Liminal Space
The Ultimate Teachable Space
It is when we are betwixt and between, have left one room but not yet entered the next room…
A friend graciously gave me some feedback on my website recently. She was not quite sure what was meant by the term “liminal space” that I had used to describe a place that potential clients might find themselves and want help exploring together.
She came across this description of liminal spaces from Richard Rohr, priest, spiritual author and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico:
“It is when we are betwixt and between, have left one room but not yet entered the next room, any hiatus between stages of life, stages of faith, jobs, loves or relationships. It is that graced time when we are not certain or in control, when something genuinely new can happen…Much of the work of human destiny itself is to get people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough to learn something essential and genuinely new. It is the ultimate teachable space.”
I like this description very much. It captures the place where I have been a considerable amount of time in recent years. It’s not a comfortable space and there were many times while in the midst of it that I resisted and resented being there. Yet, there was absolutely no way that I could hurry the process, no matter how much I tried. I wasn’t ready, time had not ripened me to point of being ready to move forward; I had more to learn. Beginning with the notion that I was not in control.
When the pandemic hit it and the world grounded to halt for those many confusing and chaotic months, I had already been in the liminal space for a few years. I had naively thought that 2020 would be my year to finally step into whatever was next for me. But as the weeks and months wore on, it became crystal clear to me that the greatest lesson to be learned from what we were collectively going through was that we had very little control over that tiny virus that was wreaking havoc across the globe. In truth, it’s an illusion that we are ever in control.
And so, I settled into the uncertainty once again and dug deeper into what would be my teachable space. In many ways, the preceding years of questioning and seeking had led me to discover helpful works from others that had crossed this space before. Fortunately, it is not an unusual human experience and the collective wisdom that has grown out of such phases has been captured and well documented over the ages.
I learned was that it was much less painful to embrace that which I could not change, and to surrender to my experience in all its complexity and discomfort. It truly was my best teacher, or what the Buddhists term - my sadhana or spiritual practice.
Most of us are intensely uncomfortable in the face of change, especially major life changes such as changing jobs or careers, or ending a relationship, moving to a new home or a new community. It is unsettling, and we feel lost, unmoored. It can take a while before we start to find our footing and feel comfortable in our skin again. There is a lot to process.
All the above factors were in play for me in the years preceding the pandemic. In addition to that, I was dealing with an injury and physical pain that limited my ability to depend on my coping mechanism of exercise and taking to nature for healing. So, as things would conspire for me, I was forced to develop other ways of managing it all. Part of that meant leaning into the pain and going toward it, rather than escape it as I wanted to. There is truth in the saying that the only way out is through.
In Life Coach training we learned about what Martha Beck calls the change cycle. It is comparable to what a caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly. It turns out, that cocoon stage is very important and without that time period in which the caterpillar turns into goo and rearranges (reimagines) itself, it cannot emerge as an entirely new creature. Even then, it takes time for the butterfly to gain the strength of its wings before it can take flight.
I remember when I was first introduced to the change cycle and recognized that I had the “symptoms” of being in Square One, I felt despair. It seemed I had already spent much time in that liminal space of not knowing and I wanted to be done with it. Yet, I also learned that there is no set time for the stages and that we can’t move on to the next until we complete each one.
There is power in knowing and understanding what we’re going through and why it’s an important part of our personal evolution. The good news is that there are many things that we can do to support ourselves during each of the stages. Looking back over our lives, we see these cycles have been repeated many times over.
For me, the most important lesson of the last few years has been to stay in the present moment. To remember to breathe and return to myself. To trust that in this moment, I am safe, and I am connected to the earth and to my inner knowing. So far, Life continues to hold and support me in these moments. And as my mother always said in times of distress; this too shall pass.
