A space holder is someone who can create and hold a safe space for a person so they can be themselves around them, knowing they will not be judged, they will be understood, valued and have an authentic meaningful connection.
As adults, we need to try and be embodied, calm and grounded to support our children to regulate, rather than expecting a child or young person to modify their behaviour themselves or change for external reward systems. We need to be a space holder for them.
Embodiment and Sensory Systems
Understanding the nervous system and its functions, trauma, and trauma responses, is vital for effective learning, safe space holding and non-toxic wellness and spiritual communities –and in any learning environment. It is also important to recognise and understand the stress responses of the body. As an educator, facilitator, space holder or practitioner, working under the premise of ‘first do no harm’ is part of a well-rounded trauma-informed approach.
Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing
This is a time when we need a lot of facilitators and mediators—a lot of holders of change. We are at a very particular moment in human history, a period of time when we need to shift away from the competitive, directive, combative, colonial energy of toxic leadership at every level of society. The structures built to pierce the sky, the walls conjured to make the earth a puzzle of combating territories, keeping some in power and others without it…all of these structures are crumbling.
It is time to move towards ways of being that are focused on listening to each other deeply and accepting each other, whole. We need to learn ways of being in space together that help us see beyond false constructs of superiority and inferiority without asking us to sacrifice what has shaped us. We need to study being receptive and nonjudgmental with each other, letting the earth and community hold us until we remember we already belong.
I believe holding change can be sacred work, and I’ll admit it is most satisfying to me when the sacred is palpable in the room.
The lineage of holding space reaches back to our original ways of being in relationship with each other and the earth. Like many displaced peoples, I have had to find my way back to listening to the earth and my own nature through longing and intuition, gathering little pieces and practices, studying different methodologies, asking a lot of questions, stumbling, making mistakes. I am still returning.
Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation by adrienne maree brown
Every time I write to capture a way of understanding or doing anything, I am instantly humbled. I am trying to describe something that I am feeling, learning, something unfolding, something changing, that has a million paths, of which I may only grasp one. And there are things that are true about facilitation and mediation that I may not be able to put into words, or may never be able to make clear.
The facilitation I most love feels like a sacred act. In addition to the strength of a good agenda, clear direction, generative agreements, and values-aligned logistics, I believe facilitators offer our most powerful contribution when we operate from faith—faith that this work in this moment will shape change. That the people in this room are a collective succession of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Grace Lee Boggs, and other known and unknown freedom fighters.
As facilitators we step back from the knowing that makes us stand out as individuals, the call to make ourselves distinct from each other and the universe. Facilitation is a commitment to the power of the collective. We hold space for humans to find each other, clearing the debris between them so that they can access the forward motion of life, the flowing river of change, the rich ecosystem of differences.
Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation by adrienne maree brown
