In between

An exploration of liminal space

A depiction of liminal space by Gemini

There’s a moment most of us have lived — where something has already ended, but what comes next hasn’t taken shape yet.

Maybe it was leaving a job you’d outgrown, or a relationship that no longer fit, or a version of yourself you’d quietly carried past its time. The old way was behind you. The new one not quite visible yet. And in the middle — that strange, suspended place — you weren’t quite sure who you were anymore.

That place has a name. It’s called liminal space.

The word comes from the Latin limen — threshold. The moment a person sees the end of one state of being but hasn’t yet arrived at the next. Student to worker. Partner to parent. Wife to widow. Healthy to ill. Employee to self-employed. Worker to retiree. Stranger to local. Coder to overseer. Progress is a harbinger of transitions that challenge our perspectives and way of being.

Imagine you are moving, and you are in the process of deciding what to take with you.

Maybe you have a destination you’re excited about. Maybe you don’t yet. You find yourself looking at things you’ve amassed over the years — some you’ll want to keep, some you’ve outgrown, some you’re not sure about yet. When you can be in this confusing space between identities, without trying to pick a side or find a fix, what emerges can be very powerful.

In this liminal space, priorities get revisited. Beliefs that no longer quite fit start to loosen. You begin to sense which parts of yourself define you, and which belong to a place you’ve left behind. The powerful clarity that who your are is more meaningful than any identity you can take on. Richard Rohr calls this the crucial in-between time — when everything actually happens and yet nothing appears to be happening.

It doesn’t arrive cleanly. Liminal space often feels like fog — options that all look the same, a numbness that makes it hard to feel which direction is forward. Or clouded by emotions so intense they colour everything, and leave you feeling stuck and resistant.

And it’s hardest when the change wasn’t your choice.

When change is your choice — when the restlessness became louder than the fear — there’s a wave underneath you. You might not see the other shore, but you can feel yourself moving toward it.

When the change arrived uninvited — a redundancy, a loss, a world that shifted while you were standing still — resentment and grief can set in. It’s hard to be with those feelings, to let them bide their time, to trust that they will pass through us rather than define us. The fog doesn’t lift on demand. But when we stop fighting it and allow it to move at its own pace, something eventually begins to clear. The space leads somewhere, in its own time.

Heather Plett, in her work on holding space, describes it through the chrysalis. The caterpillar doesn’t know why, and has no capacity to imagine its future as a butterfly. It only knows it must surrender, shed its skin, and dissolve into a formless substance — awaiting something it cannot yet picture. In the chrysalis, it becomes completely unrecognisable — not its past caterpillar self, and not yet its future butterfly self.

Even in the darkest, most formless stage of the chrysalis, something called imaginal cells remain. They hold the blueprint of what is coming — the wings, the eyes, the whole new form — quietly waiting for their moment. Even everything feels out of shape, the forming is happening.

That’s what liminal space is. An integrative interior process, when we allow it.

It’s where you reflect on what the last chapter taught you. Where you set down what you no longer need to carry. Where, like the caterpillar, your imaginal cells are quietly doing their work — holding the shape of what’s coming, even when you can’t see it. Unlike the butterfly’s one time transformation, life offers us multiple opportunities to evolve through change. At each liminal stop, there is opportunity for more of our human blueprint to emerge. But only when we postpone the rush into the busyness of the next seemingly obvious course.

So if you’re in a transition right now — in any part of your life — this is an invitation to stay with it a little longer and listen to what it has to teach you.

If you are in this space, may you find peace in nature. May you hold yourself with compassion for the journey you are on. May you find the comfort of a listening ear — one that holds you without judgement and without rushing you toward answers. May you feel held by whatever you perceive to be bigger than yourself, be it the universe or a form of god. May you find acceptance, even when confronted with conflicting realities. May you find a way to express the dimensions of this experience, in whatever form feels true to you. And may you find a flicker of light that shows you the path through the messy middle.

You don’t need to see the whole way. The next step will emerge.