There’s a fussy baby that lives inside of each one of us. That baby is there because being a human is hard, and we all have different ways of being in relationship to that fact. Why is it so hard? It’s hard because somewhere along the way we lost the sense that “God” or “the universe” or “society” or whatever holding structure you wish were there has left us.
And if you were lucky enough to have had a well-cared for mother while she was growing you, there’s the disruption of birth. No matter how you came into the world, the sudden transition from a warm, dark, quiet holding environment where just the right amount of nutrients were delivered directly into your blood stream changes into a world there are masked humans shining bright lights on your naked body and sticking probes and monitors into every orifice so that you can survive this next phase of your journey which requires you to breath, acquire, consume, and digest your own food, and suddenly you have all of these senses like seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching to navigate. From the little baby’s perspective, we can see how this could be quite overwhelming.
After birth, in that first year of life, hopefully we make it into our mother’s arms. The mother who’s smells and rhythms we’re wired to understand. And hopefully that mother is well cared for and doesn’t need to be distracted from us by attending to too many pressures from the outside world. If mom is overwhelmed by how to take care of her family’s survival needs or doesn’t have a community or partner to offer her emotional support, or if she struggles with mental illness the baby will miss key moments of her love, attunement, and attention.
And before we start to feel like this piece is an attack on mother’s let’s remember that the world is not structured to support most mothers in these keyways, and so at best we get “good-enough” mothering. This is why many go through the world sensing that while sometimes disappointing the world is “good-enough”. And yet, as our vast number of individuals with anxiety, depression, ADHD, and PTSD can attest, the support from the world does NOT feel good enough and we haven’t been taught how to find that support from a greater place inside of ourselves. When we try to find a place physically, emotionally, or mentally that we can trust, sometimes it feels like nothing is there but a scary, dark, black hole of nothing. Of course, we don’t want to fall into that hole because there is no trust that anything or anyone might catch us.
But allowing ourselves to experience that hole of holding is a crucial step in reclaiming our contact with our own Resonant Self Witness, that each one of us has the capacity to find, so that we can re-establish the sense that we are taken care of, seen, and supported, no matter what is happening in the outside world. We call this sense of global holding, which includes the emotional and mental places, basic trust. It is the sense that your soul is being held.
Many are afraid to look back and feel past hurts because the body sensations, emotions, and thoughts can be so overwhelming that we fear they could kill us. And this makes sense. That sense exists because you weren’t accompanied or supported when those hurts happened. A person trained in Resonant Healing has learned specific techniques to accompany you when you feel strong enough to approach your own personal abyss with its sense of disintegration or fragmentation and accompanying fear.
As we start dipping our toes into these tender areas, we realize that with the right kind of support we do survive whatever sensations, thoughts, or emotions that meet us there and we start to trust that we can move deeper into the hurt with our trained guide. We discover unconscious contracts that we made at key moments in our development that were very important at the time to keep us safe, but that we discover no longer serve us. When we see these contracts, and the pain that they now cause, we get to a moment where we discover we can release them, and a blessing, formulated by our own Resonant Self Witness emerges. We know this has happened because suddenly we start connecting with a sense of support, a sense of relief, of satisfaction, of meaning, and your basic trust is strengthened.
The more experiences you have that involve dealing with painful states and memories, and resolving them, allowing you to connect with various aspects of your fundamental nature, the more that sense of trust is created. The more your soul is held, and the more basic trust is developed, the more you will unfold. Providing this holding for who you really are is one of the functions of the Resonant Healing Practitioner. So, the whole of the Work ultimately builds your own basic trust that you can be supported by even without your practitioner.