Hypnosis and Creativity

Hypnosis is a powerful way to access unmediated creative resources. Creative resources can be often tarnished by our tendency to over-reflect, by our exposure to stress, by many other factors which detract from the creative impulse, or from the capacity to fully immerse in the creative process itself. With hypnosis the person can find a level of focus which quietens the dualistic experience of the mind and allows for a surrendering to one’s own subtle internal experience which can starkly regenerate the creative thrust.

It is common for people to find their mind has ‘unblocked’, after a session of hypnotherapy, allowing them to reconnect with a direct and vivid creative experience. As such, hypnosis can deepen, reframe, and expand an artist relationship with their medium, very often with surprising and exciting results. This is have witnessed over and over again, with writers, visual artists, dancers and with artists of thoughts, i.e. philosophers and theorists.

Is creativity a process of hammering at some kind of content until it has transformed into an evidently creative ‘thing’, an artefact? Is it the product of labour and effort and determination? Yes, and no. It certainly requires thinking and labouring to manifest the creative impulse and the creative insight into some external form. It might also require strategising, alertness to context and good social skills to bring that form out into the creative field so that it can be appreciated and perhaps acquired by the public.

Yet, more often than not, it is a matter of quieting the thinking mind and releasing oneself from effort into receptivity, allowing for the ideas for that creative act to arise, to be heard and felt and seen. In endlessly different ways artists receive an idea, witness a bubble bursting from the depth of their unconscious into awareness. The imagination needs to be unfettered to resonate with creative content, not pushed around by need or wishes to success and recognition, by fear of failure or doubts of direction, this any successful artist who enjoys his/her practice knows.

Hypnosis, so as many other techniques of course, can release the fetters we have added onto our imagination through all the experiences of success and failure which have been laid upon our past. All good and bad experiences from the simplest responses we got as a toddler to our wondering about on four legs, to the more articulate ones of later life brought about by expert critique and feedback weigh down our imagination with some kind of visible perimeter of possibility. The work is to erase that visible perimeter and break out of the enclosure we are electing around our selves, and expand the field to infinity, or beyond.

The difference between hypnosis and other approaches is that it capitalises on our natural innate already very powerful capacity to daydream, to trance, to drift off and the fact that such state is inherently pleasurable and nourishing therefore a place where all minds like to be allowed to go to. The other advantage of the hypnotic process is that it is made easier by the presence of a witness, the therapist, which mounts the sails so that the traveller can simply enjoy the journey and take in the landscape. If the therapist understands the subtlety of the creative process, and the tenderness of the imagination, he/she can nudge the journey so that it stays on the powerful currents already in place within, and through them, reaches as far as the inner eye can see.