IMPORTANT UPDATE
As of April 2024, my blog has moved over to Substack where I’m co-hosting A Tender Space (together with my business partner at Centre for Holding Space). You can find my new writing plus podcast episodes there, or sign up below to get them in your inbox.
Here’s some of my earlier writing…
Tips for helping the bereaved
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...
Holding liminal space
“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...
What I want to tell you about having work that goes viral
In recent weeks, I’ve had a few people whose work is growing and who want to be prepared for more growth ask me what advice I’d give them from my experience of having a blog post go viral. A year and a half ago, my blog post about holding space went viral....
Do my words improve on the silence?
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...
Waking up is hard to do
Waking up is hard to do. First, you wake up to your own oppression, to the ways you’ve been silenced, to the many little stories you carry about why your words are worth less than those who benefit most from the old story. You wake up to the truth that your view of...
What’s the opposite of holding space?
During an interview for a podcast recently, I was asked “what’s the opposite of holding space?” Though I’ve done many interviews on the subject of holding space since the original post went viral, that’s the first time I’ve been asked that question. As is typically...
Four kinds of fear (what the self-help books might be missing)
Fear. It shows up in nearly every coaching conversation I have. Sometimes it’s bold and in-your-face and can’t be denied, and sometimes it’s sneaky and disguised as anger or laziness and has to be coaxed out into the light. Fear fills a lot of pages in self-help...
My crooked family tree (and the gifts I’ve gotten from it)
I have been contemplating the above quote ever since I heard it on the radio yesterday. We are, all of us, products of the “crooked timber of humanity”. None of us has ever emerged perfectly straight. Before being shaped and carved by the woodworker’s tools - life’s...
My pause for radical self-care (and what happened as a result)
I am slowly, one breath at a time, finding my way back to equilibrium. Two weeks ago, I was suddenly aware of how wobbly I’d become - spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Like a toddler on new legs, I was stumbling around, bumping into things (and people), and...
The back of the spiral: Taking some time for radical self-care
I was walking home from the grocery store one day, about five years ago, when I saw the most unusual birds in the sky. They looked like mystical creatures straight out of Avatar and they were floating in large spirals across the sky. I didn’t realize they were...
Shawnigan Lake, B.C.
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