124: The Art of Holding Space

If you’ve been a parent for a while, or maybe even if you haven’t, you probably saw an article on Holding Space making the rounds of online communities a few years ago.  In the article the author, Heather Plett, describes how she and her siblings were able to hold space for their dying mother in her final days because a palliative care nurse held space for them.

The article outlined some principles of holding space, and I think it really resonated with a lot of people – possibly because so many of us wish we had been held in that way, and we find ourselves trying to hold space for others in that way without a lot of guidance or support.

I kept that article in the back of my mind, and last year I took Heather’s 9-month in-depth course on holding space, and she’s just released a book called The art of holding space: A practice of love, liberation, and leadership.  In this episode we discuss what it means to hold space for others as parents, and how to raise our children to be able to hold space for others.   Links mentioned in the episode The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation, and Leadership (Affiliate link). The Centre for Holding Space Website [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  00:59 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. If you've been a parent for a while, or maybe even if you haven't, you probably saw an article on holding space making the rounds of online communities a few years ago. In the article the author Heather Plett describes the death of her mother and how she and her siblings were able to hold space for her mother, because a palliative care nurse was holding space for them. The article outlines some principles of holding space. And I think it really resonated with a lot of people possibly because so many of us wish that we had been held in the way that in that way. And we find ourselves trying to hold space for others in that way without a lot of guidance and support.   Jen  01:38 And so, I kept that article in the back of my mind. And then last year, I took Heather's nine-month in depth course on holding space. And she's just released a book called The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation and Leadership that she's here with us to discuss today. Welcome, Heather.   Heather  01:52 Thank you, Jen. It's good to be here.   Jen  01:55 And we should mention we were just chatting beforehand. Heather was mentioning her voice is a little raspy today because she's in the middle of recording the book for the audio edition. So that should hopefully be available very soon. And I also just want to mention before we get started that we may mentioned today, some topics that might be difficult for some people to listen to. These could include the topics of suicide and stillbirth. And so, we're not going to delve deeply into them. But if you're in a place where you would find hearing about these topics, any more than I just mentioned them any disturbing to you in any way, you might want to consider listening at a time when you feel well resourced, or perhaps with a friend.   Jen  02:29 So that said, Heather, I wonder if you could start by getting us on the same page, and maybe just helping us to understand what does it mean to hold space for someone?     Heather  02:38 Well, holding space is really what we do when we show up for somebody without trying to control the outcome of whatever they're going through, without placing our judgement on them or projecting our own narrative on them. It's really trying to hold them in a way that is fully supportive of the journey that they're going on and giving them the autonomy to be going through their own journey.   Jen  03:01 Okay, and so you describe that as structure, kind of three nested bowls, right? Can you help us to picture those bowls and what that's made of?   Heather  03:10 Sure. So, I've been evolving this concept of being the bowl for people and being the bowl is really about supporting somebody through their liminal space, I talk a lot about liminal space as the journey they're going through. And they're in transformation, really, between some old story and a new story. And in the middle of that they need some kind of containment, some support, as they kind of deconstruct their old narrative, and get ready to evolve into the new narrative. And so, the bowl really evolved as the primary metaphor kind of for explaining that. And I've developed this three-layered bowl, initially, it was just one layer, but with time, and the more I taught it, I recognize them, some other qualities were needed. So, in the three layers, and the inside is what you're offering to the person, you're holding space, and there's a number of qualities there. And then what guides you your kind of internal guidance system of what's guiding how you hold space. And then what supports you is the outer layer of the bowl.   Jen  04:10 Okay, and what are some of the really key characteristics of maybe we'll start with the internal layer, and then move to the external layers as we continue the conversation. And so, what are some of those key characteristics of that inner layer?   Heather  04:22 Well, some of those things are compassion and connection is really offering you know, love and compassion to the other person. There's also selective guidance. And I use the qualifier selective in front of some of these quite intentionally because I want to really help people understand that it's, it's not giving them tons of guidance, but it's being using your discernment to pick only the little pieces of guidance that they need. You mentioned the palliative care nurse, for example. And she came with a little bit of guidance to help us understand the process of mum's dying really is what we were supporting. And she just gave us you know, one or two handouts kind of and a little bit of information, she didn't walk in with a whole textbook full of guidance on what to expect when a person's dying because that would have overwhelmed us.   Heather  05:10 And then there's also things like selective nonjudgement. And there's another one where I added the word selective in front of. Initially, I was talking about nonjudgement but then I realized there are times when we do need to use our judgement, we need some discernment. For example, if someone comes to us and tells us they've been breaking the law, well, we need a little bit of judgement to support them and making a wise decision to turn themselves into authorities or make reparations for whatever they've done. So, and that's where we come to kind of the middle layer of the bowl. The middle layer is where we're discernment lies, making those good decisions, and intuition using our intuition to sense what's needed in that moment.   Jen  05:52 Okay. And I was just thinking, as you're talking about the idea of offering some support, but not everything that you know about a subject. I think that's so critical in so many aspects of relationships, and even teaching that I've always remembered one of the most effective lectures I ever attended in my undergrad career was it, it was a guest lecture by someone who was talking about schistosomiasis disease, that's, I remember the basics of it. But it was, you know, passed on to people through a worm infection. And he kind of gave us just the amount that we needed to know. And then the Q&A at the end, it became clear that the depth of his knowledge on this topic was incredible. And he had so deliberately curated exactly what we needed to know and didn't attempt to tell us 'Well, everything I know' about schistosomiasis. And it seems as though that kind of resonates with your experience with the palliative care nurse, and she knew so much.   Heather  06:48 Absolutely   Jen  06:48 And she also knew what you needed.   Heather  06:49 Yeah, very much so. And this is where really, the practice, I talk a lot of in my book, and in my work about learning to hold space for yourself, because when we're in that position of holding space for another person, we have to hold ourselves back, sometimes we have to, you know, soothe ourselves so that we won't project our own stuff on to the other person. And you know, and that requires holding back some of our wisdom, because we may know really, really well we've been through the situation they're in, etc. But that's not what they need at that moment. Because if I dump all this knowledge on them, there's a good chance they'll feel a little bit of shame for not knowing as much as we do, they'll feel that you're superior to them or whatever, it's going to turn into a less helpful situation for that person. So like you say, just offering and even sometimes asking what they need, like telling them I do you know, I have some experience in this, would you like to hear from my experience, or just holding back and letting them have their emotional experience first and then saying, you know, once you're ready for it, let's talk a little bit more, I have a few things I'd love to share with you.   Heather  07:58 So, it's using that quality of discernment and caution around not coming in with a dump truck full of knowledge and dumping it on.   Jen  08:06 Right. And so, I want to get back to something that you mentioned very early on in that definition. And that's the concept of liminal space, which is really central to this. Can you just tease apart a little bit? What is liminal space? And what kinds of situations is that refer to?   Heather  08:23 Yeah, so liminal space, it comes from anthropology and in anthropology, there's a term "Limin" which means the space in between. And really what they, the way they started using this term, and defining it was when they were researching cultures, where they would have rituals around some transition points in a person's life. For example, if somebody was coming of age, a young person was emerging into adulthood, they were researching these rituals at these transition points. And notice the threshold ritual was really important part of the ritual was the space between the old story and the new story. So it wasn't just a crossing directly to the new story, that the ritual would include them going into the woods for a vision quest, for example, or going away for some silent time or there was something that marks that time, because there really is this space of emptiness in between what once was and what will be. And the metaphor that I've really adopted for this is the process of the caterpillar turning into the butterfly, because in between, it doesn't go directly from caterpillar to butterfly, it has to go through this chrysalis stage, which is a really, it deconstructs into this messy, this gel apparently inside the chrysalis. And that's kind of reminiscent of what we do when we are transitioning and that it's very vast what this can imply to. It could be when your children are moving away from home or it could be when you're giving birth or changing a job or getting a divorce or there's so many different liminal spaces. I think right now we're kind of globally in this liminal space that the pandemic has kind of thrust on us. We're in between, you know, what we used to know as reality and what we don't yet know and understand.     Jen  10:13 Yeah. And just the breadth of the kinds of circumstances you just described. I mean, this is something that's prevalent throughout our lives. And I was really surprised to see that you quoted in the book and surprised and interested, I guess, that you quoted Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr, and he described liminal space, I'm going to read his quote, "When you've left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It's when you are finally out of the way. It's when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. It is no fun." And it's that last part, it is no fun. I was so struck by that because change is the one constant thing in our lives. It's the only thing that we can be sure of. And yet we get so hung up on this search for stability in the search for holding things comfortable and stable. And it's just impossible to do. And I'm wondering, why haven't we developed better skills for dealing with liminal spaces? And I guess implicit in that is the question, why do so many of us learn about this concept through your viral blog posts? And not because this is something that is just handed down to us as a part of our culture?   Heather  11:23 That's a really good question. And I wish I knew a succinct answer for it. I think there's a lot of layers, I think that there's this human nature to just want things cleaned up and not messy. And so, we look for the cleaned-up version of our lives we've created it's really cultural, though, too, especially in Western cultures, I find. I've travelled a fair bit in more developing countries where they were their messiness upfront. Like they don't hide it the way that we do. But we've developed this cultural value around perfectionism around you know, not showing our messes. We don't invite people into our homes when they're messy, we clean up our front yards, I was wrestling this weekend, for example, with my environmentalist daughter wants me to leave the leaves on the grass because it's more environmentally friendly. But I'm noticing my next two neighbors have both cleaned theirs, raked theirs clean...   Jen  12:17 Oh, cause the line.   Heather  12:19 Exactly, I'm wrestling with being the messy yard. And this is the cultural value that we have about being, you know, showing our best front. And I think there's many layers to that, I think some of it is our capitalist culture, we can always buy more comfort, we can always buy more ease, we can buy things to replace the broken things in our lives. And, you know, to some degree, capitalism in the marketing system around it has helped foster that in our culture, because we always need to buy more to replace things and to fill our void, etc. We're not supposed to have uncomfortable lives, we're supposed to buy the newest and most comfortable and, you know, etc. thing and so. So, there's so many layers of complexity. And when I think about even in our classrooms in our school, like, when our kids are in high school, we're pressuring them, what are they going to be when they grow up?   Jen  13:12 In high school? My daughter is getting questions and she's six.   Heather  13:16 They're supposed to have their lives planned out for them. Yeah, like, yeah, it's really kind of ridiculous that we're not talking to them at that stage, about the complexities of life and about how they're going to have to learn to be resilient and weather the storms, and it's not just going to be an easy path to some magical career and this, you know, happy family.   Jen  13:38 Yeah. And it just a couple of points to pull out further and what you said, I'm just thinking of funerals in other countries where, I mean, people are just exposing the rawness of their soul. And funerals here in western countries. I mean, it's very buttoned up and I might escape and maybe there would be a little bit of crying, but you got to keep it. You got to keep that locked down, right?   Heather  14:02 Yeah, no. And we, with my parents have passed, and we tried to do things a little bit counterculturally, actually. And you refer to the palliative care nurse who was there supporting us with mom dying. And one of the things she said, for example, is that you can keep your mom's body in the home as long as you want. You don't have to call the funeral home right away. And it's funny, but that was a surprise to us. Like we just had this assumption that you got to clean up the body right away. And we've built those kinds of, and so we didn't call right away. We kept her body there and let her like her sister and significant family members come and sit with her before we called the funeral home and also with my dad, when he passed, my brother really wanted to be the one to cover the coffin with the dirt shoveled the dirt onto the coffin. And for the rest of us, it felt, oh, that's not something the family should be doing. You know, there's this just this weird cultural, and yet we chose to do it and it turned out to be really, really meaningful practice as a family to do this. So, yeah, we have to mess with convention sometimes to be in the mess of the complexity of life.   Jen  15:10 Yeah. And what you said about your mom and you don't have to call a funeral home right away reminded me of when my daughter was born. And you know, the accepted way is okay, immediately after she's born, she gets whisked away and weighed and checks and all the rest of it. And it was the doula that we hired that said, you know what, you don't have to do that you can request some time before that is done. And so, we did that. And that was such a special memory to me of that period of time when I mean, that's an incredibly profound liminal space in many women's lives.   Heather  15:39 Yeah.   Jen  15:41 And then just, we've talked a little bit about death and I also want to make the point that liminal spaces can happen with changes that we might traditionally think to be positive as well like a new job that you've hoped for over a long period of time. And maybe it puts you in a different role related to people in a different way. And that changes how they see you and how you see them and what you're doing. And it seems as though that's a...