The Spiral Path Blog

When  I talk about holding space for ourselves , I often introduce the concept of psychic membranes – the container in which we can protect, nourish, and support ourselves. The cell membrane serves as a metaphor for what it means to have healthy boundaries that allow nourishment in, keep harm out, connect us with others, and maintain homeostasis (similar pressure inside and outside the cell). In m...

I was sitting on the dock on the Red River at the local park. It’s my favourite place to sit with my journal on these pleasant Spring/Summer mornings. I can usually sit there uninterrupted, but sometimes I have to share the dock with people launching their boats. One morning, three men, who were probably in their thirties, pulled up and backed their boat into the water. None was very experienced a...

“Will you be my companion?” That was a familiar phrase in our household when I was growing up. As a farm family, my siblings and I all had daily chores that we had to do in the barn after school, and none of us wanted to do them alone. If one of us had a job we had to do alone, we’d look for someone who was willing to go out to the barn with us, just to be with us as we completed whatever task was...

Recently I wrote a post about  worshipping our wounds . In it, I talked about how sometimes we cling to our wounds too long because they become part of our identity or healing them might feel threatening to those who don’t want us to change. I’ve been thinking about that post since, and I think it might need a few additional words to give it balance. As much as I think it can be unhealthy to worsh...

In the movie,  Sound of Metal , Ruben, a drummer in a heavy metal band, begins to lose his hearing. Fearing that he might slip back into addiction because of it, his girlfriend helps him check in to a facility for deaf recovering addicts. Joe, the man who runs the facility, encourages Ruben to find his way to stillness and acceptance, but Ruben is resistant, and much of the movie is about his dete...

After George Floyd’s murder, there was a huge spike in the amount of money invested in diversity and inclusion work across the U.S. According to  one study which surveyed HR professionals , 85% have expanded inclusion activities and 75% either started or enhanced unconscious bias training. A lot of people started having conversations and doing training that should have happened years ago. Read mor...

Not long ago, I listened to an interview with someone who’d written a piece for the New York Times on the “ empty religions of Instagram ”. She was critiquing some self-help social media influencers, and she mentioned that some of them “worship their wounds”. On their Instagram feeds, she said, they make themselves accessible by being wounded people, but then they stay with the wound because it ma...

A few years ago, I had a pretty big a-ha moment when I realized that the concept of holding space (which I’ve spent the last seven years exploring in a deep way as I developed  programs  and wrote a  book  about it) is, at its core, about  freedom  and  sovereignty . Here’s a quote from one of the last chapters of  my book … “If I treat you as someone entitled to your own sovereignty, it means tha...

A few weeks ago, when I was teetering on the edge of crawl-under-the-covers-and-don’t-come-out-until-2022 burnout, I was on Zoom with a couple of wise friends. We were checking in about how our lives were going, and I had just unloaded a long list of stressors, fumbles, and mom-worries. I was fighting back tears. They both looked at me with kindness and one of them said “Nothing is expected of you...

I turned off the radio this morning, on the way home from driving my daughter to work. It was making me feel a little rage-y and I didn’t want to be in a bad mood.  In the lead-up to Mother’s Day, the radio station was holding a contest where people could phone in and nominate a mother for a prize. The people phoning in, mostly nominating their mothers or wives, were saying things like “she sacrif...

Once there was an Invisible Woman.  She wasn’t born that way – in the beginning she was just like every other child, expressing herself freely and wanting to be seen and accepted and loved for who she was. Sadly, though, it was her quest for love and acceptance that convinced her that, in order to survive in the world as it presented itself to her, she had to become an Invisible Woman. Read more.....

“Try not to react when you see her. She doesn’t look good.” That’s what my former husband was telling family members outside of my hospital room before they entered. He was right – I was in rough shape. Motherhood did not arrive gently at my doorstep. That moment didn’t look anything like those muted magazine photos of rapturous mothers in long flowing white eyelet dressing gowns leaning over equa...

I have a three-fold spiritual (and mental health) practice that I like to call  “wonder-wonder-wander” . It has become especially relevant to me in recent months while this pandemic winter drags on and threatens to drag me under the waves of melancholy and despair. When I commit time to this practice every day, it helps me stay afloat. First,  wonder as a noun …  “a feeling of surprise mingled wit...

Nebulous  [ neb-y uh -l uh s ]  adjective hazy, vague, indistinct, or confused cloudy or cloudlike of or resembling a nebula or nebulae in deep space; nebular When the lockdown is over, I will go back to the float spa. When I climb into that white pod, turn off the lights and music, and lie down to float in the warm saltwater, I will drift away into a nebulous field where there are no edges, no be...

On New Year’s Eve, I was contacted by a local radio station to do an interview on how to prepare for the new year. I didn’t get back to them soon enough, so they found someone else. Later that day, on my way to the grocery store, I happened to hear the interview with the life coach they interviewed instead, and while I was sorry to miss the interview opportunity, I realized I wasn’t quite the kind...

“Is there empirical evidence that backs up your holding space concepts?” I’ve heard some version of this question a few times in recent months. Sometimes it comes from people who are simply curious, sometimes they want to include my work in an academic paper and need to be able to prove its merit to their academic advisors, and sometimes they’re a little suspicious of what I teach and want to know...

Yesterday, I came undone. It’s been a rough week. With our province on lockdown (no restaurants, gyms, coffee shops or movie theatres are open, and stores can only sell essential items), the infection numbers staying stubbornly high, the weather getting colder, and the time since I’ve spent any quality time with friends stretching behind and ahead of me, I was feeling claustrophobic, frustrated, a...

Meaning -making can help us survive hardship and struggle. But it can also be a form of spiritual bypassing and it can cause harm. Read more...

The workday was finished and I had just picked up my two daughters – one a toddler and one an infant at the time – from daycare and we were on our way home in the family minivan. I was tired and knew that I still had to find enough energy to make supper, feed the girls, and give them the attention they needed after a day away from me.  There was a train crossing the road, so I stopped at the railw...

I didn’t rake the leaves off the lawn this Fall. My climate activist daughter regularly sends me articles about how the dead leaves create biodiversity in the backyard, serving as places for insects (including pollinators) to hibernate, and then, in the Spring, bringing more birds and flowers to the yard. As for the leaves I needed to clean off the patio and walkway – I built a backyard composter...

A few weeks ago, my shoulder started to ache. My right shoulder has become a bit of a barometer for my emotional state. Specifically, it tends to ache when there are trauma memories being triggered by a particular season or event. Three years ago, I broke this shoulder on a day when my body was trying to process a couple of traumatic events at once. On the afternoon of that day, I’d had a hard con...

I remember that moment clearly. I was sitting in the rocking chair in the tiny living room of the first home I owned with my ex-husband, I was five months pregnant with my first daughter, and I was in complete and utter despair. I was rocking back and forth, unable to imagine how I would get through that day, let alone the next one and the one after that. My mom, who had come in from the farm to b...

Not long after my  first attempt at defining holding space , I changed some of my original language and I added a few important nuances. Specifically:   I stopped talking about “non-judgement” and replaced it with “selective non-judgement”; I started talking about boundaries and limitations and the times when you shouldn’t hold space; I started writing about spiritual bypassing and the many ways w...

A couple of weeks ago,  I shared a video on social media of the moment I first glimpsed a printed copy of my book . It was a fun little moment – one I’ve waited many years for – and I wanted to share it with my friends and followers. In the comments that started flowing in, there were several that made reference to the joy written all over my face when I first saw the book. Something about those c...

Last night, after sunset, I lay in my hammock in the growing darkness of my backyard feeling low. I couldn’t shake the growing melancholy that’s been with me this week, but I couldn’t quite name it either. Why, in the middle of all of the excitement of finally launching the  Centre for Holding Space  after many months of hard work, was I feeling so much sadness? Perhaps it was launch hangover? Per...