by John Welwood
Later that week Sarah attended a funeral for the father of her friend Jill, and she held Jill as she cried during the service. Later, when Jill thanked Sarah for comforting her, Sarah had a strange sense of “Don’t thank me; I wasn’t doing anything.” Yes, she had embraced Jill in a caring way that felt warm and sweet. Yet at one point in the process she had felt a shift in Jill’s body: Something had let go, and then Jill relaxed and landed on a ground of support in the midst of her grief, just as Sarah herself had done in my office the previous week. These two incidents helped Sarah start to develop a new and profound insight: that another person cannot actually provide the ultimate holding we most need.
During the next session Sarah started to connect the dots and realize that the shift that had happened in Jill’s body was similar to something she had often experienced in my office. For years Sarah had remarked on how different she felt in my office than in her life outside. In her life, she ran around putting out fires, taking care of people, struggling with to-do lists, and generally feeling harried and stressed. Here in the office she was able to settle down, relax, consciously experience her feelings, connect with herself, and enter into a deeper quality of presence, which was both calming and strengthening. Why, she would often ask, can’t I feel like this on my own at home?
All these years Sarah had experienced our work as a holding environment that helped her be herself more fully. In one sense it’s true, I was holding her experience, just as she had held her friend at the funeral. I provided an environment of attentive listening and presence that welcomed her experience in an attuned, accepting way. The warm human connectedness between us had been deeply healing for her and had allowed her to learn new ways of relating to herself and others. Indeed, this kind of holding environment is the bedrock of therapeutic healing.
Yet in a deeper sense, my holding presence allowed her to relax and open into her own ground. And when she did this, she found a larger holding that was already naturally there. Through experiencing this holding, she was able to discover the support of a larger warmth and presence that held her whole existence.
Now I could say something she was finally ready to hear: “You feel held when you’re here in this office, but in truth I’m not really doing the holding, any more than you were holding Jill’s grief at the funeral, or than Eric was holding your pain over the weekend. You were lovingly present with Jill’s grief, but you couldn’t hold her grief, because only she was having her experience. The same thing is happening here. Only you are having your feelings, so I can’t literally hold them. But my attunement to what you are feeling helps you find the strength to meet and open to what you’re going through. When you’re open like that, you’re finally there for yourself. And then you discover what is always holding you.”
“How can I hold myself at home like that?” Sarah asked.
“You can’t hold yourself. It’s not the I that is doing the holding, just as I as a therapist can never really hold your experience. When I am here for you, it helps you be here for you. And when you are here for you—that is what gives you the experience of feeling held.”
Just as the vast expanse of sunlit space is always nurturing and cradling the earth, so too the warmth and openness of our larger being, our love-nature, is always holding and surrounding us, whether we know it or not. The only thing that separates us from this larger presence is our tendency to turn away from our experience or shroud ourselves in the clouds of defensiveness.
Different spiritual traditions describe this true ground in different ways. Christians, Jews, and Muslims say that God is holding us—that He has the whole world in His hands. Other traditions say the Divine Mother always holds us in Her arms. Buddhists say we live within the expanse of open, compassionate awareness—the Buddha-nature within each of us. (The Buddhist term for the fundamental law of existence—Dharma—literally means “that which holds.”) Whatever the religious language, this holding is regarded as vast and spacious, as well as benevolent and kind.
The lack of holding in Sarah’s childhood had caused her to contract and try to hold herself up. This made it hard for her to recognize this larger holding. But with these realizations, that began to change. As she warmed up to being there for herself, she developed a new sense of life holding her in a benevolent way. And this brought new confidence and strength. She ended therapy not long afterward.
A year or so later, I ran into Sarah at a social event. I asked her how things were going, and she told me she was in a new relationship that seemed to be working. For a long time after ending with Eric, she had given up looking for a relationship, focusing instead on being there for herself. “That was a rich time for me. It was the first time I had ever been able to fully enjoy myself and my life without a man. I learned to appreciate each day, not for what I was accomplishing, but for the experience of being alive. It was like having an intimate relationship with myself, and with my own life. I saw how I had previously thrown away this treasure to go begging for love from others instead.”
After six months, Sarah met a new man, but she didn’t find him terribly interesting at first. She hadn’t felt a great need to get involved because she had been enjoying her alone time so much. “We spent some time together, and it was friendly but no big deal.”
But then things gradually started to develop between them. He had also suffered some big disillusions with women. So they both entered into relationship without a lot of expectations. “Things seemed simple, we each liked what we saw, and our appreciation of each other deepened over time. We were able to accept each other in a simple way I haven’t known before.”
Having come to know that she was held in life’s embrace, Sarah no longer expected a man to be the bedrock of her existence. And this was allowing her to experience a warmth of connection that becomes possible when a relationship is no longer burdened by expectations for total fulfillment.
Sarah went on to admit that she had spent most of her life dreaming about perfect love while blaming the men in her life for not measuring up. But recently something had changed. Instead of resenting their failings, she could now see how each of these men, all the way back to her father, was wounded. And even though their wounding had kept their love from fully shining through, she recognized that each had loved her in his own way. “I’m learning to focus on the ways I have been loved instead of the ways I haven’t been.”
I felt moved by Sarah’s words and the sense of freedom coming through them. And I was reminded of the last year of my mother’s life, when I was finally able to let go of my grievances about how she couldn’t see me, and appreciate instead all the ways she had loved me. I remembered how liberating it had been to free up my heart like that.
Sarah had spent her whole life trying to find someone who could fill the hole of love that her childhood had left her with. But no one had ever been able to measure up. Finally forced back on herself, she learned to be there for herself and discover that her life was held in love. And this had freed her to have a simpler kind of relationship with a man, not so encumbered by the old struggles and dramas.
In bringing our conversation to a close, Sarah left me with these words: “It’s quite something. Now that I don’t expect as much, personal intimacy with a man is sweeter than ever before. My new relationship is far from ideal, but I’d say it’s good enough. Maybe that’s what knowing I am loved has given me—the ability to be satisfied with a good-enough lover. Even though human love isn’t perfect . . . I’m still willing to play.”
Exercises
THE EXERCISES PRESENTED HERE (arranged according to the corresponding chapters of the book) have proven helpful to people in my workshops and trainings. Many of these exercises involve looking within and answering key questions. You can answer the questions either through journal writing or by simply contemplating them. I suggest that you spend a few moments at the beginning of each exercise settling down, taking a few deep breaths, and feeling yourself present in your body.
In
troduction
RECOGNIZING YOUR GRIEVANCE
This exercise will help you identify a central grievance pattern that is operating in your life and in your relationships. Bringing this adversarial grievance pattern to consciousness is the first step in becoming free of it.
Think of some difficult, stressful, or painful situation in one of your current relationships—with a friend, lover, spouse, colleague, or family member.
When you think of this difficult situation, how do you feel in your body? How does it affect you?
When we feel conflict with other people, we often set ourselves in opposition to them. In what way are you seeing the other person as an adversary here? Notice how that oppositional stance affects your nervous system. (For example, do you feel anxious, tense, or heavy?)
Ask yourself if this is an old, familiar battle that you’re fighting here, one that’s been going on your whole life. What’s familiar about it? What does it go back to in your past? What is your old grievance against “the other” that is coming up again in this situation? Phrase it in one sentence, in the present tense, starting with “You . . .” and imagine saying it to the other person. (For example, “you don’t see me,” “you don’t treat me right,” “you just want to take advantage of me.”)
Once you have stated the grievance, notice how it is linked to an old, familiar sense of “you don’t love (see, appreciate, know) me as I am.”
What is it like to acknowledge this old grievance about not being loved, and to see how it still remains alive in you, affecting your interactions with others? It’s important not to judge it. Instead, see how it feels just to bring it out in the open and recognize it.
Chapter 1
EXPLORING LOVE AS AN INNER EXPERIENCE
This exercise will help you explore the experience you are most wanting in a love relationship. Shifting your focus to your inner experience helps move the locus of power from “out there” to “in here,” so that you are not totally dependent on an external relationship for what you most need inside.
In this exercise you will be repeatedly asking and answering key questions. This is best done in pairs, but if you don’t have a partner to do it with, you can also ask yourself the questions and then pause and contemplate before answering them. Answer whatever first comes to mind without thinking too hard about your response.
1. Facing each other, one of you asks a question (listed below), and the other person looks within and then answers in a sentence or two. Then the questioner asks the question again and the responder answers again. There is no other dialogue during the exercise. This process continues for 5 to 10 minutes.
The repeating-question format is designed to help you inquire further into the issue at hand. Each time the question is asked, you can look more deeply within yourself. In this particular exercise there are two questions that are asked sequentially:
What kind of love do you most long for?
And what would that really give you?
The first question invites you to get in touch with how you most want to be loved. Give yourself full permission when answering this to say what you really want. The second question asks you to consider what having that would give you on the inside. In other words, what is the inner experience you most want from feeling loved? For example, the exercise might go something like this:
Questioner: What kind of love do you most long for?
Responder: I want to feel known and understood.
Questioner: And what would that really give you?
Responder: That would give me a sense of belonging.
Questioner: What kind of love do you most long for?
Responder: I want to know that someone wants me just as I am.
Questioner: And what would that really give you?
Responder: Then I could relax and feel more trusting.
2. At the end of 5 or 10 minutes, the questioner and the responder switch roles. At the conclusion of the exercise, you can talk together about how it feels to acknowledge the love you most long for and what that would give you. If you do this exercise alone, take some time to feel the effect of recognizing these things.
TO FEEL LOVED IS TO BE LOVE
This exercise will help you explore how being loved allows the window of the heart to open, so that you can experience love as something within you, rather than something that someone hands over to you.
Think of someone in your life who loves you—a lover, spouse, friend, or family member. Let yourself feel this person’s love and caring for you.
Notice how you associate this good feeling with the other person, and how you tend to see the other as the cause or source of it.
Now let go of thinking about the other person and pay attention to what happens in your body when you feel loved. Pay particular attention to the heart center, the area at the center of your chest. See if you can recognize the warmth or fullness in your heart as your own experience, as something that arises from within you, as something that is yours.
How does it feel to recognize that?
Chapter 2
RECOGNIZING YOUR INVESTMENT IN GRIEVANCE
This exercise allows you to explore and name the hidden payoff in holding on to your grievance against others. You can do the repeating-question part of this exercise with someone else or by yourself.
1. Come back to the grievance you articulated in the first exercise, entitled “What’s your grievance?”
2. Acknowledge any way in which it feels good to hold on to this grievance. See if you can recognize and admit the satisfaction you take in making the other person wrong.
3. What does making the other wrong give you on the inside? What does it do for you? If you could prove to this person and have this person accept that he or she is wrong, what would you get from that?
4. This next step involves a repeating question:
What’s good about holding on to this grievance? (One person asks this question and the other person looks within and then answers in a sentence or two. Then the questioner asks again and the responder answers again. There is no other dialogue during the exercise. This process continues for 5 to 10 minutes. Then the questioner and responder change roles.)
5. Each time you respond to this question, explore and describe the benefit you derive from holding on to your grievance. It’s important not to judge yourself in any way but just to let yourself see what’s true in a neutral, inquisitive way.
THE BAD OTHER
This exercise will help you see how bad-other projections operate in your relationships.
Think of a recent conflict with your partner, or anyone else, where you felt badly treated, misunderstood, or hurt in some way.
Acknowledge how that sense of mistreatment feels to you, particularly any anger or frustration associated with it.
When feeling your anger or frustration, how does the other person look to you? What bad-other picture comes up? (For instance, you might see the other as indifferent, hostile, invasive, rejecting, abandoning, or controlling.)
Now ask yourself: How is this bad-other picture familiar to you, going back all your life? What does it remind you of from your childhood?
Recognizing this bad-other picture as something that you bring with you from your past, see if you can lift it off the person with whom you are relating in present time.
What is it like to see this person apart from the old bad-other picture?
Chapter 3
MELTING GRIEVANCE INTO GRIEF: MEETING YOURSELF IN THE PLACE OF UNLOVE
This is the process of unconditional presence applied to the pain of unlove, as described in chapter 3.
1. Think of some way you don’t feel fully loved in a present relationship in your life—with a lover, friend, or family member.
2. How do you experience this sense of unlove in your body? Notice the specific quality of the bodily sensations (such as heavy, anxious, tight, nervous, cold, empty, numb, hot, thick, dull) and where in your body you feel them most strongly.<
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3. Acknowledge the feeling and the sensations that are there, directly contacting them with your awareness. If you feel tight or constricted, let your breath touch and permeate the sensation of tension.
4. Then see if you can let the feeling of unlove be there just as it is, without trying to fix it, change it, or judge it. Open up space around the sensations in your body, giving them plenty of room to be there just as they are. Experience the sensations being held in that soft, open space.
What’s it like to acknowledge and allow the sense of unlove and the sensations that go with it?
If it feels bad to acknowledge and allow a feeling, this probably means you are rejecting or identifying with it rather than fully allowing it and giving it room to be there. The question here is not, “How does the place of unlove feel?” (yes, it may feel painful), but rather, “How does it affect you to contact that place and allow it room to be as it is?” If you feel stuck in or oppressed by the pain, place more attention and emphasis on the space of awareness surrounding the pain. As space, it is soft. The pain may still be there, but the act of allowing it to be there is not itself painful. Usually it feels more like a relief, though not always right at first.
Also gently put aside any stories about yourself this might be enough that may come up as you meet the sense of unlove (such as “This means I’m unlovable,” “It’s bad to feel like this,” “If I let myself feel this, I’ll become depressed”).