by Heather Plett | Aug 31, 2016 | Uncategorized
Mom & Dad’s engagement
Long before I ever heard the term “holding space“, I was paying attention to my early understanding of the concept. In fact, thirteen years ago, before blogs were popular and before social media arrived, I had my first “mini-viral” article about supporting people in grief.
I dug back into my archives to find the article I wrote after my dad died, about how you can help people who’ve lost a loved one. It’s a more practical guide than what I wrote after Mom died, but it’s still helpful. This article was published in the Winnipeg Free Press, and I heard from people years later that they’d clipped it out of the paper, made copies, and passed it around to friends and colleagues.
How can I help? Tips for helping the bereaved.
Originally published in the Winnipeg Free Press
It was the longest ride of my life – those 2 hours between the time I got the phone call that Dad had been killed in a farm accident and the time my sister and I arrived at the farm. Two hours of excruciating pain, hating the truth, and wishing we could be at Mom’s side more quickly. Two hours of desperate hope that someone who loved her might be there to support Mom as she faced the darkest hours of her life.
The pain didn’t end when we reached the farmhouse, but it eased a little when we saw the roomful of people who had gathered to be at Mom’s side. Cecile, Mom’s dearest friend, met us at the door. Julie, my childhood best friend, sat supporting Mom on the couch. Others were there – Wilbert and Mernie – some of Mom and Dad’s closest friends, Michael – the pastor from their church, neighbours I didn’t recognize. They’d all heard the horrible news, dropped whatever they were doing, and rushed to the place they knew they were needed most. There was nothing they could do to bring Dad back, but they knew they had to show up.
And then, as the family started to arrive, and those in the house knew Mom had the support she needed, they quietly began to disperse, wordlessly acknowledging our need for time alone to be the splintered family we had become.
Over the next several weeks, with almost uncanny timing, neighbours, friends and relatives showed up at the yard offering what they could to help us cope. They brought food and water, they fed Dad’s animals, they cared for our children, they helped with funeral arrangements – they showed up when we needed them and disappeared when they were in the way. In the middle of my hurt, I learned lessons in community, in kindness, in acts of service, and in “paying it forward”.
These lessons will serve as reminders for me the next time a friend loses a loved one. Here’s what I learned:
- Show up – You may worry that you’ll get in the way, or that too many other people will be around and your presence won’t mean anything, but that’s rarely the case. Every person who showed up on our parents’ yard was appreciated because his or her presence bore evidence to the emotional support we so desperately needed at that time. Don’t overstay your welcome, and don’t get in the way of family moments, but show up and demonstrate that your friend is important to you. And don’t forget to keep showing up – weeks and months after the fact, when everyone else has forgotten and the bereaved feels most alone. If miles or circumstances separate you, at least make phone calls or send e-mails whenever you can.
- Find a need and fill it – It was amazing to me what needs people found to fill – needs we often didn’t know we had until they were filled. One person brought a tank of water to fill Mom’s cistern, because he knew, with a houseful of people, we would run out of water. Another person offered a camper for the family members who would be coming from a distance. Try not to ask “how can I help”, because the family has so much on their mind they probably won’t have an easy answer – just find something to do and do it.
- Think of the unusual items the family may need – Some people seemed to know just what we’d need to help organize the funeral and play host to lots of visitors. One of our most-used items was a notebook a neighbour brought – she knew we’d need to take lots of notes as we planned the funeral and made crucial decisions and she thought it would be a good idea to keep it all in one place. Another person brought paper plates, paper cups, and napkins to feed all the extra people coming to the farm.
- Remember the children – Some people were very good at knowing what our young children would need and when. The night of the viewing, friends showed up with colouring books and crafts to keep the children entertained while we mourned. Children can feel very lost, confused and overlooked when the adults closest to them are emotionally distraught most of the time. If there are children involved, offer to take them to the park or some other neutral/enjoyable place for awhile. Taking them away, even for a short period of time, gives them a break from the emotional atmosphere and gives their parents a much-needed break.
- Consider giving money – My dad died without life insurance, leaving the family with unexpected bills to pay. Funerals cost a lot of money, and most people don’t have a lot of disposable income to prepare them for something like this. Several people, most of whom had gone through a similar event, brought cheques and envelopes full of cash. My mom was touched beyond words. One of her friends sacrificed the money she’d been saving for a digital camera because she felt Mom’s needs were more significant than her own.
- Bring food – One thing that really impressed our family was the variety of food people thought to bring – casseroles, fruit baskets, meat platters, desserts, treats for the kids, crackers, cheese platters, chocolates, etc. If you bring casseroles, use disposable containers that don’t have to be returned. Think about bringing healthy snackfood for people to munch on when they’re too busy or too distraught to eat a decent meal. Consider showing up at a mealtime with everything ready to be served (eg. sandwich fixings at lunch time, a hot meal for supper complete with a salad and loaf of bread). It’s a huge relief not to have to worry about what you’ll feed the family when your mind is far from food. One of my friends called a week or two after the funeral and said not to fix supper – she was having it catered.
- Talk about the deceased, and LISTEN – After Dad died, I clung to every memory of him, every picture he was in, and every story I heard. I wanted to soak it all up and remember it forever. Tell the family what you remember of the person – share stores of kind things the deceased did for you in his or her lifetime, or a special time you had together. Listen to their stories and acknowledge their need to work through their grief.
- If nothing else, send a card – You may think that cards are overlooked and unimportant, but quite the opposite is true. If it’s the least you can do, it’s still better than doing nothing. My Mom got hundreds of cards, and now, weeks later, she still pours over them, getting comfort from the fact that so many people are thinking of her and praying for her. Try to say something personal in the card – perhaps a favourite memory of the person who died, or a quote or scripture verse that helped you through a similar time. My mom was moved to tears by a letter my cousin wrote about his favourite memory of my Dad.
- Consider the roles/needs that are no longer being filled by the deceased – If the deceased ran a business, or had some duties that were unique to him or her, try to find ways to fill those needs so the family’s burdens will be eased. One of Dad’s friends showed up faithfully to feed the farm animals. Another friend came to help organize an auction sale when he heard that Mom wouldn’t stay on the farm. Perhaps the family has business associates or board members that need to be notified. Perhaps you were involved in an area of the person’s life that gives you unique information (eg. a business partner, a colleague on a committee, etc.) – figure out how your information or skills could be used at this time. Try not to pester the family with too many questions – just do what needs to be done and let the family know they don’t have to worry about it.
- If you have unique information about the death or surrounding circumstances, share it – One of my Mom’s greatest comforts was the knowledge that Dad was not alone when he died. A nurse and her husband (a pastor) saw the accident and were the first on the scene. They worked to save Dad’s life, and they prayed with him until the ambulance arrived. When Mom arrived on the scene, they prayed with her too. These people were strangers to us, but a few days after the accident, they stopped on the farm to meet Mom and share details of Dad’s final minutes – including his last words. This information and their compassion have become very meaningful to the whole family and we are forever grateful to them for taking the time to visit us.
- Personalize floral arrangements or memorial gifts – My Dad’s sisters put a lot of thought into the bouquet they brought for the funeral. Because they knew Dad had great respect for the earth and for his animals, and preferred natural things to commercial ones, they chose flowers that represented him. The focal point was a farm hat, and the pièce de resistance was a branch where 7 plastic sheep perched – representing his love for sheep and his 7 grandchildren. Their floral arrangement, and another one made almost entirely of wildflowers for on top of the coffin, will always stand out in our memory.
- Pray – Within hours of dad’s passing, prayer chains spread out through friends, relatives, churches, and extended contacts – spanning the globe. My mom is convinced much of her strength was derived from these prayers. If you are a person of faith, offer prayers and support for the family and friends. Let them know of their place in your prayers – the knowledge that people are praying for you can be as powerful as the prayers themselves.
- Cry – One of the most significant things you can do is also the simplest – let them know you hurt too and that their loss is shared. Don’t feel that you have to be stoic around your friends all of the time – if the tears well up in your eyes, let them overflow. Crying with a friend can be one of the greatest demonstrations of compassion and support.
There is no perfect way to help a friend in the middle of grief, and often you will second guess your choice of words or actions. There is also no antidote for grief – it’s something the bereaved family will have to grapple with day after day. However, the effort you make to support your friends will go a long way toward helping them cope in their darkest hours.
by Heather Plett | Aug 22, 2016 | holding space, journey
“I’m holding space for you.” That phrase has become more and more common in our vernacular lately, and there’s a part of me that delights in hearing it and a part of me that sometimes cringes.
The part that cringes is the part that hears the cliché that that phrase has become. Those words are said (especially on social media) sometimes far too glibly and casually. It’s become a throw-away phrase, not unlike “thoughts and prayers”, that makes us feel like we’re being supportive without requiring that we get our hands dirty. If I’m holding space for you, we seem to think, you can’t accuse me of being an absent friend, but you also can’t expect me to do any of the messy work with you.
When we toss those words out too casually, the space we’re holding becomes a shallow one. “If I just drop this ‘I’m holding space for you’ comment on your anguished Facebook post, I can come back later when your problems are resolved and we can celebrate together. No fuss, no mess.”
There is an element of spiritual bypassing to this understanding of holding space.
Spiritual bypassing is a term coined by John Welwood. “Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves,” he says, “I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.
“When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as an “occupational hazard” of the spiritual path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current karmic situation.”
There is something in our nature and/or culture (especially in the West) that has conditioned us to want the easy path. We want to get to “spiritual” without taking the journey through “messy”. We search for those tools and practices that will help us avoid the darkness, the brokenness, and the rawness. And, in the ways that we hold space for each other, we hope to avoid other people’s rawness and darkness too. It is our unspoken fear that if we have to be too present for their darkness, then we will have no choice but to see our own.
For the last few months, as I prepare to write a book on what it means to hold space, I’ve been wrestling with these concerns around shallowness and spiritual bypassing. If I am to be so closely associated with the concept of holding space (ie. Google the term and my name pops up at or near the top), then I need to be clear about what I mean by it, and what I mean by it is far from shallow.
In order to deepen the term, I started to consider what kind of space I wanted to talk about holding. Is it safe space? Not entirely – sometimes it feels frightening and unclear and requires that we step into that which makes us uncomfortable. Is it brave space? Sometimes, but other times it just feels like soft space that doesn’t require bravery. Is it deep space? Often it is, but then there are those times when shallow is good enough, at least for a first step.
Finally I came up with this… It’s about holding liminal space.
Liminal originates from the Latin word “limen” which means “a threshold”. In anthropology, liminality is “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual’s liminal stage, participants ‘stand at the threshold’ between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.” (from Wikipedia)
A liminal space, then, is a period in which something (social hierarchy, culture, belief, tradition, identity, etc.) has been dissolved and a new thing has not yet emerged to take its place. It’s that period of uncertainty, ambiguity, restlessness, fear, discomfort, and anguish. It’s the space between, when a trapeze artist let’s go of one swing and doesn’t yet know whether she’ll be able to reach the other swing. There is nothing shallow about liminal space.
In the article Grieving as Sacred Space, Richard Rohr describes liminal space as “…a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the “tried and true” but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are in between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. It is no fun.”
It was that liminal space that I talked about when I first described the kind of holding space that happened at my mom’s deathbed. It was messy and raw and it lead us into the depths of our darkest grief when Mom finally breathed her last breath. It was also a time when we were “finally out of the way” and had to surrender to the God of our understanding.
It’s that liminal space that I talked about when I was in a place of burnout from the demands of a growing business and the ending of a marriage. Or when I was stepping into complex, trauma-informed, race relations work where I was challenged with my own bias.
This weekend, along with millions of Canadians, I watched some of that liminal space unfold in front of me on stage as Gord Downie performed what was probably his final concert. In a remarkable show of courage and strength, he went out on tour with his band, The Tragically Hip, despite the fact that he has inoperable brain cancer that will probably kill him in less than a year. In a moment I don’t think I’ll ever forget (watch the video clip here), with pure anguish written on his face and tears rolling down his cheeks, he screamed a primal scream that ripped through the air and left a scar across the whole country. This was not a scream that could be resolved. It was not a cry for help or for pity. It was a scream that emerged from the deepest place in him and touched into the deepest places in us.
When we hold liminal space, we are willing to hold that kind of scream, to witness it and not judge or resolve it. We are willing to be in both the darkest and lightest of places with each other, to be alongside that kind of anguish and terror in tandem with the profound joy and celebration of a life well-lived. We are willing to crack open and be at our rawest and most vulnerable and we are willing to hold each other in that unresolved place.
That is what I mean when I talk about holding space. There is no spiritual bypassing in that place and no shallowness. It can rip you apart and leave you breathless. It can require much more of you than you knew you had to give. It takes strength and courage and resilience and a fierce commitment to love.
Holding that kind of space is one of the most sacred acts we can do for each other. When we do it, we are standing on holy ground.
I have the great privilege of coaching and sometimes creating ceremony for people who are in that liminal space. This is not a task I take lightly and sometimes I fail at it (especially when I let my ego get in the way). I need to be spiritually and emotionally prepared for the darkness to show up and for the anguish to overwhelm people as they take this journey. I also need to be prepared for the most powerful kind of light and love to emerge. It’s what coaches, therapists, pastors, hospice workers, healers, spiritual directors, nurses, and midwives must all do. It’s humbling, beautiful, and exhausting work.
I had the privilege of creating a “liminal space” ceremony for a couple of people recently, and I can tell you that it was one of the most beautiful and yet energetically draining things I’ve done in a long time. I created a metaphoric journey that invited them, over the course of a couple of hours, to peer into both their shadow and their light. When they dove into their own darkness, I held them both physically and emotionally. When they stepped into the light, I was there to steady them. At the end of the ceremony, we celebrated what they are about to birth.
For hours after the ceremony, I suffered from a powerful headache. That night, I had frightening and disorienting dreams. It took me a few days of intentional self-care and gentleness to shake off the weariness. While it was an amazing experience for all of us, it took a lot out of me both physically and emotionally.
That’s why I am so insistent that self-care needs to be a high priority for anyone who holds liminal space. We can’t do this well unless we are well-grounded and supported.
The next time you say to someone “I’m holding space for you,” ask yourself if you’re only willing and able to hold shallow space, or if you’re truly willing to be there for the liminal space. If it’s shallow space you’re holding (and, to be clear, that is necessary too – when we’re in that liminal space, we don’t need everyone in our circles to hold the depth of it), perhaps better words would be “I love you and am standing by you.”
If, on the other hand, you want to hold liminal space, make sure you’re prepared for the primal scream.
P.S. If you’re in the midst of that primal scream and need someone to hold that space with you, check out my coaching page. If you host liminal space, consider joining us in The Helper’s Circle.
Interested in more articles like this? Add your name to my email list and you’ll receive a free ebook, A Path to Connection and my bi-weekly reflections.
by Heather Plett | Aug 8, 2016 | Uncategorized
On the plane earlier this week, I was reading a new book on narrative coaching that had been sent to me by the author, David Drake. I worked and studied with David a few years ago when we were trying to create the (sadly ill-fated) Canadian Centre for Narrative Coaching, and he’d included a piece I wrote at that time in the introduction of this recently released book. (I was pleased to discover that he also included a quote from me in a chapter on holding space.)
When I read the following sentence (a quote from Ram Dass) I had to stop and put the book down for a while…
Do not speak unless you can improve on silence.
That’s one of those powerful, weighty sentences that could change a person’s life.
“What would it mean to build that habit into my everyday life?” I wondered, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
What if I were intentional about speaking only when it improves on the silence?
Would I hurt people less frequently?
Would my words have more weight and less waste?
Would I pause more intentionally before interrupting or correcting people?
Would the conversations I’m in shift their tone?
Would I be more fully present for people’s stories?
Not long ago, a participant at a workshop I’d co-facilitated gave some feedback that hurt a little at first, but was valuable for me to hear. “Sometimes you talk too much,” he said. It caught me off guard, because I try to be very intentional about not claiming too much space and allowing all of the voices in the room to be heard. (That’s the nature of The Circle Way – especially when we pass a talking piece around, each person has equal space to be heard.) But after I sat with it for awhile, I realized that there was truth in what he said.
Sometimes, I do talk too much. When I’m feeling insecure about the content I’m teaching, I talk too much. When I notice people disengaging and I begin to worry that they’re not catching on, I talk too much. When someone disagrees with me and I feel the need to defend myself, I talk too much. It’s not just in teaching settings – it happens in my daily life too. When I’m frustrated with my children and I need them to understand me, I talk too much. When I’m feeling misunderstood by a friend, I talk too much.
For me (and maybe for you), talking too much is directly connected to my ego. When my ego feels threatened, I talk too much. When my ego needs attention, I talk too much.
When I am more grounded in True Self, I let go of my need to over-explain, justify, or defend, and I am more intentional about how much I speak and how much I honour silence.
In this noisy world, it’s counter-cultural to believe that silence can have more value than wasted words. Consider the last conversation you were in. When everyone fell silent, did you feel uncomfortable? Did you feel the pressure to speak, if only to fill the void? What would happen if you simply allowed the silence to happen?
One of the practices of The Circle Way is the council of silence. When anybody in the circle feels the need for a pause, they ask the guardian to ring the bell, and then we sit in silence for a few moments until the bell is rung a second time. It’s a beautiful and intentional choice to sit for a moment within the gravitas of someone’s words or the emotions that have arisen in the circle. The more I sit in circles, the more I wish we could incorporate a similar practice in our everyday conversations.
The pauses make our conversations more meaningful and they teach us how to be better listeners.
Intentional silence is one of the most important principles of holding space. To hold space for other people (and for ourselves) we have to know when to speak and when to remain silent. When our egos get in the way, we want to offer advice, improve on someone’s story, control the outcome, or at least let people know how smart we are. All of those things are detrimental to the process of holding space. They draw the attention away from the person you’re holding space for and draw it toward yourself.
“Silence is a place in which your restless minds, internal chatter, and fragmented attention can find the stillness you need to listen well.” David Drake
If you want to listen well, you have to learn when not to speak.
Sometimes our words improve on the silence, but often they do not. When we pay close attention, we will learn to discern the difference.
