Many are familiar with the term “holding environment” as elucidated by Winnicott, an evocative and poetic description of relational experience rooted in embodied, empathic attunement and right-brain to right-brain resonance.
As the matrix of secure attachment, it provides the fertile, creative neural and psychic foundation from which we can explore reality, play within the imaginal world, and rest in unstructured states of being - wonder, awe, and the mysteries of Pure Being.
From within this centering, we’re able to venture out into the unknown, know experientially the full spectrum of the feeling body, and explore relationship with both inner and outer others.
Not having to hold it all together by way of our own effort, we relax into a holding which is always, already here; a holding which is so vast that it naturally contains momentary states of disintegration and “falling apart.” These states are no longer viewed as pathology, but as path.
Intimacy without fusion, closeness without engulfing, healthy attachment without impinging. This is the psychic soil from which a baby’s little brain and heart emerge into being. What a miracle. Real magic.
Holding manifests within psyche and soma, as interior pieces of soul companion one another; interpersonally through relationships where we take the risk to allow another to matter; as also transpersonally through containment by the Totality and Divine Ground.
In this way, the holding environment is wired into who and what we are. At times appearing inside, and at other times outside us, just like the Beloved itself, it will take any form – outrageous, wild, untamed – so that it may embody and incarnate itself through us as its vessel.
