise or reduce us. In Gestalt therapy terms, we are always orienting towards health, and happiness, and we do it really pretty well. In spiritual terms, the nature of our true self is flawless, limitless and loving.

From those central themes, my work branches off in two directions:

-I write with a splendid fury – novels, poetry, non-fiction, and journalistic articles.

-I also facilitate the creative and therapeutic process of others. (See here as well as Wild Words).

I enjoy turning traditional creative writing teaching methods upside down. According to The London School of Economics, I’m ‘revitalising traditional creative writing teaching’. 

Whatever I do, it’s a delicious fusion of evolutionary psychology, conceptual metaphor, embodied cognition, writing technique, spirituality, and body-based therapies, facilitated (whether it’s between me and a blank page, or me and an other) with warmth, humour, honesty and clarity.

Whenever I can I support others to write and read in beautiful natural environments. I lead word lovers to the places where celebrated poetry and prose were written, and we share the thrill of reading it on that very ground.

A Spiritual Dimension

We can start from the premise that we are incomplete, lacking, wounded from the outset, in need of fixing or even born sinful. Alternatively, we can start from the premise that what we are is something bigger than this struggling little me, that we are innately connected, whole, complete, perfect.

The latter has alway made more sense to me and been experientially easy for me to access. I consider it an everyday sense that we all have, although we call it very different things. And, in every encounter I’ve ever had with a psychotherapy client or creative writing student, and especially with my own creative process, I’ve found it to be more useful. It liberates us to see clearly and take helpful actions.

So, call it what you like, but know that most of the greatest words ever written came from people someone who felt they were part of something bigger than themselves…

The Power of Storytelling

One of the ways, we can listen to our intuitive animal self-orienting towards health, is by writing and telling stories.

In my work with writers, I describe human being as natural storytellers. Writing and storytelling are being a fundamental way in which we discharge energy from the nervous system, process emotions, rehearse problem solving, connect and communicate. We need to tell stories in order to survive and to thrive.

I believe that we each have a story we need to tell. However, it will be different on different days, and even in different moments. It may manifest as fiction, or autobiography piece, as an article or a poem. Whatever shape it takes, that system of signs will be representative of an emotional, biological, psychic journey that we need to do. When that story shows up, its form may surprise us, as it’s often not the same story that the rational mind was planning to tell on our behalf. However, we will know it, instinctively. If we listen to the sensations in the boy, and our global sense of that, we feel it.

If we don’t listen, we can spend our lives trying to express a single story… a story that our body has not only been offering clues about, but literally shouting at us for years. And feeling frustrated is the least of it. If we don’t find a way to tell our stories, if that energy remains trapped in the body, then it leaks out, in a myriad of ways that sabotage health and relationships.  To briefly name some of them: we project parts of ourselves we can’t own, on to others and the environment. We somatise, and become stressed or ill. We ‘act out’, for example, we are aggressive towards others.

Storytelling is only one of the ways in which we process energy from the nervous system, communicate, and come back to organismic equilibrium. We also do it when we dance, or make love, or just when we tremble after being involved in a traffic accident.  My work with others involves helping them to spot, and to stay in contact with, the body sensations and urges. It’s also about supporting people to notice how and when they circumvent that process.  There’s a learning in containing, and channelling the flow. I bring people back to the trail.  

So, taking a dose of my own medicine, I frequently ask myself what’s the story I need to tell, now, here, today? Certainly I have a sense of something biting at my heels, jostling my elbow, sliding in beside me, roaring to be heard.

My creative process involves, firstly, a reconnection with a sense of something bigger than myself, with my ground of being, with the sacred. That enables the clarity to separate out of the stories I need to tell, from the stories I’ve been persuaded, along the way, I should tell. I must turn away from those messages that aren’t mine.

I train (because it is a training), to rest in my true nature and to stay steady with my embodied experience, without diverging from, or drowning in, the emotions concerned. It’s only then that my voice emerges naturally – my holistic, intuitive, wild self – and I can tell the stories I need to tell – in fiction or fact, poetry or prose. I know then that I’m always doing it right and that there’s nothing I can get wrong; there are only choices to achieve different effects.

As my ideas evolve, my job is to keep speaking up, to engage with the debate. Even when that takes courage. Sometimes I disagree with what I’ve said in the past.  Sometimes I change my mind about what I think. And I’m ok with that. It’s a conversation.

When we can stand proudly in the fullness of who we are, and are witnessed in that, then we’ve found our voice. To speak from a place of truth, what an utter relief that would be. We take from the melting pot of myth and story, and we feed back into it. The stories keep evolving.

I believe that it is time to let ourselves out of the cage, to re-wild ourselves, and to be unashamedly ourselves. Our potential then is limitless. Writing and the arts, body-awareness, and contact with nature and the sacred; those are the tools to get us there. Ironically, it’s in finding what we have in common with all other animals, that we find our unique voice as storytellers, and as human beings.

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The Wild Self

We see the animal part of ourselves as base, aggressive, unpredictable, and dangerous. We fear that, if released, it will destroy our self or another. But what if that weren’t true? What if the opposite were true? What if connection with it were the way to, not only survival, but thriving? The evidence is all around us, but we’re not seeing it. We only have to start listening to know the direction to go. It’s all about reconnection, with ourselves, and our world. It’s about coming alive, and being fully engaged with this beautiful world.

In order to approach building a relationship with our animal nature, it can help to understand the functioning of animals in the wild. We can regard them as base and dangerous, when, in fact, they are often altruistic, co-operative, and in-tune with their surroundings. They respond effectively to any threats and opportunities presented by the environment.

Many of the behaviours that we consider animalistic, or wild, are actually the outcomes of disconnection from our animal nature, rather than a result of it.

When we make start to make good contact with our animal selves we begin to appreciate our extraordinary ability to function from intuition. The word intuition gets a bad press. It's usually equated either with 'flights of fancy' that society does not value, because it's thought that they cannot be scientifically evidenced, or, it's confused with instinct.

To clarify the difference, instincts are the automatic responses to stimuli in the environment. Intuition is broader. It's the holistic sense of an appropriate response to a situation. It utilises all aspects of ourself, including instinct, and the thinking mind, and arrives in a 'blink' moment of understanding, felt on every level of our being.

In fact, when we begin to look closely at how we work, we find that intuition is already guiding us in many situations. That is despite our best attempts to ignore or sabotage it, and identify solely with the conscious, thinking mind. More than that, there’s now sound scientific support for the view that physical actions are taken, before we make a conscious decision to act! However much we’d like it to be different, it’s the unconscious, body-based processes that come first.

It’s worth knowing too, that intuition is as much learnt, as given. Although we are born with predispositions to certain behaviours, we can choose whether to train and develop them, and if so, how.

Human beings, as any animal, are designed to return to equilibrium after disturbance to the system. Contact with body sensations enables that. When we allow that intuitive, holistic process, then we come alive. We not only survive, but we thrive. That inbuilt guidance is available on tap to us, if we choose to take up the offer.

So, what does it take to get out of our own way, and function from a place of wild?

Wild, or Caged?

As human begins we have highly developed thinking minds, which we default to whenever we are faced with a dilemma. In doing so, we sabotage, and forget how to listen to, our instinctual drives and broader intuitive selves.

We also confuse emotion with body sensation. Body sensations are much more varied and often more subtle than emotions. Emotions are certain intensely felt, and labelled, body sensations. We falsely believe that to re-enter (and re-enter again) into strong emotion, to cathart, solves problems, when mostly it doesn’t. There is good evidence for emotion being an outcome of uncompleted instinctual urges, a distortion of them, in a way. Whilst helpful, emotions aren’t the whole answer.

An ability to drop down and touch base with body sensations, rather than only the thinking mind, and emotions, is fundamental. Only then can we act from holistic wisdom of our organism.

The problem is, that, as human beings, we have become increasingly distanced from our embodied selves, both in terms of contacting sensation, and taking action motivated by it.

To some extent that’s a tendency that is observable in other animals as well. In the 'higher' apes, stillness is seen as high status. If you’re still it means you’ve reached a place where you can order others around, you have servants. Aspiring to the same, human society trains us to ‘sit still’ and ‘stand still.’ Simultaneously we are learning not to act on instinctual urges.

Survival in any animal pack or tribe depends on being part of the group. That means fitting in and not being shunned. Human animals are not exempt from that. Perhaps partly as a result of the need to belong, but also because of our overactive active frontal lobes, we too frequently censor, suppress and limit our speech and physical movement, to the detriment of our health. The messages given to us, by our family, and/or community, about what we should be achieving, and how it’s appropriate to behave, are internalised. Ironically, we are the ones (emotionally or physically) beating ourselves up, even if others ceased to do it long ago.

It seems to me such a crying shame that, given the internal safety, and resources available to us, here and now, we are an animal that (metaphorically speaking) shoots itself in the foot at the slightest opportunity. My reminder, to my clients, students and at times myself too, is that we remember the animal that we are.