Can’t go under it. Can’t go over it. We’ve got to go through it.
Holding the Tension of Opposites
Every single tender shoot of my soul’s emergence has been preceded by a merciful scambling. Tectonic rumbling magnetizes something irreconcilable, and neural circuits are not quite ready to bear it. The tension of opposites comes calling again.
Death is the only choice, but there is more than one way to die.¹
What does holding the tension of unreconcilable opposites generate in the heart?
The heart’s fear of being open is not fanciful: holding powerful tensions over time can be, and often is, a heartbreaking experience, but there are at least two ways to understand what it means to have our hearts broken. One is to imagine the heart broken into shards and scattered about — a feeling most of us know, and a fate we would like to avoid. The other is to imagine the heart broken open into new capacity — a process that is not without pain — but one that many of us would welcome. As I stand in the tragic gap between reality and possibility, this small, tight fist of a thing called my heart can break open into greater capacity to hold more of my own and the world’s suffering and joy, despair and hope…(Keep reading in the footnotes!²)
Parker A Palmer in A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life
A Transmission, A Motion, A Practice
Dr. James Finley tells two poignant stories in this video that evoke the felt experience of the holding paradox—an extraordinarily familiar neural overload and the faint felt outline of something else.
The whole video is gold; I have bookmarked the stories. The teaching that follows gives words to inner experiences. See if you enter first through a felt sense rather than headfirst.
A Note About Content:
These are not easy stories. They touch primarily on two clinical settings, an impatient alcohol treatment facility and working with a client whose wounded spouse was dehumanizing her. Dr. Finley is exceedingly gentle. It is not easy to find places to where these things are talked about with such care and beauty.
My heart is magnetized to keep returning to the felt sense of these paradoxes, and so I do, over and over. In twenty-minute increments of silence, I climb into dissonance and breathe with it.
In this moment, she is completely vulnerable, and in this vulnerability, she is invincible in the world.
In this moment, she is childlike, and in being childlike, she’s manifesting the essence of maturity.
In this moment, she’s alone unto herself, and in this aloneness, she bears witness to the mystery that we’re all alone together.
In this moment, she knows nothing, and in knowing nothing, she manifests the essence of true wisdom in the world.
In this moment, she is dying, and in her death, someone is being born.
We’re Going On A Bear Hunt
In the heart of this season of paradoxical prayer, words from a children’s story come calling.
Questions for Opening
Tune into the whole of you. Where is bracing’s ground zero?
What is it like to spread bracing out, to let it be shared?
As you breathe, see if something in you wishes to smile upon bracing.
If there’s a loving wind at your back, perhaps a smile will form. If not, you are welcome to carry the wish.Tune in to the spaces between toes, to earlobes, and to your solar plexus…to the sound of rain, the memory of golden hour light on the trees, the spaces between thoughts.
Is there a single square inch of softness? Where is its epicenter?What is it like when softening wraps its arms around bracing just to be with it?
What is it like inside, in your real life, the instant gotta go through itdawns?
This version is too cute not to share…
Footnotes:
1 There is no wrong choice. The soul is patient. The Ocean, persistent. If I miss this wave, there will be another. And another. And another.
2 Name anyone who is famous for a personal devotion to truth and justice, love and forgiveness. I cannot think of a person fitting that description who has not spent a lifetime in the tragic gap, torn between the world’s reality and a vision of human possibility. That, in brief, is the story of the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Thich Nhat Hanh, to name a few. Hearts like theirs have been broken open to a largeness that holds the possibility of a better future for us all.
E.F. Schumacher painted the picture well: ‘Through all our lives we are faced with the task of reconciling opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled…Countless mothers and teachers, in fact, do it, but no one can write down a solution. They do it by bringing into the situation a force that belongs to a higher level where opposites are transcended—the power of love.
Parents often find themselves standing in the tragic gap between their hopes for a child and what is happening in that child’s life. If the parents fail to hold that tension, they will go one way or the other, clinging to an idealized fantasy of who “their baby” is or rejecting this “thorn in their side” with bitter cynicism. Both ways of responding are death-dealing for all concerned. But many parents will testify that by standing in the tragic gap and holding the tension, they not only serve their children well; they themselves become more open, more knowing, more compassionate.
-Parker A. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life
My name is Kirsten. I write, collage, and practice spiritual direction in Vashon, WA. Describing what spiritual direction is feels like trying to “catch a cloud and pin it down.” Here's what's freshly alive in me: Spiritual direction is spacious accompaniment. Together we attune to the deep and the timeless. We hold questions no one else can answer for you and listen deeply to what arises. We open to what you sense and ground intuitions in rhythms and practices that anchor you as you live into what is emerging. We notice what is—obscurity, pain, fear, longing, wonder, delight, hope—and invite it into the home within you where true belonging and wisdom are always, already present.
Read More on the Soulspace Blog:
Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity
We Are Here
Practicing Presence with Abstract Art
