Fiction or factual writing, poetry, conversation, blogging, spoken word, song-writing, speech-writing.

Word-crafting workshops, residential retreats and mentoring support, in the UK, France, and online.

Play, explore, dream, imagine, rage, laugh, love and share the sacred human-animal adventure with like-minded souls.

Founded by writer, psychotherapist, university lecturer and lover of the inner and outer wilds, Bridget Holding.

How To Take Part

About Me, and how Wild Words began...

Larking about in nature, connecting with something bigger than myself, revelling in the awakening of my senses and bodily experience, playing with the words that arose. It began as the fun thing I did when I wasn't doing the real, important writing. Then I realised it was the most real, important and liberating of all. Then I wanted to do it with other people...

I feel passionate about continuing to build a support community motivated to find passion, power, connection and freedom within the experience of connection to nature, the nature of ourself, writing and storytelling. At a certain point, feeling frustrated beyond imagining with my creative process, I took what felt like a risky step: I unchained myself from my desk and broke out of the office. Living and writing on beaches and, later, in the mountains of the Pyrenees, I explored the relationship between the wild in the natural environment, the wild in myself and the wild in my world. In doing so, I touched in with the instinctual, the embodied, the sensory, the sacred, the playful and the expressive. Both passionately and gradually, I integrated my personal experiential work with theory I knew well from body-based psychotherapy and spiritual practice. In 2011, looking for others with whom to continue the adventure, I founded Wild Words and The Society For Writers In-The-Wild.

Now I enjoy adapting techniques from many sources (Evolutionary, Arts and Body-based Psychotherapy; Non-duality; Buddhism; Zen; Christianity; Somatic Experiencing; Yoga; Qigong; Focusing; Shamanic Practice; 5Rhythms) to offer enlivening mini-experiments to aid you on your word-crafting path.

I've 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, and Uppingham Summer School. Articles written by me, or about my work, have been published in–among other publications–The Telegraph Newspaper, The Psychotherapist Magazine, Psychologies, Writing Magazine and Saga Magazine. 

My Background

I completed an honours degree in English literature, before working in film production. I worked on feature films including The Full Monty. In my twenties I was an award winning short filmmaker and screenwriter in London. I was a winner of the Sky Moviemax Short Film of The Year Award. I also gave creative support to other writers, and read scripts for Sky Television. Later I began teaching creative writing for The University of Exeter and The Open University.

After practicing Buddhist-based mindfulness, yoga and other practices for many years, a wish to understand the human psyche, as well as my own creative process better, led me into a four-year integrative arts-based psychotherapy training. This provided a solid grounding in Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Psychodynamic Theory, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Somatic Experiencing work with trauma. I explored the profound implications of a body-centred approach to therapy which cuts through the repetitive thought patterns that we can get caught in at times of difficulty.

I'm a writer, teacher and all-round lover of the wild.