Holding, Support

Dear friends. 

Perhaps you are beginning to see that this practice of presence allows for a new relationship with our experience, especially our suffering. When we turn towards our experience, even our resistance, and we allow ourselves to get closer, more intimate with the felt sense and some alchemy starts to happen. Our turning towards is the movement of our consciousness, our presence. It is as though our presence wakes up and rather being lost in the experience, identified with the suffering, we become present with the experience, awake in the  experience. And this changes everything. We discover that we are more. We thought, we believed we were simply a suffering ego, a suffering me, cut off, frantic, lost, and yet when we wake up, even just a little we find that our living presence, our consciousness deeply affects our experience. We are still suffering but now we are more than the suffering. Somehow we are not so alone. We may notice if we can breathe and settle into being with ourselves that we are being held by presence.

This holding, this buoyant ground of being, allows us to relax and feel safe. We feel less cut off and hopeless. This ground is always there, but we get so lost that we don't know and don't recognize it when it arises. We actually take it for granted most of the time. We only know it by it's absence, when we are in dire straits. At first it may be a subtle. Like a simple feeling that all is well. A simple okayness. But if you pay attention you will notice that is a palpable presence: Supportive, buoyant, reassuring, safe. You may feel that you are sitting in, floating in a field of this beneficence. The more you become aware of this, the more your nervous system can relax. We loosen our grip, we find some trustfulness that indeed all is well. And as we settle a quiet hope may arise, understanding about the suffering may bubble up, and there is a sense of flow. What was frozen suffering, cut off, stuck, becomes a fluid unfolding and our suffering morhps, opens into clarity, understanding, healing. What I am pointing to is that our living presence holds us, holds our experience, and this holding makes all the difference.

As children many of us experienced real abandonment by our mothers, our care takers. We were not held, and I mean physically, well enough. The holding was cold or rejecting or we were even dropped, parked somewhere. So we didn't have the real support that our bodies, our souls needed. As infants we needed mother's holding to help regulate our nervous system, to feel safe, loved, welcomed. We needed to feel that the world was good, trustworthy. And we learned this by being held, by being responded to in an attuned way, over and over. Mother's physical holding invited this support of presence. It was there implicitly and explicitly.

This lack support so early on creates a sense of being abandoned, cut off, a deep fear and agitation. And we learn that there is no holding and so we choicelessly turn away from this precious ground of support. And we forget it, ignore it, discount it. Mother was not there, so presence was not there, god was not there. But presence is always here, it cannot be otherwise. We abandon this precious support that we so desperately need. We never can have the mother we needed, as much as we spend our livings looking  for the perfect holding, the perfect love, the perfect relationship. What we are seeking out there is right here now. Sensing yourself, remembering to come back to your experience now, kicking out the superego is the way back to this precious sense of presence as holding.

(exercises. Tell me a way you experience the lack of support; tell me a way ou experience being held. Explore what is like to be held. What happens to your sense of being held as you become more embodied.)

Happy springtime, Easter, Passover. Warmly, Alison