Listen to Krista read this post:
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When Heather first started using the term Holding Space to describe what happens when someone creates safe, brave, intentional space for others and ourselves as we move through all of the liminal spaces of our lives, it wasn’t a particularly well-known phrase. Her deftness at describing the particular traits of this ability struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of people, causing her post, “What it means to “hold space” for people, plus eight tips on how to do it well” to go viral.
It didn’t take long for Heather to realize that there was a deep desire in folks to learn how to do this better in their own lives. Liminal space - that space between what was and what is still emerging - happens to us all the time, and Heather began to develop a course aimed at helping folks understand this reality, develop better self-awareness and compassion, and have tools to bring intention, awareness, and groundedness about how they hold themselves and others in liminal spaces.
When we started the Centre for Holding Space six years ago, we dreamed about the term growing in popularity across the zeitgeist. We had seen how much impact her course, the Holding Space Foundation Program, had on folks from all over the world and were excited for everyone else to catch on how to important these concepts were, especially as the western world was finally starting to grapple with important issues like race, colonialism, and the patriarchy.
The COVID pandemic launched everyone into an even more obvious liminal space. All our old ways of being - from working, to schooling, to religion, to the environment, to our day to day relationships - were turned on their heads and we were all forced to grapple with the question, “What now?” The concepts we were teaching about holding space seemed more relevant than ever.
But instead of our business taking off and growing like crazy, it felt like we fell into a giant, unexpected pothole in the road. Rather than thriving, bringing groundedness and better ways of being in community together, we got left behind as the era of the rage-baiting, quick-fix, bio-hacking, optimizing, anti-everything-but-whatever-I’m-being-paid-to-promote, divisive, hyper-political, perfectionism-demanding(-but-as-I-define-perfectionism)-cancel-culture, algorithm policing, billionaires blithely committing corruption out in the open, AI everything vomited itself into existence through and after the pandemic.
The last six years have been a bit of a wild, involuntary, global case study of what happens when our cognitive dissonance encounters facts that upend our beliefs. Heather and I talk frequently about the book “Mistakes were Made, but Not by Me” by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. In it, they describe that one of two things occurs when our beliefs bump up against new evidence that might challenge them. We either choose to lean into the challenge and adjust or discard our old belief, or we double down on our old belief and erect echo chambers around ourselves so as not to be confronted with that challenging evidence any longer.
It occurs to me that, in the west anyway, what COVID lockdowns exposed was how terrible the system of capitalism actually was - not just for the most oppressed, but for all of us. When many of us suddenly were not able to work, we realized how hand-to-mouth we were actually living. When governments stepped up to offer relief through interest-free loans, or a $2000/month subsidy if you were out of work (in Canada, at any rate), we realized that things like a Universal Basic Income and financial relief could actually be available to the average person and not just to big companies receiving bailouts when they came upon hard economic times. When banks offered deferments of mortgage payments and people could use that money to save, or pay off other debts, we realized that perhaps the banks’ profits were not as precarious as they had led us to believe. We all saw, in real time, how the air cleared up with fewer planes flying through it. We noticed the reduction in noise pollution. We started to grasp how important caring professions really were. And we saw how effective mutual aid could be, and how fast and inexpensively we could actually employ it.
The system was exposed for what it really was: exploitative of our time, our labour, our energy, our care, our children, our disabled and disadvantaged friends and neighbours, the very planet we live on. And we had been letting it lie to us for a long, long time.
Since then, since the restrictions lifted and we were able to “get back to normal”, despite many of us hoping that this exposure of the harmfulness of capitalism would wake people up and unite them to come up with a better way of being together, the opposite seems to have happened. The confronting evidence did not lead to an adjustment or abandonment of our old belief that capitalism is the best economic solution for a healthy, functioning society. Rather, it led to the doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on that old belief, to the point where we have allowed fascists to take over our governments, billionaires to create monopolies on a whim, and mega-corporations to rape and pillage the finite resources of our land, water, and air with extinction-level glee that ought to be horrifying instead of normal.
In the face of all of that, the concept of “holding space” may not feel like enough for those of us who have come to adjust or abandon our belief in capitalism since COVID. It was good, perhaps, when we were just dealing with inter-personal things like racism or sexism. It was appropriate, perhaps, when we were just dealing with small conflicts in our families. It was so good for attending to and coping with the deaths of our loved ones due to sickness or age. How can it possibly help now?
And then there’s the cringe factor. The term has had its viral moments since Heather’s post back in 2015. But not always in a good way. People lob it at each other as a substitute for “thoughts and prayers”. Or they suggest that a song really held space for them during a particular moment in time when they really just mean that the lyrics connect with their own personal experience. Blithely telling someone that you’ll “hold space” for them in the comment of a social media post does not a space holder make. That’s more akin to bypassing their experience in order to avoid discomfort but still giving the impression that you’re a “good” person. Assuring someone that you can “hold space” for their story or experience only to steamroll them with advice they didn’t ask for or your own experience is something we call “hijacking space”.
So yes, “holding space” can be cringe in those contexts.
And I’m going to be a bit mean here, but it’s because you’re doing it wrong.
Holding space is still, and will continue to be relevant because it is a skill-building endeavour that can help build and maintain communities, organizations, coalitions, governance structures, and activist initiatives. Just like the “loneliness epidemic” is due to a lack of skills in how to make and maintain friendships. Just like “social anxiety” is due, in part, to an atrophying of social skills. Just like “partisan politics” is due to a lack of skill in healthy conflict and civil discourse.
We live in a world where we can learn just about everything with the stroke of a few keys, but learning and skill building are two very different ventures. Our ease of access to information has made us impatient, non-resilient, easily distracted, and quick to angry frustration when we can’t master a thing in the first five seconds of learning it.
The evidence of this is everywhere. Talk to any teacher and they will tell you that one of their biggest frustrations with students is their lack of stick-with-it-ness. When they bump up against a frustration, their inclination is to immediately give up rather than push through to the solution. When teachers do push them to keep going, rather than rising to the challenge, some of them are becoming angry and violent, creating unsafe work and learning environments for everyone. This is not a problem with “the kids these days”. Kid culture is a reflection of adult culture, but in a fun-house mirror. This same thing is happening with adults in different contexts. They abandon their creativity to allow AI to write a book for them. They go to the hospital for their pain and then lash out at the care staff who aren’t fixing them fast enough. They leave their job or their family or their church or other community because they can’t tolerate the discomfort of being wrong, or not understanding, or working through disagreement.
Holding space is about slowing down, being present, being aware, and not abandoning the processes, the discomfort, or the messiness of being in relationship with other people. It takes practice, it takes intention, it takes self-awareness and it takes compassion, but it is both teachable and learnable.
Whether those who refuse to believe capitalism is bad want it to or not, the system of capitalism is drawing to its end. It has always been an oroborus (a snake eating its own tail), and it is very close to devouring its own head now. Like a cancer, it will eventually kill its host if we don’t take measures to remove it. Now, more than ever, we are going to need people who know how to hold space both for whatever comes next and all of the things we will need in the meantime. We are going to need coalition builders - people who can bring people together despite their varying values and pet causes. We are going to need mutual aid mobilizers - people who are willing to “cross the floor” to extend help and support to everyone, not just those who share all their opinions about everything. We are going to need people who can start to generate alternate options for governance beyond the party systems we currently operate under. That will require navigating discomfort, disagreement, and conflict.
And we will still need people who can have conversations about racism, sexism, colonialism, and oppression. We will still need people who can help their families navigate conflict and change. And we will always need people who can be with death and dying in healthy ways.
Holding Space is a skill that can help anyone interested in systems change, but it can also help you if you’re just trying to figure out how to be with yourself when your whole life is changing for one reason or another.
We will never try to tell you that we have all the solutions or that our offerings will give you the immediate cure for your community or relationships. This is slow work. It is good work. It is the work that is needed to help us all be with the changes life, the universe, and everything throw at us.
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