What are Liminal Spaces?

Liminal spaces are moments in time, life experiences, seasons that offer a transformation by the nature of them being transitional. It's that space between the old thing and the new thing, the thing that was and the thing that could be.

By nature, the liminal spaces come with a sense of uncertainty. So liminal spaces are often turbulent. They can be highly emotionally charged. There can be a great deal of uncertainty, of feeling unsafe in our body.
Maybe we feel confused or lost, disorientated, disillusioned. Maybe we don't even know how we feel.

By nature of having all these emotionally, volatile experiences, we can often end up feeling in a space of fear. And what do we want do as human beings when we feel fear? We want not to feel it anymore. We wanna get out of the other side, pass through it as quickly as humanly possible. Of course, on top of that, we've got the fact that our brain doesn't want us to feel unsafe. So our brain is always literally fighting for our safety.

We've got the value tag that society offers that says, hey just keep progressing. Just keep being productive. Just keep moving. Time's a healer. You'll be okay. Pull your pants up.

We Give Ourselves a Tiny Bit of TIme

We might offer ourselves a tiny bit of time.

"I'll  just give myself a week or a month or maybe a couple of months at tops just to kind of get over it, and then I can just get on with it."

But what does that really create for us? Well, first of all, it doesn't put us in any kind of position where we can learn to feel safe in the difficult emotions. We don't learn how we create our own certainty even if everything around us is uncertain. We don't learn to understand more about ourselves.

Liminal spaces for me are an expression or experience of not living a flat line life because we're willing to go into them. We're willing to understand that the that what they offer in this transitional space between where we've just come from and where we might be going, but we don't know yet, we don't have to fear it.

It can actually be the most incredible space to be in, and we can experience the transformation that's on offer.

My Invitation to You

I want to offer you today,  that instead of seeing liminal spaces as this space of turbulence and uncertainty, that you just need to get through it, what if instead you saw the liminal space that you're in, the season you're in, as an invitation to pause, to literally just stop.

Now I know as a recovering alpha female, and most of my community the same, that the hardest part of this journey, in my opinion, is giving ourselves a mission to actually just stop.
It's not even the the process of the stopping. It's all of the head chatter that will come along with giving yourself permission to just be in the liminal space rather than focusing your brain on how do I get out?

Where's my escape route? Which direction should I swim in? Where can I run to? It takes a lot of courage and a lot of different mental and emotional conversation to allow yourself not just to be in the liminal space, but to also lean in and raise awareness of what learning is available to you in that space so that you can have the ultimate transformation.

It also gives us an opportunity to practice dropping from our head into our heart and really learning about ourselves. One of the things I've really worked hard to practice in the liminal space that I'm in, which has been created through many different things, you know, house moving, dealing with a daughter with mental health issues, my dad dying of cancer, hitting perimenopause, is looking at that word perimenopause and really focusing on the pause.

I have to take this I have to take this opportunity to pause right now because I don't have the emotional, physical, or mental availability to get through this anymore. I I literally felt like I hit a wall. I didn't want to feel like I'd just laid down and said I've got nothing left.

I want to be active in my participation of nothingness.
I want to be in the experience of the pausing.

The the biggest part of that process is continuing to lean in from the incessant noise in our brain that comes from our conditioning and our societal, you know, shoulds and tapping into the somatic awareness. The wisdom, the knowledge is contained within our body so that we can reach a deeper truth.

I also feel that when we see the liminal spaces as this invitation to journey the transition in order to create the transformation, it allows us to take the time to choose a direction.

Redefining Direction

I don't mean direction necessarily as in a forward movement. Like, I have to go from here to here. Maybe the direction is I need to double down on my self love. Maybe the direction is I wanna learn more about what my body's got available to me. I wanna use this space to do some more healing. I wanna use this space to create art. I wanna use this space to find out actually, what lights me up in this season of my life.

So it allows us even just to be curious about what direction even looks like rather than being swept up on what we've always done or the shoulds or what other people tell us that we should be doing?

I like to think of liminal spaces as an opportunity for a magical, soul filled, wisdom fueled, higher self orchestrated transformation versus coming out the same coming out the other side as the same person just with more scars.

Not every liminal space has to be something that is filled with difficult emotions in terms of, as an example, like grief or sadness or uncertainty.

Maybe the liminal Space is you've decided to move country, but it's still a space of transition. Right?  So I want you to just be encouraged. If you're in a season right now that has any level of uncertainty, a level of turbulence, a level of unsafety in your body that you get to choose, You get to pause. You get to go deeper rather than thinking that progress is about moving forward.

You get to divorce yourself from society's obsession with progression and achievement and attainment and go, this could be an opportunity to have a transformation that I couldn't logically create with my own brain. Like, this is bigger than that. This is bigger than my brain.  

Optional Actions

If you would like to actually put some action into place from what we've been talking about, here's a few questions for you to use as a guide or something to journal on or contemplate.

#1 What liminal space do you find yourself in right now? And it's okay if you can't define it. It's okay if you just feel like, I feel like I'm in a transition, and I don't really know why. That's okay. What's your experience right now?

#2 What thought do you need to practice so you can start to access the magic of the liminal space? My one, was it safe for me to keep letting go, and it's safe for me to be still. I was so driven to keep moving and to keep doing stuff that I had to make it okay for me to be doing nothing.

#3 What does this look like in action? How do you create that thought?

Just giving yourself some different ways to practice the concept of liminal space will reward you on all levels. It will generate more ideas and options and help you keep accessing your innate wisdom and highest truth. ❤️