How to Hold Space for Yourself | A Guided Meditation for Emotional Support
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Most of Us Were Never Taught How to Be With Ourselves When Things Are Hard
Most of us were never really taught how to be with ourselves when things are hard.
We were taught how to cope, how to push through, how to keep going, how to talk ourselves out of what we were feeling, how to minimize it, override it, spiritualize it, or quietly judge it as something we should have already “figured out.” Many of us learned very early on that certain feelings were inconvenient, embarrassing, or burdensome to others, and so we adapted by learning how to carry them alone.
Over time, this becomes so normal that we don’t even recognize it as loneliness. It just feels like the norm.
And yet, when I look at my own life and at the lives of the people I work with, what I see again and again is that so much of our suffering doesn’t actually come from the emotions themselves. It comes from the experience of being inside those emotions without any sense of support, safety, or companionship. It comes from feeling like there is no one there with us… Not even ourselves.
Holding space for yourself is a different way of being with your inner world
It’s a way of learning how to stay with yourself when things feel tender, confusing, overwhelming, or painful, instead of disappearing, tightening, intellectualizing, or turning against yourself in those moments. It’s a way of building an inner relationship that says, again and again, “I’m here with you. I’m not going anywhere just because this is uncomfortable.”
When people begin to relate to themselves this way, something very real starts to soften and reorganize inside.
The inner world begins to feel less like a problem that has to be managed and more like a living place that can be listened to and cared for. There is often more gentleness, more emotional breathing room, and more capacity to feel what is true without immediately becoming overwhelmed by it. Over time, many people begin to notice a growing sense that they are no longer constantly bracing against themselves, and that there is a quiet, steady feeling of being on their own side.
It is, in my experience, one of the most deeply healing shifts we can make.
What It Means to Hold Space for Yourself
Holding space for yourself means creating a compassionate, nonjudgmental, and supportive inner environment where you can fully acknowledge and be with your emotions, sensations, and experiences. It’s a kind process of deeply listening to and honoring your feelings, acknowledging and validating your needs, and bringing the full depth and breadth of your capacity for love inward, toward yourself.
In everyday life, this means learning how to stay present with what is happening inside you without immediately trying to fix it, analyze it, override it, or make it go away. It means letting yourself feel anxious without attacking yourself for being anxious. Letting yourself feel sad without telling yourself you should be over it. Letting yourself feel tired without immediately forcing yourself to push harder.
In the way I often guide this work, it begins by connecting with the heart, not just as a metaphor, but as a real, embodied source of steadiness and support. From that place, you gently turn toward whatever is asking for your attention, whether that is anxiety, grief, self-doubt, old pain, or a part of you that feels unsure or overwhelmed.
This way, you’re no longer meeting your pain from inside your pain. You’re meeting it from a more grounded, more compassionate place within yourself. You are not trying to get rid of what you are feeling, and you are not being swallowed by it. You are learning how to accompany yourself through it.
And that changes the entire experience.
The Heart as a Source of Wisdom and Support
The heart is a powerful place to do this kind of inner work from, and not just in a poetic sense.
Research from The HeartMath Institute has shown that the heart has its own complex nervous system and plays a central role in how the body organizes itself in response to stress and emotion. The heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart, and when you slow your breathing and gently bring your attention to the heart area, many people notice that their nervous system begins to settle into a more coherent, regulated state.
From here, thinking often becomes clearer, emotions feel more workable, and inner reactions feel less intense. Many people also experience the heart as a place that naturally holds more patience, kindness, and perspective than the mind does when it is stressed or afraid.
When you meet your struggles from this place, they are being held in a very different inner environment, one that has more warmth, more spaciousness, and more capacity to include what is here without immediately trying to change it.
From Managing Yourself to Loving Yourself
So many of us learned, consciously or unconsciously, how to suffer quietly.
We learned how to be “low maintenance,” how to not take up too much emotional space, how to keep our struggles private, and how to take care of ourselves by being tough with ourselves. We learned how to manage our inner lives rather than tend to them, how to override our needs, and how to keep going even when something inside us was exhausted or hurting.
A lot of our adult patterns still live inside that atmosphere.
Holding space for yourself begins to change this. It’s a way of turning toward the parts of you that learned to cope alone and saying, “You don’t have to do this by yourself anymore.” It’s a way of building an inner relationship that feels attuned, responsive, and trustworthy.
This is how self-love becomes something lived rather than something we try to talk ourselves into. It is how safety begins to grow inside. It is how the parts of you that have been bracing, protecting, or overfunctioning begin to feel seen and included instead of judged or pushed aside.
How Holding Space For Yourself Gently Changes Your Inner World
When you regularly meet yourself in this way, your inner world often begins to feel more welcoming and less adversarial.
Your nervous system doesn’t have to stay on high alert. Your emotions don’t have to escalate in order to be noticed. Your inner critic doesn’t have to work as hard to keep you “in line.” There’s often less internal conflict and more internal cooperation, less bracing and more softness, less self-surveillance and more self-trust.
Over time, many people develop something very precious: a sense of inner belonging. A felt knowing that whatever arises inside them, there is a place within that can meet it with patience, honesty, and care.
Holding space for yourself is not something you perfect. It is a relationship you grow over time, through practice, missteps, remembering, forgetting, and returning again and again. And for many people, it becomes one of the most meaningful ways they learn to come home to themselves.
Try the Guided Meditation to Hold Space For Yourself now!
Episode timing:
00:00 - The healing power of learning to hold space for yourself
05:30 - Guided Meditation to Hold Space For Yourself
30:50 - Conclusion and reflections
If this kind of gentle, body-based healing speaks to you, I’d love to invite you into Somatic Healing Hub - my membership community where we practice this work together.
With live classes, workshops, and coaching you’ll:
Create a steady rhythm of nervous system regulation, so you can feel calmer, clearer, and more grounded in daily life
Gently process the emotions held in your body, instead of getting stuck in reactivity, overwhelm, or shutdown
Break free from chronic stress patterns by addressing what’s underneath - not just managing the surface
Reclaim your attention from spiraling thoughts or anxiety, and reconnect with what your body is truly asking for
Feel supported and not alone, inside a community that honors your sensitivity and your pace
BONUS: You’ll also get AD-FREE ACCESS to my entire podcast library! (Somatic Healing Meditations)
How did that Meditation to Hold Space for Yourself feel to you?
What shifted within? And what was it like to look at your struggle through the perspective of your heart?
Please let me know in the comments!
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And please join me every Friday on this beautiful journey out of your head, and into your more embodied and authentic self. 🩷🩷🩷
Thanks so much for joining me today!
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Enjoy more like this: Somatic Emotional Processing, Embodied Self-Love Series, Self-Compassion Exercises
About me
Hey, I’m Karena!
I’m a somatic emotional healing coach here to help you quickly identify and heal the subconscious blocks, old emotional wounds and self-sabotaging core beliefs that are holding you back!
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