I sat with pain.
Not to solve it.
Not to scream through it.
Not to write about it.
Not even to understand it.
I just… sat.
No crying.
No proving.
No pushing through.
For the first time in my life,
I did cry.
I didn’t run.
I didn’t explain.
I didn’t perform.
I did not protect or defend or try to be right.
Not healed.
Not whole.
Just here.
I stayed.
I abided.
And in that staying, in that abiding, something ancient and unfamiliar occurred—
Not peace, not clarity, not relief.
But presence.
A kind of stillness so full, it almost felt like noise.
But it wasn’t noise.
It was the sound of pain being allowed to be.
I didn’t know it then, but what I was doing had a name.
Or at least, it needed one.
We talk often about metacognition—thinking about our thinking.
We talk about self-regulation, emotional intelligence, even meta-emotion—our ability to name and manage how we feel.
But this… wasn’t that.
This wasn’t reflection.
This wasn’t management.
This was a kind of affective abidance—
The act of remaining with the raw emotional experience, without judgment, without redirection, without agenda.
It was not healing.
It was not breakthrough.
It was dwelling.
I was staying present with the emotion—
Not reacting to it,
Not regulating it,
Not resolving it,
Not even naming it.
It’s not a technique.
It’s not a performance.
It’s not even clarity.
It’s a kind of reverent stillness.
The moment when you no longer try to outpace, remove, or suppress your pain—
you just sit beside it.
What is Affective Abidance?
Affective abidance is the willingness to stay present in the middle of emotional pain—not to understand it, but to let it exist.
It is not detachment.
It is not even witnessing in the way we often describe in mindfulness circles.
It is being with, not thinking about.
It is when the body says:
“I will not abandon myself here.”
And it is the first time I have ever done this.
Not in the middle of fight-or-flight.
Not in performance mode or protector mode or academic mode.
This time, I didn't flinch.
This time, I looked pain in the eye and said,
You are allowed to stay.
Where in the Sp*ral Am I?
In my personal and professional work, I often describe growth as a spiral—not a circle or loop.
We don’t revisit the same pain because we’ve failed.
We revisit it because we are seeing it from a higher level - even if ever so slightly higher.
A more capacious place.
A different energetic frequency.
I am not the Celina of last year.
That version of me would have fought or fled.
This version?
She abides.
She holds the pain like a teacher, not a threat.
If I were mapping this onto the spiral of transformation—3, 6, 9—this would not be the 3 of creation, or the 6 of friction.
This moment lives in the space between 6 and 9.
It is the pause before integration.
The breath between breakdown and becoming.
It is not alchemy yet.
But it is what makes alchemy possible.
The Spiral Butterfly
I were mapping this onto the spiral of transformation—
3, 6, 9—in another way
I would not be the 3 of creation,
the caterpillar just beginning to feel the longing for more.
And I would not be the 6 of friction,
deep inside the cocoon—
where everything softens, dissolves, disorients.
Where what was known collapses into formlessness.
No.
I am in the moment between the cocoon and the butterfly.
Between the 6 and the 9.
The body has broken down.
The old shape is gone.
But the new form is not yet fully emerged.
I am not in flight.
Not yet.
I am in the ache of almost.
In the stillness of not this and not yet that.
In the breath held between being and becoming.
It is not alchemy yet.
But it is the atmosphere in which alchemy gathers.
The sacred pause before integration.
The space where you feel your wings before you move them.
This is affective abidance.
Not strength, not clarity—
but presence in the in-between.
The butterfly will come.
The 9 will arrive.
But not by force.
Only by staying here long enough
for the wings to remember how to open.
Why This Matters (To Me, To You, To Leadership)
We talk so much about clarity, confidence, courage.
But do we know how to sit in contradiction?
Do we know how to hold emotion without fixing it?
Do we know how to say:
“This, too, is part of me. And I’m not moving.”
In a world that values action, abidance feels like failure.
But it is not.
It is the deepest kind of sovereignty.
It says:
I don’t need to perform this pain.
I don’t need to control this grief.
I don’t need to be strong or right or wise.
I just need to stay.
And in staying, I become whole.
If you are reading this and feel like you’re looping back to old wounds,
old patterns,
old emotions—
Let me offer this:
You are not looping.
You are spiralling.
And you may be further along than you think.
Sometimes the most radical act isn’t movement or clarity.
Sometimes it’s the moment when you stop everything,
look at your pain without fear,
and say—
“I see you, and I’m not going anywhere.”
That moment?
That’s where transformation begins.
Not in fire.
Not in flight.
But in stillness.
In affective abidance.