Holding space for someone else to share their burdens, concerns, hopes, stories, and trauma is a beautiful gift. Yet when we internalize what they share – in our bodies, our minds, our hearts, or our spirits – we can become off kilter, restless, and depleted. In this episode we will bring to memory a situation where we listened to another’s story and then we will release any piece of it that we may have internalized. So that we can hold space for others and maintain our own stability, instead of disintegrating into chaos.
Listen:
How surely gravity’s law
Strong as an ocean current,
Takes hold of even the smallest thing
And pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing –
Each stone, blossom, child-
Is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
Push out beyond what we each belong to
From some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
To earth’s intelligence
We could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
In knots of our own making
And struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again
To learn from the things,
Because they are in God’s heart;
They have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
To fall,
Patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
Before he can fly.
-Ranier Maria Rilke, The Book of Pilgrimage
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