Why Presence Matters More Than Resolution
The Ache to Be Healed
We live in a world that rushes to repair.
There’s always a method.
A mindset.
A way to reframe the ache into something more… manageable.
But sometimes, what we need isn’t healing.
It’s holding.
Not answers, but arms.
Not progress, but presence.
I didn’t learn this in a book.
I learned it while holding my son.
There was a time I would’ve tried to fix it—talk him out of the tears, find a solution, turn the moment into a teaching.
But I’ve lived enough now to ask a different question:
How can I help?
And one day, not long ago, he answered without thinking:
“Just hold me.”
So I did.
I didn’t reach for a tool or a truth.
I just listened.
And stayed.
That moment taught me more than a thousand strategies ever could.
The Myth of Resolution
We’ve made healing a destination.
A proof of progress.
A badge for public display.
But not everything that hurts is ready to be resolved.
Some pain needs to be remembered before it can be released.
Some sorrow needs witness, not wisdom.
In many traditions, holding is the ritual.
In Judaism, we sit shiva—seven days of sacred stillness.
In the Celtic soul-friend tradition, anam cara means showing up without needing to fix.
In Tamil homes, children are allowed to weep into laps and shoulders. Not punished. Not rushed.
Gathered.
But I wasn’t raised that way.
Though I am Tamil, I was shaped by the fracture inherited two generations deep—
when tradition began losing ground to the promises of western capitalism.
My parents bore that shift. The old world had loosened its grip, and the new one arrived without grace.
Care became currency. Emotion became inefficiency.
So they numbed.
And I inherited the silence.
What It Means to Be Held
To be held is not just to be touched—
it is to be trusted with your own tenderness.
It is the sacred reversal of survival:
where once you had to carry everything alone,
now someone says, “You don’t have to right now.”
To be held is to be given back to yourself.
No expectation to perform your pain.
No urgency to recover fast.
No story to tidy.
Only breath.
Only presence.
When you are held, your nervous system remembers something ancient—
before betrayal, before betrayal’s betrayal,
before the scripts of strength written by those too wounded to hold.
To be held is to be seen in your most unarmored form
—and to be allowed to stay there.
It doesn’t mean the grief leaves.
It means you’re no longer alone in the room with it.
In some cultures, that room is built communally.
Through ritual, rhythm, collective weeping.
In others, it must be rebuilt from scratch—
stone by stone, moment by moment,
as we unlearn a lifetime of solitude.
Sometimes, holding is a hand that doesn’t move.
Sometimes it’s silence that doesn’t fill.
Sometimes it’s presence that asks for nothing but your truth.
To be held is to have your ache welcomed,
not erased.
The Practice of Holding
To hold is to stay with what others step over.
It is a spiritual act.
- Holding self means sitting with your ache without reaching for distraction.
- Holding others means offering silence instead of solutions.
- Holding time means letting a moment breathe before moving on.
“I see this. I’m still here.”
That is the ministry.
Even now, I sometimes feel the pull to explain or ease.
To offer a tool, or a truth, or something wise that might help.
But the more I live, the more I return to this quiet truth:
Presence is enough.
And when it is, nothing else is needed.
Holding is not inaction.
It’s devotion disguised as stillness.
Presence Without Performance
“I act in this world, not for it.”
This isn’t about renouncing responsibility.
It’s about releasing performance.
To act for the world is to center visibility, approval, outcomes.
To act in the world is to center presence.
When everything becomes a performance—
a post, a strategy, a brand—
we forget how to simply be.
The one who holds does not perform.
The one who holds doesn’t need to be seen doing it.
The holder is here to remind us:
some things are sacred precisely because they are not public.
This is not detachment.
It’s devotion—quiet, steady, unseen.
This is leadership, too.
This is love.
The Healing That Follows Holding
Healing doesn’t always come with breakthroughs.
Sometimes it comes with breath.
When we are held—truly held—something softens.
Not everything at once. Not always visibly.
But slowly, the body begins to loosen its grip.
We name what hurt.
Not poetically. Not abstractly.
We call it what it was.
Control. Neglect. Disappearance.
The naming doesn’t trap us. It frees us.
And when we are safe enough,
we feel what had to stay buried to survive.
The anger that never had a voice.
The longing that never had a home.
Held long enough, we stop confusing the wound with the one who caused it.
We see the pattern—not just the person.
And in that clarity, compassion quietly returns.
We begin to ask new questions about loyalty.
Not “How do I keep the peace?”
But “What does peace cost me?”
And “Who do I become when I leave that story behind?”
Healing means rewriting the role, even when the cast doesn’t change.
We no longer beg to be understood.
We begin to understand ourselves.
And then—
sometimes in a moment, sometimes across years—
we mark the shift.
With a ritual.
A word.
A breath.
A scar that no longer stings, but still speaks.
A wound breaks you open. A scar makes you whole.
That’s the quiet miracle of being held:
It doesn’t erase the wound.
It makes space for a new shape to form.
A shape that remembers,
but no longer bleeds.
The Threshold of Return
Holding isn’t the end.
It’s the threshold.
It’s what makes return possible—
not as a retreat,
but as a reentry.
After the spark.
After the seeing.
After the spiral, the shift, the windows that opened and the soul that remembered—
comes the quiet decision:
Will I carry this presence back into the world?
To return doesn’t mean you’ve mastered the journey.
It means you’re willing to live inside it now—
awake, aware, and no longer alone.
Because we don’t heal in isolation.
We hold and are held.
And in that sacred reciprocity, something changes—
not just in us, but between us.
Held—not healed.
That is enough.
That is everything.
A Note for the One Carrying Too Much
If you’ve been holding your breath—
or your sadness—
or your silence—
this is your permission:
You don’t have to fix it first.
You don’t have to name it perfectly.
You don’t even have to understand it.
Just set it down for a moment.
And let yourself be held.