SUPPORT

" There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reftlects it."

- Edith Wharton

Support is holding up from underneath. You support someone when you willingly step forward to strengthen, energize, and help her through a challenging time. Yet the great irony is that when you support others, you are also, in fact, supporting yourself. When you withhold support from others, it is usually an indicator that you are also withholding support from yourself.

When I train people to become facilitators of my workshop, the primary thing I teach them is to be aware of how much their support of the individual workshop participant mirrors their own issues. If a facilitator is having difficulty supporting a participant who is expressing rage, it is a good sign that he or she is not supporting his or her own tolerance of or personal tendency toward rage. If a facilitator cannot support someone developing her sense of inner power that is getting in the way. This is not unlike the training of psychoanalysts, in which they use their own reactions to patients as mirrors in which the patients can view themselves.

We are most often called upon to support others in friendship. One of my facilitators, Donna, told me a story recently that clearly illustrates the magic of support and its potential as an emotional mirror. Several years ago, donna had been feeling very depressed. She had just broken up with her boyfriend of two years, and she was having a very difficult time accepting the loss. She had been laid up with a knee injury for several days, and the time alone at home certainly was not helping. Her misery was only compounded by her frustration at herself for not being able to "pull it together" and stop crying all the time.

Early one morning,Donna received a phone call with some terrible news: her bestfriend's brother had been killed in a car accident. Donna had known this friend, Mary Ann, and her brother nearly her entire life, and the news was devastating. However, Donna quickly pulled herself together, got in the car, and drove to her friend's house to be there with her.

Over the course of the next few days, amidst the haze of the funeral and hundreds of visitors, Donna was 100 percent present for Mary Ann. she held her close while she cried endless tears, sat by her side as the waves of grief washed over her friend, and slept on the floor next to Mary Ann's bed to make sure she did not wake up alone in the middle of the night. During that time she hardly felt any pain in her knee at all and none of the depression she had been experiencing.

Several weeks later, when life began to return to normal, Donna realized that the level of support she had given Mary ann far exceeded any support she had offered herself during her dark time. She was able to use the support she had given her friend as a mirror for the support she had been witholding from herself. SHe realized that her own tears required as much attention and nurturing from her as anyone else's, and that if she could give it to another, she must be able to also give it to herself.

When you find yourself unable to support someone else, look within and see if perhaps there is something within yourself that you are not supporting. Conversely, when you give complete support to others, it will mirror those places within you that require the same level of attention.