I left the sanctuary of my quiet Glastonbury attic at the beginning of July and headed back to life on the road, travelling about, teaching, learning and catching up with lovely pals in lovely places for the summer....

I'm back in Glastonbury now, resting up and savouring all the summer memories. I'd like to share a few snippets of summer with you to give you a taste of the wonderful worlds I've been inhabiting and a whiff of the residue they've left on and in me.

It’s been two years since I packed up my Bristol home, jigsaw puzzled all my belongings into a storage unit and moved to Devon to to volunteer as a coordinator at The Barn meditation retreat centre. I am astonished to realise it’s now been a whole year since I left The Barn!

This is the story of the last year of my life.

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).

Whilst preparing for my three new Mindful Play Weekends in May, June and July, exploring the themes of PLAY (May 19 + 18), FLOW (June 22 + 23) and SPONTANEITY (July 20 + 21), I've been reflecting on the history and development of these courses. 

We’re a group of IFS trained clowns and fools who have been meeting online for the last couple of years, exploring the space where Internal Family Systems (IFS) meets clowning and fooling through experiential play and discussion.

In this blog I will be outlining our experiments and describing some of what happened for me during our first ever in-person play day. Read on for tales of grief, gratitude, identity, connection and home.

IFS is a therapeutic system which is based on the theory that we are all made up of many parts (ie feelings, sensations, thoughts, memories, dreams, fantasies, etc…). You may already have a sense of this in yourself; in conversation we often say, “Part of me thinks this and part of me thinks that.“ Our parts don’t necessarily all get along, they can have very different wants, needs, values and desires...

During the dark, cold month of January, I ran a 4-week Creative Clarity course online. Twelve intrepid adventurers from all over the world, gathered together on Zoom for two hours each week to explore different methods of creative inquiry.

Wanting to capture some of the groups’ wisdom to share with the world, I played around with the words they shared in the chat box to create the following three collective poems: How Is It To Enter The Unknown? How To Stay In The Unknown… and Playing With Tension and Release.

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.

Welcome to my 2023 review, as I look back on a year of transition, exploration, not knowing and discovering. This was a year where I welcomed joy, learned to make less effort, completed my year of volunteering at The Barn, found my way back to facilitation, sweatily hatched plans in my dad’s attic in France, exploded out into a French street theatre festival, drifted around England and Wales looking for home, did an awful lot of experiential learning and training (including gaining my IFS level 1 certificate!), applied for several jobs (and didn’t get an interview!), birthed a new workshop, opened the doors for 20 fantastic online one-to-one clients, parachuted into a few places for some lovely guest teaching gigs, returned to Fooling and found a new home (for now)...

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.