I had a dream once, that my body had become part of the landscape. The curve of my belly was now a hill that people and animals were walking across. Small children were playing on my forearms and trees were growing in the soil between my fingers rooting my hands to the ground. It was not an unpleasant dream – in fact I found it quite comforting to witness my body sinking into the soil and becoming a part of it. I awoke feeling rooted and at peace.
I’ve been remembering that dream these past weeks as I’ve been wandering in the woods and along the shoreline of this island that is becoming my new chosen home. After sixteen months of traveling the world with my laptop and a small suitcase, I’ve landed on Vancouver Island – a place I’ve long felt drawn to but have only had a flirtatious relationship with.
I want to become part of the landscape here. My wandering feet are ready to root themselves, to find familiar paths that feel like home, to learn to know trees that feel like kin. Though I was born and bred a prairie girl and will always know the prairies as my first love, there is something about this landscape that brings both soothing and aliveness to my body in a way that feels right for this season of my life.
On these misty cool days of a Pacific north-western December, while I deepen my relationship with this landscape and this climate, I’ve found myself drawn back into the work of John O’Donohue, a poet and mystic who could translate landscape into language in ways that most writers only dream of. Reading and listening to him anew has awakened something in me that feels true and good for this moment. While I am here, I want to slow down and live as the mystics have taught us to live. I want to unleash the inner mystic in me and lean into whatever wisdom awaits among the tall trees and rocks on the wild shoreline.
“What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.
“When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” – John O’Donohue(From Beauty: The Invisible Embrace)
On Saturday, I sat on a rock at the edge of the sea, looking out into the shrouded expanse of the horizon. Noticing movement at the edge of my vision, I looked down and there was a seal, floating on its back just feet away, looking up at me with curious, friendly eyes. “Welcome to the neighbourhood,” it seemed to say. “Take care of the place and treat your neighbours well and you’ll find a way to belong here amongst your kin.”
In January, I’ll be moving into a small apartment in a quiet little town near a lake. When I first came here, I thought I’d be living in the city. I’ve become accustomed to having the conveniences of a city available to me ever since I left the rural life behind in those restless days of early adulthood. But I surprised myself when I landed here by falling in love with a place and becoming intrigued with the idea of returning to a more rural life. It might have something to do with the fact that I put “proximity to good walking trails” and “space to set up a hammock under a tree” on my wish list for my next home (a wish list I’m happy to say that this place fulfills completely).
While re-listening to John O’Donohue’s interview on the On Being podcast, which he did just before he died, his words about thresholds felt particularly timely. “If you go back to the etymology of the word ‘threshold,’” he said, “it comes from ‘threshing,’ which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.”
I have a lovely and nostalgic relationship with the word “threshing”. Among the highlights of my childhood were the visits we sometimes made (in years when we could afford such an outing) to the Austin Thresherman’s Reunion. After the parade of antique farming equipment passed by, the old threshing machines would be lined up on the dirt floor of the arena and the farmers (and wannabe farmers) would gather for a friendly threshing competition. My siblings and I would always coax our dad out into the arena, knowing that if he went down there, he would almost certainly bring home the prize – a shiny silver dollar. Few people could beat my dad when it came to the stooking competition. (To “stook” is to stack the sheaves of wheat in upright pyramids so that the heads of wheat have the best chance of drying.) Afterwards, the stooks would be fed into the threshing machines and the wheat would be shaken from its husks.
a picture my sister took at the Thresherman’s Reunion long after our dad’s death
Years after losing my dad to a farming accident, I stand at this new threshold, reflecting on what it means to metaphorically separate the wheat from the chaff as I prepare for the seasons ahead. What will be harvested to nourish me over the winter and what will be saved for planting when the sun begins to warm the soil?
It’s not lost on me that only a week after I move into my new place, I’ll be launching my next book, Where Tenderness Lives: On healing, liberation and holding space for oneself. It seems an auspicious time to be sending this book, which I’ve worked so hard to gestate, out into the world. Like a pregnant parent, I’m now in the nesting phase that often marks the turning point when birth is on the horizon.
“I think a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit,” O’Donohue said in that interview. “And I think that, very often, how we cross is the key thing.”
Two territories of spirit. That’s an intriguing thought that won’t leave me alone. What is the territory I am leaving? What is the territory I’m moving into? How do my new book and my new home play into that? And how do I wish to cross over?
If these past few weeks have given me any clues (and I believe they have), the next territory of spirit will have something to do with a deepening relationship with Mystery and a kinship with the non-human beings I encounter in this new place. Perhaps while I lie back and look up at the giant tree that’s near the small patio where I intend to put up a hammock come Spring, my dream will be realized, and my body will become part of the landscape.
As I set my intention for how I wish to cross over into this next territory of spirit, I turn to Richard Wagamese, another wise guide whose final years were lived out not far from where I now live.
I want to listen deeply enough that I hear everything and nothing at the same time and am made more by the enduring quality of my silence. I want to question deeply enough that I am made more not by the answers so much as my desire to continue asking questions. I want to speak deeply enough that I am made more by the articulation of my truth shifting into the day’s shape. In this way, listening, pondering and sharing become my connection to the oneness of life, and there is no longer any part of me in exile.
“He was a poor man in a criminal justice system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.” – Anthony Ray Hinton
For nearly thirty years, Anthony Ray Hinton was in solitary confinement on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Largely because he was Black and poor, the justice system failed him. Despite the fact that there was convincing evidence that should have exonerated him, he was convicted by an all-white jury, and then had multiple appeals rejected by a systemically racist justice system intent on covering up past errors. With no money to hire good lawyers or skilled experts (i.e. the ballistics “expert” his lawyer hired was blind in one eye and didn’t know how to use the necessary equipment), he stayed in jail anticipating his execution.
I listened to Anthony Ray Hinton’s remarkable book, The Sun Does Shine, last week on my long road trip to the west coast. It’s remarkable for a few reasons: 1. it’s hard to fathom spending month after month stuck in a tiny jail cell while, on nearly a monthly basis, listening to your fellow inmates being executed just down the hall; 2. Hinton managed to move through his bitterness and hopelessness (he didn’t speak to anyone other than his visitors for the first three years) and became a source of comfort, hope, humour and support for others on death row; and 3. Hinton’s loyal friend Lester visited him every Friday for the whole time he was incarcerated (usually bringing Hinton’s mom with him).
After finishing the book, I switched to podcasts for the second half of the drive. For many hours, I listened to The Dream, an investigative series that dives deep into some of the ways that the American dream has been sold to people. Season one examines pyramid schemes and MLM (multi-level marketing) businesses; season two looks at the wellness industry; and season three focuses on life coaching. All three of these industries are built on the beliefs that wealth, health, happiness and success are available to anyone who works hard, believes in themself, and thinks positively.
The content of my two listening experiences was vastly different, but I couldn’t help but notice a disturbing thread that tied them together. In very different ways, they both reveal the dark underbelly of a culture shaped by capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. They both say something about the delusions required to keep those systems alive and the ways they are upheld by those who most benefit from them.
In the case of Anthony Ray Hinton, there were few delusions that the system would serve his best interests because of his skin colour and socio-economic status. Though he hung onto a persistent hope that the truth would prevail, as a poor Black man in the south, he grew up knowing the system was rigged against him. In his youth, he and Lester would hide in the ditch on their walk home from school because they had no reason to believe passing motorists would treat them well.
Many of the people featured in The Dream (especially those who’d signed up to sell products or services on behalf of MLM businesses) were also poor, but most of them were white and had been raised to believe that the world was fair and would treat them well if they did the right things. They wanted so badly to believe this, in fact, that, even when presented with overwhelming evidence that most people who sign up for MLMs lose money, many of them tried company after company, thinking the next one would finally bring them financial security. Unlike Hinton, they had just enough privilege in the system to believe that the system would protect them. “Think and Grow Rich” is one of the most popular books among those working in direct sales.
What’s especially striking about the many stories covered in The Dream, about people who buy into MLMs, are devotees of the wellness industry or seek out life coaching (and some fit into all three categories) is the amount of messaging they’ve received from all of those industries that if they are failing, the responsibility rests solely on themselves. The system (or the business model or industry) is never to blame. “You must not be believing in yourself,” they’re told. Or “you just have to try harder.” Or “you need to improve your tactics, your self-talk, your relationship skills, your financial literacy, your thoughts, your food consumption, your business strategy, your perseverance, etc., etc.” So many people are led to believe this, in fact, that few people challenge or file complaints against MLMs or the wellness industry because they internalise the blame instead of recognizing the predatory nature of the system they’ve bought into.
Capitalism and individualism are close bed-fellows. Capitalism strives to convince us that we are self-reliant, because self-reliant people spend money on goods and services that they might otherwise turn to the community for. Plus self-reliant people take personal responsibility for their lack of success and internalise the shame of their failure instead of building alliances that might disrupt the power that corporations have over them. Self-reliant people keep believing that the next thing will be the golden ticket to a more secure life.
I’ve been working on the fringes of the wellness/self-help/personal development/coaching industry for many years now, and have always struggled with the tension between what is personal responsibility and what is systemic. Am I responsible for my own failure, or have I fallen victim to a system designed to make me fail? If I can’t “pull myself up by the bootstraps” or “think myself into riches”, is it because I’m not resourceful or positive enough, or because others have been given better boots than I have?
The self-help industry has been largely shaped by capitalism, so we get the same messaging that all of those MLMs are passing down to their sales people – if you don’t thrive, it’s YOUR fault. It’s even built into the name – help yourSELF. I have yet to find a section of the bookstore called “community support”, but the self-help shelves are always well-stocked. Nobody is responsible for our well-being except OURSELVES, we are told, both explicitly and implicitly. When you hear that message in so many ways, whether it’s about your financial success or your health, it’s hard to interrogate the system that’s preaching it at you because the system has managed to make itself largely invisible.
The other side of the tension, though, is that if we believe that we are entirely at the mercy of the systems, and we fail to see the role we play in upholding those systems or in keeping ourselves entangled in them, then we develop victim mentalities that disempower us. We get paralyzed by our helplessness and fail to make any meaningful contributions to the disruption and transformation of those systems. “Woe is me,” I tell myself while in my victim story. “I have been so hard done-by and all my power has been taken away from me.”
The best place to stand, in my opinion, is in a both/and position rather than an either/or one. We need both a clear sense of personal responsibility and a willingness to honestly examine the injustice and oppression baked into these human-built systems. We need to believe in our own power (and other people’s power), and we need to recognize the ways the systems have been designed to disempower us and keep us complacent. And then we need to organize with other empowered people so that meaningful change can happen and healthy systems can replace the toxic ones.
That’s the place I want my work to land – where we are both self-empowered and collectively-empowered. When people ask me what I do for a living, the easiest answer is to say “I work in personal development”, because that’s a term that most people understand, but it feels more truthful to say “I serve the well-being of the collective by supporting the growth, healing and transformation of individuals and communities.” I want to disrupt the narrative around individualism and attachment to capitalism so that we can imagine something different for the future.
How do I do that? Well, for starters, I don’t do it alone. Krista and I have, very intentionally, created a partnership and business model that centres collective work and de-centres “claw your own way to the top” capitalism. We regularly interrogate our business decisions to determine whether or not they are rooted in capitalist and/or patriarchal mindsets. Our teaching is almost always done in partnership within a circle where hierarchies are disrupted and there is a “leader in every chair”. In every course we’ve developed, whether it is about holding space or self-reflection, we invite people to examine the ways they’ve been socially conditioned by systems, and then to make empowered personal choices about how they wish to respond. In my upcoming book, Where Tenderness Lives: On healing, liberation, and holding space for oneself, I wrote about how I’d come to understand myself within the systems that shaped me, and how I practise tenderness as a deliberate disruption of the ways those systems have taught me to treat myself (and others).
I believe that we can learn to live with (and hold space for) the tension between what’s personal and what is systemic. I believe that we can challenge the delusions that keep us mired in systems that privilege only a select few. I believe that there is a path forward and we can learn to walk it together.
Anthony Ray Hinton had little power within the system, and yet he chose to use the little power that he did have to change the experience for other inmates and to advocate for meaningful change within his scope of influence. He started a book club while still on death row and introduced fellow inmates to revolutionary Black writers like James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. Since his release from prison, he’s written a memoir, spoken out against the death penalty, and worked as a community educator for the Equal Justice Initiative (the organization that helped secure his release). He refused to accept powerlessness as his final story.
“Despair was a choice,” said Hinton in his book. “Hatred was a choice. Anger was a choice. I still had choices, and that knowledge rocked me. I may not have had as many as Lester had, but I still had some choices. I could choose to give up or to hang on. Hope was a choice. Faith was a choice. And more than anything else, love was a choice. Compassion was a choice.“
(Note: Anthony Ray Hinton’s story was turned into the movie Just Mercy.)
I wake up among the treetops. I peek out the window near my head and I see the shadowy lake below, surrounded by the shadowy trees. Across the lake, I hear the train that was probably the reason for my waking. I close my eyes and a smile creeps across my face. I love the melancholy sound of a train passing through wild spaces. I don’t care for it much in the city, but out here, away from civilization, the clicking and clacking and screeching of metal on metal, especially in the middle of the night, sounds to me like kindness and sadness all mixed together.
I have to pee, of course, as a fifty-seven-year-old body does in the middle of the night, but I close my eyes and pretend otherwise, willing my body to hold off until morning. It would be too much work to grope around in the dark for my headlamp, climb down the ladder from my perch in the loft of this tiny off-grid cabin, and make my way up the dark path, made more treacherous by the exposed roots half-buried by Fall leaves, to the compost toilet in the dark little outhouse. Too much work and too much awakening. Luckily, my body cooperates and I fall back to sleep.
In the morning, I climb down the ladder, pull on a sweater, and make my way to the toilet. After grabbing breakfast from the cooler that feels less-than-cool and should probably be reloaded with ice from the freezer at the far end of the property, I wander down to the lake. I curl up in an Adirondack chair on the dock and watch the ripples on the lake. It’s mesmerizing to watch them, the way they shatter the reflection of the trees into thin strips of perpetual motion.
I wonder, on this windless morning, what is causing the ripples. There are no boats out on this small lake, and nobody else in the handful of cottages is stirring. There are no fish jumping or birds landing, so why the steady ripples?
I stare at them, deep in thought, and something else pops into my mind. “I wish I remembered how to pray.” It’s a thought that I’ve had only occasionally in the years since I stopped going to church and since my faith became so deconstructed I wasn’t sure it existed anymore. Not feeling very certain there’s a god to pray to anymore, I mostly gave up on any attempt at prayer, but sometimes I miss it. Sometimes I miss trusting that there is a higher power with whom I can entrust my worries.
I still think of myself as spiritual, still believe I have spiritual experiences in which I witness the presence of a force greater than me, but prayer feels much more elusive when “god/goddess/mystery” is a more nebulous thing than my former Christian beliefs held to be true. Without the belief that god is the benevolent, omnipotent father-figure I can bring my requests to, I don’t know where to direct my prayers.
This morning, though, I’m missing the simplicity and trust of the prayers of my earlier life. There are worries in my life that I want to entrust to a higher power. There are things going on in my daughters’ lives that I wish I could offer up to a god who might solve their problems for them (since I can’t solve them myself). “Find this daughter a job, give this daughter some friends so she doesn’t feel as lonely.” It’s a “god as vending machine” belief that I’m probably longing for most… drop a few prayers in the slot and out pops the solution, easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
Unfortunately, even in my most fervently religious days, god never showed up as a vending machine, no matter how many prayers I dropped into the slot. At some point, I just couldn’t reconcile the randomness of it all, or the way that god became, for so many, a weapon for manipulation, power, abuse, and shame. That’s when prayer stopped making sense.
Still staring at the lake, I realize that the ripples have disappeared and the water is nearly flat. I’m puzzled for a moment, and then I realize that it was ME who created the ripples – not a boat, bird, or fish. When I stepped onto the dock, the ripples started, and they only stopped once I was still enough that the dock no longer moved.
Suddenly it occurs to me that this may be prayer – bringing my worries to the lake and then sitting so still that the lake responds to my stillness. Sitting so still that even the ripples in my mind are settling. Maybe this is the point – not to send my wishes to a benevolent being I hope will reshape the world in my favour, but to be in acceptance of the world as it is – in tune with the lake, in stillness, and in deep presence.
I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem…
Praying It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
Much later, after sitting by the fire for hours and reading by the light of my headlamp, I turn off my light to walk to the outhouse. The full moon offers enough light that I can safely navigate the path despite the roots. It helps that I am becoming familiar with this path, on my second day here, getting to know these woods around my tiny cabin. I look up to the moon, and for a moment, I stand in reverence of her beautiful glow. Perhaps this, too, is prayer.
I came here, to the lake, feeling discouraged and a little burnt out from putting so much free content into the world. This is the time of year I have to be the most active on social media because we are marketing our Fall programs, both online and in-person. I always find myself getting knocked off my equilibrium in times like these. I start seeing social media as a monster with insatiable hunger and I am one of many who are chained to the beast and must never stop feeding it lest it turn toward us to make a meal out of our bodies. The beast keeps changing its algorithms, which means that we, its feeders, need to keep finding new and novel ways to satiate its hunger. If we don’t, we can’t pay our bills and capitalism eats us alive. (Yes, I can be a little dramatic sometimes.)
I came to the lake because the lake and the woods nourish me. They help me remember who I am. They ground me and help me return to more embodied presence. Here, I can disentangle myself from the beast and remember that no beast will ever determine who I am.
But the complicated truth is that I also came here to write. I’m at the lake not just for self-care, but to pump out more of that free content that I keep sending out into the world – content that, while generous and emerging from an open heart, is at least partly for the purpose of encouraging people to sign up for our programs. And so, even though I am disconnected here, and I am reminded of who I am, there is still a thread that ties me to the beast and, especially at this time of year when my business partner and I need to make enough money to sustain us for the year ahead, I can’t be fully free of it.
This morning, I went down to the dock to watch the thick fog begin to lift off the water. The world felt mystical and I was happy to be part of it. I’d already written one post upon waking, and I was feeling good about the work I came here to do, but I was still feeling some of that niggling dread that comes from being tied to the beast. I longed to be free, to write what I want, without the beast smacking its lips as it looks over my shoulder.
At the dock, I chatted with a woman and the two children who were with her. I told her I envied her dry folding lawn chair – I hadn’t thought to bring one from home and all of the wooden outdoor furniture at the rented cabin was wet from the overnight rain. I asked her about the children and discovered they weren’t hers – she was watching them for the friend she’d come with who was back at their cabin. I told her that I’d come here for a few days to write and she worried that the noise of the children might be a distraction for me. I said, no, I miss the happy sounds of children and it doesn’t bother me.
As I walked away from the dock, the mother of the children arrived, carrying her morning coffee. We chatted briefly and then I went back to my cabin. I covered one of the wet chairs with a garbage bag and set up my laptop on the small outdoor table with a view of the lake.
Twenty minutes later, a voice called out from the path beside my cabin. “Sorry to disturb you…” the voice said, as the mother of the children appeared around the corner, “but my friend said you hadn’t brought a lawn chair and that you’re having to sit on wet chairs. We have an extra chair so I brought you one.” She placed it on the small deck, and I thanked her.
“I have an odd question,” she said. “My friend told me you’re a writer and I’m wondering… are you by any chance Heather Plett?”
“I am!” I said. It’s not often that I get recognized, so it still delights and surprises me when it happens.
“Oh!” she said. “I’m on your mailing list and I’ve responded to your writing a few times because it means SO MUCH to me! Sometimes I feel lost and you say just the things I need to hear and I don’t feel so alone anymore. I’ve read your book too. I am SO grateful for what you write!”
“That means a lot to me,” I said, meaning it more than she could have imagined. “You’ve given me renewed energy for the writing I came here to do.”
“I’m learning to hold space for myself, just as you write about. This morning, for example, I had to take a break from my children so that I could take care of myself.” I told her how glad I was to hear that she was doing that. “We moms need to resource ourselves,” I said.
We talked for a few more minutes about the challenges of motherhood and then she turned to go. “I don’t want to take too much of your time,” she said, graciously.
To that woman, who gifted me far more than a lawn chair, I want to say THANK YOU! You were far from a disturbance this morning, you were a messenger. You reminded me of the real reason I do this work. You reminded me that my words have value and purpose and they are not simply fodder for the beast. You gave me hope in a moment of discouragement.
I will keep writing for you, dear woman, and for all of the other people who need a lamp to be lit so that they can find their paths. I will keep writing because other people lit lamps for me too. I will do my best to make peace with the hungry beast so that my words can land where they need to, and I will remember that even hungry beasts have soft, vulnerable hearts that need to be tended.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”― Rainer Maria Rilke
****
P.S. If a writer, artist, musician or content creator of any kind is creating something that inspires you, makes you laugh, challenges you, or makes you feel less alone, tell them! They might need to hear it.
If you want to dive into more of what I’ve created, consider joining us for the How to Hold Space Foundation Program. It starts the week of October 23rd.
****
Some of you have asked me to add a tip jar to my post, so that you can offer financial support when something I write moves you. Here’s a link for that purpose.
I can’t fix it. I want SO BADLY to fix it. My daughter is in distress, she’s far away, and all I can do is be here, listening, at the other end of a FaceTime call. I feel so helpless. My words feel empty and void of purpose. My emotions swell into desperation as my nervous system sends my brain scrambling to find at least one small thing that is fixable by me, her mom. There is nothing.
This is the hard stuff of parenting young adult children from a distance. I feel so frequently helpless when their lives overwhelm them. I can’t show up with food, I can’t rush over to their apartments to hug them or do their laundry… I can’t even send them a plane ticket back home because “home” is no longer a physical place. (And yes… the niggling guilt over selling their childhood home sometimes pokes at me when the desperation swells.)
Even as I write this, the tears well up in my eyes. I feel the enormity of it all over again. This parenting stuff – even when the children are grown and living lives of their own – it’s not for the faint of heart. It wrecks us again and again, tears us apart and leaves us raw, battered and lost. Nothing has ever made me feel more helpless and vulnerable than parenting. Nothing else has triggered my fears of irrelevance, incompetence, or failure in quite the same way.
In an interview I listened to yesterday, Kerry Washington was talking about two of her acting roles and how those roles related to parenthood. The first role she talked about was in Scandal, a series in which she played a “fixer” who was almost always the most powerful person in the room, fixing things on behalf of a government, believing she was doing so for the greater good. During the eight years of taping Scandal, Washington gave birth to her own two children, and she wrestled with whether her character, Olivia Pope, should become a mom in the show. It was a deliberate choice on the part of Shonda Rhimes, though, not to let the character become a parent, because that would have made Olivia too vulnerable and no longer as capable of the kind of power, control and ruthlessness she needed to be a fixer.
Immediately after Scandal, Washington appeared on Broadway in American Son in which she played the mother of a Black son who’s gone missing and may have been killed by the police. This was the counterpoint to Olivia Pope, a role in which she could explore the vulnerability and powerlessness that comes along with parenthood. Unlike Olivia, the mother in American Son has no power to fix (especially as the mother of a Black son).
It’s true – there is a way in which parenthood disempowers the “fixer” in us. It takes away some of our potency and leaves us vulnerable and exposed. It’s an unraveling, a deconstructing – it unmoors us from what once felt like control.
Some of us resist that deconstruction at every level. Helicopter parents, for example, or those who’ve sometimes been referred to as “Tiger moms” – they cling desperately to their ability to control every situation on behalf of their children. They push away the powerlessness and swoop in to rescue, control, and strong-arm whatever situation threatens their child. Back when I used to spend summer evenings in a lawn chair beside many soccer fields, I witnessed this resistance on a regular basis – parents who reacted to feelings of powerlessness by inserting themselves into every situation. Some always knew better than the coach, some insisted on having input into every decision that would impact the team (and specifically their child), and some were overprotective about the potential for injury to their child.
I understand the temptation to over-control. I have sat helpless on the sidelines and witnessed more than one injury to one or the other of my children – once a concussion that required an ambulance be brought onto the field, once a broken arm, and once a torn ligament that required knee surgery.
It’s a vulnerable thing to allow your child to enter a situation where you have no control over what happens to them. It starts when we watch their first lurching steps across the living room, and it gets increasingly more complex as they get older and take more and more risks. From the first day of school to their first sleepover to their first job – it’s a gradual (and sometimes painful) process of letting go.
Now, while my daughters each navigate big cities and diverging lives far away from me, I have to let go even more. The thread that ties us to each other has stretched and I have less and less capacity to be the “fixer” in their lives. Sometimes I feel completely lost, not sure what my role is anymore.
For years now, I have been teaching people that holding space is the practice of walking alongside someone and supporting them, without trying to control them, while they pass through liminal space into an unknown future. At its heart, it’s about letting go of our attachment to the outcome.
But what about when the person we’re trying to hold space for is our child and we’ve been the primary person committed to raising them into responsible, compassionate adulthood? How do we let go of the outcome THEN?! In some ways, it feels like the outcome is the WHOLE POINT of parenting – we want to attach the label of “success” to their version of adulthood.
Therein lies the rub. It is ALWAYS the hardest to hold space for the people we are closest to, and the complexity of it increases for the people we’ve birthed and/or raised. We can’t help but be attached to the outcome when we love someone, especially when we’ve been highly invested in training and guiding that person into adulthood. We want the outcome to be a better, happier, healthier, more fulfilling life. We want them to know ease and love and contentment.
There is love in this attachment and in our wish for them, of course, but there is a shadow side too. Especially when it comes to our children, our egos are invested in the outcome. We don’t want our children to fail because we ourselves are afraid to fail and their failure can feel like a personal failure on our part. We don’t want our children to experience discomfort because we ourselves are afraid of discomfort and we get triggered by theirs. We don’t want our children to be unhappy, afraid, lonely or depressed because we’re uncomfortable with our own emotions, and (because our children feel like extensions of us) their emotions make us feel too exposed.
It is hard to disentangle ourselves from our children’s identity and emotional experience. It’s hard to watch them be educated in the school of hard knocks.
Some of us, because we haven’t done enough of our own healing and personal growth work, become enmeshed and codependent, shaping our lives around our children’s lives and taking too much responsibility for their emotional well-being. I understand this tendency – in my most vulnerable moments, when I want to swoop in as the fixer on my daughters’ behalf, I feel nearly helpless to the energetic pull toward codependency. There’s a pattern of it in my life. It flared up especially during the two times my former husband attempted suicide. In the years since, I’ve had to work hard to avoid slipping back into the pattern whenever another out-of-control situation presents itself.
It sounds selfish to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway… the best thing we can do for our children when they are struggling is to take care of ourselves. I don’t mean that we take care of ourselves AT THE EXPENSE of them, centering our own needs and feelings and dismissing theirs. No, I mean that we hold space for ourselves, for whatever ways that we get triggered and feel powerless and desperate, so that we are grounded enough to provide for them the “safe haven and secure base” that they need.
It’s become a well-worn cliché to say “put on your own oxygen mask first”, but it’s worth repeating nonetheless. We can’t support our children from an empty tank. We can’t hold space for them well if we’re not holding space for ourselves. We can’t support their breakdowns well if we are too enmeshed and their breakdowns trigger our own. We can’t help them hold their big emotions if we are afraid of those big emotions and stifle them in ourselves.
Since selling my house (and my daughters’ childhood home) last year, I’ve come to the realization that, especially now that there is no physical place to return to, my children’s version of home is ME. My presence serves as an anchor for them while they learn to navigate the world on their own.
I want to be a solid and secure place in which they can sink their anchor. I want to be emotionally available and reliable so that they don’t have to second guess my capacity to hold space for them. I want to do my own work, continuing to heal my own woundedness and resourcing myself well, so that, whenever they need it, I am a safe place to land. I want to be on the other end of FaceTime, not solving their problems for them, but listening and supporting and loving and empowering. And I want them to know they can call.
Our children don’t need enmeshed or codependent parents. They don’t need fixers who will disempower them when they swoop in with solutions. They don’t need us to become overly attached to their identity, their emotional experience, or the outcome of their decisions.
They need a safe place where they can fall apart occasionally. They need to know that they won’t be abandoned (or fixed) when they fail. They need to be allowed to have big emotions without having those emotions shamed, ridiculed, fixed, or projected back at them. They need to be allowed the autonomy to discover their own resilience and their own tools for navigating hard places. They need us to hold space for them – with a love that’s not enmeshed.
But first… we have to learn to hold space for ourselves.
****
Want to learn more about holding space for others and for yourself? Join us for theHow to Hold Space Foundation Program. It starts the week of October 23.
