The Guardian's science corespondent, Linda Geddes had come across the term,“lemonading” - the ability to turn lemons into lemonade, recently coined by scientists over in the States who discovered from a study conducted during the pandemic, “…people with high levels of playfulness may be better equipped to cope with the dud cards life throws at them.” Linda spent a week hanging out with playful people to test this theory out for herself.

Mid February 2025, as winter released its final flurries of sleety snow, I was blessed with a heart-warming, life-affirming, well-filling weekend of play, connection, irreverence and depth in the enchanting Forest of Dean. 

This blog describes some of what we got up to on our Fooling Nerds Holiday.

Last week, Amelia Hill, senior reporter at The Guardian interviewed me, along with a gaggle of clown teachers and students, to find out about the therapeutic benefits of clowning. She’d gotten wind of a growing trend of clown teachers offering workshops - not just to train people to become professional performers, but to also offer spaces for self-discovery and healing - and she wanted to know why!

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.

2024: A year of relentless experimentation, research and development: on a quest to find more sustainability in work and life. 

In 2024, I planned to try out various types of work and different living situations, reflecting on how they made me feel. I wanted to know: What feeds and what drains me? What makes my heart sing? What extra boundaries and support can I put in place to make sure I don’t fall back into my old patterns of burnout as a life-style choice? I was hoping to find the formula to living a life free of burnout by the end of 2024!

Here follows an outline of my 2024 workshops, courses and projects and what I learned along the way.

This blog explores the pain of polarization (an IFS term describing when two or more parts have conflicting ideas about how to keep us safe) and paradox. We’ll be meeting some of the internal parts who have been involved in my decision-making about trying to find a place to live. We’ll be zooming in on the parts that don’t want me to settle down and exploring the impact they’ve been having on my system and my life. I’ve included a bit of backstory for those who are new to the blog (Welcome!). I hope you enjoy travelling with me, deep into my psyche and I hope my reflections support you with yours.

I’m gearing up to run The Well-Held Space, my 3-month creative facilitation course again. As part of my preparation I’ve been reflecting on how my own facilitation practice has developed since I last ran the course in 2021. 

This blog focuses on my development as a facilitator from 2021-2024, when I trained as a Creative Supervisor, spent a year at a meditation retreat centre, trained in Internal Family Systems and spent a year exploring ways to integrate all this into my facilitation practice. 

This years’ British Association of Dramatherapists (BADth) conference took place (mostly) online over the week of the 14th October 2024. It was titled: Creativity in Conflict; Empowering Change Through Dramatherapy and I was both an attendee and a presenter, gorging myself on all the dramatherapy goodness I could get my hands on, as well as offering my own workshop titled; ”Exploring Internal Conflict Through Creative and Embodied Approaches To Internal Family Systems (IFS).” 

This blog explores my learning during two sessions at the conference, Drew Bird’s Monday morning presentation, “To Be Or not to be a clown: Conflict on and off the stage” and my Friday evening embodied IFS workshop. It’s a blog about bringing fun into facilitation. It’s a blog about what stops us following our impulses towards connection and play. It features theory from clowning, fooling and Internal Family Systems (IFS), as well as personal reflection and ponder points for you, dear reader. It’s quite long, my Inner Academic may* have got a bit carried away. 

*She definitely did, but waddaya gonna do?

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.