I have just completed my last online one-to-one (for now). 

For three years, I have regularly sat with a gorgeous assortment of artists, performers, directors, musicians, poets, therapists, facilitators and researchers. I have held space for them to explore their lives, their work, their creativity, their inner worlds and their relationships and I have loved every minute of it...

After the final obligatory Zoom-goodbye-wave (I still wish we did that in real life meetings), I sat down and I meditated. 

Wanting to mark the transition, I picked three cards from The Wild Unknown Archetype Tarot Deck at random, holding these three questions in mind...

This week I didn’t go to Buddhafield.

I didn’t dance in a throng of hippies. I didn’t sit round a campfire, tooting my clarinet ’til dawn. I didn’t do the hour-long improvised show that I was booked to perform. Instead I stayed at home, tending to my exhausted body. 

I didn’t have much of a choice...

...Riddled with FOMO, I resentfully rested in my tiny, hot flat.

In amongst the huffing and the puffing, I stumbled upon a week-long online writing challenge called Writing From The Body. 

This session was presented at Clownvergence, an online Clown conference, on 10th April 2026. 

Holly Stoppit, Sarah Burns, Saskia Solomons and Angela Hayes are a group of Internal Family Systems (IFS) - trained clowns and fools....

We have been exploring the meeting point of clowning, fooling and IFS in a series of playful co-created labs since 2020 and we want to share some of our findings with you! Come and discover how IFS is helping us deepen our performance work and how clowning and fooling is helping us deepen our therapeutic work.

This is one of those Very Long Holly-blogs, where I reflect on the run up to smashing out a fully improvised performance-lecture at a play conference in Denmark. I give a bit of background, explore my terror leading up to the performance and my preparation on the day of the show. There’s an outline of the content of the show and a description of the aftermath. The last section is a series of short reflections on what I learned (you could just scroll down to that if you’re pressed for time and enjoy the photos on your way!).

This one goes out to everyone who is interested in play, Fooling, IFS, improvised performance, finding balance between structure and freedom, stage fright and the parts that fuel it, how to ground and anchor yourself in a storm and the journey back to living fully after a breakdown. It’s also for nosey people who just want to know what I’ve been up to lately.

This blog is a contemplation on the inner parts that lead us into old, familiar holes. There are snippets of my own story, an exploration of the parts that like to push me towards the pit of burn-out, and some writing / ponder prompts for you to explore your familiar holes (fnar, fnar!). There’s a classic poem about a hole in a road, and some nuggets of advice from nature, about how to stop falling into holes. At the end, there’s an invitation for you to go out into nature and ask for whatever advice you need. 

This is part two of a two-part reflection on the Fool and Somatic IFS week that took place in Bristol on 16-20 February this year. 

This blog features writing from two of the participants.

The first piece, 'Frogspawn,' was written by Helyn Wilder, after spending time by the pond in the Easter Gardens, up the road from our training space. Photos are by fellow participant, Lucie Wild.

The second piece, written by Bess Spencer, features a poem that Bess wrote after attending my 5-day Fools School in 2019. Bess read the poem, titled 'To be seen is not a passive act,' in our closing circle at the end of our Fooling + Somatic IFS lab in 2026. They've written a short introduction to the poem for this blog, which includes some of their experiences through the Fool + Somatic IFS week.

From 16-20 February this year, I ran a 5-day training / lab for 8 Fools, exploring where Fooling meets Somatic Internal Family Systems. 

This Blog

This blog offers a glimpse of what we got up to in our 5-day group journey. There’s a section offering some context, an outline of some of the activities we did and photos of the participants at play. There are excerpts from one of the participants' creative journal, some poetry that I penned in the room and a letter I wrote to my future self. The blog ends with some more descriptions of the course by the participants.

I recently got some of my words published in an actual real life book!!! Author Emma E. Redfern was writing a user-friendly guide to Internal Family Systems (IFS) when she stumbled upon one of my blogs, where I was dialoguing withy my parts on the page. Tickled by the unfolding internal conversation, Emma asked if she could lift a section of my blog to include in her book and I gratefully agreed. 

After that, I had a request from a reader to make a “how to…” guide to help them have a chat with their inner voices on the page. So we go!

This blog gives a little background about my daily writing practice, before offering you a handy 6-step guide to help you dialogue with your parts on the page. I hope it’s helpful to you!

I will be appearing at Counterplay International Festival of Play, in Denmark in May! Come along! It sounds like it's going to be A LOT of fun.

CounterPlay ’26: And so we play…

Dates: 7-9 May, 2026 

Place: Kolding School of Design, Ågade 10, 6000 Kolding, Denmark

This is a guest blog written by Lucy Heard. Lucy invited me to facilitate a three day artists' residency for her and her collaborator, Bee Golding, at 101 Outdoor Arts centre near Newbury in February 2026. 

This blog describes some of what we got up to in our residency, in the context of Lucy's year-long Arts Council funded research project - How To Live In A Queer Dying Body. The photos were all taken by Bee and me during the residency. 

Over to you Lucy!