There are some things on my mind and more on my heart. I’m a bit distracted by love island right now and won’t bore you with the gushy details. I'm getting ready today to take the RV to a pretty lake and cook dinner with a man I like very much.

I wear a pretty skirt just because, and I'm reminded how special this stage is with someone. I hope it lasts forever.

Liminal space

I’m thinking today about what it really means to be in the liminal. We talked about it at church this weekend. It got me thinking, I wouldn’t classify myself as in the liminal today. I’m doing things. I’m doing things I just have to stick with. But I was just weeks ago. I actually find myself more comfortable in the liminal. I’ve always said I love being in the space of possibility and potential.

The goal, the efforts, of spiritual people, people who make a life of living and being with the Divine, sit in the liminal more than most.

Liminal space is that place between one stage of life and before you’ve entered the next. The Latin origin, limen, means a threshold.

We don’t often willingly go into liminal space. Most of us are shoved into it. By the death of a friend or parent. By the loss of a job. By a global pandemic. Something is changing, something big. Something that affects our being. It’s not comfortable being in liminal space. It’s the long, eerie hallway. You don’t see a chair, and you’re not sure where or when it ends.

Losing my job and finding toxic mold in my house just earlier this year put me into the liminal. Forced me. I’m often forced into the liminal by the universe, especially when I try to do “normal”.

The void is somewhere in here too. Coming either before or after. It’s the door entering and exiting the hallway. It’s emptiness and transformation. It’s death and rebirth. It’s being in front of the face of God.

For spiritual growth

You have to have liminal space for spiritual growth. It’s why the mystics sit in liminal space. It’s why spiritual people just live here. They’re connected to the place more than most. They find a comfort in having their being changed and altered consistently. That’s what liminal space does. It alters your being. It’s the space that allows our expansion.

Liminal space is the place that transforms you into being like a lone tree on a windy mountain top rather than a small cottage in the valley. One is comfortable. The other is epic.

You have to have your being challenged and changed on the spiritual path. On the human path. If you want to do anything of your desire, big desire, you better be ready to be changed. That’s the spiritual path. That’s spiritual growth, even if we want to call it something else. If you even make one big change of your being in this lifetime, from say a hateful person to a loving one, that’s freaking huge. That’s life’s work that benefits you now and into the next lifetime. Your soul thanks you from and for the liminal.

The liminal lets us become an erased tablet waiting for new words.

Liminal space is good for us for this reason, for the potential for change and transformation, yes, but because we are most teachable here. Most humble here. An event like the death of a parent requires us to struggle with the hidden side of things, and it calls normal reality into creative question.

I’ve been through A LOT of change in my life. My father transitioning into a woman put me in a liminal space for years. I was in the void for a lot of it, too, and I suffered there ( you don’t actually have to suffer in the void). I’ve lost jobs twice over the last 5 years. I moved around 6 times while I lived in Colorado. I was just called to stay in the liminal. It was like the universe kept putting a small fire under my seat. I would sit long enough, because I just wanted to sit, that I would burn my butt a bit, and then have to jump up out like, okay, I’ll keep going!

Authentic spirituality and human development is to get people here and keep them there long enough to learn something essential and new.

St. Francis, Gandhi, and John Wesley (the principal leader of the Methodist movement) are just some of the people who sat in permanent liminality on the edge of the dominant culture. The in-between place is free of illusions and false payoffs. It reminds me of all those tech people who leave their jobs after they drink ayahuasca (I was not one of them. I did Iboga, LOL).

Liminal space allows us to live from a broader perspective with deeper seeing. It expands our consciousness for that time where we can be truly cognizant of where we were, where we are, and where we are going. Sometimes we have to deliberately falter to understand different dimensions of life.

If lives were to stay the same and not change, we would be robots. Gurdjieff talks about “being asleep”. You stay asleep. It’s easy to live our lives in a mechanical, automatic way. Gurdjieff talked about creating “friction” to get up out of this sleep. I would say he’s talking about the same thing the mystics did. The friction Gurdjieff prescribes creates a kind of liminal space on purpose. It forces you out of the comfort of mechanical sleep and into the threshold where transformation can occur.

Both beg us to get out of the usual autopilot flow, feel unsettled, uncomfortable, stretched, and remove our old reference points.

These spaces allow us to say what am I doing and why. And it takes time to come back from this. It’s not a weekend adventure. It’s a months, sometimes years long space. But in the end, we reenter the world with free and new and creative approaches to life. Where we can voluntarily enter into a world where rules and expectations are different.

And where we return to ordinary life carrying a deeper steadiness, knowing that the in-between is not a detour but the very ground of transformation, growth, and story arc for our lives

Love,
Val

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