Compassionate Christmas Wishes 2025

Seasons greetings all!

This Christmas, may your spirit be as strong as your stance and your heart as warm as holiday cheer.

We celebrate the discipline, focus, and resilience forged through martial arts training, which teaches us to be halting, not harmful. We remember to embody the true meaning of strength: the fierce compassion to protect others and stand against injustice, coupled with the kindness to uplift every spirit.

May you carry the warrior's body-mindset into the New Year, embracing the strength to set boundaries and the courage to act with kindness and understanding. May you share the gifts of respect, focus, and unwavering spirit.

From our dojo family to yours, we wish you a powerful, peaceful, and Merry Christmas filled with inspiration and the courage to make a difference.

Peace,

Neil and Syd

FCMA and CFT in Birmingham, Monday 6th October 2025!

Greetings Compassionate Warriors!

We are excited to be travelling to Birmingham in just a few days to deliver a pre-conference workshop at the annual international Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) conference!

We look forward to seeing and training with many of you there. It’s going to be a fun and action-packed day of Martial Arts-informed embodied compassion practices that will afford us the chance to really tap into and harness (y)our embodied courage and wisdom.

See you there!

Warm and peaceful wishes,

Neil and Syd

FCMA returns to Dublin in June 2025!

Greetings All!

It’s a while since we’ve posted, but we’re delighted to announce that FCMA shall be returning to Ireland in June 2025!

In collaboration with the Irish Centre for Compassion Focused Therapy (ICCFT) and The Mindfulness and Compassion Centre, we will be running a two-day Radically Embodied Compassion (REC) workshop in Dublin on Saturday 14th June to Sunday 15th June.

For full details and to book your place, please check out the following links:

https://www.mindfulness.ie/professional-training/cpd/radically-embodied-compassion-training

https://irishcentreforcompassionfocusedtherapy.com/training

Don’t miss this opportunity to experience REC and become your most fearlessly compassionate (therapist) self! We really hope you can make it and look forward to training with you soon!

Peace,

Neil and Syd

Remaining in the centre..........

Hi,

I saw this image (scroll down) the other day and an important principle, featured in several of the martial arts that inform FCMA, sprang to mind. Occupying the centre, dynamically with another, seems at the heart of therapy and fluctuations/ruptures/impasses to this are inevitable, natural and therefore to be expected.

In keeping with this theme (staying safe in the centre), Neil and I are working on the latest evolution of our 2-day workshop.

We'll be in Ireland on the 12th and 13th of December 2024 and are reducing some of the theory content drawn from our papers (which are free for everyone to read) so we can focus on a more experiential encounter with radically embodied compassion.

As we're reducing content to its core, we're freeing up more time to focus on elements such as:-

1. Modified pad drills (as both the recipient and feeder of energy)

2. Physical boundaries and how this fits with notions of consent giving

3. Kiai/Kihap as forms of issuing fierceness in the face of suffering

4. Basic footwork drills drawn from Western Boxing

5. The initial section of The Eye of the Storm FCMA first kata/form

6. Group distancing drills (tricky but good fun)

7. Flanking and remaining in engagement distance

All of this might look somewhat confusing, given it's out of context but this is a taste of some of the ideas we're currently working through, as FCMA/radically embodied compassion continues to evolve.

Stay safe, train hard and look for peace,

Syd and Neil

How long, no way, it can't be........

Tempus fugit! It’s been so long since our last blog we thought it was time to break cover.

The truth is we’ve been busy beavering away on a couple of writing projects, along with workshop planning and personal training.

Do check out our two most recent papers:

Hiskey, S. & Clapton, N. E. (2024) Enhancing Therapist Courage: Feasibility and Changes in Distress Tolerance and Equanimity Following Martial Arts-Based Radically Embodied Compassion Workshops OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine, 9(2), doi:10.21926/obm.icm.2402029

 Clapton, N., & Hiskey, S. (2024). Radically Embodied Compassion Training: Cultivating Psychotherapist Courage, Distress Tolerance and Compassionate Responsiveness via Traditional Martial Arts. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 11(2). 71-87.

We’re really proud of these additions to our growing body of work. They spell out the rationale for our clincal workshops and present data supporting meaningful therapist change, sustained 3 months post-workshop.

We’re delighted to be able to annouce that we’re visiting Ireland again, in December 2024, although this deserves a blog entry in it’s own right. Watch this space.

For now, go well and let’s speak again soon.

Peace!

Syd and Neil

Parks and RECreation at the Compassionate Mind Foundation October 2023 conference

Firstly, welcome back. It’s been a wee while since Neil and I posted on this site. We’ve been busy in the background focusing on writing academic papers, delivering workshops and gathering some initial exploratory data. Amidst all this we realised we’ve been uncharacteristically silent.

Last week’s CMF Conference in Birmingham was, therefore, the ideal opportunity to change all that.

We offered a friendly invite to any and all attendees to come along to the park and train in some radically embodied compassion, FCMA style. See some pictures of what went on below…….

Those who came joined in a warm up, some fierce breathing, some static stance work (from both Wing Chun and TKD) and some basic punching. We then moved into a partner drill, with variations along the theme of compassionate maai and staying in relational space during conflict. We demonstrated several non-harmful wrist grab releases and moved into more vigorous kiap/kiai striking (on pads), before warming down with ha breath and shaking it all off.

A big thank you to all who attended and especially Graham Music for linking the work we’d done during our time together to the theme of his brilliant keynote speech at the Conference.

See you all soon.

Syd and Neil

FCMA is coming to Ireland in May 2023!

Greetings All,

We are excited to announce that our Radically Embodied Compassion workshop is coming to Dublin!

This two-day workshop will be hosted by our dear friends at the Irish Centre for Compassion Focused Therapy (ICCFT), taking place at the Hilton Garden Inn, Dublin from Friday 12th to Saturday 13th May.

This workshop is perfectly suited for CFT therapists/clinicians who are seeking to deepen their embodied capacities to be more present, sensitively attuned, distress tolerant, courageous and compassionately responsive in psychotherapeutic encounters.

For further details of the workshop and how to book, please visit https://irishcentreforcompassionfocusedtherapy.com/training and/or contact Dr Katie Baird directly at katie@iccft.com.

So if you wish to develop and enhance your therapist self's compassionate courage, distress tolerance and responsiveness, COME JOIN US and experience radically embodied compassion for yourself!

Warm and Peaceful Wishes,

Neil and Syd

FCMA in 2023

Greetings All!

It has been some time since we posted here, so firstly a warm welcome to 2023!

2023 promises to be a very exciting year for FCMA. Having endured and navigated the travails of COVID-19 and the restrictions this imposed on in-person training(s), we were so excited and grateful to get our face-to-face training workshops up and running again in 2022.

It was a joy to be able to welcome and train such a passionate, enthusiastic and courageously willing bunch of therapists/clinicians for our Bristol workshop from September 9th - 10th 2022. We had a wonderful two days of Martial Arts-informed Radically Embodied Compassion practice(s) that afforded participants the opportunity to inhabit and cultivate their fearlessly courageous Compassionate Selves, with an emphasis on transferring this to their psychotherapeutic work.

Following on from this, we are delighted to announce that our next workshop will be taking place in Dublin on Friday 12th - Saturday 13th May 2023! We are thrilled to be able to bring the FCMA experience and Way to Ireland and give therapists an opportunity to experience the transformative power of Radically Embodied Compassion for themselves. Full details will follow soon, so keep checking back in if you don’t want to miss out.

We hope to see many of you in Ireland in May and many more of you at forthcoming workshops, as we continue to roll out and grow FCMA training(s).

Go well with courage and peacefulness,

Neil and Syd

How to Survive: Lessons for Everyday Life from the Extreme World

Hi all, it's 2 minute review time!

How to Survive is a great book by John Hudson, the top survival trainer in the British Forces. His role is to train other survival trainers and the way the book's written comes across in a friendly and clearly very informed way.

He explores how key survival skills generalise from extreme environments into everyday life.

His central model, refined through experience and reflected upon via numerous real-life stories of survival successes and failures throughout the book, boils down to three components (see below).

This is a concise model of factors contributing to survival success and how they play out over time.

Overall, I found this a great addition to this literature. Unsurprisingly, the model John describes fits beautifully with our ethos here at FCMA.

Our workshops aim to draw on the effort and work involved in managing therapy conflicts with compassionate hopefulness for resolution with our plan for this based on the burgeoning evidence base on psychotherapy process.

Look out for mention of this work at our next workshop and, in the meantime, stay well, stick to your plan for compassionate development and stay fierce!

Syd

TRAUMA INFORMED MARTIAL ARTS inaugural conference

Hi all,

Last Saturday Neil and I attended the first TRAUMA INFORMED MARTIAL ARTS inaugural conference online, hosted in Australia.

It was led by Georgia Verry of the FightBack Project and the event bought together 20 or so martial artists, psychologists, sociologists and therapists from across the globe, all keen on developing ideas around how the Traditional Martial Arts (and to some extent MMA too) can help trauma survivors process their experiences in a safe setting.

There was a wealth of knowledge on display and a clear desire for everyone to share good practice and experiences.

The chat section of the day was buzzing with references and content, for attendees to explore further.

The day featured a group discussion of how Martial Arts have impacted us, followed by a deeper discussion of each of the related attributes that had been raised. It’s so clear that the many different styles of Martial Arts each has something unique to offer (and perhaps meeting different needs, which is a topic worth exploring in future).

There was plenty of time for questions, ideas, chatting and networking and there's talk of a dedicated WhatsApp group to afford further sharing going forwards.

Neil and I couldn't attend the second day but met some really interesting and dedicated practitioners and with whom we're keen to keep in touch.

Overall then, an important event to have attended. Watch this space as we'll share the wisdom that this group cultivates, over time.

Train well and be safe,

Syd and Neil