Image description: a graphic with the text “holding self, holding space” in dark black letters.
This autumn, I gratefully started my DYCP project “Mindful, Inclusive and Accessible”, and I’m rebooting the news section of my website to document what I’m up to, but also to share my findings in case they prove useful to any other artist who holds space for others.
My DYCP project so far, has largely been dealing with the project management side of the project – talking to my collaborators, booking in training, arranging my diary and making sure I’ve set up expenditure tracking so I’m not blowing my budget. I have, however, been introspective on what tangible results I want from this year. Yes, some of the activities – Makaton Level 3 & 4, introduction to signing, d/Deaf awareness – will have these by default and will equip me with practical skills I can take forward, but what softer skills can I fold in? How can I safeguard myself and invest in my own mindfulness practice?
This notion of safeguarding myself is rooted in my experience of participants feeling safe enough to share their own lived experience and me not knowing what to do with it after. At first, I was touched that I had created a safe space for them to share, but then I didn’t know what to do with the sharings. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it secondary trauma (perhaps with more introspection I might change my views on this), but my emotional intelligence, craving to be inclusive and to empathise, meant I found myself taking more and more weight as the years progressed. Weight I didn’t think I ought to be carrying, but had nowhere to put it.
I keep coming back to this idea of how I can hold myself whilst holding space. Ways I can carve out space mid session for myself without sacrificing the quality of the content for participants. Of course I’m human and therefore fallible, I can’t expect to always maintain the highest quality content throughout the session – there will be natural dips and curves, for participants can also hardly be expected to be entirely engaged throughout – but how do I keep the flow when I need to pause without it being a hard pause to the session?
As an extension, how can this idea of holding myself travel with me past sessions and percolate into all aspects of my working day? I need mechanisms that are easy to embed, don’t take too much from me in terms of time or energy, but have real benefit to my practice.
Consequently, now that I’m moving from the preliminary set up of the project into the meat of my research, I’m questioning how I can:
- find space for myself whilst facilitating which means I can rest, or pause, problem solve or just regulate
- discover a pre session and post session routine which prepares me mentally, emotionally and physically for leading that is considerate of the fact that I might not have much time or space to do this.
- interrogate ways I can unload or seek alternate means of supervision after sessions when I feel the need to unload what has been shared
I have ideas of how the above objectives might transpire in the real world, and methods to get there that I’m starting to test within my sessions currently to see whether they have traction. So, I guess we’ll discover what lands over the next year and I’m looking forward to finding mechanisms to ensure I’m held whilst others are held too.
Charlotte Arnold 