The Complex Negotiation of Being Held

So many powerful women teachers, leaders, and facilitators I mentor speak of their great and understandable longing for a woman’s community in which they can be held with intelligence, strength and care. 

This is a complex negotiation, this ‘being held’. 

So often, women who end up in the role of teacher, leader, or facilitator within healing professions do so because they were born into family systems that were not safe, where there was a great need for guidance and maturity and a great lack of any well-enough adults to appropriately fill the role. We learned to be self-sufficient and we learned to be wise. 

Of course, it’s likely, we were born with a capacity in this realm. Perhaps it’s a capacity of strength, or practicality, or intuition, or all three. But no matter what else it might be, it’s also a great capacity to sublimate our own innocence, to forgo our own childhood, to become instead what the system needs in order for it to remain (at least marginally) functional. Many of us did a phenomenal job at this adult-ness, and as a result, we learned to derive our sense of value and worth from our capacity to skip over the perfectly healthy requirements of childhood in order to continually prop up the (chronological) adults in our midst.

Eventually, if we are to find our way into true wholeness – delivering our most precious gifts to The World – the leader/teacher/elder-before-her-time within us must have her own safe place to be held, where she can shed her well-used capacity to be everything everyone else needs in the moment, to be, instead, what SHE needs for herself. 

Here, she is invited to own her grief and her rage and often, most poignantly, her longing, innocence, and curiosity. This container must have enough integrity for her to acknowledge her own truth: that there are many parts of her, perhaps the most wise and soulful parts, that have gone unvalued and unexplored because where would she have done this exploration? With whom would she have done it?

In this safe-enough container she might begin to develop pathways of knowing herself, parts of herself that have likely felt like liabilities, the parts that ‘out’ her as a human who has needs like the rest, parts that reveal to the world that she does not, in fact, know everything. 

In this safe-enough container, she can ask questions she never dared ask and rest in other women’s knowing and guidance in a way she has never had the opportunity to do. 

From this place, she crafts herself into a truly unstoppable force of Nature; one who can unfurl her exquisite superpowers with her tap-root planted in a wellspring of nourishment where her human-ness is honored and fed.

Our world is in crisis. As leaders and teachers in the realm of human healing we know this all too well. But like all intelligent wild systems, our world has been busy birthing the very radical wild women with the capacity to create a new world cycle. We are those women. But only if we can find places where our chronic depletion and brittleness created from our learned invulnerability can be reversed

Join us for the next round of The Verdant Collective Immersion, a four-month container of impeccable integrity, ferocity, and intelligence, where even the strongest alpha mares may curl up in the arms of elders, if even for a brief moment, before they gallop back out to hold up the sky.