“You need to pause to let joy in.” Those words popped into my head one day last week while I was sitting on the couch, weary after a long day of book-launch-related tasks, which followed several long days of gathering the things I need to make a home and unpacking them into the cupboards and closets of my new place.
Pause to let joy in? I was puzzled at first, and then suddenly I understood what my internal wise guide (which I call Tenderness) was trying to say to me. I hadn’t been pausing much in recent weeks, staying busy nearly all day every day. Moving across the country, launching a book, trying to keep a business afloat, re-launching a course – ALL. OF. THE. THINGS. Even when I had some moments when there was nothing that needed to be done, I was rarely truly pausing – at least not in a mindful way. I was mostly just filling those moments with mindless stuff, like endless episodes of Real Housewives (don’t judge me).
Did my lack of mindful pauses mean that I wasn’t letting joy in? Yes, when the voice of Tenderness poked through the din, I recognized that it did. Some of the busy-work, plus the hours of reality TV binging, was about numbing myself and holding my emotions at bay.
What’s challenging about pausing to let joy in is that when you open the door to your emotions, you don’t get to pick and choose which emotions come through the open door – you have to let them ALL in. That’s why my subconscious mind had kept me from opening the door. I knew that, even though there was joy that would likely come my way (because I’ve landed in a beautiful place on Vancouver Island that I’m delighted to call home, and because I’ve completed the hard work of getting another book into the world), there were other emotions lurking just behind joy that would sneak in through the open door.
I knew there would likely be some grief over what I’ve left behind in Winnipeg, and maybe some sadness over this period of travel ending, and a little loneliness because I’m now living in a town where nobody knows me and my children are far away, and some of the rawness, self-doubt, and vulnerability that’s been connected with the birth of this new book, and some ongoing stress from some recent business road bumps.
Without being fully conscious of my choices, I was staying busy because I wanted to hold the door closed to ALL of those emotions. But to numb one emotion is to numb them all, and so I was denying myself joy.
When I heard the voice of Tenderness inviting me to let joy in, I grabbed my journal, lit a candle, and sat down to reflect on all that was bringing me joy. In my line of sight was the beautiful backyard, lined with towering cedar trees, that I now get to enjoy every day. Just down the hill, out of sight but not out of consciousness, is the lake that was part of the draw to settle here for this period of my life, where I hope to kayak in the summer. Within an easy drive is the ocean I love to walk along and look forward to plunging myself into. On the table, not far from where I sat, was a copy of the book that has finally come into the world after two and a half years of labour.
For those moments, I sat and savoured the exquisite joy that comes from having crafted a life that so beautifully suits me. It’s a joy that comes because of all the things that I wrote about in the book (and teach about in the course) – about finding a pathway through trauma, about learning to love (and love with) my own body and live in it more fully, and about learning to call myself back from exile when I realized how much I’d abandoned myself in order to meet other people’s needs and expectations. It’s not an easy joy – it’s a deep and rich joy that holds steady even in the face of grief, tragedy, disappointment, and fear. It’s a joy that needs to be regularly nourished and tenderly held.
Of course, just as I suspected, when I opened that door and sat down to savour the joy, those emotions that had been lurking in the shadows soon snuck through. Since that moment on the couch, I’ve had to feel them all, in waves that sometimes threaten to drown me. There’s been grief, loneliness, fear, disappointment, anxiety, self-doubt, defensiveness, and even some anger. Some of those emotions come like tidal waves, and some sneak in like tiny ripples, but all of them insist on being witnessed.
I can’t say that any of this is easy or even fun, and I can’t say that I always meet those emotions mindfully. Sometimes I still turn on Real Housewives to try to reclaim the numbness. But I am trying to be faithful to it all, to let myself (and all of my parts) have the fullness of the experience so that I can be fully human and fully alive. I meet these emotions with as much grace and acceptance as I can muster, and then when they have had the attention they need, I let them simply move out through the open door.
Sometimes, when an emotion is particularly reluctant to make an appearance, and I sense that it might be lurking behind another emotion, I do what I can to coax it into the light. Grief, for example, sometimes hides behind agitation and frustration. When I sense that it’s there, in the shadows, I invite grief into the room by tapping into that which allows it to surface. Sometimes I do that with sad music or a sad movie. Lately I’ve found that Anderson Cooper’s podcast, All There Is (about how he’s finally processing the years-old grief from losing his mom, brother, and dad), is a beautiful and profound way of allowing my own grief to come to the surface.
Why do I do this? Why do I so intentionally invite these challenging emotions to surface, even when they threaten to overwhelm me? It’s because I know that there is less chance of them ACTUALLY overwhelming me if I meet them mindfully and with an open heart. I know that each emotion will flow through me and pass more quickly if I don’t fight it or get too attached to it.
It’s also because I have learned to trust the bedrock of grounded joy in my life. I have learned to trust that when the emotional waves have passed, I will still have joy as my faithful companion and foundation. I will still be standing on the shore when the mist has lifted or the storm has passed and the sun comes out and shines on my face.
As it turns out, when I open the door to the other emotions, it actually serves to deepen my joy. When I meet even the hardest emotions with mindful presence, they pass through and clear the clutter out of the space when they leave. When I listen to Anderson Cooper’s podcast, for example, and have a good cry if necessary, I almost always end up feeling more joyful than I did before. Grief opens a portal that reconnects me to, and prepares me to meet, joy.
In the words of Mary Oliver, in her poem Don’t Hesitate, “Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
Today, as I sit here writing this, the emotional waves are subsiding and I am standing, once again, in the presence of joy.
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 the case for me, the right question can crack open months worth of thought, and this one did just that.
As I contemplated, I searched for a term or word that might describe the opposite of holding space, but I didn’t find one that fully satisfied me. Finally, I came up with this:
The opposite of holding space is hijacking space.
When you hijack a vehicle (a plane, train, ship, etc.), you illegally seize it for your own purposes and force it to a different destination.
While holding space involves supporting without judging, fixing, or controlling the outcome, hijacking space involves manipulating, disempowering, and imposing various forms of judgment and control.
When we hold space, we liberate. We give someone the freedom to be who they are, to make sovereign choices, and to control their own outcome. When we hold space, we leave the person feeling supported and empowered.
When we hijack space, we violate. We take away a person’s freedom, limit their ability to make choices, and take control of the outcome. When we hijack space, we leave the person disenfranchised and weakened.
While holding space offers people an open bowl for their journey through liminal space, hijacking space puts a lid on that bowl.
Some forms of hijacking space are obvious and intentional (such as violence, abuse, overpowering, or bullying), but other forms are much more subtle and inadvertent. Many of these more subtle forms of hijacking space include the kinds of behaviour of which we are all guilty—and usually more frequently than we care to admit.
Here are some of the ways that we hijack space:
expecting them to experience or interpret situations the same way we do
acting as the “tone police” when their emotions are stronger than we’re comfortable with (ie. insisting that they calm down before we’ll talk to them)
gaslighting them and making them believe that they are going crazy and/or are no longer in control of their own emotions
one-upping their story with a better one of our own (and thereby dismissing the value of theirs)
implying that our emotional response to something is more important than theirs
dismissing the value of their work and/or taking credit for it ourselves
not allowing them to trust their intuition and insisting they do things our way
interrupting them
acting dismissively when they share a personal story
not hearing them when they ask us to change our behaviour toward them
ignoring and/or dismissing their emotional state
fixing their problems for them and taking away their power to fix them themselves
taking over their emotions and feeling those emotions deeper than they do
apologizing too much so that they become responsible for making us feel better
expecting them to feed our egos
passive-aggressively trying to manipulate their behaviour
shaming them for feeling too much, speaking too much, eating too much, etc.
over-explaining things (with an assumption that they can’t understand otherwise)
expecting them to educate us about how we should be in relationships with them instead of doing the hard work ourselves
worrying about them in a way that implies we don’t trust them enough to look after themselves
Hijacking space, at its worst, is a tool of oppression. Those who uphold the patriarchy or white supremacy, for example, are usually masterful at hijacking, whether or not they know they’re doing it. We have all seen it happen – the person in power dismissing, fixing, shaming, interrupting in ways that keeps the other person disempowered and fearful. Even in race relations work, where people are conscious and intentional about being in conversation and reconciliation, I have seen people’s ideas being dismissed, emotions being shamed, and/or problems being fixed. (I have even, admittedly, caught myself doing it.) It can feel surprisingly threatening to see an oppressed person claim agency over their own bodies, emotions, etc., and, in response, those who are used to holding the power fall back on the tools of hijacking space that have been passed down through the generations.
But we can’t simply dismiss it as something “they” do.Each of us finds ways of hijacking space. We do it to our children, to our friends, to our spouses, to our employees, and even to our parents. We even do it to ourselves when we police our own emotions in order to make other people feel better (ie. the inner patriarch that Sidra Stone talks about in The Shadow King: The Invisible Force that Holds Women Back).
Just this week, my teenage daughter came home from film camp complaining about a girl in her group who annoyed her, and I was tempted to jump in and assure her that it wasn’t really as bad as she said it was and that she needed to be kind to people no matter what, etc. If I’d done that, I would have immediately disempowered and shamed her. Instead I tried to listen without judgement and speak with compassionate guidance. The next day, she figured out how to deal with this person on her own without me needing to intervene.
We also do it in situations where we’re trying to increase our power in a relationship. Consider a time, for example, when you felt intimidated by someone, and, consequently you interrupted them, dismissed their emotions and/or tried to control the outcome of the conversation. Though it might have felt good, in the moment, to be doing it to someone with seemingly more power than you, it doesn’t serve either of you well in the end. Change doesn’t happen when space is hijacked.
In the talk I gave at a conference a few months ago, I talked about holding space as “being the bowl” for someone else. After a Lego house falls apart, I explained in my analogy, a bowl serves to contain all of the broken pieces before they can become what they’re meant to transform into after that. The bowl doesn’t intervene – it just holds, protects, and creates safe space for the brokenness and emergence.
As hijackers, instead of serving as the bowl that holds, we become the mold that shapes. Instead of creating safe space for the emergence, we break the house and we force it into the shape of our choosing. We manipulate, direct, and judge.
Consider, in your own life, how often you have made choices that weren’t authentic to you, simply because you didn’t want to stir someone’s anger or because that person was shaming you for your choices? Sometimes it’s the subtlest of behaviours that have the most power.
It takes a lot of emotional maturity to be the bowl instead of the mold. We have to do our own work to dismantle our inner patriarch and to look deeply into our shadow. We have to address our shame and our fear, and we have to practice releasing control and sharing power. We have to find the spiritual practices that allow us to detach from other people’s emotions and their outcomes and to allow them their autonomy. We have to practice trust in ourselves and in each other.
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