Understanding liminal space
There are moments in life when something ends and what comes next has not yet begun.
A career ends.
A diagnosis lands.
Someone dies.
Or a life that once made sense… stops making sense.
What follows is often disorienting, especially when it arrives through crisis. Familiar structures fall away: relationships, roles, identities. Without them, it can feel like there’s no clear way forward.
This is what is often called the liminal.
From the Latin līmen, meaning threshold, the liminal is commonly described as the space between no longer and not yet. A kind of in-between.
That framing can be misleading, however. It makes the space sound void, like a pause. As if something has gone off track. As if this could have been avoided.
But what if nothing has gone wrong?
What if something is asking to be seen that could not be seen before?
Something Shifts
The liminal begins with what feels like an interruption.
Life is merrily going along and then something disrupts the flow: a loss, an ending, a change.
What once felt stable loosens. What once made sense no longer holds.
The instinct is often to restore what was. To find answers quickly, regain footing, or, alternatively, move forward to get over this. Because surely there are greener pastures on the other side.
But not everything we encounter is meant to be resolved or overcome.
Some thresholds ask us to remain. To not escape or rush past the encounter.
The In-Between
One of the most useful reframes comes from Vine Deloria Jr., who critiqued the worldview that made “the liminal” necessary as a category in the first place.
He suggested that what we call liminal is not a break in connection, nor simply a phase to move through, but a reorientation—a shift in how we are in relationship with everything around us: self, others, spirit, and the wider world.
Seen this way, the liminal is not a severance from life. And it is not a hurdle.
It is a reordering of relationship.
A kind of rite of passage shaped by the conditions of modern life.
Even so, it can feel disorienting and confusing, at times. There can be some reassurance in remembering that the discomfort of the “in-between” is not because you are lost or nowhere, but because you are still learning how to be in relationship with where you are.
Why It Feels So Difficult
Many people experience the feeling of being untethered and searching for a timeline where things make sense again.
They may encounter:
grief that doesn’t move in straight lines
questions that don’t have clear answers
a loss of identity or direction that turns their world upside down
emotions and memories that were easier to avoid before
These are not signs of “doing it wrong” failure. They reflect the nature of the experience itself.
Part of what intensifies this difficulty is cultural.
There are few shared frameworks in the Western world for how to navigate and stay in relationship with uncertainty. Little tolerance for not knowing. Too few rituals for endings that don’t involve death.
Instead, there is pressure to:
move on
get back to work
find closure
return to normal
or quickly begin again
Without structures of support, people can feel as though something is wrong with them, when in reality, they are in the middle of a necessary reorganization.
A Reorientation
The liminal cannot be rushed. It asks for a kind of wayfinding our culture of productivity does not teach or have patience for.
Over time, the shift is not in what is happening, but in how it is met, by you.
Questions soften from:
How do I get out of this?
to:
How do I stay in relationship with what is here?
There is nuance here. And this shift is often quiet.
It may show up as:
a little more patience inside the experience
maybe not less pain, but more capacity to be with it
moments of curiosity or courage
a softening toward what is
sparks of creativity
Overall, you’ll notice that there is less urgency to return to a previous version of life. Less insistence on resolution. Less pressure to make something happen.
At a certain point, the work is no longer about finding answers.
As Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart…and try to love the questions themselves.”
Not because the answers don’t exist, but because they cannot be lived all at once.
A Return (but Changed)
What emerges from the liminal is never a return to who you were.
There is no going back to life as it once was.
Instead, what changes is your relationship to what has been lived.
Life continues, but differently than before.
You may come to recognize that loss remains part of the landscape. Some things may not ever fully resolve. But your way of being with them has shifted.
And what carries forward is not just insight for personal gain, but a changed way of relating—to yourself, to others, and to life. A more expansive way of seeing and being in the world.
Not a Detour
The liminal experience will challenge you. But it is not a detour from your life. As Jane Hirschfield writes “The world is full of thresholds.”
It is part of how life reorganizes us. How our relationships, our sense of self, and our place in the world are continuously shaped and reshaped.
If you find yourself here—uncertain, in-between, without a roadmap or support—it does not mean you are lost, nor alone in it.
It may mean you are at a threshold.
And that something is asking for a deeper presence.
