Jasmin Lee Cori, M.S. - Author, Mind, Body & Spirit

Part of the magic of psychotherapy is that a good therapist creates a container for your experience. This container becomes a safe space. It is both a physical space and an emotional space. It must feel safe enough to relax your defenses so that whatever has been kept at bay can now emerge. In this way, the therapist provides a “holding environment.” This is what good friends do as well. When we share our ups and downs with our friends, they are helping to “hold” the experience.

Part of becoming more autonomous is learning how to hold your own experience, not so you won’t need anyone else, but so you don’t have to stop our process when you’re alone. This involves both learning how to stay with the experience and to provide the safe container needed. 

One element of a safe container is that all experience is met without judgment. If you are rejecting or attacking yourself, that is not safe. To feel safe, your struggles and your feelings need to met with compassion. Working with a skilled therapist for a period of time can provide valuable modeling that you can build on. You can also imitate the responses of a compassionate friend. Another strategy might be to imagine how a spiritual ally or your Higher Self might respond to your feelings. What is important is to be able to meet your experience in a way that is accepting so that it will continue to reveal itself.

Another element of the container is the physical surroundings. Although ideally we could allow ourselves to have our feelings in even hostile environments, I find it much easier if I can adapt my environment to make it feel more nurturing. When at home, I turn off the phone, reduce surrounding noise as I can, and change the lighting. These are physical reminders that I have marked off this time and space for me.

What has helped me “hold my process” is working with my journal. It serves as an anchor and helps me see when I skirt away from scary and painful states. It helps me by holding the thread. I record my emerging experience and when I find myself wandering away, I look back at what I had been feeling right before the wandering.

The journal also holds my experience by giving me a place to express it. There are times I leave the journal to cry or rage or immerse myself in an internal state, but I come back and write about it. It holds all feelings without judgment.

I’ve talked about journaling because it is so central for me, but maybe your way is a different. Find what helps you stay with your experience. Maybe it is quietly sitting with an internal focus, not turning away from whatever shows up.

It’s not easy to do this. The mind has many ways of distracting us. One is simply to turn our attention in another direction, be it a task or a daydream. A judgment can also serve as a distraction because it turns us away from the experience itself and enmeshes us in an evaluation of it instead. If I am judging my dependency, I am probably not really feeling it. We also create substitute feelings and physical armoring to avoid sensitive emotions. You might, for example, tighten up or get angry in order to avoid feeling helpless. Most of us have a lifetime’s worth of practice in ways to step away from our immediate experience.

The point of staying with experience is so that it can continue to unfold and work itself out. Otherwise, we tend to get jammed up inside, which makes us really cranky. Being able to “hold our process” thus helps with self-regulation and supports our growth.

© Jasmin Lee Cori 
This topic was first covered in my 2000 book The Tao of Contemplation and recently covered in more detail in Healing from an Emotionally Absent Mother (2025).