Compassionate Indifference

One element of harmony in group living is nonreactive spaceholding.

We decrease reactivity in others through offering clean expressions of emotion.

In clean expressions of emotions, we can claim grounding and spaceholding to witness the sacred experience.

Clean expressions of emotion involve the person expressing taking responsibility for the experience and accepting the experience of the emotion reality is serving them now.

This does not involve a lot of talking. It NEVER involves blaming (because it does not come from the premise that something has “gone wrong”).

This looks like breathing and laughing and crying and body movement. It sounds more animal than intellectual. The content of the words is beside the point, except that it MUST be respectful of those listening in order to have a genuine claim on spaceholding.

Clean holding of emotion involves what I like to call compassionate indifference. We do not engage with the emotional expression as a relational event. We engage with the emotional expression as an individual expression, as sacred as any other experience.

We may offer to facilitate the embodied expression of the experience, offering the spectrum of generous absence to full on somatic participation, such as bear hugs and wrestling with frustration and rage and powerlessness.

I received what I consider to be sacred training while working in juvie—I know what it is to hold the child inside of an adult-sized body, the child with a BIG expression of an INTENSE feeling. I know what it is to hold this with other adult bodies. My embodied knowing creates a field where all the adults in a field hold the space for the expression, even if the other adults do not have experience in this.

I also choose to intervene if someone is personalizing or pathologizing the expression of someone else. I ask for silence and witnessing. I remind us we will all have a chance to express, and there is nothing to do or fix or solve. The only question to have here is the open, curious "what else?"

This is a practice of intimacy, getting to know the here and now.

What's here and now?

Hello to what is here and now. Welcome.