Happy New Year! 

To mark the transition, here’s a wee muse on the theme of beginnings and endings.

A few weeks ago, in the final session of my online Creative Facilitation course, we explored the theme of beginnings and endings through play and reflection. Here follows a few of my experiences with beginnings and endings, along with an outline of the groups’ playful explorations and a poem I assembled from their musings in the Zoom chat-box.

In April 2024, eight wonderful Fools gathered together in a beautiful dance space for a 5 day experimental, experiential, emergent and engaged research lab, co-facilitated by Saskia Solomons and me.

What’s In The Blog?

• The story of how the 5-day Fooling + IFS research lab came to be

• An outline of what happened in the lab

• Little chunks of IFS theory from Saskia's morning talks

• Descriptions of some of the ways we integrated IFS, creativity and the body - you could have a go at some of these if you wish!

• A brief outline of our Fooling + IFS solo stage experiments 

• My key learnings

This blog explores Flow: what it is, how to find it and why being in the Flow State might be A Good Thing To Do. There’s a video workshop, 'Exploring The Flow State Through Play and Journalling', flow poetry from past participants of Mindful Play and a story detailing a moment when I lost connection with flow and how I managed to find it again (with a little help from my friends, a tiny dog and a squidgy baby).

In this blog I'll be offering a series of 10 minute Playful Pauses, to help you reconnect, re-centre and recalibrate.

I've found that 10 minutes can actually be enough time to step out of my automatic reactionary thoughts, behaviours or emotions, to calm down my nervous system, soothe my inner parts and prepare the ground to begin again.

I’m still buzzing and recovering from the Clown Congress 2023 where 50+ clowns spent three incredible days at Bristol University; talking, listening, workshopping, eating, singing, playing, dreaming, planning and scheming; exploring the theme of identity in clowning. 

I was invited to deliver Creative Clarity sessions at the end of each of the days, offering participants opportunities to “process the day’s learning through play and reflection, accessing [their] inner wisdom, through movement, meditation, embodiment, writing, artwork and structured dialogue.” (my programme description).

This blog charts what happened during my first Creative Clarity session, which I have retrospectively titled, “Playing With Not Knowing.’ The blog includes a Not Knowing Meditation / Sensory Exploration which you can do wherever you are, and a poem from Bee Golding capturing some of the participants’ insights from the session.

It’s now four months since I left the Barn Retreat Centre in Devon. After a year of being immersed in meditation retreat land, I had no idea where I wanted to live or what I wanted to do when I left, so I made a commitment to stay with the not knowing until it became clear.

This blog charts the last four months of my adventures into the unknown, exploring what I’ve been doing and why I’ve been doing it, examining the responses I’ve been receiving from other people, through the lens of The Fool and investigating the responses of my inner parts, using techniques gained from my recent Internal Family Systems (IFS) training. I’ve included an IFS exercise to help you quieten your inner parts if that feels helpful to you.

There’s nothing like a bit of rejection for helping us get clear about what we really want! Here is a story about how I recently received a rejection and a rundown of the OW to WOW process I put myself though (I should totally trade mark that!), which has helped me get clear about what I really want. 

As a clowning, fooling and improvisation teacher, my work is helping people to get comfortable with hanging out in the unknown. But learning to rest in the unknown as a lifestyle choice is Next Level Stuff! This blog charts my journey with the unknown, through the past year, from terror to excitement. It’s really a guide for me as I continue to move out into the world without A Plan, but hopefully it’s useful for you too, dear reader. 

In this blog we’ll be exploring:

• How do you behave when you enter into the unknown?
• If you listen to the voice behind your behaviour, what does it say?
• What emotions do you feel when you enter the unknown? 
• How can you sit with those feelings?
• How do thoughts block access to the unknown?
• How can you work with those thoughts?
• How might setting an intention be a guide into the unknown?
• How do you set an intention?

It’s peppered with advice from wise teachers and exercises that you can do if you want to play with embracing the unknown too. 

After 11 months of being planted in the idyllic, vibrant Devonshire countryside, nestled within a team of devoted and dedicated big-hearted Buddhists, running back-to-back meditation retreats, whilst learning to live with grief, I find myself spat out into the Big Wide World again.

This one goes out to all of us who try too hard, hold on too tight and stretch ourselves too thin. 

In this blog, I’ll be exploring how over-efforting causes suffering and pondering on why so many of us fall into this pattern. I’ll be exploring how over-efforting creates tension in the body, heart and mind and how that can influence our behaviour. I’ll shine a light on the tension that has been taking over my meditation practice and share some tasty theory and exercises for you to try, from a range of practitioners who have been teaching me how to effort less this year.