The TV blares out the latest abduction, killing, accident.

     Your best friend's father was just diagnosed with terminal cancer and she comes to you in tears.

     You are grieving the loss of a lover, a partner, a friend. You are sad, You are mad. You are confused. You are overwhelmed.
    
     Your anxiety goes through the roof and you drink coffee, alcohol, take prescriptions. Your body is in pain.


      The messiness of living this life.

   If we can, we turn to a friend to listen, a sibling to soothe us, a spiritual practice or a therapist to 'hold our space'. It is in the jargon. If I can hold the space for you

                                                  Healing happens.

    I learn about life working with clients and students 'on the mat'. It is my laboratory for living and shows me new attitudes for being outside this healing space. For years I followed the injunction of holding the space for another without really being taught how to do this skillfully. Like meditation it is an art honed through practice.

      I held this intention no matter what my mind was screaming, no matter how shaky parts of me were.

         I would bite my tongue for silence lest I say the wrong thing; sweating to allow.

    Yes, those on the mat would benefit immensely from silence and my being but the true value of doing the work of ListeningTouch isn't in the results alone but the process entered.

    The intention is effective but if the process has me holding not only the space but my breath, my thoughts, my feelings in check than I am clustered into a righteous endeavor within a very narrow room as my body suffers believing on some level the value of personal sacrifice to another.

   What has unfolded over the years experimenting within my laboratory is something I am more at home with. An embrace taking less effort and a release of wonderful creative responses crafted for the rising moment.

   The blaring TV, the friend, our own problems make us believe we have to leave our centers and do something. We have to hold space as an action that is most compassionate and least intrusive. We hope this will stimulate the empowerment of the healing process.

          We cannot change public policies or diagnoses and what is out of our control worries us.

   Holding becomes an action taking place outside of ourselves, protecting us. Or does it?

           Over the years as fears have dissolved and anxiety over death reduced I have noticed on the contrary how space holds me.

    If I am busy
    holding space
    I am always inner negotiating how much I can handle. Can I trust my capacities especially when it comes down to the nastiest nasties?

    It is all punching at the air. Down in our inner cores we are mostly space. Even in our material selves we are mostly space...so I decided to get over my holy self who 'holds space'...all it takes is a shift of perspective.

   I posted this on the mirror in my therapy room blaring me in the face as I leaned over to wash my hands:


   I AM HELD BY SPACE! THE WORLD AROUND ME IS HELD BY SPACE AND MY CLIENTS ARE HELD BY SPACE!! CHILL.



The deeper question becomes: what is my relationship to space and how can I cultivate this?


   I attended a 5Rhythms dance held in the arts center yesterday. The small venue held a packed house of 60 people all moving free form to programmed music. At the start I felt my body and mind condense. I imagined myself hiding and being held too tightly in by the closing mass of bodies.

     I made a decision as the first beats rolled over us.

     I walked through the space weaving among forms and shapes always in relationship to the space between. In minutes I covered the entire floor, met the people in periphery and felt free to move about. My shoulders relaxed and my breath deepened. With this safety and openness of spatial motion I turned inwards to the cramping emotional fears and anxieties crowds trigger and allowed inner space to open as a container.

      As I danced meeting others, I moved through the space both outside and within them. Each moment opened to a new trial of trusting myself to be held by the space we shared. Cultivating trust of the core self below false contractions or false expansiveness and a truer alignment with the natural forces of human gravity and radiance.

    On the mat with clients I want to skillfully respond to the space they are held in. Through trained touch, dialogue, imagery what appears to be a crowded room of inner voices each vying for attention becomes a center we can learn to trust. A personal sun holding disparate planets of self in gravitational place and radiating love and life affirming existence.

It has been almost three years since I sat on the family couch next to my wife of 25 years sticky with sweat in my fresh clothes. I called her in from dinner preparation with the surreal pronouncement...

    I needed a divorce.

    The previous week I spent in a bathtub lowering my head under the still water as a child trembling with this knowing. I listened in the watery depths praying for the words to give fluidity to this evolutionary move.

     It made uncommon sense for the two of us but not others who relied on our consistency, among them our two girls of 24 and 22 who had already left home but used us as an anchor.

     I had a telling moment weeks earlier as I entered our house after a long day of bread and butter work- I was self employed as a top notch wallpaperhanger. I looked at my dearest friend cooking dinner as if through the narrow end of a telescope where everything is further away, out of reach. I  saw in the prismatic space between her and me... my death.

    It was a premonition and clear feedback of that moment where our marriage after years of creative therapy and conscious communication, play dates and holding each others hands through parental loss and childrearing was left with frigidity and a slow dying. Immovable.

   Now, after her startling remarriage and return to vitality I have been slowly rising to manifest what this push is on me. I have always had a spiritual life of practice and healing.

On the side.
In the cracks of 'real life'.
 In small groups.

    After the bills of private schooling and organic food my money went to trainings in massage, expressive movement therapy, dance, yoga therapy, yoga trainings, Chi Kung Internal Achemy training, western magic initiations. In fact  our children were both born at Kripalu ashram in Pennsylvania and we raised them in that clear and  focused community for 6 years.

   It was here I learned the power of consistent personal practice and healing. I want to bring this now into the world for others.

 
Coming off the sidelines.
Living my real life.
In the mainstream marketplace.

    I have had many adventures these past years which will be referred to on the blog  I am sure. I have chosen to remain in one place to cultivate this growth outwards in Asheville NC for a year.

    The words ListeningTouch came to me one morning this past summer as I worked on others at a taoist camp. The words give sense to my approach. I hope to find out more what this approach is and who I am within it on these pages.