Standing in Your Light: Holding

Introduction

Holding is a universal principle active at all levels of existence. The Sacred holds the universe in its love, creating the conditions—the space of beingness and potential—that allow the cosmos to exist, flourish, and develop. Gaia, the World Soul, forms the boundaries and holds the space that allows planetary life to evolve. The Soul creates and holds a space that allows a physical incarnation to exist and hopefully develop and flourish as well. The important realization for us is that Holding is something we can do. It’s not just for Gods or Souls or Planetary Beings. We can hold ourselves and the world around us in our love, deliberately creating a space for blessing and unfoldment.

The Exercise

Close your eyes and enter into your inner theater of the heart and mind. Go into that quiet and safe inner space where you can touch that part of yourself that feels free and capable of connecting with the whole of life, the whole of creation, that part of you that feels capable of expanding beyond the boundaries of your personality life, your incarnate self, even beyond the boundaries of your humanness. Not dissolving those boundaries, not taking them away; honoring and respecting them, but knowing the capability to expand beyond them – like going outside your house and meeting all your neighbors, however different they may be from you, and yet knowing your house is still there, secure, waiting for you to come back.

In this exercise, we create a lap and we do so by sitting down. The physical act of sitting creates the lap. When we stand, the lap disappears, at least as a physical expression. But when we sit, the lap is there and it becomes a space of holding. That space of holding is also there in our hearts. It is a space of comfort and healing, of encouragement and upliftment, a space of love. In this heart-space of holding, in our heart-lap, we can take in the negativity we may experience in the world and simply let it sit and be healed. Let it be held and healed. Our heart-lap is very powerful in the love that it can hold and what that love can do.

Your mind is also a lap. Your mind is a cup that holds your thoughts. It holds your imagination, it holds your dreams, your aspirations, it holds your understanding and it holds your confusions and your questions. It holds your certainty and it holds your thoughts of doubt. It holds your thoughts of boredom with the familiar and the everyday and the ordinary. And it holds your thoughts of wonder and amazement at what the world can offer even in the guise of the ordinary, the everyday, and the familiar. Your mind is lap that can hold all these things and let them dissolve into silence. Your mind can hold your thoughts and it can hold no-thought. For the mind-lap, both are important – the silence and the crowd of thoughts, the no-thought and the many thoughts. Both have their place, both are held in the mind-lap.

The cup is oldest of magical images. It is the grail that holds the sacred, the cauldron of magic and wisdom, the cooking pot that transforms life into nourishment. It is the womb from which life emerges. Your lap is this space of magical cosmic space in which all things are held in order that they may be and become. When you sit and form a lap, you come into resonance with this primal container and its spaciousness, the womb of the beloved, of the sacred from which all creation emerges.

Whether you are sitting or standing, walking, running, or being still, you are always a lap of God. Your incarnation is always a vessel that holds your sacred self, your sovereignty, your unique part of the cosmic whole. Your incarnation, my incarnation, the incarnation of all beings and of all things hold the sacred.

Now I would like you to open your eyes and look around at the room where you are and see the things that are around you. Feel your lap, your energy of holding expanding out to embrace all these things. I look around and I see my computer monitor in front of me, I see my desk lamp, I see my tea cup, my glass of water, I see the walls behind me, the kitchen, the piano, a bookshelf. I see all these different things, many more things than I can give voice to or describe. I can draw all of these things into my lap. I can recognize that I hold all of them in the lap of my love, and this is what you do as well. You hold all the things around you in the lap of your love and your presence and together we hold each other’s sovereignty, each other’s sacredness.

Just feel that in yourself, feel the sense of I am the cup that holds the world that I see and how I hold it, the thoughts I have, the feelings I have, all that goes into that cup is very important. Do I hold my world with acceptance and respect and honor, with love? Or do I hold it with irritation and boredom, with a sense that I’ve seen all this, it’s so familiar, it’s just ordinary. Do I hold it recognizing some things are alive and worthy of my attention and others are not? Some things are sacred and others are not? How do I hold my world? How is it held in my incarnate lap, my heart-lap, my mind-lap, my magical lap, my soul’s lap, my sacred lap? Who am I as a holder, as one who holds?

Now let’s reverse this. Again look around and realize that everything you see is holding you. Look at your body, look at your hands. Look at your body and realize that there are trillions of cells, trillions of lives, of little bits of sentiency and consciousness that are holding you and holding me and making our incarnate lives possible. Look at the environment – I see the sun shining through the window. I see trees outside and the trees are producing oxygen that I can breathe and the sun is bringing energy that empowers everything, that enables life to be. I am held by the sun, I am held by the trees, I am held by the soil and the earth and by the air. I have my coffee cup – a gift from Lorian friends of mine and I have coffee and tea and I love it, it fits my mouth beautifully; it holds me, it holds pleasure for me. My water glass holds water, which is life for me.

We are held. We are both the holders and the held. This is a partnership, a reciprocity of roles that links us in oneness with our world and creates the environment in which we may act with sacredness. God holds us with love, with will, with interest, with playfulness, with humor, with joy. When we do that, when we hold our world with love, with joy, with interest, with attention, with playfulness, with honor, we are acting as sacred beings, we are doing sacredness.

Please close your eyes again. Think for a moment of all that you’ve been experiencing in this exercise, feel the thoughts that I am sharing and hear the emotions that I am sharing. Feel how you are holding these things.

But most of all, feel how you are holding yourself. At this time we are not standing in sovereignty, but we are holding in sovereignty. Let the power of this, the joy of this, the peace of this fill your being. You are held but you are also the holder and that power is the sacredness within you.

Now I invite you to come back fully into the holding space of your body and your mind, your feelings, the holding space of your incarnate self, to feel yourself fully grounded in the place where you are. We bring this exercise to a close, but we never bring to a close our power to hold and to be held. May the blessing of holding be with you throughout this day and all days.