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. 

If you’d like to get a little more context about my background in facilitation, pre-2021, check out Part One: The Early Years, which charts my journey from circus workshop leader to playworker to drama workshop leader to performer-facilitator and Part Two: Going Deeper, which follows my journey from circus and street theatre performer / director, to dramatherapist, clowning / fooling teacher and autobiographical theatre director. 

The Birth of The Well-Held Space

During the pandemic I was awarded Arts Council ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ Funding to develop a Mindful Play Handbook for group leaders. This gave me precious time and support to reflect on my facilitation practice and consider how to pass on my skills to others. The book remains unpublished (that’s another story for another day!), but the deep exploration of my pedagogy ignited the spark and formed the foundations for The Well-Held Space Creative Facilitation course. 

In autumn 2021, at the tail-end of the pandemic, the world was beginning to open up. As we all tentatively began to creep out of isolation and back into real life connection, I had the strong urge to provide support for people who hold space for other people. The pandemic had been a traumatic experience for many of us and I wanted to help facilitators to develop their skills and confidence to be able to hold all this compassionately, safely and ease-fully. I asked my pal and long-time collaborator Dominique Fester to assist me and together we offered two versions of The Well-Held Space, one in-person and one online. 

Relight Creative Supervision Training

As it became clear that I wanted to focus my energies towards facilitator training, I searched around for support and found Relight’s year-long Creative Supervision course. I began Relight’s training at the same time that I started delivering the first version of The Well-Held Space in September 2021. It was so deliciously nourishing, inspiring and life-affirming to be part of a collective of dramatherapists and dance movement psychotherapists. We gathered together in a beautiful space in a Bristol park for one weekend a month to learn how to support arts therapists and facilitators to be safe and healthy in their practice. We learned experientially, through play, embodiment, artwork and interacting with objects, before reflecting on our experiences on the page and in discussion with each other. 

The spacious, slow, tender pace of the supervision course inspired me to slow down and leave more space in my own facilitation course. I felt myself growing roots with the explicit permission to read loads of theory from different supervision and coaching experts. Practicing my new supervision skills on two wonderful, willing guinea pigs (both facilitators who use clowning in their practice), under the kind and astute guidance of supervisor, Bruce Guthrie, gave me so much insight into my strengths and challenges as a therapist / supervisor / facilitator. 

The supervision training inspired me to want to offer more spaciousness and depth in my Creative Consultancies and workshops, however, whenever I offered clowning workshops, I found myself clicking back into classic Stoppit overdrive autopilot. So I took a pause from clowning and created a bunch of new courses including;The Inner Voice, Outer Voice weekend, a 3-day Intro To Fooling, a 5-day Site Responsive Fooling and a 5-week online version of The Mindful Play Inquiry.

The most surprising thing that came out of my supervision training was the discovery that I needed to take some time off work! That wasn’t what I was expecting at all! But having spent a year in the compassionate gaze of my course-mates, the course facilitators and my two supervisors, I couldn’t deny it any longer - I was burned out and grief stricken and needed some time out to rest and heal and figure out a different way to work and live. 

The Barn Meditation Retreat Centre

At the beginning of July 2022 I made a radical, life-changing decision and moved from the vibrant city of Bristol which had been my home for 22 years to the rolling green hills of Devon, where I took up the role of volunteer coordinator at The Barn Meditation Retreat centre. For one whole year, I lived and worked in community as part of a team that delivered back-to-back week-long retreats for small groups.

My duties included welcoming retreatants, offering daily information sessions, leading check-ins, meditations and mindful movement sessions, supporting retreatants with their daily chores, meal preparations and gardening tasks, offering one-to-ones, supporting visiting dharma teachers, doing admin, lighting fires, going to meetings and trainings, cleaning out the chicken coop and feeding the cats. Not really a rest!

Through co-delivering the same week-long retreat over and over again, I had opportunities galore to see in excruciatingly vivid detail my tendency to make more effort than anyone would ever need to. I discovered my ability to over-effort in pretty much every area of life; in the practical work, in the way I facilitated and related to others, in my creative process and even in my meditation practice! Through awareness, compassion and conscious choice-making, I began to learn how to create and maintain boundaries and how to open to kindness, softening and acceptance as legitimate and appropriate forms of effort. I wrote a blog all about these discoveries, How To Make Less Effort.

As I moved into the second half of my year at the Barn, I began looking for opportunities to facilitate workshops, so I could practice facilitating with less effort, within the steady container of retreat land. I offered workshops in creative writing, mindful communication and nature inquiry for the retreatants, led trainings in facilitation skills and The Clearness Committee for volunteers and staff at The Barn and The Coach House and designed an Embodied Voice workshop for Sharpham teachers and coordinators at the staff training retreat. I felt heartened by these experiences and hopeful that I could find a more sustainable way to work back in The World.

Internal Family Systems

I was already a big fan of parts work (by ‘parts work,’ I mean exploring our inner voices, like the Inner Critic and Inner Child) and had been using it in my work for many years, but a ridiculous amount of Barn retreatants kept mentioning Internal Family Systems (IFS) to me, so eventually I gave in and read Richard Swartz’ ‘No Bad Parts.’ 

I found IFS to be a neat system, with it’s simple categorisation of parts: Managers who try to pre-empt trouble, Firefighters who spontaneously emerge to douse trouble’s flames and Exiles who have been sent to deep underground cellars to avoid more trouble. I appreciated the step-by-step approach of how to converse with parts and found the notion of ‘Self’ or 'Self energy’ to be quite intriguing (more about ‘Self’ below).

I started playing with IFS at The Barn, integrating the theory and techniques with environmental arts therapy, movement, meditation, journalling and ritual to get to know my grief. I wrote a blog about all this, called ‘Grief Rituals.’

Towards the end of my time at the retreat centre, I was trying to figure out how to integrate more meditation and IFS into my facilitation work, when my eye was drawn to the IFS Level 1 training. The lead trainer was psychologist and mindfulness teacher, Paul Ginter. I applied and got in first time!

I underwent my IFS level 1 training in August and October 2023. To be honest, I found the training to be a mixed bag - I felt really lucky to get to do the training in person in the beautiful, spacious Penny Brohn centre near Bristol, but it was a huge group of 36 participants, with 12 assistants and a teaching team that took the numbers up to 50+. I hadn’t been in a room with that many people since before the pandemic and having come from the quiet rural Devon retreat, I found all the chatter and dynamics to be pretty overwhelming. 

We covered a lot of really useful material in the 12 days, but there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on the body, which was tricky for this kinaesthetic, neuro-spicy, embodied, physical learner. But as the course progressed, I figured out how to take care of myself in that environment, asking my body what it needed, moving and stretching on the floor and sneaking off for lunch with the trees and silent discos with the river. With my nervous system more regulated, I was then able to take in more of the learning on offer with gratitude. 

Integrating IFS

I have spent the last year exploring ways to integrate IFS into my toolkit of dramatherapy, meditation, movement, play, embodiment, writing and creative reflection via relentless experimentation. I've been collaborating with a wonderful research group of IFS-trained clowns and fools (pictured above) and I've been discovering many different ways to weave IFS into my workshops (Creative Clarity, The Mindful Play Weekends, the Fool + IFS lab) and one-to-ones (including two 2-day therapeutic processes with individual artists). 

IFS is not only providing a useful framework for my workshop participants and one-to-one clients to investigate their inner parts, but is also helping me offer more a Self-led approach to facilitation. 

You: What does Self-led mean? 

Me: Well dear reader, to be ‘Self-led’ is an IFS term for having the ability to tap into Self-energy.

You: But what does Self-energy mean?

Me: Self-energy is an IFS term for a person’s soul, pure essence or witnessing conscious. 

You: You what?

Me: I know, that might sound a bit far out, but there’s another way to describe it.

You: Yeah?

Me: Yeah! Self-energy is the you that is not a part - it’s you when you are able to feel curious, compassionate, calm, connected, clear, confident, courageous and / or creative.

You: Oh right. How do you find that?

Me: Well, the more I get to know my parts, the more space they give me to be more fully available to my workshop participants and one-to-one clients. 

You: So that’s what you’d call being Self-led?

Me: You’ve got it!

You: What impact does that have on the participants?

Me: Well, when I am operating out of Self-energy, it’s easier for me to connect with the Self-energy in everybody, which means I am more able to empower people to make their own choices about how to connect with my offers. This makes my workshop spaces even more anarchic than they ever were (they were always pretty anarchic, but this is Next Level Self-Led Anarchy).

You: What does that look like?

Me: Well, let’s take last week for an example, I invited a group of participants to explore the space we were in by allowing their bodies to respond to the space. Some of them were performing spontaneous choreography interpreting the objects and architecture, some of them were lying on the floor with their feet dangling out of a window, one of them had crawled under a table and another was discovering the sounds of that the radiators made.

You: Sounds wild!

Me: Yes that’s it! When I am Self-led and not trying to control or manage other people’s experiences, then things can get beautifully wild (within explicitly agreed boundaries, obvs!).

I have written prolifically about my discoveries in playful, embodied, creative IFS on this here blog, and I’ve had the joy of sharing some of them at the IFS Open Space, at the Dramatherapy Southwest Conference and at the British Association of Dramatherapists (BADth) annual conference. You can read about that here.

How is this all going to shake down into The Well-Held Space for 2025?

Well, I remember saying to myself back in December 2021, at the end of the last two Well-Held Space journeys, “This was a great first draft, people seemed to be benefiting from the content, it feels like a great direction for my work, but, oh dear, I appear to be on my knees with exhaustion!”

Recognising that I was stepping into the position of Facilitation Elder, it felt really important that I practiced what I preached and found a more sustainable way to work. It’s taken me 3 years, but with the support and insight I’ve experienced through the Creative Supervision course, my year at The Barn and my adventures in playful, embodied IFS, I feel like I’m operating on a totally different frequency. 

I’m imagining that much of the course content will remain the same, but I’ll find ways to thread in some of the inquiries I’ve been investigating through these last three years. I’m really looking forward to discovering how it will all synthesise, alongside the next cohort.

I am only offering the in-person version this time, as I’m getting the sense that whole weekends on Zoom are no longer what anyone wants to do (Is that true?)! I’m currently trailing a 6-week online mini-version of the course, which I will repeat next year if there’s enough interest (email me on info@hollystoppit.com if this something you might want to do).

Gratitude

Thanks to you for reading this blog and thanks to all the beings that have supported me through this massive transition: Big up Arts Council England, Dominique Fester and the original participants of The Well-Held Space, my Supervisors, Tone Horwood, Bruce Guthrie and Elise Parsons, Rosie and Lyndsey of Relight, all my fellow supervision course-mates and my two wonderful guineapig supervisees, my Barn family, the wider community and the land at Sharpham, all the Barn retreatants, IFS-UK, Penny Brohn, Paul Ginter, Sue Smith and Nick Austin and all the PA’s and participants of IFS level 1, all my workshop participants and clients and all the friends, fam, therapists, teachers and facilitators who have held me through the storm and out the other side.

Links

The Well-Held Space begins in January 2025, you can find more about it here. Application deadline: 6th December 2024 

To find out more about my journey as a facilitator, check out Part One: The Early Years, which charts my journey from circus workshop leader to playworker to drama workshop leader to performer-facilitator.

Part Two: Going Deeper, follows my journey from circus and street theatre performer / director, to dramatherapist, clowning / fooling teacher and autobiographical theatre director. 

I blogged my way through my year at The Barn and you can find all those here.

I have been documenting my explorations in playful, embodied approaches to IFS here.