Life Is A Feedback Loop Of Your Internal Landscape. What Does It Mean To Hold Space For Your Life?

By Celine Castagnet

Holding space for yourself is holding space for your life.

You are not a victim of life “happening” you are a co-creator painting your life every day, you are all you know and how you perceive life is precisely what you are. You are your life.

Below I share seven stages for contemplation on how you can hold space for yourself and your inner landscape.

What is your space?

Your space (life) is your five bodies:
1. Mental — Our thoughts, knowledge
2. Physical — Our bodies, muscles, flesh, bones
3. Emotional — Our present feelings, or past emotions
4. Energetic — Our energy field, frequency
5. Spiritual/Archetypal — Our spiritual bodies, larger consciousness

Identifying with only your physical or mental body (as we do in modern culture) automatically creates a split between the edge of your skin and the rest of the world around you.

The big illusion is that life is separate from ourselves.

We tend to think of life as something that is separate from us, that we are living a life and things keep “happening” to us. Somehow we perceive our skin to be a solid layer that keeps us away from everything out there. A protective barrier for some, a flesh prison for others.
“Life happens” is the saying.

Your space is in constant movement with the space around you.
Your space is made up of all your five bodies constantly harmonizing (or not) together in one big symphony as you interact with the world around you and go through your experiences. The world then (people, places, things) feeds you information that your five bodies interpret, arrange, and make sense of — a giant feedback loop constantly in action with each breath you take.

Why does it matter?

It is proven over and over again that in our modern patriarchal culture, we live in fragmentation of our bodies, having lost our relationship to the spaces around us (Gaia, our planet, each other) as well as to our inner selves (the 5 bodies in which we experience the spaces around us)

We have grown to feed only the mind and use only our reason for rational thinking, gaining knowledge, relating, doing business, and for making decisions. And at what cost?

At the cost of our sanity, our planet, our Joy, our conscious feeling, our sovereignty, sensibility, our possibility for deep connection, and our self-responsibility, the list goes on...

We are living in a climate urgency, a mental health urgency, political urgency, and financial urgency, and we do not know how to really connect or relate to each other on deeper levels of intimacy. We do not know how to hold space, for the planet, for each other, or for ourselves. How can we really connect with each other if we know nothing about how our feelings are moving inside of us? How can we claim to love others or the planet if we do not know how to love and hold space for ourselves?

To bring back balance into our culture, we need to bring back balance and awareness into ourselves, of the space we take up, of our inner landscapes, seeing and feeling the world through our five bodies. Upgrading our thoughtware to holistic perspectives.

What does holding space mean?

Holding space for your life means rebuilding the relationship to your own inner landscape, observing, allowing, and radically facing yourself. When you can authentically observe your patterns you create a new space for emerging choices. Creating new spaces and possibilities within yourself gives you a choice to try something different (internally), and thus the world around you (externally) gets rearranged.

Holding space means allowing for these new spaces to emerge, as we hold we grow, just as we hold and nurture a child into their adulthood. A child needs constant safety, nurturing, holding, and feeding for healthy development into adulthood and autonomy. These are all things that our 5 bodies and internal landscape also need.

There is a whole world and depth to unpack and uncover within our internal landscape that I am excited to write more about in my posts to come.

How to hold space for yourself?

I encourage you to contemplate these seven stages of holding space. It is a non-linear process.
Check with yourself if there is something alive in you right now (anxiety, rage, doubt, loss, joy, anger etc) that you can contemplate through these stages.

1. Observe — Something happens that triggers that same feeling/sensation in you…. Learn how to observe what you are feeling. Observe what is really happening inside of you. Learn to distinguish your feelings. Learn to distinguish your emotions. Observing means to become a watcher instead of a participant — just as now you are a reader of these words that I am writing. You can do the same with your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Pause and read your life for a moment, instead of blindly writing it.

2. Hold — Hold what needs to emerge. Hold that feeling or sensation in your awareness. Let yourself emerge in front of yourself as you are. No analysis only feeling. Allow yourself to go into it, it contains more answers than you think.

3. Explore — Wear your research hat, and now go and explore your feelings/sensations, thoughts, etc. Ask it questions, and explore/observe what actions you take when this feeling emerges. Who do you become when you embody this frustration, sadness or anxiety?

4. Transform — When you hold yourself and explore what is alive inside of you — you have conscious choices and transformation that emerge. Do you want to react to this inner feeling, becoming that feeling? Or can you see it as information for a change you can make in your life?

5. Create — When you have discovered something new, you then can create new possibilities for yourself. You choose what you want for yourself. If anxiety runs your life, how about you challenge yourself to call a friend every time you enter an anxious thought spiral and share everything you are afraid of out loud?

6. Integrate — You have to practice and integrate the new choices you make. What small things can you do to make possible what you want to happen? Stick to the challenge you have set for yourself. It can help to have some people you trust that are committed to your self-commitment.

7. Repeat — Continuously approach yourself and life in this way. Become an active creator, observer, and explorer.

“Holding space for yourself starts with learning how to consciously feel and radical acceptance of your choices. It is becoming an explorer of your inner landscape, allowing all spectrums of yourself to emerge.”

Let yourself come alive, let yourself hold your own space for the full spectrum of life to emerge within you.

Write these steps down, and write your findings, if not it disappears, it’s very easy to forget something that runs on autopilot for most of our lives.

Contemplate It.

This is a Journey I am on. To explore, create and hold spaces where radical acceptance, responsibility, and transformation can emerge. Where each of us are radically responsible adults initiated into conscious feeling, not victims to our surroundings. Where we move into a new culture where cooperation and possibility are the drivers to expressing our value as an ever-evolving species.

If you made it here, thank you for reading me. I explore, create and hold transformational spaces for you to discover new possibilities, go through healing processes, explore your own internal landscape, and find your unique empowerment, discoveries, and aliveness. So that your authentic being and expression can unfold, and evolve in sustainable ways. Ingredients for transformation that on a collective scale allow for a new culture to be created and emerge.

“Your inner landscape shapes the outer and your internal transformation is a catalyst for collective transformation.”