Good Walking Mad Morning Free E Booklet

So it's finally arrived - Free E-Day. Here's my little offering, Good Walking, Mad Morning, a meandering verbal meditation on the joys of walking coupled with reflections on the fast-changing scenery of inner London.

In the City people are the landscape.

Complete with my own photos.

it's available by clicking this link to the Scribd Site.

Happy reading.

Top Ten Songs that had an Impact on my Life

Recently I was asked to do a Desert Island Discs choice, to select the top ten songs that moved me, songs that had an impact on my life. I've often thought how true the line by Noel Coward is 'extraordinary how potent cheap music is.' Its power is so underestimated. The paradox is that cheap doesn't do it justice; it is more like vast inner riches with all the associations the songs bring up. The limit was ten - Ten!!!! It was criminal. So many gems to be discarded from the parade.

Wracking my brains was easy but selecting was extremely hard. I ended up with a continually reshuffled list of nearly 30 songs vital to significant moments in my life. It bugged me for days, yet I kept remembering more and more songs that had a powerful impact on me. So it's wonderful for jogging the memory. Who could ever forget The Verve's haunting anthem Bitter Sweet Symphony back in 1997? I can't, no doubt along with thousands of others whose lives it touched. Yet, I could not include it. I tended to wallow back in the Seventies when I was in my teens. I cut my teeth on the early part of the decade when life without music was unthinkable.

So here's my list... It may not suit most people, taste is subjective after all. They are roughly in chronological order, rather than in order of merit.I vote for them all equally but don't be surprised if I retain the right to change my mind.

• Dolphins: Tim Buckley

• Quicksand: David Bowie

• Boredom: The Buzzcocks

• Light of the Magical Moon: Marc Bolan

• Perfect Day: Lou Reed

• Corpus Christi Carol: Jeff Buckley

• To The Birds: Suede

• Let Down: Radiohead

• The Guests: (Leonard Cohen) Anthony and the Johnsons

• Adam’s Lullaby: Natacha Atlas/Jocelyn Pook

Enjoy listening.I recommend doing it as an exercise in what is important to you. Send your lists so I can listen too. Choose songs that are great landmarks that mark stages in your life. We probably churned through lots of difficult experiences and were helped by these songs in countless subtle yet profound ways that have now been coded into our DNA and will go with us to the grave. It definitely gets you reflecting hard on which ones not just affected you but really seared deep. Music has a transforming power, which allows us to overcome the love of power and enter a shared world of emotions.

As Aldous Huxley said: After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Is Hypnosis an Altered State?

Latest News on the nature of Hypnosis: Is it an Altered State?

If you are one of the few still wondering if hypnosis is safe and effective, here is a fascinating article. It helps dispel the media-generated myths that have grown around hypnotic trance. It says clearly that hypnosis could be a hitherto unrecognised different state of consciousness, or just a variation on normal waking consciousness. Whichever it is, one thing is sure: our beliefs and expectations colour the outcome yet it is still a state of mind accessible to everyone to be utilized for change. It is elusive to precise scientific definition. Yet, in this state, we can hold two opposing ideas in our minds at the same time; we can enjoy the benefits of a deep slow-cycle brain waves called ‘THETA’ , and far from being a zombie, you are fully aware of the powerful change it can bring about. Let’s hope the research continues…Read the full article at: Hypnos.co.uk

Free E-Download Day Brochure

Thanks to Dan Holloway from songs from the other side of the wall for providing this. The Free E Day is the online festival of independent music, literature, and art. The first free e-brochure for the event is now available. You can download it for free at the Free E-Download Day website.

This day is a celebration of all that's free on the internet.

You will also find a link to the Bookbuzzr for the event - the Bookbuzzr is an incredible widget that not only allows you to read the brochure on line in a super-whizzy format, but also enables you to embed it in your social media pages. Any of you who want to share the brochure in this way, that would be fantastic! You can use the Bookbuzzr widget for better ways to read it. Click "read now" to read in full screen and note that there is a zoom feature if you're having problems with the smaller print.

It includes my Writing as Healing Workshop info. That's on November 25th. Naturally as I'm taking part in this festival, there will be a free download from me of a story called 'Good Walking Mad Morning'. So look out for that.

Writing As Healing Workshop

Writing as Healing Workshop

Wednesday November 25^th , 6.30-8.30pm,The Feelgood Centre

Ever feel you have something unsaid still locked inside? Then this workshop might be for you. Learn How Writing really can heal your life. Journaling is often overlooked in our busy lives. With a sensitive approach, truthful writing can be used a therapeutic tool to uncover long buried feelings to gain insight, and thus regain power. Writing your way to health is simple, easy and even good fun.

This workshop invites you to explore the true value of how writing unravels problems, first by getting them on to the page. Deeper feelings can come through images and metaphors which should be valued as messages from the unconscious. Writing out your problems on a piece of paper can clear many long-standing issues.

Kieron’s approach to writing is a unique synthesis of ideas about how writing releases emotions, thus clearing the way for self growth. It is based on a variety of methods developed by pioneers in the field such as Julia Cameron, James Pennebaker, Kathleen Adams, and Tristine Rainer. The added bonus is that he also uses techniques from developments in EFT, neuroscience, guided visualisation, lucid dreaming, energy psychology and personal development as aids to discovery.

During the session you will be shown how to:

· become centred and focussed

· visualise through imagery

· write freely without censoring yourself

· release blocked emotions

· clarify long standing or unresolved issues

· be more in contact with your dreams

It is not a standard Creative Writing class but could lead to more confidence to write stories and poetry. Confidentiality and personal boundaries are respected. The workshop is most useful for people who have recently been through a difficult transition, a major illness, relationship break down, or other traumatic experiences. But, since writing can also be a fun activity, it is really open to anyone who feels they have a story they have not yet voiced where writing as the best medium to reveal it.

Kieron is a practising writer of fiction and non fiction. He has taught Creative Writing and has done extensive research into the healing power of writing. He is also a qualified Hypnotherapist and Lightning Process Practitioner.

www.kierondevlin.com info@kierondevlin.com

Tel: 07896 483746

The Feelgood Centre, 34-5, Chiswell Street, London, EC1.

Hypnosis for Finding the Creative Spark

It is often not so easy to find the inner creative self, the part of us that has truckloads of ideas and a pool of answers and solutions. Daily life tends to act as a smokescreen, filtering out the best we are able to think. There are so many distractions to deal with each day that it takes our energy and we forget to breathe and function on a deeper level.

All it takes is some uninterrupted time alone in a quiet place and we can regain that mode of being again. In just a few minutes we can reengage with it, reconnect. Start by slowing down, relaxing, and then listening, watching what is front of you, and the world around you becomes highly sensitized.

These videos are short samplers of what is possible to achieve with just a very light trance. Watch carefully as you can see thoughtful reflections from poet..

Rumi

If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?

Gerald Jampolsky

A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed restrictions

And
Stanley Arnold

Every problem contains within it the seeds of its own solution.


Watch it till the end, preferably with head phones. I hope people find it calming and useful and that it generates the creative spark you need.

It might be an idea to make sure you won't be interrupted for six to ten minutes and perhaps to write down a question that is currently on your mind before you start. Just to see if the answer will come up. Chances are it will.

Here it is on Daily Motion and You Tube Hypnosis for Creative Change.

Have some relaxing fun with it.
Thank you.

Song of the Desert

This is a video posted on Daily Motion and You Tube as a sampler of all it takes to relax and enter a wider inner space than we might be used. Images of the desert often spark a feeling of grandeur, mystery and the ultimate metaphysical sensation that there is infinite space right here on earth.

All you have to do is make sure you have uninterrupted time - no mobile phones- just some headphones so you can go right into the experience and just watch how amazing it feels to enter a light trance and engage once again with your inner resources. Just doing this for a few minutes each time you need to can allow you a better right left brain hemisphere relationship and just bring you into contact with your deeper self.

So, please listen and enjoy.

Brand Literary Magazine Issue 04 Winter/Spring 09

The best things come in small, neat, well designed packages they say. All the better for slowly unwrapping. So this is how the latest Brand Literary Magazine Issue 4 appears. Nice to touch, with smooth glossy pages, very easy on the eyes, and full of edgy, provoking lines of poetry, short fiction and art work. It is the magazine of the Creative Writing Department at Greenwich. It contains my story String of Bright Moments which you can read a sample of here. The public launch and reading will be at Rix Mix, May 3rd.

Editor, Nina Rapi goes to the core of feelings in the introduction, talking of the battle that breaks out between erotic and higher forms of love, an overriding theme. Jeffar Khaldi's work appears in it. This artist, from Lebanon, also appeared at the Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East at the Saatchi Gallery, reported below.

Two copies have just arrived for me to look at, so will leaf through them at leisure and report back on the contents: thus far, thus good, I'm smelling a winner, it's a tasty literary morsel.

The Sound of Music Heals

Funny how you come across things just when you most need them. By chance. Happy chance. I have been raving about the elegaic and arcadian sound of the Fleet Foxes lately and even went to see them at the Roundhouse last week. They have a sublime sound. This got me talking to a friend who said 'Have you heard of Mari Boine?' I said I hadn't. She said 'Oh, you must listen'. She brought me the CDs Gula Gula and Idjagiedas. This music touches deep somehow if you are able to listen deeply and let it in. It harps back to ancient rhythms, and irregular resonances, with unusual instrumentation, blending jazz, folk, world, but mostly being Shamanistic. Mari Boine is of the Sami people that live across the Scandinavian countries, into Russia and even Siberia. She has a haunting, soulful voice. It seems to say 'don't forget nature', 'don't forget where you came from'. So the sound of music can come back to reconnect us. I imagine it's not for everyone, not really, but if it happens into your life at a crucial point in goes right to the solar plexus. If you are feeling down or fractured, broken up about something and this can happen more frequently than we care to admit, being handed Mari Boine could do worse than help you to soothe over any sore spots in your life. Listen hard, and learn.

Painters from the Middle East

Just some images from the New Painting from the Middle East exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, London. It's a very impressive collection with some thought-provoking works, mainly from Iranian, Iraqi, Lebanese,Palestinian and Egyptian artists. It's very good to see that ideas are challenging and deal directly with controversial issues that are every day experiences: bomb attacks, hospitals, the veil, gender roles. There's a mix of media too with sculpture, painting and photography. Definitely worth a visit. The Saatchi is a well proportioned, spacious gallery, a perfect space in the heart of Chelsea.

New Hypnosis Website

This website www. kierondevlin.com is dedicated to helping people overcome all the problems, low self esteem, low energy anxiety, depression, insomnia, chronic illnesses, fatigue and many others to seek ways of getting out of the mental box we often tie ourselves up in. Hypnosis helps unravel the knots, so we can free ourselves more easily.

It has a lot of information and links to how to book hypnosis sessions, and reserve places on the fantastic three day life changing seminar The Phil Parker Lighting Process.

It is also a great resource not just about hypnosis, NLP, EFT and the Lightning Process but with tips and articles on :
1) Self Hypnosis
2) Goals exercises
3) Writing as Healing: A pen is mightier than a pill.
4) Using EFT with Lucid Dreaming ( to come).

And you can expect much more to come in the next weeks with more news of the Proteus Project workshops and writing experiments. I hope you enjoy reading and would love to see lots of people get the benefit of all that I have learned.

Have a browse through and see if it matches what you are looking for, or if anything rings true.Contact me for more information.

Life is a Life Poster:Part 2

Visualization is the key to operating the deeper aspects of the mind. If you can't visualize something happening then, it is still not clear in your head and it is better to wait for clarity to come before moving ahead. Once it is clear, it will begin its work to materialise. To help shape your world, and even make things happen that you never thought would happen, it is a great idea to do a Tony Buzan-style mind map, collage, image tree, spider-gram, or anything that visually represents what you hope to achieve. Often using scissors paste, magazine cuttings, crayons, pencils, pens is a great way, but for visual people just the image is enough.

I previously suggested the Life Poster as a way of building self esteem, getting in touch with your self image, and building that into the shape that you would like it to be, but it is also just good fun and therapeutic to play around with images, to observe their interplay of colour, forms, and meaning.

The Life Poster is meant to represent your ideal self. With image programmes nowadays it is getting easier all the time to create fessional results. In the previous post, I talked about how to do it on Photoshop, but even I don't have the time to spend using it. A much easier way is to use Picasa which is free to download from Google.

Just follow these easy steps to make your own Life Poster Collage:

1. Download Picasa from Google, if you don't already have it on your PC.
2. Collect jpeg pictures of yourself or of people or objects you admire or wish to have in your life.
   
3. Select for colour, interest, contrast, similarity.
4. Create a folder and give it a special name, something that resonates with what you want.
5. Open Picasa and add the folder
6. Select the folder and 'hold items'
7. Click 'Create Collage' from the options at the bottom of Picasa
8. Use the settings to arrange it in Grid, Mosaic, or Scattered Photo arrangment.
9. Click to finalise the Collage
10. Wait for Picasa to complete the collage for you.
11. Send it or print it out, or use it as a backdrop or wallpaper wherever you need reminding of what you most want to have in your life.
12. Enjoy contemplating these wonderful multiple images.
13. Observe the effects in your life.
14. Try it on other things and see what happens.