For when life goes off the map.

Knowing these 4 things will help you through.

First: Can you remember a time of huge uncertainty in your own journey? How did it feel? What did it do to your state of mind?

Someone once said humans prefer certain pain to uncertainty. Nobody wakes up in the morning wanting life to fall apart. But sometimes it does.

Here are 4 things that will help you through times ‘off the map’:

1. We need “limit” situations to grow and change. They have purpose, despite how they ‘feel’.
2. There’s not something wrong with you, something new is happening to you (and through you).
3. It’s universal, not personal. Nature is not in a rush, so trust the process.
4. Know who, what & where are your safe places, “anchors” to help you through the ‘sticky’ periods of life toward the new and next version of you.

The first time I heard the word ‘liminality’ was over coffee with a friend, the word buzzed in the air between us like a wasp magnetising my attention. Something in me felt apprehensive. A year later I arrived full throttle at the limits of my own self-made map of how I thought the world worked. It heralded the end of married life, moving out the home, exiting long-term employment and unsubscribing from my lifelong faith. My ‘life’ broke, like the straps on a satchel that carried too much for too long.

Why am I telling you this?

Because recovery begins from stark raving honesty. As Pema Chödrön says, it comes as a great relief when we get to drop the act.

There is good distance between now and my liminal experience then, but it was over four years before I felt coherence to life again and people stopped giving me that “look” when asking how I was doing, tilting their head a little to the right, narrowing their eyes to check whether I was cooked and ready to come out of the oven.

So what?

Our words limbo, limitation and liminality come from the Greek ‘limne’ and Latin ‘limbus’. We all regularly experience ‘shallow’ types of liminality: the feel of lazy days off, twilight, pauses between breaths. The gaps which hold life together. Shallow liminality provokes/provides rest, but ‘deep liminality’ can signal a tectonic shift in how life works, a life-stage change. The emotional volatility of the teenage years (“in-between-agers”) is a liminal period of life to which many of us wouldn’t want to return.

We are “in limbo” and “on edge” we say, a lost zone between old and new: whether between jobs, homes, relationships, or between versions of who we are becoming. We might spend more time awake at night, as if tipped into the underworld where darker thoughts loom larger than normal: worry (“oh my god, what if…?”), regret (“why on earth did I…?”) revenge (“right, I’m going to…”) or depression (“what’s the point?”). This can be frightening.

German philosopher Karl Jaspers says we can tell we are facing a ‘limit situation’ because we experience dread, strong guilt, self doubt or anxiety, or some great weight of responsibility.

Sound familiar?

The mind reaches a neurological boundary, “it’s doing my head in” we might say, as we are thrown into uncertain territory. “Should I really go in this direction?” we wonder, before retreating to former things. Self-doubt screams like sirens during liminal times. Initiating my divorce process meant I was the first to do so in at least a hundred years in my direct family line. It felt like a betrayal of family generations gone before. Loyalties run deep, often pulling us back rather than pushing us on.

Life does not leap from one certainty to the next. Transition is a process not a switch, whether we like it or not, and as William Bridges describes (originator of “Transitions” theory), it is a process of ‘endings, then nowhere, THEN beginnings’. We can’t jump over ourselves to become something different, we change by going through change, which means entering The Liminal Zone and encountering its nature: confusion, frustration, limitations. As New Mexican priest Richard Rohr points out, many people will do anything to avoid liminality, investing their effort in staying on cruise control and capsizing the prospect of anything new happening. Perhaps you know people like that. Perhaps you see it in yourself. I detect that temptation within myself too.

Liminal places are abundant in fairytales, myths and sacred texts: the island of Calypso where Odysseus washed up on a shoreline, taking sanctuary on his return journey during which he was blown around the Mediterranean (‘middle-lands’) for three years; the belly of a whale that swallowed the prophet Jonah (a place within a place, hidden beneath the surface of the sea); the deserts that Moses, Jesus and Mohammad endured; the seas in Moby Dick; the forest in Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Greek myths, Iris the goddess of rainbows could travel to Hades (the place of death) and return, and Persephone, goddess of spring, oscillated between underworld and overground, always on the edge of one or the other. It is no accident many of these “confusing nowhere places” (an island, whale belly, deserts, seas, forests, underland spaces) are located within nature. Liminality is first revealed there.

Nature offers an immediate lens through which we can understand ourselves more clearly. It (or “We”) froth with transformative, liminal processes:

• dawn and dusk;
• hibernation;
• seasons;
• fermentation;
• photosynthesis.

“Things go slowly for a time and nothing seems to happen” says William Bridges, “until suddenly the eggshell cracks, the branch blossoms, the tadpole’s tail shrinks away, the leaf falls, the bird molts.” When a caterpillar creates a cocoon to undergo the process of changing into a butterfly, the caterpillar doesn’t just pop fresh wings on like a change of evening attire. The caterpillar disintegrates into sludge, it becomes a No-thing (becoming ‘nothing’ is a great human fear). The butterfly, which in some faiths symbolises resurrection, emerges from this total decomposition, gradually forming as an entirely new creature, its wing-strength forged as it fights its way out of the self-made grave, the struggle necessary for strength. What leaves the chrysalis is something altogether different from what went in. The journey into liminality becomes a journey down, through and, eventually, butterfly-like we experience a different kind of freedom to what we knew before.

But nature is not in a rush. Trust the process, something is always happening.

If we noticed our natural environment more often, we might notice how intrinsic and ever-present liminality is, the creative energy between loss and renewal. We might then become more gentle toward ourselves and in turn, one another, when life goes off the map.

Liminality is a natural and necessary process moving us toward what psychologist Carl Rogers described as “more complexity, more order, more inter-relatedness”.

We become more not less: more whole, more healed, more vibrant, more true.

For a while the paradox is that less is the way to more, the struggle is the path. Perhaps the process is paradoxical so we can’t control it. An important lesson in ‘nowhere land’ is to stop fighting with ourselves, or telling ourselves off. It is no surprise that the risk of psychosis, depression and suicidal ideation all increase during liminal times. Asking for help isn’t okay. Asking for help becomes vital.

Why do we need them?

Liminality introduces us to limitation, the frustrating boundaries to our power, understanding, control, emotions, resources. We reach the edges of our map. We realise we are not Masters Of The Universe (this is a tough lesson in teenage years) and that there is a whole host of variables forever beyond our fathoming. We need to experience limit situations to grow up, those ‘sticky’ periods of life where we feel emotionally and psychologically stuck. Limus is also the Latin for mud. Feeling stuck has purpose.

Here’s the thing: Stop analysing whether there’s something wrong with you. Stickiness serves the purpose of getting you curious (“how did this happen? what should I do?”), frustration becomes the fuel for determination.

Liminality gets confused with boredom, passivity, and resignation which all may feature, but it is none of these things in itself. In the hyped-up western world, we can be so intoxicated with speed, efficiency, targets, status, accumulation, Claps, Likes and Followers – all things in the way our world spins, but they detract us from the inner process of change and who we are becoming.

So what?

We need to be reassured of how common liminality is and how necessary it becomes to find safe people and places to share our experience, and determine small, solid steps through it. Because there IS a way through it, and a vital purpose aligned to who we are becoming, although we can neither see nor feel it. Not yet at least.

Personal change does not come with “Just Hit Turbo”.

Just being aware of liminality, that it’s something which occurs in the process of change and growth, helps validate the experience. An old way of doing things is dying, so a new way of being can emerge. On some level knowing my life had stumbled into a Liminal Zone kept me alive, offering protection from the frightening, insistent thoughts that I should end my life, because “my life” felt it was at an end.

This liminal parallel existence – the constructed external self-image (social media being a canvas for this) and the turbulent changing internal self, can trigger depression-like symptoms when we crash into our limits. In coaching work, naming this experience includes words and phrases like: empty, numb, powerless, cut off, low, flat, worthless, dead inside, tired for ages, heavy heart, despairing, defeated, miserable, no energy.

These difficult but intelligent emotions tell us we need decent rest, a breather, a pause in the routine. Visiting the doctor maybe necessary to check on iron and vitamin levels or to access talking therapy, because mental health is woven with biological and nutritional health. When things don’t change, or not in the way we anticipate or the timeframe we try to manufacture, frustration can get tangled up with feeling powerless: “I want something to change, but I can’t change it”. Because external change isn’t proving possible, the impulse gets turned inward which might trigger urges toward self-harm and sometimes suicide. We need safety valves for this kind of pressure, especially when the timeframe is prolonged. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” as the proverb goes.

So ask yourself: who, what and where are your safe places? List them. Use them.

• We need other people we trust, to speak truth and comfort.
• We need processes that keep us moving. For me, running in nature and writing probably saved my sanity.
• We need places away from screens, demands, the noxious noise of the world. Places of safety, stillness and silence where we can hear ourselves think (or not think, for a change). Walking and working in my local woods were my “geography of hope”.

“Understand that this in-between condition” wrote poet Seamus Heaney at the turn of the millennium in his commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania, “is not to be regarded as a disabling condition… it is rather a necessary state, a consequence of our situation between earthy origin and angelic potential.” Liminality feels like nowhere, but we learn to land more fully in the present. We don’t become more perfect, but we might feel more whole.

In summary, 4 things we need to know during liminal times are:

1. We need “limit” situations to grow and change. They have purpose, despite how they ‘feel’.

2. There’s not something wrong with you, something new is happening to you (and through you).

3. It’s universal, not personal. Liminality is embedded in nature and revealed in mythology. Nature is not in a rush so trust the process.

4. Know who, what & where are your safe places, “anchors” to help you through the ‘sticky’ periods of life toward the new and next version of you. List them, use them, stay safe during the hard times.

Go well, and thank you for reading.