Draw closer to you
I invite you to bring your hands to your lap, lower your gaze or close your eyes. Take a full breath in through your nose and exhale out your mouth – follow with two more breaths just like that. Begin to notice your breath and experience effortless inhales and exhales through your nose. Witness the quality of your breath, the energy in your body, and the thoughts in your mind. No need to judge or analyze them, rather meet whatever is present with compassion and care. You may bring to mind one word that describes how you feel right now. Sit here as long as you like until you are ready to carry on with your day.
You just practiced holding space for yourself. The Gender and Sexuality Therapy Center define “holding space” as:
Being physically, mentally, and emotionally present for someone. It means putting your focus on someone to support them as they feel their feelings.
The first 200 hour yoga teacher training module I led was on holding space. I was asked to lead the module due to my work founding and leading Setu, a community for yoga teachers focused on bridging relationships across different identities. One of the main ways I brought Setu to life was by organizing events for NYC yoga teachers. The titles of the events included “See, Be Seen,” “Love, Be Loved,” and “Give, Receive.” Each one included a yoga practice led by a teacher in the community followed by self-reflection and community conversation which I facilitated. The intention was to provide space for teachers to be held in the energy of care, as they are often the ones holding others in that energy.
Heather Plett, author of “The Art of Holding Space” defines “holding space” as:
“The practice of showing up for another person and allowing them to have whatever experience they’re having without trying to direct them or fix them.”
Heather Platt contributed to the popularization of the term in 2014 with her viral blog post “How to Hold Space.” In the post, she names 8 lessons she learned about how to hold space. (1) Give people permission to trust their own intuition and wisdom. (2) Give people only as much information as they can handle. (3) Don’t take their power away. (4) Keep your own ego out of it. (5) Help them feel safe enough to fail. (6) Give guidance and help with humility and thoughtfulness. (7) Create a container for complex emotions, fear, trauma, etc. (8) Allow them to make different decisions and have different experiences than you would. Additionally, she learned that you can hold space for others and you can hold space for yourself.
Platt’s lessons remind me of the generous people who have held space for me and how it opened my world. They provided space for my experiences and feelings to be seen and held. They modeled holding space for community and for themselves, in ways that I strive to do today.
A vinyasa yoga teacher I enjoy practicing with, Marti Nikko, often says “draw closer to you.” I interpret her encouraging phrase to mean, draw closer to your experience, be present with your experience, listen deeply inside, and wrap yourself in love. In vinyasa yoga, you can do this by tuning into your breath, being intentional about how you move your body, being attentive to how you feel and backing off or challenging yourself when you need to. This kind of movement dialogue is a way of holding space for yourself and can be shared with others in the way Marti does by gently inviting her students to be present with themselves.
Sometimes vinyasa yoga offers me the chance to listen to myself deeply but in recent years yoga nidra and restorative yoga have supported me in holding space for myself and my students. In yoga there are the koshas, the 5 sheaths or bodies, which teach us that there are layers to our human existence. They include the physical body (annamayakosha), energy body (pranamayakosha), mind body (manamayakosha), wisdom body (vijnanamayakosha), and bliss body (anandamayakosha). When we move through our layers, we can bear witness to our experience as an observer and access our wisdom that is beyond our conditioning.
When I was leading the 200 hour yoga teacher training module on holding space, I asked the trainees how to define holding space and most people said, “it is when you are there for someone when they are going through a challenging time.” This is true and I think you can hold space for someone who might not know they are going through a challenging time and just wants to process or step outside of the roles and expectations of their daily life to consider things from a new perspective. We live in a world that conditions us to normalize the absurd, as Michelle Cassandra Johnson shares. When we normalize the absurd we often accept pain as a way of life instead of tending to it.
By choosing practices like restorative yoga and yoga nidra, you are giving yourself the chance to let some of those layers of conditioning peel away and you are opening yourself up to feeling what is underneath. You are reclaiming parts of you. You are inviting yourself to see who you uniquely are outside of any external messages that falsely tell you who you are. In this kind of practice you don’t always know what will come up, but you are holding your whole self in spacious care.
In 2020, I took Lama Rod Owens’ Love and Rage workshop. He is an incredible example of how to hold space for yourself and community. One thing he shared that continues to stick with me is that through practices like meditation we can increase our container to hold all parts of us. So when I try to push aside parts of me that I don’t like or that I don’t want to remember, instead I can consider creating more emotional space to hold those parts of me with care. This is a form of making space that will then hold more of you.
As I continue practicing yoga nidra, I often think of Tracee Stanley’s question, “What are you asleep to?” She asks this question after leading a yoga nidra practice at workshops and trainings, because the true answer is found deep within. It comes after we create the conditions to go deep inside, be with our experience, and remember who we truly are.
We don’t always know what we need to wake up to. We can’t always think our way there. Our bodies contain vast amounts of wisdom that these subtle practices provide us with access points to. And when we do encounter those challenging feelings, memories, or nightmares, our wisdom body knows how to provide the antidote, the medicine we need.
