Holding Space for Yourself
“When we learn how to sit with our uncomfortable internal experiences, we can regulate them.”
We often discuss holding space in therapeutic work.
When we hold space, we let things be exactly as they are without trying to change or fix them.
Part of healing is learning how to hold space for our internal experiences.
Allowing ourselves to feel what we are feeling without judging ourselves for feeling enables the energy of it to move through our system without getting stuck.
We often judge our internal experiences.
I hear these types of things all the time:
“I shouldn’t be feeling this way. So many people have it worse than me.”
“I don’t want to be feeling depressed right now.”
“It’s totally fine.” (as their body tightens up and they slouch forward)
“Only bad people express anger.”
There are so many ways we can fight with our internal experiences and wish them to be something else.
Sometimes we have even learned to fear our internal experiences due to intense emotional experiences related to trauma or being highly sensitive to emotional energy.
It takes a lot of energy to push down and resist what we are experiencing internally.
And paradoxically, the more we try to suppress our experiences, the longer they stick around.
When we learn how to sit with our uncomfortable internal experiences, we can regulate them.
This does not mean we sit in our feelings and dwell in them, allowing our thoughts to fuel them.
It is about witnessing our feelings on a sensation level in our bodies without our minds jumping in and trying to explain them.
When creating space for us to acknowledge and welcome the feelings in, we can then listen to the messages that may be giving us about what we can do to bring ourselves back into balance.
We can take the energy we were using to deny our feelings to then do something to bring us back to a more emotionally balanced place.
Creating space for our own experiences allows us to do the same for others.
When we can sit in discomfort, we can hold space for others to be in their distress more easily.
A Practice to Help Sit with Emotions: Emotional Tea Time
This practice was inspired by Rumi's poem, The Guest House. It is a simple practice to shift our relationship with our emotions. You can practice this in whatever position you want (seated, standing, lying down, or walking). You can start this practice with more neutral emotions and then move to more uncomfortable emotions as you get more comfortable with the practice.
The practice:
Close your eyes or find a soft focus of your eyes, so you can focus your awareness on what is happening internally.
Take a few deep belly breaths.
Invite in the emotions to your experience. You can pretend to open a door and ask it to come in for tea. You can tell it can stay as long as it would like.
Then notice where in the body you feel that emotion. You can notice location, temperature, contraction/expansion, texture, and any direction it is moving.
You can ask the feeling if it brought you any messages or if there is anything it wants you to know.
Be here as long as you like in the exploration.
When you are ready, notice where your body is in contact with your clothes, the ground, and/or anything you are sitting/lying on.
Take a few more deep belly breaths and slowly bring your awareness externally.
