Liminality

You want to be on both sides of the wall at the same time. 
You can, but you must remove the wall. 

– Nisargadatta

This essay has been edited from its original form, published to the True Nature community on October 22, 2024

At the fall, 2024 CCE women’s retreat, I offered a talk centered on liminality after having listened to a podcast with a man who focuses on midlife transitions and supporting people to fully explore and embrace this particular point in their lives. He used the word liminal, meaning being at or on both sides of a threshold or boundary. In psychology, sociology, and modern wellness fields, the transitions around adolescence and death, and sometimes new parenthood and middle age get some attention for their in-your-face brand of liminality. As all of us experience personally, however, our whole lives could be said to be liminal. 

Derived from the Latin limin, meaning threshold, the words liminal and liminality have rapidly moved from scientific realms to common usage. Originally used to describe sensory stimuli that are barely detectable (sub-liminal is beneath the threshold of consciousness), usage soon expanded to mean at the threshold between one state or phase and another, such as states of consciousness or universal transitions within normal life.  

While there is much to be said for labeling the world around and within us, contemplatives may benefit even more from questioning these labels, even while continuing to use them liberally. After all, naming the world around and within us facilitates communication, offers relief through identification and intellectual understanding, and has surely been inseparable from the experience of being human since the emergence of language in our species.

I was so taken with the word liminality in the interview that I looked it up - then I liked it even more when I found definitions referring to a quality of ambiguity or disorientation when a person is between identifications with their old way of relating to and structuring their life, and a new way. This is really starting to sound like a common experience of meditators, isn’t it?

Paradigm shifts that are regularly experienced as a result of consistent meditation may be primarily differentiated from universal life transitions in terms of a sense of volition, empowerment, and/or transcendence. That is, it would be only natural to think of passing through adolescence as outside of one’s control, while one could easily take ownership of a change that seems to have been caused by meditation. With this awareness of a personal, separate self in relation to change, however, we find ourselves right back in the world of duality (the “I” and the self it changes becoming two separate things, in this case).

Personally, I find this mobius strip of logic relieving and even a little funny: I get to see one more time that no matter what I do, what I think, or what skills I develop, the ultimate achievement of practice is to come back to the beginning in one way or another. Any attempt to escape from or understand duality necessarily leads directly back to the conundrum of how to be on “both sides of the wall,” as Nisargadatta said - knowing duality and transcending it all at once.

That puzzle also holds within it a promise that we can know our True Nature, or “original face,” as it’s sometimes referred to in Zen: while we practice sitting with not knowing, we paradoxically grow in clarity, humility, and wisdom. That wisdom can be in turn shone in any direction, deepening understanding and ease - not just for ourselves, but also for everyone with whom we come in contact.

In everyday parlance, liminal states are named to help people on a practical level to trust that change is coming, thereby gaining relief through intellectual understanding and empowerment. The inherent two-edged sword in looking forward to the end of a transition, however, is that it encourages fixation on the future as a way to relieve discomfort in the present. In American culture, we don’t have much time or place much value on liminal stages of life as valuable and sacred the way some other cultures do, but there’s still more to this than valuing what obvious transitional periods have to offer while they last. As meditators, we can also benefit from the insight that even during times of stability and contentment, we know in our minds that change is inevitable, and deep in our bodies, that change is continuous.

One transition after another, we are always on a precipice, whether we’re aware of it or not. One of the most valuable promises of practice, then, is that of losing the habit of waiting to get to the other side of something. In so doing, we have the opportunity to not miss our lives by constantly craning our necks to look ahead. Start by not rushing through this transition. Recognize for a moment that transition is all there is.

It’s a simple yet pervasive misunderstanding that the future will arrive one day and give us a place to land. Seeing through this misunderstanding opens doors to freedom that remain otherwise closed. As we come to know ever more deeply for ourselves that impermanence is ubiquitous, we have the opportunity to become well-adjusted to the way things actually are. One cannot, after all, be well-adjusted to the way things are not in any practical sense.

Learning to land moment by moment - but not anywhere in particular - allows for free movement in all directions, while also honoring the very real and clear phases and states along the way. Life still not only happens, but can be lived with greater fulfillment and ease as we come to know our experience as one of, as the classic Buddhist poem says, “above, not a tile to cover the head; below, not an inch of ground on which to stand.”