I cut off someone in traffic recently. It was completely my fault. I wasn’t paying enough attention and drifted into the other lane when mine was suddenly blocked off for construction. The moment I realized what I’d done, though, shame-brain quickly tried to find...
I swore I’d never write a parenting blog. Parenting feels like a lifelong experiment where the variables, subjects, and researchers keep changing so that there’s never any way to prove your hypotheses. Just when you’ve figured out that “Action A applied to Subject B...
“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...
During an interview for a podcast, not long after my post on how to hold space went viral, I was asked “what’s the opposite of holding space?” That was the first time I'd been asked that question. As is typically the case for me, the right question can crack open...
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...
In May of 2017, I stood in front of a large group of therapists, school counsellors, and youth workers in Broward County, Florida, teaching a full day workshop on how to hold space for grief and trauma. The next day, I taught many of the same people in two smaller...
Sometimes the hardest thing about holding space is it can feel and look a lot like doing nothing. When we’re holding space well, we’re keeping our ego out of it, not controlling the outcome, not giving unsolicited advice, and not taking people’s power away. That can...
“…whenever I dehumanize another, I necessarily dehumanize all that is human—including myself.” – from the book Anatomy of Peace This week, I’ve been thinking about how we hold space when there is an imbalance in power or privilege. This has been a long-time inquiry...
Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch. – Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak When I shared my post about what it means to hold space for people and it went...
When my mom was dying, my siblings and I gathered to be with her in her final days. None of us knew anything about supporting someone in her transition out of this life into the next, but we were pretty sure we wanted to keep her at home, so we did. While we supported...
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