What happens within us when who we have been begins to fall away, and something we cannot yet name begins to stir?
I had fully intended to begin my first blog writing about the cave, a space that has captivated me since childhood. From the caves of the natural world to the complex blanket forts built with my brothers, the marshland hideaways, and small enclosed spaces in my childhood bedroom, the cave held mystery, adventure, excitement, and sometimes fear. Over time, through my work in Jungian sandplay and my own personal exploration, the cave took on a profound psychological and spiritual significance. I have spent many hours studying, reflecting on, and writing about its symbolic presence in the landscape of the psyche.
Yet, as I approached writing this first blog, something else kept coming forward. Despite my intention to write about the cave, I found myself unable to begin. Something was calling for my attention, something I could not quite name. I was caught between what I had intended and what seemed to be emerging. As I stopped trying to think my way forward and began to listen, I recognized the space I was inhabiting. It was liminality, that mysterious space between what has been and what has not yet become. I began to realize that the liminal spaces I was experiencing in my own life were calling me to explore liminality itself!
As I sat with this, I realized that I am in a deep, lived experience of liminality right now, layers of literal and psychological spaces where I am not where I was or have been, and not yet where I am going. I have been immersed in this for a while now, thinking about the changes and transitions that are calling to me at this time in my life. Wondering what will be on the other side. Does this resonate?
I’d like to invite you in to explore liminality over the course of a series of of blogs. In this first writing, I want to open the way in to a deeper understanding of liminality and its presence in our lives.
What is liminality?
From a Jungian perspective, liminality offers the possibility that the psyche is already moving toward something new well before the conscious mind knows what it is. [[fn: C.G. Jung, General Aspects of Dream Psychology, in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, Volume 8.]] This captures the essence of the liminal space, that something within us may already be preparing to emerge, even before we consciously recognize it.
The word liminal comes from the Latin word, limen, which means threshold. When we imagine the image of a threshold, we can consider it as a place that is neither entirely here nor entirely there. We can even stand IN the threshold and have one foot here and the other foot there. The threshold is a place we cross as we move from one room, so to speak, to another, from one landscape into another, or from one way of being to another new way of being. I use the term often in helping people identify the space they sometimes find themselves during intensive psychological, emotional, and spiritual processes, that place between where they have known and where they have not yet arrived. This can be an uncomfortable, unfamiliar place. Yet many who come to understand that this is where they are, soon experience it in excitement and hope, along with the discomfort.
Liminal spaces are everywhere.
Everywhere we look, there are liminal spaces: in our psychological person, in the natural world, in our personal worlds. Literal liminal spaces in the natural world include the shoreline between land and sea, twilight between day and night, doorways, bridges, the edge of a forest, and yes, the mouth of a cave. I had to add that last one! (While I don’t go in depth regarding the cave in this blog series, I will at another time, for sure! ) In the work that I do in my office, the sandplay tray itself can be seen as a kind of threshold - a grounded physical place within which something belonging to the invisible interior world of my client becomes visible and embodied.
If we consider liminal space psychologically, it is the experience between identities or ways of being. I have recently asked myself: If I am not a therapist, who am I? This comes as I continue to consider and listen to where life is taking me at this moment in my career. Many life events instigate liminal space including relationship changes, death of a loved one, recovery from addiction, and aging. And often, the process is occurring simultaneously, even though one may not yet be fully aware. For instance, as someone’s child is heading toward leaving home, the question around identify begins to emerge.
Again, we often approach the threshold before we fully know that we are there.
Have you ever had a feeling deep in your body that something is about to change? I have. And if you have experienced that kind of unexpected and powerful awareness, what happened in your body, and in your spirit? Often people report anxiety, excitement, a feeling of mystery, trepidation, hope.
I remember a time years ago, after a challenging yoga class, where I suddenly began to cry. It was a sudden and unexpected awareness of something that felt overwhelmingly big. When my friends asked what was happening, I answered spontaneously with “everything is about to change”. I felt myself in between, in the threshold of here and there. I remember having an image of one arm reaching toward my old life and one arm stretching for what was coming, yet unknown. I knew, by then, that I needed to let go, yet I was frightened of the uncertainty. That space in between felt both scary and full of hope and freedom. Liminality challenges us to sit with the discomfort of not knowing.
Liminality is a passageway, one that should not be hurried, although the discomfort can make that tempting. I believe that the threshold itself is where the deepest psychological work lays waiting.
I am left to wonder, before one gets to the threshold, the space of liminality, what is the psychological experience? What happens in the space of approach, where the familiarity of here (the place we have been in) still holds us, yet something within is already loosening, shifting, or waking up? Kind of like that space where I described my hand reaching for, still holding on to the old, yet stretching with yearning toward the new.
I’d like us to consider that the liminal space is not only what we meet when we stand at the threshold. Maybe it stirs much earlier, in subtle rhythm’s of change, when the life we are in very quietly begins to become something else….well before we are aware of what is emerging.
This is a wonderful place to continue from in our next blog, The Space Before The Threshold.
I’ll close with this beautiful quote from John O’Donohue [[fn: John O’Donohue, “The Inner Landscape of Beauty,”, conversation with Krista Tippett, On Being, 2008.]]
“I think a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit. And I think that, very often, how we cross is the key thing.