Holding.
I thought it meant one thing, and based on this understanding, I saw my actions and who I was at this phase in a particular light. I thought holding meant having the pieces together, grasping what was going on and having a grip on things.
At the same time, something within me didn’t totally believe that having a grasp was a sign that I was in sync with life.
Sometimes, there are rapids, or you’ll find yourself in a strong current, and there’s simply no way to grasp the edges of the situation. You may even find yourself off of the map, with little to no point of reference for the situation you’re in. In these moments, how do you hold what is going on?
Understanding happens in layers. Have you ever read a sentence or watched a film a few times and noticed that you picked up something slightly different each time? A word or experience may have one meaning, and then, as you explore it and relate to what it actually means, you may discover it has another, deeper significance. I may think I am tired and attribute this to lack of sleep, but at a deeper level, my tiredness invites me to lay a layer of my identity and an outdated set of beliefs about rest.
Ralph Stacey, a scholar of human dynamics and complexity, spoke about how our understanding of a concept has origins that inform the meaning we ascribe to something. He points out that as our thinking evolves, our understanding will evolve as well. In other words, we may understand something like the plague one way and then hundreds of years later have an entirely different explanation for what is happening.
How do you hold something that is forever changing, shifting, and evolving?
Life has felt this way lately. It’s like I am trying to grasp onto something that is expanding, contracting, and sometimes even changing form. When it changes form, there’s no way for me to feel the edges or know if I am holding onto anything at all. Instead, I am left reaching, sensing into the space around me, trying to find my way forward through a felt sense. It’s like walking with my eyes closed; I move slowly and carefully and wonder where exactly I am all the while.
If change is the only constant, why do I feel I need to have a hold on things to trust that I know what I am doing and will be able to find my way through the situation I am in?
When I sense what it means to hold, I immediately feel how I need something to complete this gesture. Holding can be related to an object, an immediate task in your environment, or a situation unfolding around you. In essence, holding is relational.
At some level, it’s about feeling connected to whatever I am engaged in and in a conversation with it. By conversation, I mean a form of exchange where there’s a give and take; each side can sense and respond to the other. The connection is reciprocal.
One of my favourite academics psychologist, John Shotter, speaks about the difference in how we engage with concepts and forms when we approach them as static as opposed to dynamic. Thanks to Descartes, however, there can still be a dominant tendency to try and grasp the world through a series of static or dead concepts; ideas removed from their original context and abstracted from the flow of reality in which they arise.
Dead forms can be understood in terms of objective explanations and theories that represent the sequence of events supposed to have caused it. It’s easier to grasp static or dead forms, because their meaning is fixed. Shotter points out that this differs from the responsive understanding that becomes available when we engage with living forms. When we engage with living forms from our own aliveness spontaneous and emergent responses arises, which would never be possible if we continued to approach something as static. In other words, a third dimension of meaning arises out of the exchange.
Even with a concept like holding, there is a way to approach the gesture as living rather than a static word with a fixed meaning. Then an interplay of movements can unfold, as a kind of conversation of gestures in which ‘living movements intertwin[e] with each other, new possibilities [and] new ‘shapes’ of experience can emerge’1.
In a time when I can’t quite grasp the experiences unfolding within and around me, it’s helpful to hold the possibility that I am in a conversation with my life and that through this exchange, a new shape of experience may be born.
What I’m Listening To
In just an hour, Nora Bateson, and podcast host Douglas Ruskoff speak about the ghosts of previous generations that are influencing our thinking today. The importance of breaking out of the epistemological grids we may be stuck in and reaching to a different level that allows us to reach to a new level or sense making. The necessity of getting lost to arrive at a deeper level of understanding.
Nora also advocates for ‘letting the weird in’ proposing that ideas that are weird have the ability to open up possibilities in systems that have become overly rigid. Listening to this podcast I had the experience of being a fly on the wall and witnessing two friends having an engaged and animated chat.
What I’m Reading
Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being, by Philip Shepherd
A colleague recommended this book to me, it came up in a conversation about worldviews, ways of being and the tendency some humans have to see themselves as separate from the world and to an extent, each other. This book describes how many of our most potent experiences arise from a state of wholeness and outlines practices to ease into the reality of wholeness that is accessible to us through our bodies.
Works in the Centre
PST: December 14th, 2:00-4:00 pm
AEDT: December 15th, 9:00-11:00 am
Works in the Centre is an opportunity to engage in learning through reflection, observation, and practice. Over the course of 2 hours we’ll have an inner work, connect with each other, then I’ll work with someone, and we’ll debrief the work together to explore the structure of what unfolded and other possible directions the work could take. After that there will be an opportunity to practise together in breakout rooms. Space is limited to 8 participants. Learn more and register here.
Shotter, J. (2006) Understanding Process From Within: An Argument for ‘Withness’- Thinking. Organization Studies [online]. 27 (4), pp. 585-604. [Accessed 23 November 2023].