🌿 The Truth About Holding Space (That No One Wants to Hear)

Become the Mirror not the Savior

It’s been over 8 years of guiding others, holding space for their deepest wounds, witnessing breakdowns, breakthroughs, and the raw alchemy of the soul. In all this time, one thing remains painfully clear:

👉 Most people who come asking to learn “how to hold space” are not ready to face their own shadow.

They come with subtle agendas; to feel important, to bypass their pain by fixing others, to decorate their spiritual identity with the title of “healer.”

Even when my intuition whispers “This isn’t aligned, Priya…” I still give them the benefit of the doubt. Because I believe in people’s possibility to grow. I believe in the sacred intelligence of each soul’s journey.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

If you truly want to hold space, you must first hold space for your own darkness.

🪞 Helping is not always helping.

Sometimes it’s ego.

I’ve been recently provoked, accused of being “ego driven” for what I do. The irony?

It usually comes from those who are projecting.

Because here’s what no one teaches:

When you jump to save others, it’s often your discomfort, your guilt, your compulsion talking not compassion.

Real holding space is not about:

• Carrying someone’s cross so they won’t feel pain.

• Spooning them answers they must find by themselves.

• Rescuing them so you can soothe your need to be needed.

That’s just ego in spiritual clothing.

🌑 Karma doesn’t let you cheat.

I’ve watched this over and over:

When you interrupt someone’s karma by over-helping, fixing, or taking on their burden before they’re ready, you rob them of a soul initiation.

Saturn, the cosmic taskmaster ensures it resurfaces again, sometimes harsher.

Because karma is here to grow souls, not comfort egos.

If you help out of guilt, codependency, or impatience, you inherit a fraction of their karmic load. This isn’t punishment, it’s cosmic recalibration. It forces you to see your own shadow, your lack of boundaries, your need to interfere.

🧠 The wounded healer trap

Many who come to “learn to hold space” carry the wounded healer archetype (Chiron).

If you weren’t supported as a child, you might compulsively try to save others now. If your worth was tied to being useful, you confuse identity with helping.

“Let me carry this for you…”

is rarely true compassion. It’s often an echo of your own unmet wounds.

🪔 Jung, shadow work & the dark night

Carl Jung wrote that individuation, becoming whole only happens through integrating shadow and the unconscious.

When you “help” someone bypass their dark night, you actually:

• Block their shadow integration

• Become a crutch that delays their authentic emergence

You can’t walk their underworld for them.

You can only stand as a torchbearer.

🔄 Projection: The favorite tool of the unconscious

So when someone calls you “ego-driven” for holding space, it might be their own shadow speaking.

• A person afraid of anger may say “you’re too aggressive.”

• A person afraid of weakness may call you “too intimidating.”

They’re not seeing you. They’re seeing fragments of themselves they cannot yet own.

Your task?

• Don’t take it personally.

• Name it: “That doesn’t feel like mine.”

• Return the energy with clear, loving boundaries.

💎 Real help is raw, patient, and uncomfortable

Holding space is not taking space.

It’s not managing someone’s emotions so you can feel good about yourself.

It means:

• Letting them fail, struggle, rise on their own timeline.

• Witnessing without fixing, judging, or hijacking their process.

• Asking yourself: “Am I helping from love, or from my discomfort?”

Because Saturn will mirror it back to you.

If you try to “save” someone meant to climb their own mountain, you may find your own growth delayed.

Not as punishment, but as a painful invitation to evolve.

⚔️ The unpopular truth

So to those who come seeking my guidance on how to hold space:

Know that this path is not glamorous.

It’s not an escape from your pain.

It is an intimate dance with your shadow.

I will teach you. I will guide you.

But only if you are willing to confront the parts of yourself that long to be a savior, to control outcomes, to avoid the discomfort of watching another bleed.

Because real holding space means becoming so rooted in your own wholeness that you can trust another soul’s journey without needing to direct it.

❤️‍🔥 If reading this made you defensive, triggered, or plotting a clever comeback…

Good.

That’s shadow knocking.

Invite it in for tea.

Because until you can hold space for your own discomfort, your own projections, your own ache to be needed you have no business holding it for someone else.

And that’s not ego talking.

That’s just truth.