Last week at the Internal Family Systems International conference, I went to a session called ‘Playful IFS Pathways: Integrating Play Therapy, Expressive Arts, and Internal Family Systems.’ 

During the session, presenters Natasha Varela and Stefani Misiph explained how they integrate play therapy and IFS in sessions with children and young people. It got me thinking about how I do similar work with adults...

I’m in the process of developing a new workshop called Body + Page: Creative Curiosity. 

I thought about it a lot whilst on a week-long silent meditation retreat at Gaia House in Devon a couple of weeks ago.

This blog explores some of the ideas behind Body + Page; how the body can be a portal to all of life, how both relaxation and movement can open up deeper ways of knowing and how the page can be a place to bring all those discoveries together and to find out even more.

There are three physical experiments in this blog, which you could try if you’d like to get an embodied taster. There are also a bunch of ponder points, which you could explore through meditation, movement or writing if you’re called to.

This is a 10 minute guided grounding to help you connect with your body, heart and mind through the element of air.

Everything is an invitation and you can do it your way. There are invitations to first connect with the element of earth, before connecting with the air around your body. From here you are invited to connect with the sky and the sun and the moon and the stars, before breathing a sense of spaciousness into your body. From here you are invited to meet yourself as you are right now.

This August was the 6th annual #NoPlaceLikeKnowle Home Retreat, hosted by the magnificent Bee Golding and the mighty Lucy Heard. Every summer for the last 6 years, Bee has opened up her home and garden to an assortment of Bristol’s finest oddballs for a week...

These retreats have become an important pause-point in the middle of my year, a place where I notice where I’m at with my grief, re-connect with my creative practice and feel the support of a community of hilarious, tender-hearted creatives...

This August, I bounced straight from months and months of back-to-back projects, into a 5-day Internal Family Systems (IFS) Level 2 training, called Deepening and Expanding, led by Osnat Arbel.

This year, most of my time has been organised around holding space for other people, so I thought it would be a lovely treat for the first week of my summer break to put myself in a held space, in a beautiful place, surrounded by the kind-hearted IFS community....

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.