Explorations on Liminal Space
Liminal: 1. Relating to transitional or initial stage of a process. 2. Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. Oxford English Dictionary (2020)
Threshold
by Maggie Smith
You want a door you can be
on both sides of at once.
You want to be
on both sides of here
and there, now and then,
together and—(what
did we call the life
we would wish back?
The old life? The before?)
alone. But any open
space may be
a threshold, an arch
of entering and leaving.
Crossing a field, wading
through nothing
but timothy grass,
imagine yourself passing from
and into. Passing through
doorway after
doorway after doorway.
“A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.
At this threshold a great complexity of emotions comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossing were always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds; to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.” - John O’Donohue
Liminality is the space within which metamorphosis is encoded.
-Tom Gunning
The following are some of the contemplations that I am entertaining and embodying during my current period of transition:
What does it look like to move through transition without resistance?
What does it feel like to be at home in the journey - not rushing to feel the certainty of arrival? To live more in a state of liminality?
— It seems there is a continual invitation to awakening in each moment (as in Smith’s poem). A threshold at each breath. There are doorways opening to an ever deepening mystery if we choose to stay with the tension of loosening our fixation with how things have been.What is the moment to moment felt sense of a heart breaking?
Can I feel impulses, movements, sensations of regeneration?
How can I more thoughtfully ritualize elements of this liminal journey?
Is it true that I need a physical representation to aid this death/rebirthing process.
Where/what in my life symbolizes a tomb/womb?Reflecting on periods I’ve had of deep depression of the existential variety. I can see now that they were times that I was in the maw of a liminal descent. I feel myself now become curious about instances when a) I chose to stay with the discomfort and b) when the emptiness/uncertainty was more than I thought I could safely bear.
What does paradoxical tension feel like?
I find myself clarify/qualify this question of paradoxical tension by adding “when orienting from the rational mind.”
This begs the question - What does paradoxical tension feel like or more to the point maybe, does it exist, in embodiments of places outside/beyond the rational mind?“Betwixt and between” - what do these words enliven in me?
Richard Rohr says “Without standing on the threshold for much longer than we’re comfortable with, we won’t be able to see beyond ourselves to the broader world around us.” and “If we are able to stand it and stay there, liminality is likely to induce an inner crisis.” WTF and LOL. I’m certain that the escape from the inner crisis is to rest in open, boundary-less Awareness. Such an orientation has no inner and no outer and no “me” from which to freak out.
There’s something else here too though, about not escaping. Instead, offering myself to be voluntarily displaced in the discomfort.Christians talk about “voluntary displacement”. Henri Nouwen on the subject: “Through voluntary displacement, we counteract the tendency to become settled in a false comfort and to forget the fundamentally unsettled position that we share with all people. Voluntary displacement leads us to the existential recognition of our inner brokenness and thus brings us to a deeper solidarity with the brokenness of our fellow human beings.” I spend a lot of time looking at our shared, inherent wholeness - what is it to look more regularly at our shared suffering?
I also understand voluntary displacement to mean moving out of the habit of striving for comfortable all the time to sitting with the cracked/broken/uncomfortable places (“it is our wounds, not our worthiness that unlock doorways to the divine” -Radnor).
To voluntarily enter a situation or a contemplation where your typical worldview will likely be shocked into a transformation.Am I willing to allow dissolution of the previously held identity?
Sitting with these words: “takes place outside the realm of the profane, inside the crucible of the sacred.” Oh the stars that reside in my gut are twinkling at “crucible of the sacred”. Definitely need to rest here for a bit.
What part does crisis/loss play in opening more fully to liminality?
What part does wonder/awe/love play in opening more fully to liminality?
Sitting with felt sense of: regeneration, suspension, death, rebirth, erosion, dissolving.
What is it to stay in the tension of becoming?
What is my relationship with ambiguity?
What is the correlation between liminality and Presence? Liminality and Truth?
Imagery meditations on - Crumbling mountains. Burning maps. Body turning to sand and being blown away by the wind.
What a strange gift this discomfort is. Neither completely here nor there. No longer what I was, and yet, unable to see what comes next. I feel-hear a disquieting hum in the tension of this liminal space and sense that the key to embodying the sacredness of this transformation is to stay in the tension.
So I stay. The ego is antsy to solidify, return to established boundaries - this feels at times like anxiety, at other times like fear. In other moments, the unknown beckons so strongly. I fall back into it, expand as it, and am held in the boundless unbecome.
I watch my mind have definite preferences and opinions about these experiences.
When I stay with it, the disquieting hum, I sense that it is a vibration of erosion; shaking that within me which has concretized. I feel it loosening my grip on certainties like how things are and how things should be. In this liminal phase, my old ways of understanding don’t work - which I think is what can propel a person deeper into fear and disorientation. What’s a person to do when the old structures can no longer be trusted to help them navigate?
As I stay longer and longer with the eroding vibration of this liminal place, I’m finding myself quite naked, vulnerable, willingly open to the point of ache (Gate gate paragate). The phrase “naked before god” pops into my mind and I’m trying to remember some long ago mystic* who may have written about this…
And so it goes. It is true that I have had powerful, meaningful and lasting awakening experiences. It is also true that some ego structures have always come back online. I sense that this is an opportunity to let myself be wretched and wrecked. In my current state of liminality, there is an invitation to face a new level of (ego-perceived) annihilation willingly.
Strange what a gift this brokenness is turning out to be.
*found her: The medieval mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg (c. 1212–c. 1282)
In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, are doors.
-William Blake