Hold

...every place we exit under the influence of fight or flight, every moment the nervous system declares too much and pulls us toward the door, something of us stays behind.

Years ago, when I was living in Mobile, Alabama and leading a spiritual center there, I received a call from a professor at a local Baptist university. He was teaching a comparative religion course and was assembling spiritual leaders from as many faith traditions in the area that he could find listed - a rabbi, a priest - and he had extended an invitation to me as a minister of New Thought. I remember feeling genuinely honored, excited and curious, and I accepted immediately.

I think back with great amusement at how much time I spent in preparing for my scheduled lecture. I had created trifolds about the philosophy, had an assortment of business cards and additional literature about our wonderful, burgeoning little center. I was ready.

I remember the classroom as modern, built in an arena style - the professor’s lectern was below in an open well, the seating rising up around it in a wide horseshoe. I would estimate the students were between nineteen and twenty-two years old. I was invited to speak first followed by an opportunity for questions. What followed was not what I had pictured.

The questions began with a tone of annoyance. These were young people whose belief systems were being pulled and stretched in real time. It’s formulaic really - presenting new considerations, new references about divinity, about creation, about an interpretation of God that is entirely foreign to how you’ve been raised, is unsettling. So I could understand their annoyance. I had been them once. I too had been groomed inside a contained dogma, and I knew exactly the kind of force that erupts in the body when something feels threatening.

And then, at the height of the escalating questions, one student stood up and yelled the word heretic, and suddenly the room erupted. I recall a loud chorus of yelling.

I stood at that lectern and looked up into the horseshoe - all those heated, reddened faces - and something extraordinary happened. I stayed. Not because I had some formal protocol in conflict management. I just stayed - in an extreme climate of conflict and…. observed. This was definitely atypical behavior on my part. I can’t share with you any calculated reasons for staying because, truthfully, I don’t know why. It was something that simply rose in me that was quieter than the noise, and it held. I could feel every pore of my body tingling, the familiar churning in my stomach, my face completely flushed - the ancient pull to flee or defend or argue back very much alive in me. But underneath it, or perhaps alongside it, something else was also present - a kind of witnessing, a steadiness I had not summoned and could not entirely explain.

The professor, I should note, did nothing. He let it unfold as though he had planned it this way, and perhaps he had. When the bell rang and the class emptied, he seemed quietly amused. I had the distinct impression I had just been served as fresh meat to a very hungry room.

I walked back to my little Mazda hatchback and sat in the parking lot, the tingling still moving through me, the flush still in my face. And after a moment, I laughed, not the laugh of relief, but something more like recognition as I straightened all the trifolds and business cards that no one touched.

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I thought about this while sitting with the word hold this week, part of * a year-long course on awareness I am currently teaching in which we have arrived this month at exactly this territory - the middle way of experience, that seemingly narrow and demanding path that runs not around difficulty but willingly enters through it.

The invitation this week is to hold. To stay with two seemingly contradictory things at once without forcing one to win. To resist the verdict. To discover what becomes visible when we stop trying to make the tension go away. It sounds manageable enough until the nervous system gets involved, which is really the whole point.

There is a teaching I return to often: your energy is where you last left it. I have always understood this to mean that every place we exit under the influence of fight or flight, every moment the nervous system declares too much and pulls us toward the door, something of us stays behind. And in our absence, we build. We construct a story about what that place is, what that person means, what that feeling confirms about us or about the world. The story, rehearsed often enough, becomes more real than the original moment ever was, and then we spend years routing our lives around it.

The exhaustion of avoidance is something we rarely seem to speak about but it is, nonetheless, prevalent. It takes enormous energy to maintain a life built around the places we have decided we cannot go. And underneath all of that architecture of protection, something waits - patient and unchanged, still holding what we left behind.

That afternoon in Mobile was, I understand now, one of the first times I stayed. Not heroically, not with any great spiritual intention. I simply did not leave. And in that not-leaving, something became available that flight would never have allowed, the discovery that I could be in the force of something deeply uncomfortable and remain intact, that what the nervous system was reading as emergency was not, in fact, an emergency, that I could hold what felt unmanageable and find, on the other side of the holding, that I was still there.

I have never once looked back on that afternoon with regret. I have looked back on it with something closer to gratitude - the particular gratitude you feel for the experiences that changed you before you knew you were being changed.

This is what Hold makes possible. Not the elimination of tension or the resolution of contradiction, but the discovery that awareness is present even inside the things we have been most convinced we needed to escape. Divine design does not skip the difficult rooms. What we have been avoiding has sometimes been holding something for us all along.

The middle way of experience shines an impeccable light on how everything, even everyone, is the guru, a portal for expansion. It runs directly through the place where two true things stand on opposite sides of you and neither will yield. The nervous system may read that as danger. The practice is simply to stay one breath longer than the oldest training tells you to, and then to notice, without forcing anything, what was always already there.