Who is Holding Whom?

Space is too wild, undomesticated, and vast to be "held."

The image of “holding” is an evocative one that has given rise to the idea of “holding space” for another, where we’re attuned to what they’re feeling and how they’re making sense of their experience.

Through empathic resonance, they feel felt and understood.

While I’m sympathetic to this view, it’s not completely accurate for me in lived experience.

When with another who is spiraling outside their window of tolerance, it’s not me who is “doing” the holding. There is “holding” occurring, but in no way is it “mine.”

I can recognize and participate in this holding and practice devotion toward it, but it doesn’t originate in me. It originates in the stars and in the soil.

My role is to move into reverie, to set aside any fantasy that I know what healing is, and to listen. To move into awe. To wonder. To pray.

Even the agenda to "hold space" can interfere with that unfolding, contaminating the vessel.

Space cannot be held…
… but entered into and loved.

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What we lose on the healing and awakening path

Much is said these days about healing and spiritual transformation, and the deep joy, clarity, and peace that are the promised fruits of the inner journey.

Not much is mentioned, however, about the disappointment involved in waking up, and the immense deflation wired into the transformative process.

It doesn’t really sell that well.

“Making the darkness conscious,” as Jung noted, “is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

Healing can break our hearts and shatter old dreams. It is oriented in birth and death, creativity and destruction, transcendent and descendent currents, and must by its nature dance in the full spectrum.

Not only does it involve resurrection, but the chaotic glory of the crucifixion as well.

While it is natural to have a bias for renewal and rebirth, it would appear the beloved does not share this bias as he or she (or it or they) will make equal use of the alchemical processes of dissolution and putrefactio to open us into her world – each holy arrows in her quiver.

We want to heal but we don’t want to have to feel too much. We want to feel fully alive, but not too vulnerable and tenderized. This is so understandable and so human and need not be shamed. But it doesn’t seem to always work like that, not in this star anyway, where shakiness is the portal.

At times, “getting what I want” is no longer a majestic or sensitive-enough reference point around which to organize our experience. Love is the new organizer and may have a different idea.

Relationships ending, dreams collapsing, careers recycling, the dissolving of the way it was all supposed to turn out: these yellowings of soul are not evidence of error, failure, or defeat, but of the relentlessly creative nature of love as it emerges here. One form dying so that another may come into being.

Yes, at times the burning can seem unbearable. Such is the nature of the human heart. We may burn until we are translucent, but it is by way of this burning that wholeness is revealed.

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Many of us were never taught how to stay with ourselves

Most of us were never taught how to stay with ourselves.

Not in the moments when something inside begins to open. Not when the body fills with grief, or anger, or a longing that has no clear name. Not when the nervous system begins to move toward something it once had to leave.

For many of us, leaving was not a failure. It was an intelligent act of protection. There were times when staying was not safe—when what we felt could not be received, mirrored, or held, and the intensity of our experience exceeded the capacity of the world around us to meet it.

So something in us learned to turn away. To move into thought, to organize, to soothe others, to step out of the body just enough to make it through. Over time, this becomes so familiar that it feels like who we are.

But what could not be lived did not disappear. It descended—into the body, into the shadow, into the quiet inner underworld where so much of the unlived life waits.

Into the abode of Persephone—where what has been taken below is not lost, but held in another form, waiting for the conditions in which it can return. Not all at once, and not by force, but through a slow, relational turning.

The work is not to make ourselves feel more. It is to become someone who can stay—to remain in gentle contact with what is arising, just long enough for the system to discover that it does not have to leave again.

Over time, what was once overwhelming begins to unfold. Grief begins to move. Anger begins to organize. Tenderness begins to find a place to land.

And what once felt like darkness reveals itself as something else entirely—not pathology, not brokenness, but the hidden life of the soul, waiting in the underworld until it is safe enough to come home.

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