This week I accepted the challenge to post short daily videos capturing field notes from Fools School.

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.

Greetings all! We have just released our autumn programme and we're looking forward to playing with you as the leaves begin to fall!

Whether you want to dip your toe into the wonderful world of Holly Stoppit at a weekend introduction (Play Presence and Parts), immerse yourself in the audaciously authentic solo improvisation form known as Fooling (5-day Fools School), top up your Fooling practice in a new Fools community group (The Fools' Circle) or brush up your creative facilitation skills (The Well-Held Space), you're welcome just as you are!

Things are changing here in Holly Stoppit world; I’m pressing pause on my online one-to-one therapy, supervision and creative consultancy services, I’m putting my workshop prices up and I’m launching a new online community group for Fools.

These may sound like business decisions, but they’re much more than that. I’m choosing life!

This blog is the story of a woman who spent her life creating spaces of belonging for others, but somehow forgot her own need to belong.

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.

On the 28 & 29th March 2026, 75 clowns took over Bristol University’s drama department to explore The State of our beloved Art Form at Clown Congress 2026...

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.