Hello and welcome back to practicing human the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscarra, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about the difference between holding space and holding on.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells. Okay. Okay, so one of the things I've encountered quite a bit as a mindfulness meditation teacher is that when the invitation is there to move closer to one's experience to be with and hold an experience like a thought, a

sensation in the body or an emotion, sometimes a painful emotion.

For a lot of people, there is pushback to this, not simply to the ideology,

but to the practice of being with an experience

that maybe one has spent a lot of time trying to get away from,

trying not to hold on to, and when that invitation is there to be with it, it feels like it's antithetical to where they're trying to go, what they're trying to accomplish, the kind of life they're looking to create. And so I really

want to highlight that there's a difference between holding on for an experience.

Holding on to an experience.

Holding on to an experience can take a lot of different shapes and forms.

If it's something like sadness, loneliness, or grief

holding on can sometimes look like quite literally staying in those emotions and almost wanting to stay there

because it actually feels painful to transition from them. The circumstances of your

life might feel such that you should be experiencing those things.

Sadness, loneliness, grief. I think of maybe after a relationship breakup or the loss of a loved one.

Maybe you've experienced this or can imagine experiencing this,

just not feeling ready to transition from those emotions because it just feels too soon and you know time

in place for that and so that could be one form of holding on to an emotion and experience.

But it can also look different than that.

Holding on, another form of holding on,

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