listen to me read the post... I remember that moment clearly. I was sitting in the rocking chair in the tiny living room of the first home I owned with my ex-husband, I was five months pregnant with my first daughter, and I was in complete and utter despair. I...
We are delighted to share this guest post by our Master Practitioner Candidate, Emily Gillies. Emily completed Heather's Holding Space Practitioner Program (now called the Foundation Program) in 2018. She went on to serve as Assistant Teacher for the next two sessions...
Listen to Heather read the post... A couple of weeks ago, I shared a video on social media of the moment I first glimpsed a printed copy of my book. It was a fun little moment – one I’ve waited many years for – and I wanted to share it with my friends and...
Listen to me read this post... Here we are, five years after my blog post on how to hold space went viral, and we’ve just launched the global Centre for Holding Space. It’s exciting and gratifying and also a little nerve-wracking. I couldn’t have imagined this even as...
Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a retreat with a circle of beautiful women in one of the most beautiful locations I’ve ever worked. The retreat centre was so beautiful and luxurious, in fact, that it wouldn’t have surprised me to see Oprah emerge from a room...
Our vacation didn’t start well. We’d barely arrived at our AirBnB apartment when my daughter and I got into an argument. Only one of us could have a bedroom to herself for the week we were there. My daughter had done the research on where to stay in Chicago and had...
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...
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...
