The Subtle Art of Letting Ourselves Be Held
On the Tension Between Giving and Receiving, and the Grief Beneath It
This week, in our monthly ‘Heart of Being Human’ group, we explored a simple but disarming question: What would it mean to let ourselves be held?
For many of us, the honest answer is: terrifying. We long for support, but stiffen when it’s offered. We crave rest, only to sabotage it with laundry, emails, or a sudden urge to organise the spice rack.
In other words, letting ourselves be held - by another person, by the breath, by a moment of stillness, by sleep - should feel like coming home. So why does it often feel like walking the plank? Because it can bring up old wiring: mistrust, self-protection, or the quiet fear that softening will unravel us, or worse, that no one will catch us if we fall.
As we settled into this meditation, we discovered something beautiful and unexpected: beneath our contracted selves, there was a grief longing to be held.
In the sharing after the meditation, one person mentioned that they can only access their grief when sitting under a tree. Why does it sometimes feel safer to be held by a tree than by another human? Another noticed a subtle resistance in the meditation, a somatic tension fighting against the idea of ‘being held’. Just acknowledging that pattern felt good.
These weren’t dramatic breakthroughs, or cosmic epiphanies. Just small, honest sharings from the heart. The kind of things you say in a group when you feel safe enough to not have it all sussed out.
The Holding Environment
The idea of ‘being held’ is more than a lovely metaphor. It’s a psycho-biological (apologies for that long word) reality. Donald Winnicott called it the "holding environment", the way a caregiver’s attuned presence helps a child feel safe, to feel real, to trust that their needs won’t be too much, and that they’ll be okay.
And when that kind of holding is missing? The child may adapt by creating a false self, a mask that pleases, achieves, and bends to others’ needs. It keeps us safe, but at a cost. We find it hard to rest. We forget how to receive. We forget how to be seen.
Winnicott believed that good therapy wasn’t about clever interpretation, but rather about providing a space safe enough that someone can begin to “reveal themselves to themselves.” That’s what we tried to offer in our group last week, a space with just enough shared presence for parts of the self to emerge, without pressure or prodding.
Of course, our early experience of being held (or not) extends far beyond family to school, community, culture, to the very world we’re born into. As Francis Weller writes, there is a particular kind of grief that comes from being born into an atomised world where we do not feel a sense of belonging: “Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect.” It’s a grief without a name, a grief loitering in our chests. A longing for a place, a rhythm, a holding that many of us have never quite known, but in our ancestral bodies we know it is possible and we ache when it is absent.
This isn’t just a nice spiritual sentiment. It’s biology. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans survived by staying in tightly-knit groups, sleeping in shared warmth, tending fires in circles, passing children around hip-to-hip, back-to-back. To be held wasn’t metaphorical. It was survival. Our nervous systems still hum with that old code: belonging = safety.
So is it any wonder we tense up at the idea of letting ourselves be held. If we relax, if we surrender, who will be there to catch us?
The Roots of People-Pleasing.
This week, I found a video of a psychology experiment that really brought this home for me. If you’ve ever been called a people-pleaser, this one is for you.
In this 2 minute clip, we see a child sacrificing his joy to appease an angry adult. No one tells him to do this. It’s instinctive. Their nervous system is saying:
If this grown-up isn’t okay, I am not safe.
This child is learning to ‘hold’ himself so he can hold others. Not because he’s selfish, but because no one’s holding him. This is the origin story of so many of us who struggle to receive. This is the origin story of our ‘false self’, a way of holding ourselves in a particular shape to appease those around us.
From a neurobiological perspective, this is the child’s social engagement system kicking in. Their brain and body read the room for threat, and without conscious thought, redirect behaviour to maintain connection and safety. It’s not weakness. It’s survival.
And we can also see that this same impulse to prioritise harmony is also what makes us capable of love, reciprocity, and moral responsibility. It’s the root of "Do unto others..." and "Feel the room." The child in that video isn’t just afraid; they’re learning to care.
The trouble begins when this capacity for empathy becomes a cage. When we lose the ability to discern whether we are acting from kindness or self-abandonment. For those of us who learned early that love was conditional on our being good boys and girls, the line blurs.
We often praise this adaptation later in life, calling it ‘empathy’ or ‘emotional intelligence.’ I am finding this pattern in my work with wounded leaders. These are often leaders who learned to ‘eat last’, the partner who anticipates other people’s needs, the healer who daren’t ask: Who’s holding me while I hold everyone else?
Letting ourselves be held can feel so unfamiliar, even threatening. Because to be held means softening the persona. It means risking exposure. It means letting go of the job we’ve been doing since we were very small: managing the room.
But here is the really good news! It is ok to let yourself be held. Relearning trust isn’t about dramatic leaps. It’s about tiny experiments in softening. Here are some simple tips you might try to practice letting yourself be held:
In your next meditation, send a gentle invite inwardly: It’s okay to let myself be held. Or, I am letting myself be held. Notice what happens.
Place one hand on your heart, another on your belly. Feel the warmth. Let yourself be held with this loving touch.
Notice where your body holds tension. Place a hand there. Let that tension know: It’s okay to soften a little now.
Lie on the floor. See what it’s like to let yourself be held by the earth.
Sit with your back against a tree. Feel its steadiness, holding you.
Ask someone you trust to hold you, not necessarily with their arms, but with their presence. Maybe they listen. Maybe they sit beside you in silence.
Or find a podcast, a song, a voice that helps you feel held.
And for some of us, being held by something greater, by nature, by spirit, by the mystery, might be the deepest possible sense of holding of all.
Start small. Go gently. Be kind to the grief that may well be sitting under your armour.
And if you’re ready to practice this in a community where you can let go of the mask, we have a monthly meditation and community gathering for paid subscribers. If interested, you can sign up here. Below you will see a gorgeous poem that one of our members Triona shared in the last session.
Message from Triona who received this poem:
The poem is an outward reflection/passing along of a message from my Father - from his favourite story in one of his most precious books ‘The Little Fish’ in Anthony de Mello’s book ‘The Song of the Bird.’ In this story, a little fish swims to a big fish and says ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where so can find this thing they call the Ocean?!’ And the Big fish says : ‘you’re here! You’re swimming in it!’ And the little fish says disgruntingly - ‘this is not the ocean - this is just water!’ And he swims off disgruntled annoyed and restless! And the story goes on a little and then ends with the words ‘Stop searching Little Fish… All you have to do is look.’ 🤍💔🤍
‘Grá mo Chroí’ is an Irish/Gaelic/Celtic expression of deep embodied interrelated love 🤍
And the beginning two lines /stimulus came from me wondering how I could find Beauty again and watching all the people on their morning commute in their outward/dressing/ shield of presentation.
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And so we turn towards it
Slowly at first
Why is it so difficult
To see Beauty
That is not skin deep
So we keep turning
Ever so Gently
And we look
And we take it all in
And the boundaries start to sink a little
Into shades of memories of all the people
All the parts of this
That we have ever been
And the Beauty reappears
In the guitar strings of a hopeful song
In the understanding of the times when everything went wrong
In the gentle wings of a Blackbird who has ceased his wandering
In the gentle conversation
With a Robin who has kept your watch
When all else fell away
And then you see
That by Design
The Beauty it has never left you
It has met you in a thousand ways
It has been there
there within you
There beside you
There inside you
(While you thought that it had left you)
It has been you
All along
Little fish,
Grá mo Chroí,
All you had to do
Was look
Tooting Broadway, Southbound
Weds 11th September 16.23pm