A Healing Space

by Matt Licata

  It is important to note that “accepting” and “not arguing with reality” is primarily an internal practice of awareness and compassion, tending with care to the thoughts, feelings, and sensations alive in us in any given moment. It is not remaining passive or failing to defend ourselves in the external world. It is not “accepting” neglect, mistreatment, or abuse or “not arguing” with someone hurting us. It is an act of intelligence and integrity to bring forth clear boundaries, say no (at times loudly and forcefully), engage in healthy conflict when necessary, and do what is necessary to protect our own body, psyche, and integrity. In “not arguing” internally, however, we might begin to discover that the act of self-abandonment in all its forms is often more painful than the actual feelings themselves. This can be quite a realization and can liberate a tremendous amount of energy.

  As a way to make this inquiry more personal and alive, you can state (silently or out loud to yourself or another) your own personal aspiration to no longer abandon yourself, to stay close in times of activation, or being triggered, and to befriend yourself and have self-compassion. Please find the words most resonant for you, but as an example you could say, “No, I’m not going to do that any longer. Even though it takes everything in me, and it feels so shaky, uncertain, and potentially unsafe, I am going to embrace my vulnerability and care for it, slowly, and choose a new way. I will be a friend to myself, and I am no longer willing to be an enemy. Even though I will not be perfect at it and will likely fail at times, I will remain steadfast in my commitment to not turn from myself.” This is where the work shifts more to that of the heart, where we aren’t as focused on clear insight and pure awareness, and we’re not walled off and protected as a witness on the sidelines. Rather, we begin to explore what it would mean in real time to open our hearts to our pain, to hold it like a mother or father enveloping their little baby in their arms. Yes, it’s risky. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it will ask everything of us. But many of us are discovering there is no longer any other choice.

  This is a radical revisioning that truly goes against the grain. We start to bring kindness to the feelings, to the parts of ourselves we had to disown at an earlier time, untangling and enlivening them with the warmth of our own presence, which in these moments we need more than ever. From here, we can discover whether there is suffering inherent in difficult emotions—whether it’s wired into them as an essential part of their nature—or whether rejection of them, turning from them, and believing they are evidence there is something wrong with us are the root causes of our struggle. This latter realization is one of the essential discoveries of the meditative traditions: our ultimate freedom is found not in shifting thoughts and feelings, replacing them with more desirable ones but in our relationship to whatever appears. Having the experiential realization that suffering is not inherent in the wave-like appearance of sadness, rage, shame, grief, or confusion can turn our lives upside down as it becomes clear that we do not need to get rid of, change, shift, transform, or even “heal” our emotions to experience freedom and aliveness.

  Deeply Befriending the Uninvited

  Our embodied, experiential journey of befriending just moves on from there, with deeper and more integrated forms of awareness, kindness, and discovery, traveling into the core of whatever arises and touching it with our hearts, warming it with mindful attention, and tending to all parts of ourselves as an organic practice of self-compassion. Yes, it is a “practice,” not some goal we set up that we then shame ourselves for “failing” at—we’re ready to end that cycle and replace it with something more creative, more magical, more alive. At the same time, we realize that this alchemical transmutation of the old pathways—replacing the self-abandonment and archaic misperception with the circuitry of empathy, clear seeing, wisdom, and kindness—does seem to take practice, seconds at a time, moment by moment. It rarely just happens on its own.

  As we train ourselves in this way, we might notice that it starts to become second nature to stay close in the wake of challenging thoughts and feelings; we just cannot bear to abandon ourselves. Instead we can breathe into what we once deemed invalid, unbearable, and unworkable. We start to discover a certain softness and spaciousness underlying even our most disturbing experience, and we find true refuge not by eradicating the material but by infusing it with deepening levels of loving awareness.

  Eventually we might come to appreciate or even love our triggers, genuinely wishing to open to them and know their subtleties at deeper and deeper levels, standing in awe of the opportunity to learn more about consciousness as it comes into form. It’s as if a child were knocking at the door and just wanting to be let in for a moment, seeking refuge from an exhausting journey, asking for relief from carrying a burden across a lifetime. How would we respond to this little one when he or she appeared—tired, cold, frightened, and lost—just longing for some rest, some affection, and a safe place by the fire? I think many of us have a sense that we would open the door and allow the child inside—feed, clothe, protect, and hold him or her. But it is critical to remember that we cannot “skip” straight to the stages of acceptance and love, although we might have an intention to get there eventually. We must be honest about where we are and our current capacities in the moment. If we move into these areas in a hasty or impulsive way, before we are ready—without first tending to the real hurt, grief, and pain there—we will only entrench ourselves more deeply. To “bypass” the embodied meeting and working through of difficult thoughts, feelings, and sensations—jumping too quickly into acceptance, love, and forgiveness—is one of the more common expressions of spiritual bypassing, which I discuss in chapter 7.

  As we befriend the uninvited visitors, paying special attention to those parts of ourselves calling out for extra care and attention, it is common to meet with some fear and hesitation. It is natural to want to get rid of this fear because we conclude that its presence is an obstacle in our path. We’re not supposed to be scared, are we? Shouldn’t we choose love over fear? Isn’t fear an expression of a “low vibration”? As always, we must slow down and see through these well-intentioned spiritual aphorisms and get more subtle and nuanced with it all. Perhaps the problem is not fear but again, rejecting it, pathologizing it, and abandoning it as it inevitably comes for a visit. It is understandable to want to “transform” fear, of course, but in my experience, intelligence is embedded within it and a communication is in its core—a wakeup call from a part of us that longs to be known and allowed back home. If we “get rid of” the fear too quickly, without first heating it up in the vessel with curiosity and awareness, we will lose contact with any message or guidance it has for our journey.

  To the degree we find ourselves resistant to meeting and befriending our fear, we reinforce our belief in its pathology and unworkability, which only keeps it alive in our psychic organization. Rather than struggle to purge fear (an ordinary human emotion) from our experience, we might experiment, in small doses, with meeting and holding and exploring its contours and textures. We can experiment with calling off the war with fear and providing sanctuary for that fearful little boy or girl within us, where she can be heard, his feelings can be felt, and her underlying core beliefs can be illuminated. We do this so that finally we can know what he or she needs, why the fear has come, and how we can care for this valid part of ourselves in new way. We dare to see what function the fearful one might be playing in our life experience and the guidance and information he or she might have for us. The invitation is to slowly begin to train ourselves to stay with the fear and the inner figures carrying it for so long, to build the resources, scaffolding, and requisite sense of “safe enough” so that we can begin to truly open our hearts to these old companions. We need not be frightened of our fear any longer but enter into relationship with it as a kindred traveler that has taken a challenging or even wrathful form.

  In realizing the real-world implications of what it would mean to transform and heal our deepest wounds and misperceptions, we c
an bring more insight and compassion to our lives through some understanding as to why healing can seem so difficult at times. To honor the inherently contradictory nature of healing, we must slow down, not assume we know what the word “healing” means, and be willing to start anew. As we lay this new foundation, we build the resources required to step into unmapped territory. From this scaffolding we are able to create new pathways of experience that allow for greater flexibility, freedom, and natural joy.

  Opening to the possibility that lasting transformation and healing are not as much about changing our experience as retraining ourselves to meet it with new levels of curiosity, perspective, and warmth, we start to sense a sacred world that is always, already here, not the product of some grand project of self-improvement.

  2

  Already Held

  Encoding New Circuitry and Opening to the Unknown

  In this chapter, we will explore the image of “holding” in its various dimensions and what it might mean to “hold” our experience, while simultaneously opening to the possibility that no matter what is happening in our lives, we are always “being held” by something greater than ourselves. The image of “holding” is such an evocative one because it calls up not only early personal experience but also archetypal material that expresses this same psychic patterning throughout history and culture, evidence of the ways we human beings have found solace in “being held” by transpersonal figures, energies, and the natural world itself.

  In this chapter I speak in a variety of ways about this image of “holding” and why I find it so relevant to transformation and healing. When we are able to “hold” our experience as well as allow ourselves to “be held” by something larger than our personal sense of self, we learn to trust ourselves and the workability of our lives, even in the midst of uncertainty. We become more spontaneous and creative, more flexible, and better able to respond to the challenges life will inevitably provide. Even if our experience is difficult and confusing, we come to discover it is taking place within a vast context that might be a lot more purposeful and intelligent than it appears. As our trust deepens in the basic wisdom that underlies even our most trying experience, a natural confidence begins to dawn in ourselves and in life.

  Over time, as we illuminate and befriend our experience at deeper levels, we invite its meaning and intelligence to disclose itself. We become more familiar with the surrounding field in which our experience appears, a space that is not empty or void but filled with qualities of warmth, integrity, and value. The alchemists referred to this holding vessel as the vas hermeticum, a sealed and supportive container in which transformation can occur. We are the material within the vas, and we are also the alchemist looking into it. We are the vas itself and in the most primordial way the space in which the entire display has appeared, is held, and becomes transmuted from a base, or leaden condition, into something of value such as silver or gold. Again, remember we are relating to these alchemical images symbolically, not literally, as metaphors for the transformation of stuck internal experience such as difficult emotions, fixed core beliefs about ourselves and others, frozen sensations in the body, and the density of habitual consciousness more generally.

  As a consequence of profound befriending and the corresponding movement in our emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual bodies, our center of gravity can begin to shift into the experiential realization that we are always, already being held. Even during times of intense struggle and suffering, we are contained within something immense and ultimately trustable. In this way, holding is not something we need to create, deserve, or “earn” by way of completing some heroic project of self-improvement or enlightenment. For it is already wired within us.

  You might be familiar with the concept of a “holding environment” as elucidated by British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott—a warm and poetic description of a relational configuration rooted in empathic attunement and right-brain to right-brain resonance.1 More simply, a holding environment points to an inner, felt experience in which we are able to be fully ourselves without apology or shame, where our feelings are validated and mirrored back to us, and where we are able to make sense of our lives in a way that promotes an embodied sense of wholeness. In such an environment, we are able to access, articulate, and metabolize inner experience we might previously have had to disown or repress or weren’t even aware we were having. It is a vast “field of permission” in which who and what we are is fully welcome to come into being and unfold in a supportive atmosphere of curiosity, warmth, acceptance, and interest. Within such an environment, we do not need to hold back what we are—including our eccentricities, sensitivities, and unique ways of perceiving and making sense of our experience; these are all welcome, contained, and held in the spaciousness of the here and now. We need not exert unnecessary energy to repress parts of ourselves while enacting other, less authentic parts to “fit in”—we’re already fully “in,” no extra fitting required.

  This image of a holding environment is also related to that area of psychology known as attachment theory, which describes the emotional, neurobiological, and even transpersonal bond between two people and how we come to imagine ourselves, others, and the world through our experience in relationship. As the foundation of secure attachment, an adequate holding environment provides the rich, creative terrain from which we can explore reality, resting and playing in unstructured states of being. By “secure attachment” I am referring to the capacity to care for ourselves at the deepest levels and at times reach out to others when we need help, not falling into an extreme position in which we have to “do it all on our own” or, alternatively, live from a fused place of unhealthy codependence. We are able to assert our needs and make requests of the others in our lives, honoring our interdependency with them while at the same time not placing an undue burden on them to heal and live for us. We can move in either direction, flexibly and in real time, shifting back and forth, depending on our intuitive, felt sense of the situation. From this ground of emotional suppleness, safety, and psychological elasticity, we journey out of the familiar, encounter and experiment with the not yet known, and stay embodied in the full range of human feeling and experience.

  For a holding environment to be “good enough,” it must consist of qualities of both contact and space, woven together in an optimal and artistic way in which we’re able to navigate that fertile middle territory where there is intimacy without fusion.2 Without adequate contact and without the space in which our natural being can unfold, we lose touch with the mystery—with the vastness of life beyond what we already know—with the quantum possibilities of living in a new way and of interacting, dancing, and playing with the world oriented in discovery, play, and creativity. When these two substances are alchemically balanced and mixed, we can rest, explore, take risks, and participate in the bounty of this life. We don’t need to hold back, overly protect ourselves, or hide from life. An accommodating holding environment provides the soil in which a baby’s brain, heart, and nervous system can differentiate, grow, and come alive. It also provides the earthy and empathetic landscape in which we as adults can open and sink into the imaginative field of not knowing, where we are able to listen, feel, sense, and envision life in a new way. What a miracle. Real magic.

  In addition to honoring the interpersonal aspect of holding, we need to examine the transpersonal dimension. From this perspective, our nature as open awareness might be conceived of as “the ultimate holding environment.”3 By “open awareness,” I’m referring to a meditative experience of attunement to the space or ground in which all thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise and pass—that warm, spacious field in which our experience comes and goes. This “transpersonal” dimension of holding points to something beyond our biographical history to the open ground of unconditioned awareness, in which the entirety of our experience arises, dances for a short while, and then dissolves. This field of awareness holds whatever appears, without being tainted by it and with
out the brilliance or mirroring capacity of the field ever being affected. It is a clear, reflecting field in which thoughts, feelings, and emotions circle, spiral, and play as they unveil their qualities. We come to discover the nature and experience of this transpersonal holding through spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, inquiry, ritual, creativity, and silence (or spontaneously without any effort), whereas interpersonal holding reveals itself in relationship with another person or figure (real or imaginal). Training ourselves to access, become familiar with, and relax into our true nature reveals the deeper dimensions of contact and space, where we come to the embodied realization that we are always, already being held by something infinite and vast. Although psychotherapeutic approaches have revealed the interpersonal nature of holding, the contemplative traditions provide the portal into this larger, already-existing dimension of experience.