Before I continue, I’d like to issue a warning here that I am going to be talking about a certain bodily process today. Yes, the title of my post is a bit of a clue. I am talking today about all the crap, poo, shit, whatever you call it, that we carry around… and how to let go of it.

I find Russell Brand absolutely fascinating (the ‘character’ he talks about creating for himself in order to do stand-up, his use of language) and I nearly dropped the iron when he talked about the pre-gig ritual that he goes through to prepare himself for a stand-up audience, in order to ‘empty his mind and feel more open, more focused.’

Basically, what Russell Brand does is to take himself off to a toilet cubicle and do some self-hypnosis. He gets himself into a relaxed and focused awareness, if you like, a way of being that I would call a kind of ‘trance’ or doing ’self-hypnosis.’ Oh, and pardon my crudity here but he also, so he told us last night, usually does a big poo at this point too. And that’s where Frank Skinner, his interviewer pointed out that most stand-ups do. Apparently, it’s called ‘the comedy shit.’

Now, one of the reasons I laughed out loud at this idea of Brand sitting doing self-hypnosis whilst also evacuating his bowels is that, just a couple of hours previously, I’d been having a conference call with some of the students on my Word Sauce Online Writing Programme. We had been talking about the phase in the writing process that they have been exploring over past weeks, a phase that I call ‘Letting Go.’

This Letting Go - of physical tension, or pre-conceived ideas, of learned narratives or, not to put too fine a point on it, of all your shit - is an important part of a process of reconnecting with what it feels like to be you, what feels right for you as opposed to what you think you should be doing, for example.

And several of my students over the years have mde the connection between letting go of stuckness and other unhelpful crap and the daily bodily process of… ahem.. evacuation.

Some students have used words like ‘emotional constipation.’ One student told me that his daily morning practice of free-writing - of letting go of whatever happens to be on your mind onto the page - was closely associated for him with his morning bowel movement. He took his journal into the loo with him. Each was just as necessary.

So here, as I ironed my pillowcases, was Russell Brand, talking about the very same thing: his pre-gig Letting Go ritual in which he frees himself of shit on a physical, mental and even spiritual level. Hmmmm… Very interesting.

You know, I am always reluctant to over-psychologise physical health issues (sometimes things just happen) but I do suspect that there is some correlation between the way that our bodies process food and the way that we process emotions. Perhaps that is why there is a growing evidence base for hypnotherapy in the treatment of IBS and ulcerative colitis, for example.

After all, emotions produce complex chemical reactions in our bodies - oestrogen, cortisol, adrenaline - that need to be processed in the same way as the chemical reactions in our food. Or is it simply that we understand the two processes in terms of similar metaphors?

And we talk about our ‘gut instinct’ or ‘the knot in my stomach,’ because that’s exactly what and where it feels like.

And did you know that there is far more serotonin in your gut than in your brain? Or that your colon is a muscle and can, therefore, be subject to muscular tension?

So letting go - through daily self-hypnosis, deep physical relaxation and writing or through your personal toilette; through the morning ‘dump’ on the loo or onto the page - could be more significant than you may even realise.

If you’re feeling a little stuck, it might be worth asking yourself what you’re holding on to.

For people who live in harmony with the earth’s cycles, winter is a time for turning inward, for intense creativity, for gathering around the fire, sewing and shaping  and dreaming and telling stories.

Since I moved back to North Yorkshire, I find myself in greater synchrony with the seasons. Winter has become an increasingly fertile time for me. I find myself thinking about painting walls, making poems and, yes, even knitting more ‘wild tea cosies.’

I know that many people do not like this time of year, the idea of the evenings drawing in, the days shortening. But when you think about all the possibilities of those longer winter evenings, it can be very exciting.

I found this poem by Emily Dickinson yesterday:

‘Winter under cultivation
Is as arable as spring.’

In perfect Dickinson fashion, those two little lines speak everything that I’ve been trying to say so far, rather more clumsily, in this blog post.

This was my first visit to both Aldeburgh and the Festival and the five hour journey was well worth it.

Besides the powerful effect of being immersed in poems read by many different poets and hearing what others think about the process of making poems, one of my favourite features of the weekend was the Aldeburgh ‘Short Take’, a fifteen minute presentation by a poet on an aspect of poetry.

The chosen theme this year was ‘Love and Death’ and poets were asked to explore the idea that these are the only true subjects for poetry.

Pascale Petit’s ‘Short Take’ particularly struck me. She told us that, for her, making poems is ‘a way of making a home in the world,’ making a home in a world where she doesn’t feel she has a true home, and in a world which she ‘doesn’t understand.’

From the little murmur that travelled around the room, I think this idea resonated with many other people in the audience. It’s also a very interesting idea when we think about the way that the process of writing can be used in the field of personal development, in health care and in education.

The idea of ‘making a home for oneself’ with words on the page seems to make room for the idea that the process of writing is not primarily - not even necessarily -  about making a great poem, although the wonderful Petit certainly knows how to  do that.

Making poems, it seems, can also be about making meaning in a meaningless world, about creating a sense of belonging, about carving out a space.

I watched an interview by Simon Armitage recently in which he also spoke about making poems as making meaning ‘in a life where there isn’t much meanng, unless you’re devoutly religious. So I think it’s a way of not finding significance but actually inventing it, inventing significance and sort of proving it to yourself, and I think it’s a way of manifesting ourselves to ourselves.’

Yes. That resonates with me too.

Posner and Petoine claim that:

Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any of the arts–such as music, dance or theater–strengthens the brain’s attention system, which in turn can improve cognition more generally.

We know that the brain has a system of neural pathways dedicated to attention. We know that training these attention networks improves general measures of intelligence. And we can be fairly sure that focusing our attention on learning and performing an art–if we practice frequently and are truly engaged–activates these same attention networks. We therefore would expect focused training in the arts to improve cognition generally.

In his discussion of this claim, Lehrer also makes what I think is a very valid point: that education in the arts also offers children the opportunity of self-expression and of experiencing ‘flow,’ the state first proposed by Czikszentmihalyi as crucial to both creativity and general well-being.

The research in attentional states, though controversial, is very interesting to me in terms of my research into the neuroscentific underpinnings of creative writing for personal development.

There is growing evidence to suggest that engaging in regular periods of activity that train the brain’s attention networks increases their efficiency. This may help us to understand why regular creative writing practice and regular self-hypnosis are both ways of strengthening attention and increasing mental focus. Indeed, Sharon Begley has written extensively on the way that meditation may literally change - or retrain - our brains, citing fascinating research with Buddhist monks.

However, I agree with Lehrer that there are likely to be many other benefits to these activities, which the focus on attentional networks does not measure.

For example, over the last decade, James Pennebaker has researched the benefits of writing and linked them to the external expression of internal thoughts and emotions (the Expressive Writing paradigm).  And I personally believe that we can go beyond that too, as my recent paper in the Journal of Health Psychology argues.

There is also the theory that activities such as creative writing and creative visualisation create experiences of novelty and newness, the ‘numinous’ quality characteristic of traditional descriptions of artistic or spiritual experiences, which may actually turn on the expression of genes associated with well-being and/or rehabilitate neural networks damaged after stroke. The psychotherapist, Ernest Rossi, is integrating interesting neuroscientific explorations of this area and the possibilities are exciting.

We certainly need more research to be done, but this is just some of the growing evidence that the benefits of creative experience, no matter what age we might be, might be measured neuroscientifially, helping us to model best practice in this particular area of personal development.

When asked what she was most pleased with in the novel she said:

I wrote The Wilderness with my heart, if that’s not too sentimental a thing to say. So I’m most pleased that this thing that was in my heart has found expression in the world, and is interesting to people. Not everyone, I know, but some – and that really is enough.

It’s interesting to me that Harvey seems almost to apologise for saying such a thing. You did what? You wrote it with your heart? As if it is not the done thing, not terribly cool to write from such a felt sense of things.

And I find that so refreshing!

The book is written from the point of view of Jake, a sixty-year-old man with Alzheimer’s, and Harvey engaged in some comprehensive first-person research. She says:

‘I used first and third-person accounts and case studies of people with Alzheimer’s, I read medical books, went to Alzheimer’s care centres, spoke to carers, to a researcher and a neuroscientist. I watched films, I read poetry by people with dementia. I felt a huge responsibility to get it if not right exactly then at least plausible, and for it to resonate with those who know more about the disease than I do.’

I haven’t yet read the book but I’ll definitely be adding it to my Christmas bookshelf.

I purchased it at the local supermarket, under persuasion from B, aged 12. Actually, I lie. I needed little persuasion. I love any excuse for making something.

However, days later, here it sits, uncut, defiantly plump and glowing against the black countertop of our kitchen.

Who will give in first, I wonder? Will I take a knife and make the incision? (Think of the waste, otherwise! Think of the cakes and pies!) Or will the pumpkin quietly deconstruct itself over the days to come?

So I sit looking at this pumpkin and the pumpkin looks at me. We survey one another.

And it occurs to me that this pumpkin is like a poem.

‘What does a pumpkin have in common with a poem?’ you may well be asking.

Well, it’s something about the space. Something about the way that its shape is as much about the space around it as what it manages to contain. That’s what reminds me of a poem on the page.

Yes, this pumpkin resonates. It is radiantly, stubbornly its own poem.

Carving into it would be risky, would require a certain care. You know, not to squish the delicate flesh of it with my enthusiasm, my carefully thought-out constructs, cuts and counter-cuts. Scooping out just enough to allow it to glow when lit from the inside. Not too much that it becomes brittle, collapses in on itself.

Can I wring anything more from this metaphor? Well, only that poems, it seems, are everywhere.

I knew I was forcing it. It’s a sign that I need to recharge, refuel.

On my Online Programme right now, we’re experimenting with free-writing, writing anyway, writing when you have absolutely nothing that you really want to say, just writing and keeping writing.

And it’s the opposite of forcing things. It’s about letting go into the writing, keeping things loose, easy.

Because sometimes the pressure of wanting to have something meaningful to say is what stops us in our tracks.

In this month’s online Horizon Review magazine by Salt Publishing, who are publishing some of my favourite work in contemporary poetry right now, such as Katy Evans-Bush, I read an interview with Pascale Petit (another favourite) who says that she writes in large notebooks across the double page so that she doesn’t feel cramped. (I am paraphrasing here. This is one of the details that stayed with me from the interview.)

And I think that describes it nicely. Don’t allow yourself to get cramped. Breathe. Expand.

No clients today so I’m going to do some cleaning and tidying (maybe) and get out into the sumptuous autumn colours too. Nothing like getting my body moving to allow the words to begin writing themselves.

It’s not just that we reach for a poem in times of need - weddings, funerals and other rituals. It also seems that lots of us are writing poetry. Lots and lots of it.

Today my Twittering and Facebooking has been filled with news of poetic events all over the country. People are linking to their favourite poems or nominating their poetry heroes.

There’s a lot of enthusiasm for poetry out there.

Last night, we had the announcement of the biggest poetry prize in Britain, the Forward Prize. Within seconds, the Tweets from the prize-giving were flowing. Poetry, it seems, is news.

I love the fact that people all over the country are composing Twitter haikus, quoting half-remembered verses of Walter de la Mare, talking about their favourite T S Eliot and debating whether Bob Dylan’s lyrics can really be called poems.

It seems that everyone knows what a poem is. We recognise it. It recognises us. There’s just something about a poem that speaks us, or speaks for us.

Don Paterson, winner of last night’s Forward, once called a poem ‘a little machine for remembering itself.’

Yes, it’s that. And it’s also so much more than that.

Happy National Poetry Day!

When you let go of the unhelpful stuff, all the mental chatter circulating in your head,  all those thoughts and doubts about not being able to write, never being ‘good enough,’ the internal critic, unhelpful internal readers, as well as all those other unsupportive narratives about yourself and writing, when you let go of all that - and that is a lot of stuff - something magical begins to happen.

You make space for possibility, playfulness, words, words, words to flow onto the page.

You don’t need to feel very relaxed or ‘in the right mood’ to begin this process. One of the biggest and possiby most unhelpful writing narratives going is that writers are people who feel inspired every day, who sit down calmly and serenely at their desk in the mood for writing.

Speak to any writer and they’ll tell you that the most important thing is simply to keep showing up for writing; to get into some kind of rhythm, whether at a desk or walking the dog or in those precious moments before the children wake up, and just start writing. Write anything.

Natalie Goldberg calls it ‘keeping the hand moving.’ Julia Cameron calls it ‘morning pages.’ My friend, the writer Sarah Salway,  has a very helpful round-up on her blog today of her own creative practice. Sarah describes her daily process as ‘forgetting the set of rules which tell you that there is only one way to write.’ I like that.

I call my own daily practice Letting Go. I also sometimes refer to it as ‘free writing.’ In the same way that free running is all about reclaiming public space, jumping from building to building, making shapes with your body, joining things up, my early morning writing practice is about reclaiming the page. For me. Daily.

Sometimes the words that emerge turn into poems. Very often they just run on into more writing: Oh, yes… that is what I really wanted to say… and this… and this…

If I don’t allow myself the space to let go, space for the not-writing writing, then I feel cramped, stifled, unable to say anything.

My friend, the poet Meryl Pugh, talks about her daily writing practice here too, on her blog. She even includes some of the ‘discarded bits’ that didn’t make the poem she’s currently making - but were nevertheless a crucial part of that making process.

By the way, someone at a workshop once asked me if I thought blogs were a kind of free-writing. My answer was and still is ‘no.’

Many writers now have blogs. They make fascinating reading, offering tantalising glimpses into creative processes. One of my favourites is by the poet, Mark Doty, who captures experiences, pictures, imprints, a way of looking at the world which I  very much enjoy reading.

However, writing in a blog, although it may be enriching for your readers, is not the same as free-writing into the private space of the page, reclaiming a piece of physical space and time as yours and only yours, allowing words to emerge any old way and any new how. Freed from the expectations of external readers, you can  begin to develop a special kind of internal reader for yourself, a reader who waits and watches and acknowledges, patiently and kindly… whatever happens.

Because there will probably always be some kind of reader or reading going on inside your mind, so if you can make that reader a kind, helpful, supportive character, who is willing to stand aside and gently observe as you get on with the process of experimenting, writing, making ‘mistakes,’ writing, playing around with words, you might be surprised to notice what happens.

And that’s Letting Go.

Last night, the lovely Mr Armitage came to Easingwold, a small village north of York where my family live, and gave a witty, moving and thoroughly entertaining reading. There are surprisingly few poets around who can read and talk about their poems  in exciting and engaging ways. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at that.

Some poems - certainly lots of mine! - work best surrounded by silence, in the still white holding space of the page. And, after all, as Simon himself pointed out, lots of writers choose to be writers because they like to spend most of their time sitting at home at their desks on their own, in privacy. Who says that they should be good at reading their work to others? But it is a real treat when you get the opportunity to sit back and be read to by someone who is really good at doing it.

And one of the things that I love about working with people during my Online Programme in Creative Writing for Personal Development, Health amd Well Being is the feeling of being read to. People work on something in progress and share it with us in the workshop forums and over the six months of the programme, I begin to get a real sense of their developing voice. I begin to really hear them in their writing.

I am now preparing for my next Programme, which begins on 9 October.

We have a lovely group of people enrolled on the course - and there’s still room for more, if you’d like to join us.

I like the flexibility of working with people in this way. We can enjoy conference calls together and also access different parts of the Programme at the times that are right for us. I can adapt parts of the course as we go to suit the emerging interests of the group. And we always have such a wonderful range of people from different parts of the world and different interests and backgrounds.

So, I’m looking forward to October.

In the meantime, Simon Armitage said last night that he thinks every poet should practise writing ‘the definitive  poem about their home town.’ I think that’s an interesting idea, to write about your idea of home or the place where you live or grew up. It’s something that fits well with the idea of writing as a process of discovery or journeying or development. I’d better get writing.