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Listen to my real, human voice reading the post…
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“Do you have hope for humanity?” That’s the essence of a question I was asked a few weeks ago, while I was teaching a leadership workshop. I’d just spoken about the need to move away from authoritative/hierarchical leadership toward kinship/heterarchical models, and that was at the heart of the question, but it was bigger than that.
“If I’m honest with you,” I said, “I’ve been feeling more despair than hope lately. A lot of evidence suggests that we are moving toward collapse, following the wrong leaders into our self-destruction. It’s become harder to find evidence of the kind of leadership I believe the world needs.”
“And yet...” I paused. “I refuse to stay in the despair. I can get lost in it, as I’ve done in recent months, but I always let myself be pulled back toward hope. I wouldn’t be teaching this course, inviting a different future, if I didn’t believe that there are reasons for hope. If nothing else, I place my hope in the small circles of humanity that I gather in, like this one.”
Weeks after that conversation, I keep returning to the question and the more I consider it, the deeper it takes me.
Another question emerges – one that lives at the core of what it means to be human. “How do I hold both despair and hope without allowing either to distort my vision?”
When despair pulls me in like a riptide, a part of me simply wants to turn and run toward more stable ground, to cling instead to the delusion of “happily ever after” and “good things happen to good people”. And yet... I know that despair is my teacher, just as grief is my teacher, and so I dip my toe in the water, trying to hold the tension between the polarities.
When despair visits, it shows me not only what is broken or missing, but what I most care about and what is worth committing my life to. It deepens my understanding of what it means to be human in an imperfect world and reveals the medicine that is mine to bring.
To be truly human is to know despair while clinging to the life preserver that is hope. Stubbornly, I pull my head up again and again to fill my lungs with air.
Sometimes the delusions try to keep me in shallow waters where I can breathe with less effort. But to deny despair is to flatten the richness of the human experience and withdraw from the world’s pain, choosing to filter out injustice, cruelty, greed, and inhumanity; choosing to see only what validates my delusions and makes life feel easier.
A full life requires that I have the courage to swim. To paraphrase Rumi, “Out beyond the waves of despair and hope, there is an ocean. I’ll meet you there.”
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A related but different question came to me during a recent session of our Holding Space Certification Program. “What is your truest desire?”
A familiar resistance moved through me as I considered it. Trained by religion to associate desire with sin and by life to associate it with disappointment, I rarely let myself wade into desire’s waters.
I tried my best to meet the question, though, to entertain the truest, deepest desire I could find. Briefly, I turned toward it, and the words filled my journal page. Soon, the warning bells rang, though, and I took a step back toward shore. “Am I asking for too much?” I wrote, feeling the riptide’s tug. “Should I simply find satisfaction in what I already have?”
On the one hand, desire is an insistent teacher, pointing me toward a bigger, more beautiful life. It shows me what matters most, what drives me, what excites me. Desire has guided me on many quests, including the one that brought me to this beautiful island where I am surrounded by deep waters that call me every day.
And yet... if it is not balanced with contentment, desire becomes a siren call that threatens to dash me against the jagged rocks. A desire-driven life is restless and greedy, and I reach constantly for the next thing that might fill my empty spaces.
Contentment throws out a lifeline when I flounder there, tugging me away from the siren call toward the quieter shores, reminding me that life is good even with empty spaces.
When the tension between desire and contentment holds, I find there is something for me in both waters. To paraphrase Rumi, once again, “Out beyond the waves of desire and contentment, there is an ocean. I’ll meet you there.”
****
Despair and hope. Desire and contentment. Grief and joy. Anger and serenity. Peace and frustration. Every emotion holds the tension of a counterpoint, and every pair offers guidance for a life richly lived.
Questions continue to surface, weeks after I entertained my despair and desire in those two circles. How do I strengthen my capacity to hold the tension? How do I avoid getting dashed on the rocks? And how do I ground myself and keep my head above water so that the strongest emotions neither consume me nor invalidate each other?
One can only swim in deep waters for a while before tiring, and so I search for a boat that can carry me out to the depths – a boat that offers support, but also a place to dive from and return to when I’m ready to don my scuba gear for the deepest dives.
The boat looks a lot like the three-layered bowl that I developed to explain The Art of Holding Space. It is built out of the support that I get from my people – those who know how to hold space when I am buffeted by the waves. The two circles in which I explored my despair and desire are two such boats – containers that we built with great intention and care in our work at the Centre for Holding Space.
The outer layer of the bowl/boat consists of two things – Mystery and Community. It’s the strength and support that I get from my people, my Spiritual Guides, the natural world, and all that is beyond my human understanding. Mystery and Community keep my boat stable enough that I can explore the deepest of waters, the most complex of emotions.
And when I need to rest without worrying that I will be dashed against the rocks, I cast anchor, sending a tether beneath the water to hold fast to the solid earth below. I am held by the earth in the most literal sense, as I walk among the tall trees and paddle the nearby lake, but also by my values, my relationships, my spiritual practices, and my love.
Every day, I work to strengthen the boats and ensure the tethers are reliable.
I invite you, dear reader, to join me in the deep waters where we find our shared humanity.
Upcoming offerings:
Whale Song starts next week! It’s a creative gathering space for maturing women. We’ll meet once a week to work on our creative projects and talk about what it means to be a maturing woman in a world that often erases us.
The next session of our community-led webinar program, Voices of Holding Space, is next week. Come learn from Lienke Pet and Pasha Elstak.
I’ll be in Europe in September! Find out about my public offerings in Belgium and stay tuned for an additional offering in the Netherlands.
Our next module for our Grounded Guide program starts in August and you can sign up any time.
Our How to Hold Space - Foundation Program starts again in October.
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