Exploring Containment

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person...means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

― Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

Explorations

Which people in our lives stand out as being the most 'holding' presences? (For many of us, this may be a parent or our parents; for many others, a sibling, a teacher, a friend, another relative).

When we allow ourselves to feel the effect of this person on us, what do we notice? How do our bodies respond when we recall them? What is it like to pause and honour the gift of being contained in this way?

There is a more difficult side to this primal need of ours: how do we also bear the loss or pain or anger of feeling insufficiently 'held' by those who we wish had been able to offer more to us?

What qualities of containment do we receive - or wish we could receive - in our current lives?