Resources For Developing Emotional Spaceholding Capacity
Emotional skills are trainable like muscles. So where do we put in the reps?
TL;DR This is a post I wrote to send to people who DM me “hey where do I go to grow my emotional capacity?”
Eight months ago, I wrote a piece What Is Emotional Spaceholding? It's Not A Framework, It's A Specific Bodily Experience. The thesis of this piece was that it’s absolutely possible to expand your embodied emotional capacity to be there for yourself and others! What’s my evidence for it? Primarily the fact that I used to have the opposite of “capacity to stay with people’s emotions” - at the first sign of a challenge I’d dissociate or freeze or try-to-fix, and often unintentionally raise the overall level of difficulty in the system by doing so. But now I’ve got a handle on this whole “being with, in a way that the other person feels helped” thing.
That’s not to say it’s a binary thing, OR that I’ve maxed it out. There’s a skill gradient of spaceholding - the same way that someone can be an ok soccer player, or an olympic athlete. I’ve gone from about “level 0.5” (well-intentioned but not so helpful) to “level 3,” where I can hear someone express a grief or anger and maintain eye contact, and feel genuine warmth, and hug or hold them if they want that, and ask them to share more.
Note, those level numbers aren’t ‘official’. I sketched them out in my What Is Emotional Spaceholding? post. For more detail on what I mean by them, you can check out that post.
But specifics aside, I’m super stoked to be upleveling at this skill. It increased my felt experience of meaning in my life by a lot, and it’s continuing to do so.
But once you see that emotional capacity can grow with training, where do you go to grow it?
This doesn’t feel like a fully met need in our society, yet. You might have to look a little bit! I certainly did! But here’s what I’ve found so far, and the work I can spare you.
My #1 recommendation if at all possible is,
Holding Space - Tools For Tending Individual Grief [link]
Asheville, NC, for four days in May. It’s the one I wrote the article about!
It worked so well for my learning style. Lots of short practice sessions, and clear principles. 4-day immersion with a specific group, held on soul-affirmingly gorgeous and competently-stewarded land in Asheville, NC.
If that’s not possible, here are my other recommendations! Within each category, I’ve ordered them in “descending order of how familiar I am with them.”
Online Programs
Joe Hudson + AoA: Connection Course [link]
This is probably the most well-produced, accessible, solid, and “has a thriving community attached” course in this space right now. I did the connection course in May 2024, and it meaningfully upleveled my life. Mind you it omits some somatic nuance that I already brought in with me…so if you’re looking for more of that, read on.
Bioemotive Framework: 101 course + ongoing “clearing circles” [link]
I did it in Sept 2023 and recommend. I’m of mixed feelings about their models, but, they clearly move real energy, and it’s a good bridge to emotions and embodiment for intellectual-leaning people.
Importantly, the facilitators are good spaceholders. My class was led by Hoji, Doug’s daughter!
You can find DougTataryn on twitter
Grief Pilgrimage, 8 week summer & fall cohorts - Siobhan Asgarzadeh [link]
Siobhan is one of my grieftending teachers, and her capacity to see and be with people in the deepest reaches of soul darkness is frankly stunning.
This one has a hefty dose of mythosomatics and ritual!
There’s also a yearlong (once a month) that culminates in a two week pilgrimage on the Camino De Santiago. It will be potent.
Oh, speaking of grief rituals, there’s a free online one by a different facilitator that my friend Jane recommends.
Empathy Academy [link] - Karla McLaren’s work!
I haven’t been through it myself but I love Karla’s book so much. If you try out these programs please let me know how they go!
In-person
Josh Fox’s Asheville, NC Spaceholding Community
4-day trainings: the one above, and another about Holding Community Grief [link] that was in Septemberish in 2023.
Ongoing grief rituals!
Here’s one on Saturday, July 6, 2024
I love grief rituals. I’ve gone to many. They were formative for me. Come see people express distress, and move through it held by community and the elements, and feel lighter on the other side.
Sleepawake Camp [link]
“Sleepawake is a 4-week residential immersive for 18-30-year-olds … Sleepawake Camp addresses the neglected dimensions of our lives, orienting us toward a sense of wholeness and authentic happiness through science, psychology, game-play, and ancient wisdom.”
Founded by MIT grads who questioned “wait, why do I know so much more about quantum physics than I do about emotions?”
At the time of writing this I have not done this, but I am about to join the June 2024 cohort! I’m squeaking in there as a 29 year old.
Wildman - Asheville, NC, Augustish [link]
A men’s work gathering run by my friend and trusted mentor James. It sounds like a heckuva lot of fun, and depth. If gender was part of how I navigated the world, and if I was also a dude, I’d be a regular at this.
ISTA - International School Of Temple Arts [link]
This has a specific focus on sexuality, so don’t go if you’re not looking for that!
But they also have general tools for emotional process that seem effective, and they engage with trauma healing. It’s intense. I have not done it but I’ve met many people that have, and they all strike me as emotionally upleveled and skilled.
Oh, if you’re looking to build capacity around healthy sexuality specifically, I also recommend Rosalind on Twitter. She and her husband/collaborator Mark wrote a book! Called “God And Sex, Now We Get Both” and I consider it the sanest framework of sexuality I’ve encountered.
RC groups [link]
These are grassroots and you’ll need to dig around the website and email someone, to find a group in your local region. And they’re not as deep as the 4-day training I did in Asheville. But, you get direct and repeated practice with being there for people.
My read is that the 4-day training I did was an updated version of RC. RC has a lot of great stuff, but also opportunities for refinement.
Rites of Passage Council - Asheville, NC [link]
I have never attended one of their programs but I’ve met Kedar and Kat and I like and trust them.
They have a 3-day grief ritual in July. Also ritual programs and vision quests.
Some online offerings too.
Books, Podcasts, YouTube Channels
The Language Of Emotions - Karla McLaren
This one is a foundational text for me. I recommend it ALL the time. It’s a 1-1 map between each emotion, how it serves us, and how it is best handled. It also spells out a model of (body, mind, emotions, spirit) and where trauma fits into that picture. It’s a worldview that’s served me well. It’s not terrible somatic, but if you’re bottlenecked on lack of good mental maps, this is incredible.
The associate “Dynamic Emotional Integration” (DEI) online school, is probably good, though I haven’t been through it firsthand.
Heidi Priebe [link]
She’s got great models of emotions and is very precise. It’s not embodied practice, but I deepen from the episodes of hers I listen to.
The Art of Accomplishment Podcast
Big recommend. I am actively learning from this one.
Irene Lyon [link]
I haven’t personally gone through most of thes. They didn’t hook me as much as Heidi Preibe’s, but I’m glad they exist.
Jessica Alonso, a friend and somatic-emotional health colleague whose taste I trust, says “Irene Lyon is one of my favorite teachers about nervous system capacity overall. She works from the point of view of somatic experiencing, somatic practice, and Feldenkrais.”
Seems like she has some training programs too, on her website?
Tomas Huebl - [link]
I have also not worked with him, but I’ve heard increasingly good things, especially through my embodied ethics community.
He specifically has online courses on The Art of Attunement and Understanding Collective Trauma.
Practices
Do you have a local family constellations facilitator? Check those out! It’s a group circle specifically for emotional support and healing, with shamanic & theatrical elements. It’s the closest thing I know of to my vision of “authentic relating and circling but, specifically held as a container for healing.”
Oh, they have online trainings! [link] “The Hellinger Institute”
The constellations I’ve attended in person were facilitated by Adam Harvey, and I liked him, so you could probably contact him for further pointers.
Also authentic relating and circling are related practices.
For Authentic Relating, I went through Authentic Relating International, levels 1 and 2, back in 2020. I liked it, it’s good at embodied practice, though I’ve shifted away from it to practices that have an explicit healing focus.
Any embodiment practice would also help. I’m partial to dance, qigong, running, and taking walks and touching lots of plants. But that’s me. There’s lots of room for personal taste here. The best embodiment practice is the one you actually do!
Mythic worldviews:
This is less direct, but I know I hold space better when I have a cosmology big enough to hold me and the charge that’s in front of me. So, practices of connecting to trees and ecology and mythic history.
The Emerald Podcast - run by one of my teachers. The episode on grief may be a good starting point for people reading this post.
As an intro to the role mythology has to play in modernity, I recommend the book Smokehole - by Martin Shaw.
Practitioners that You Can Go See
Also, if you want to expand your own emotional capacity, having space held for you is perhaps more helpful than any training! So much of what I do now is simply transmission-based learning, i.e: someone held me in a particular nurturing way when I collapsed in tears, then I remember the tactile kinesthetic quality of that, and the warmth of it, and now I do it for others.
And, on top of that - part of the whole point of moving through your own unmetabolized charges is to free up more capacity. So by receiving spaceholding and support, you learn to do it for others and become more anchored, grounded, and alive! Neat.
To that end, I’ve listed practitioners I like, above. But please feel free to branch out and find ones you like, too! “How do you know it’s working” is - you’ll feel better. If you don’t, or if something feels subtly off, maybe you have a sense of “is it supposed to feel like this??” - no, it should be obvious that it’s of benefit to you. Keep looking.
Practitioners I’ve listed above, that I know and recommend, that see clients online, are: James Mayfield Smith (general somatic-emotional health), Jessica Alonso (general emotional health, very good for intellectual people), Josh Fox (formerly an acupuncturist), and Siobhan Asgarzadeh (grief specifically).
How is the ecosystem evolving?
So, that’s my infodump of what already exists. But I mentioned it wasn’t quiiiiiite yet what I wanted it to be.
My longterm vision is that emotional spaceholding become well-known, clear, and accessible! Like, circling and authentic relating communities and events are getting close - they’re scenes - but I want a version of those that’s more oriented towards healing and building capacity. Circling seems just as likely to end in dysregulation as in integration, and… I’m not keen to take those odds, when we could aim directly at wellbeing and emotional health instead.
Methods for emotional charge resolution are known. The skills and knowledge are simply unevenly distributed, and often poorly formalized. I can’t wait for them to develop more, and uptake into cultural consciousness :)
Crowdsourced Epilogue
Above, I’ve listed the resources that are on my own radar. But if you’re reading this and have things you’d like to add, please message me and I’ll add them below.
<Last updated June 15, 2024>
Bree Greenberg - I’m not so familiar with her. But she ran an eating disorder clinic and found that the best approaches that worked were deeply spiritual. She has some online offerings.
Thank you for this. Super useful. Will check out a bunch of the stuff you linked.
Great article. Bless you and your good work and discernment.