by Matt Licata
Although as an infant we depended upon another to provide a holding environment for us, from a spiritual perspective we might imagine it as wired into the human person innately or organically, not as something acquired throughout our lives. In this sense, it is not dependent upon the empathic, skillful attunement of caregivers and key attachment figures, which many (most) of us were not fortunate enough to encounter, at least on a consistent basis. From this more contemplative view, our inner experience is made of primordial space—open, luminous, and inseparable from awareness itself. Every feeling, memory, image, emotion, sensation, and thought is crafted of strands of awareness. In other words, a holding environment is not built around us or created by way of relationship and external circumstances but is already present as an essential, unmanufactured aspect of our very own nature. The essential qualities of contact and space that cause a little nervous system to grow, unfold, and differentiate are the same substances that keep the stars from falling out of the sky and the life force moving in and out of our lungs, providing the foundation for healing, emotional maturity, and grounded spiritual discovery. This already-existing holding environment, seeded with the right alchemical mixture of attuned contact and primordial space, can take some practice to discover and even more practice and experience to get used to. Some of the meditatively oriented wisdom traditions (e.g., Mahamudra and Dzogchen in Tibetan Buddhism) offer teachings and practices to “point out” this essential nature and to help us to familiarize ourselves with it in our immediate experience. Even if we’ve touched into this reality by way of a temporary or “peak” experience, it can take some time to get used to because it can turn our ordinary, fixated perception upside down (and inside out).
We must each navigate these waters for ourselves and find the right balance and mixture of these two substances to achieve the ideal results. Too much contact and not enough space results in our being smothered and shut down, and our natural creativity and curiosity are dampened and eroded. Too much space and not enough contact, however, does not provide the rich relational field in which we feel seen, heard, and felt in a way that supports the (safe enough) exploration of new territory. If we reflect on our experience as children in our families of origin or as parents (to human or animal children), or even on our close, personal relationships, we might get a sense of how this balance between contact and space plays out in our lives. In this way, “contact” and “space” are alchemical substances, knitted together in the precise way that (ideally, of course) provides the optimal amount of provocative experience for us to develop and grow, challenging outmoded ways of organizing our perception, while not pushing us too far and too fast so that we become overwhelmed and experience unworkable levels of anxiety, fragmentation, and trauma.
Before we dive further into the experience of holding and being held, and the vast implications these ideas have for our larger theme of befriending difficult experience so we can heal, it might be helpful to explore why we don’t just naturally “feel held” in the first place. In our early development, most of us did not have an adequate holding environment that offered an ideal or good-enough amount of contact and space or the empathic attunement required for us to trust in our experience as it is—a deep, inner knowing we are in fact worthy of holding. This (unfortunate) reality brings us into the area of neuroplasticity and the rewiring of the brain. Related to neuroplasticity is what attachment researchers refer to as “earned security,” a dynamic process in which, over time, we can transform the effects of an early environment of insecure attachment (i.e., where contact or space was missing or not properly alchemically “mixed”) to that of security. Only through befriending ourselves at the deepest levels will we be able to catalyze the transformative effects of neuroplasticity and bring about the earned security that will allow us to participate fully in our lives in a flexible, open, spontaneous, and creative way.
New Pathways of Experience
We hear a lot these days—in the realms where spirituality, contemplative practice, and empirical science intersect (something not possible even fifty years ago)—about the phenomenon neuroscientists refer to as neuroplasticity, the innate capacity of the brain to rewire itself, for new experiential pathways to be embedded in the nervous system. Despite their discoveries of neuroplasticity at a theoretical level, it is important not to assume that it will automatically occur, outside of any effort from us. It takes practice to re-encode circuitry once organized by shame and dissociation, replacing habitual patterning of self-aggression and self-abandonment with empathy, attunement, and compassion. Yes, the brain is open and flexible and ready to embody new organization, but from a more poetic point of view, we must work together with the nervous system, befriend it as an ally and kindred traveler, and meet its receptivity with our own energy, intention, and experimentation.
The reality is that for many of us, this ideal neural foundation was not available as our brains and nervous systems were developing. For whatever reason, there was not an adequate holding environment to reflect back the authenticity and validity of our early emotional experience. As a result, we were not able to feel felt. We sensed the missing empathy at a deep and penetrating level and placed the blame for this lack of connection inside ourselves.4 Because it was too unsafe to locate the failure outside us in the limitations of our caregivers, we took it on as clear evidence of our own core unlovability. As painful as this was, it was less disruptive than having to admit the truth that our parents were not (consistently) who we needed them to be—safe, interested, caring, and capable of truly seeing, validating, and honoring the integrity and uniqueness of our developing sense of self. This internalization of empathic failure—where we took the blame for the lack of connection, affection, and mirroring in our early attachment relationships—formed the foundation for the later (and often crushing) experience of low self-esteem so many of us deal with, a fundamental sense of unworthiness and feeling that there is something wrong with us at the most basic level.
Intellectual understanding, although vital, is not enough to catalyze neuroplasticity and to replace the perceptual grooves deepened over many years and decades. In addition to increased insight and awareness, it takes action in the moment, new here-and-now behavioral responses to the eruption of dysregulating thoughts and feelings, over time, for the nervous system to reorganize and for us to be able to reauthor a new, more nuanced, more complex, real-time, integrated narrative about who we are. We can’t just think our way into the realities of neuroplasticity, lasting change, and transformation but must bring together cognitive, emotional, and behavioral ways of working to mine the reorganizing potential of the brain.
When in a moment of activation, or being triggered—for example, when someone doesn’t respond in the way we’d like, criticizes or ignores us, or doesn’t see us the way we long to be seen—instead of engaging in self-destructive behavior; automatically characterizing their response as clear evidence of our unworthiness; and falling down the rabbit hole of shame, blame, and self-attack, we are invited to slow down. When we can recognize what we are caught up in, we naturally cut the momentum of self-abandonment as we realize some old pain has been activated, and we have a choice to make. We can follow the thoughts and feelings down the familiar groove of denial, dissociation, or acting out, or we can choose a new way, bringing curiosity, presence, and compassion to the charged thoughts and body-based feelings. When we engage these latter pathways, it is then possible for us to perceive the activation not as an enemy coming from the outside to harm us but as an emissary of new life, ally of meaning and depth, and ambassador of neuroplasticity.
Of course, all this is much easier said than done, especially in a moment of activation and emotional overwhelm, but the point is that it is possible, slowly, over time—when we train ourselves in mindful self-reflection—to choose a new direction and to replace the habitual pathways of self-abandonment, shame, and self-aggression with the slower circuitry of empathy, attunement, and self-compassion.
>
Despite how hopeless it can feel in a particularly difficult moment, the good news is that you can begin right now, no matter what is going on in your life or how lost you believe you are. In fact, the only moment you can engage this work is right now. From this perspective, there is no work at a later time, no future moment when you can encode new circuitry and make a different choice. Instead of urgently scrambling for relief, falling into the ancient pathways of denial on the one hand, or seeking to immediately discharge the intensity on the other, you can practice becoming curious about the unique ways you become activated in relationship. You can train yourself to enter into communion with the burning, charged, claustrophobic, alive world of feeling. And in tending to and metabolization of that which seemed unmanageable at an earlier time, you can take advantage of the realities of neuroplasticity and change the course of your life. Not all at once, over a powerful weekend, or by way of five simple steps, but slowly, moment by moment, in ways embodied and unique for you, into eternity. This work can take place only in the alchemical vas of your own immediate experience.
When you feel overwhelmed, caught in an avalanche of hot and sticky emotion, spiraling in repetitive thoughts and feeling the urge toward unhealthy or addictive behavior, slow way down. Ground yourself in your body and in the earth. Hold yourself. Allow yourself to be held by something greater—God, spirit, Source, an animal friend, a wise inner helper, an ally, a mountain, an ocean, or a star. Remember that you have what it takes to start right now, in this moment, to establish a new pathway, to chart a new course, and to allow the miraculous implications of neuroplasticity to wash through you. When you hold yourself and your experience in a new way, meeting it with curiosity, slowness, space, and warmth—even for only one second—you light up the pathways within you and invite the revolutionary potentials of the brain, nervous system, and heart to encode new circuitry.
Safety and Stepping into New Territory
As little ones, we were wired to conclude that “I feel bad” equaled “I am bad.”5 Neurobiologically, we were not capable of discerning between feeling and being, a developmental achievement that requires maturation over the course of a lifetime. We all know what it is like to identify with the passing presentation of thoughts, feelings, and emotions and then fuse with them, drown in them, or become flooded by them, losing contact altogether with who and what we are—the awareness that perceives them. This identification with open, spacious awareness is one of the great fruits of meditation. Although the original confusion was the perceptual reality of little ones in their families of origin, as adults we’re in possession of capacities not available to us in earlier times. As we cultivate these soul faculties through meditation, therapeutic and relational work and experience with others, and our own unique inquiry in which we step back and reflect upon our experience with curiosity, spaciousness, and compassion, we can discover whether this conclusion is in fact accurate—that “I feel bad” equals “I am bad”—or whether it is ripe for revisioning. The implications of this sort of reorganization are vast because they filter down from our brains and nervous system into the cells of our hearts and into and through the relational field, affecting not only the dance with the external beloved, in all of his or her forms, but with the forgotten internal beloved, those lost soul parts and pieces of ourselves who long to know us once again.
This dissociative activity—disowning aspects of our lived experience to protect ourselves from states of unbearable feeling—was not unenlightened or pathological but profoundly skillful given the capacities we had at the time. It represented the most effective way we knew to care for ourselves and prevent overwhelming anxiety from rippling through our nervous systems, sending us outside our “window of tolerance” and into sympathetic flight-or-flight arousal or shutting us down into flattened states of immobilization.6 The window of tolerance, the way I am using the term, refers to the unique balance of challenging experience that is provocative but not overwhelming, when we’re in conscious relationship with the raw materials required for transformation but not to a degree in which we become anxious, fragmented, or traumatized so that we shut down. As we come to see the ways our adaptive strategies have served to protect us, we can remove the shame from their appearance in our lives and instead use their manifestations as fuel for deeper inquiry. “Ah, it’s you again. Shame. Rage. Nausea. Tears. Looping thoughts that something is wrong with me. I know you. Please, come in for tea. I can’t promise I will like or accept you just yet, but I will offer you a place at the table, in front of the fire, where we can speak with one another and establish a new relationship.” This ability to distance ourselves from potentially crushing psychic states kept us from disintegrating into a fragmentation from which we might not have been able to recover. Although these deeply embedded responses might not be current expressions of the deepest wisdom within us, they served (and in some cases continue to serve) an incredibly important function and in this way might be viewed as early, partially developed forms of self-compassion. The point here is not to overly venerate the strategies but to remove the shame from them so that they can be seen and engaged more clearly in the here and now and updated to reflect current capacities and goals.
Although these decades-old ways of responding to agonizing emotional and somatic (i.e., body-based) experience was adaptive and played an essential role in self-protection, for many they are no longer serving a life of freedom, spontaneity, and aliveness. We long for something beyond mere protection and certainty, and although it is terrifying to step into a new world, for many it feels as if there is just no other choice. We know the consequences of standing on the sidelines and watching life go by, overprotecting ourselves, living at a distance from our openness and creativity, and not fully honoring what we know is most true. Although there might be some safety in this orientation, the result is that we do not feel alive; to a greater or lesser degree, we might feel frozen, flat, and bereft of meaning. And in this we come to the painful, yet empowering realization that we are not willing to trade authenticity and aliveness for security any longer. Although it might have been worth it—and even necessary—at an earlier time, it no longer is.
The realities of illuminating and transforming the dynamics involved in this trade-off—how it plays out in our relationships and the ways we have come to perceive ourselves, others, and the world—is a unique journey for each of us. Some are able to untangle the web in a way that feels natural and flowing, without a lot of upheaval and without the triggering of too much trauma from emotional wounding. I must confess that this outcome seems to represent the minority of people who engage this path, at least in my experience. For many—especially for those with early environments of attachment insecurity and some degree of developmental trauma (i.e., many of us)—it is important that we honor the realities of where we’ve come from to where we are. Though some will argue the possibility, we cannot simply make a choice one day to “get over it,” tear down the entirety of our defensive organization, and replace it with wise, compassionate attunement. We must go slowly and respect the timeline written in the soul (and nervous system), go at a pace that honors our current situation, and remember there is no urgency on the path of healing. Yes, we must push ourselves a bit, or we will not be able to break through the momentum of habitual consciousness accumulated over a lifetime (or generations), but not so much or so fast that we overwhelm or retraumatize ourselves, which only keeps the current neural pathways in place and even strengthens patterns of misattunement. Learning to surf the edges of our window of tolerance is a capacity worthwhile to cultivate, but we must also develop the wisdom to discern when we are going too quickly and merely reenacting earlier patterns of self-aggression. And in this recognition, with no shame and no blame, shift the way we work, rest, and then try again at another time.
Reactivity and the Ancient Pathways
In a moment of activation—when we are triggered and caught in the grip of a limiting belief, challenging emotion, disturbing b
ody-based sensation, or overwhelming urge to act in an unhealthy way—the ancient pathways of fight, flight, and freeze appear, providing doorways out of the intensity as quickly and efficiently as possible. Although these primary responses are usually viewed as relatively unconscious, instinctual states of reactivity, I find it empowering and imaginally activating to conceive of them as “pathways” that we can navigate with some (newly discovered) choice, as forks in the road, trails to pursue, and portals to explore, providing relevant data and experience. Although each has served an important adaptive function in protecting us from overwhelming anxiety, their automatic engagement might not be serving our deepest longing for a life of freedom and spontaneity. The goal is not to “get rid” of these responses, for that would not be possible or desirable, but to act in a more creative, more intelligent, and kinder way. It is unrealistic and even aggressive to believe we will overcome hundreds of thousands of years of evolution by learning some psychological or meditative techniques. But that’s okay, we need not eliminate these wired-in strategies but only flood them with curiosity, awareness, and compassion. As I continue to elaborate throughout the book, the goal is always more consciousness, forming the basis from which wiser and more skillful responses flow.
On one end of the spectrum we deny or repress unwanted experience in an attempt to locate it outside awareness, where we can be free of its intensity and perceived threat. Of course, there are times when this strategy is appropriate and effective, but when it comes to healing and transforming the deeper layers, when we are not in immediate danger or on the brink of some inner catastrophe, we want to illuminate what we’re doing and clarify our intentions. The acts of repression and denial correspond to the “flight” reaction, in which we flee or distance ourselves from our immediate here-and-now experience in the hope of avoiding the energetic disturbance often lurking just under the surface. In this family of strategies we find a lot of our addictive behavior, such as unhealthy drinking, eating, shopping, sexuality, drug use, and media bingeing. Although movement away from ourselves can be temporarily effective and certainly has its place, in the long run it is usually not the wisest, most skillful, or most compassionate choice. If we do not relate with our experience consciously and directly, it remains in the shadow, where it can be worked with only by way of its unconscious manifestations, which usually come in less-than-desirable ways. Manifestations such as emotional outbursts, saying things we later regret, addictions, existential flatness or meaninglessness, chronic anxiety and depression, and even aggression and violence can be the result of not tending to important feelings and emotions with care.
