Holding Environment

The child can experience the environment as more or less holding. If the environment is a good holding environment, it makes you feel taken care of, protected, understood, loved, and held in such a way that your consciousness -- which at the beginning of is unformed, fluid, and changeable -- can grow spontaneously and naturally on its own. The soul in this respect is like a seedling. The seedling needs a particular holding environment in order to develop into a tree: the right soil, enough water, the right nutrients, the right amounts of light and shade. If it doesn't have the proper holding environment, it won’t grow steadily and healthily and it might not grow at all. A good holding environment, then, is the environment that is needed for the human soul to grow and develop into what she can become. It needs to provide a sense of safety and security, the sense that you are, and can count on, being taken care of. Your soul needs and environment that is dependable, consistent, attuned to your needs, and that provides for you in a way that is empathic to those needs. (Facets of Unity, pg 38)

When a baby is held in a way that is holding, it feels held in a way similar to how it was held inside the womb, and there is less discontinuity in the holding from its life inside mother’s body to outside of it. This sense of holding will not disrupt the child’s sense of basic trust, and the effect will be that Living Daylight -- the loving and supportive dimension of Being -- remains an intrinsic part of its sense of reality. The holding becomes integrated into the depths of its consciousness, and the result is a sense of basic trust in reality. The child’s sense of basic trust will begin in relationship to mother and the holding environment, and will extend to the world and the whole universe. This will allow the child to grow and develop into its full potential. (Facets of Unity, pg 41)

Holding Environment & Child Development

The less holding there is in the environment, the more the child’s development will be based on this reactivity, which is essentially an attempt to deal with an undependable environment. The child will develop mechanisms for dealing with an environment that is not trustworthy, and these mechanisms form the basis of the developing sense of self, or ego. This development of the child’s consciousness is then founded on distrust, and so distrust is part of the basis of ego development. The child’s consciousness -- her soul -- internalizes the environment it is growing up in and then projects that environment back onto the world. (Facets of Unity, pg 44)

To the extent that the environment provides adequate holding the child can develop in the context of a continuity of being which allows and supports the individuation of the soul -- one's unique embodiment of Being. Because there are degrees of holding and of impingement, and because no holding environment is without failures, we typically develop a real (essential) and a false (egoic) self in varying proportions. Basic trust is usually not totally missing, but it is seldom complete. To have absolute basic trust is to be completely realized. (Facets of Unity, pg 45)

True holding comes from the truth itself, from Being. The holding environment in a sense represents reality, whether it is manifesting in a real way -- governed by truth, or in a false way -- governed by egoic delusion. If it is manifesting in a real way, we experience holding. In the course of our development, the early environment becomes projected onto the totality of existence, So we tend to believe that all of existence is characterized by the lack of holding we experienced in childhood. This makes it difficult for us to see how Being, which is the totality of all existence, can actually function to hold us. The more we have the experience of being held by reality, the more the sense of inadequacy will be healed. Such experiences generate more trust and help us understand more completely what holding is about. Initially, such experiences might expose previously unconscious memories of inadequate holding, which is part of the process of working through, and letting go of, those memories. In a sense, we have to re-experience the difficulties in the holding that we had -- and feel their impact on us -- in order to let them go. (Facets of Unity, pg 274)