Holding space doesn't exist.You can only hold what stands still. In a ritual nothing stands still.
"I hold the space" is the friendliest phrase in spiritual circles and the most wrong. It sounds modest, and it takes away from the people in the circle exactly what they came for. A teacher showed me this with a single question.
In spiritual and therapeutic circles, "holding space" describes the role of a person who creates a safe frame for a group without stepping in themselves. The phrase has travelled from English into every language of the scene.
It describes something that doesn't exist like that. You can hold what wants to stand still and might tip over: a rope, a ladder. In a ritual nothing stands still. What arises there is made continuously by the people present, and it stops as soon as they stop.
Do you know these sentences?
Every time, something snagged for me. I couldn't say anything about it. I had no argument and no better sentence, and when you're the only one in a circle bothered by something, the most obvious explanation is that you haven't understood it yet. For years I blamed myself.
You don't hold a space. You create one.
You can only hold what stands still. In a ritual nothing stands still. The leader draws the circle, step by step, with the three abilities every person brings.
- The fire: made, not held
- The leader creates the circle, step by step
- Awareness: where am I, where are the others
- Perception: who breathes how, who tips
- Intention: a line, where the circle goes
Who holds the space for the deer?
It was a fire ritual, shortly before the end. A participant said into the silence that she felt so safe because he was holding the space. She meant it, and she was right about what she felt. She had just picked up the word somewhere.
My teacher didn't contradict her. He didn't ask what she meant either. He set down his cup and asked a question that first drew a laugh in the circle and then a very long silence.
"You know deer. Who holds the space for the deer?"
A deer stands in a clearing, right out in the open, completely calm. It knows where it's safe. Not because it thinks about it, but because its awareness knows. Every animal on this earth lives like that.
How you notice that someone is holding you.
Holding rarely comes with pressure. It comes with the friendliest sentences there are, and usually the person means well. It's still a pattern. Eight of them, as they sound in the circle, and what's inside them.
None of these sentences makes someone a bad teacher. But each one gives away where the person stands: at the edge, with the grip in their hand. Once you've seen the pattern, you hear it everywhere, including in your own sentences. The three versions I wrote first myself contained four of them.
Why the word is wrong.
Holding requires two things. Something that stands still, and something that would tip over without a grip. A rope. A ladder. A ritual fulfils neither.
A fire isn't a thing, it's a process. It only exists as long as it burns, and you don't hold a process still, you keep it going. The circle is the same: what arises there is produced continuously by those present, together, and it ends the moment they stop. There's nothing anyone could hold on to for the others.
More important is where the word puts the person who uses it. The space holder stands at the edge. He delivers something invisible that nobody can check and without which supposedly nothing works. If the evening carries, it was his work. If it doesn't, the group wasn't ready yet. Indispensable and uninvolved in one word, and handed out in the friendliest tone the scene has to offer.
The price is paid elsewhere. A participant who feels something real and gets a word for it that makes another person responsible never learns that she made it herself. And that's exactly what she came for.
You can't hold a fire. You make it.
What happens instead.
You don't hold a space. You create one. The tools for that are three abilities, and this is where my second wrong word was: for a long time I spoke of my teacher's three "words" . They aren't words, they're abilities. Words can be repeated, abilities have to be practised.
Awareness
Takes you to where you are. Not in thought, but really there. It's the ability the deer in the clearing uses.
Perception
Shows you what is actually there. The warmth on your back, the faces, the crackle in the wood. Not what you expect, and not what someone told you.
Intention
Sets where it goes. Not as a wish, but as a direction. You can only create from the inside, and that's why the role the word was invented for doesn't exist.
What you can say instead.
Rejecting a word is cheap as long as you don't offer a better one. These aren't prettier, only more precise. Each sentence on the right gives what actually happened back to the people who made it.
An answer that passes the test is a sentence. Whoever describes a long process instead either hasn't thought it through or doesn't want to say. Both are an answer.
The best answer comes before you have to ask: at the start of the evening, once, for everyone. It sounds roughly like this: "The door is there all evening, and it belongs to you. If you need it, take a moment to check what sends you. That knowledge stays with you." At the door itself there's at most one question left, "What sends you?", and then a "Good". Whoever explains to you instead why stopping is usually a mistake has answered the question too.
These two questions are the core of the third book in the series, RITUALE. Wer holt dich zurück? (RITUALS) It sets out, for every single ritual, what matters.
Common questions.
Who writes this.
Andy Dittrich spent his working life in learning and development for organisations, in around thirty countries. He found the answer to his question somewhere else: with two indigenous shamans, in North America and in Mongolia, and with a teacher in the Moroccan desert. Around a hundred workshops, many years, always as a student.
You're born a shaman, he says, not made one by a weekend seminar. What he passes on is what was given to him at the fire, in the only form it ever had: as a story.
My intention with these pages: I share my knowledge so you can find the difference yourself. Between shamanic bullshit and something truly special.
You can't hold a fire. You make it.
The first one still rings.TROMMELSCHLAG (DRUMBEAT), the second book in the series. Out 25 October 2026, German edition.
The scene at the fire, the deer and what came after are told there in full. Twenty years, told by someone who walked the path.
To the book