Betwixt and Between: Navigating the Meaning of Life’s Liminal Phases

There is a name for states that exist between major life moments. The threshold moments that come between who we were and who we are being called to become. Yet we sprint past them to avoid the discomfort. Because there is no script for the week after the breakup, before you’ve decided who you are without that person. No script for the years between leaving your childhood home and actually feeling like an adult. No script for the grief, the loneliness, the feeling of limbo that we all experience multiple times in our lives.

Liminality is disorienting precisely because it resists language. This phase reveals the most to us because there is no role to play in them yet.
You’re not the bride or the mourner or the patient. Honestly, you’re not even fully the person you were before any of it started. You’re something unnamed, in transit- and what shows up in that unnamed space is closer to the truth of who you actually are than almost anything that happens once a role has been handed back to you.

We are the most confused and yet the most alive, the most us. That’s not a slogan. That is the operating thesis behind this blog.

Liminal Lessons exists to do one specific thing inside that disorientation: translate it. Take the formless, threshold experience and turn it into written language precise enough to hold onto- so the in-between stops being something that merely happens to us, and starts being something we can learn from, return to, and recognize the next time it arrives. 

Arnold Van Gennep’s Rites of Passage

Before the word “liminal” became a moodboard, it was fieldwork. In 1909, the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep studied the rites of passage across cultures. He noticed they all had three phases in common- separation from the old identity, leading to a threshold phase with no fixed identity, which led to a reincorporation of a new one. He borrowed the Latin word ‘limen’- meaning threshold- to name the middle phase, the one with nothing solid on either side.

Victor Turner Liminality

Sixty years later, Victor Turner picked up from where Gennep left off and gave the in-between phase for self-growth, the most endearing and widely recognizable description- ‘Betwixt and between’. Not Lost. Not Broken.

So when you feel like you don’t know who you are, you’re not lost. You’re in a category anthropologists have been documenting for over a century. It should take away some of the confusion as we realize that these uncomfortable moments aren’t waiting rooms for the next identity, next role, or the next phase of our lives. Rather, it’s in these moments where we have a chance to transform and descend into ourselves so that we can ascend and be better and more aligned.

Signs You’re In a Liminal Phase

Liminality rarely announced itself, but there are a few moments documented as liminal. Some of them are:

The year between the diagnosis and knowing what your body will do with it.

The months after the divorce papers, before you know what your name means without the other name beside it.

Standing in a new city with all your furniture still in boxes and no idea yet which grocery store will become “yours”.

The identity-death of leaving a career that used to answer the question “who are you” for you.

Grief, in the specific weeks when the person is gone but you haven’t yet learned how to exist in a world without them.

The pause after you’ve outgrown your own spiritual framework but haven’t found a new language for what you now believe.

The space where you have learned a lesson and yet aren’t sure how to actually apply it in life. The weeks where you practice to keep strict boundaries after you learned this lesson the hard way.

The Mystics Got Here First

Barzakh Meaning

Long before anthropologists had a term for it, the mystics had architecture for it.
The twelfth–thirteenth century Andalusian sage Ibn Arabi described barzakh (A Qur’anic term) as an isthmus. This place is neither fully of the physical world nor fully of the unseen one, where opposites are held without needing to resolve. Nothing can move from one state to another without passing through the intermediate stage.

The old Egyptians built an entire cosmology around a liminal geography: the Duat, the realm the soul crosses between death and rebirth, navigated by trial rather than certainty.

In Yoruba tradition, Eshu stands permanently at the crossroads- not a god of endings or beginnings, but of the crossing itself, the only orisha who can speak to every direction at once because he belongs, structurally, to none of them.

The liminal space is closer to a precise description of my own inner architecture. The way contradiction doesn’t resolve itself in me. Rather, it learns to stand, undiminished, side by side. My blog is not only a testament to that inner fracture, but to what happens when that architecture goes looking for language.

Why We Rush the In-Between phase of life

(And Why That’s the Mistake)

The ancient wisdoms didn’t treat the in-between as a delay to be minimized. A phase that needed to be sprinted through. We name it “a transition period” and speed-walk through it, grabbing the first identity, the first comfortable role, the first belief system that presents to us. All to make the vertigo stop, for the discomfort to recede, and for us to feel normal, but never alive.

But rushed liminality doesn’t disappear. The lessons zoomed through come back at the worst times in the future. Different costumes but the same lessons. Something we all can account for.

Ancient traditions instead built rituals, vigils, retreats, mourning periods, seclusion, dhikr, fasting, embodied dancing, and so much more. They understood something that modern culture has learned to ignore. The threshold has its own curriculum, and you cannot audit it from a distance. You have to stand and let it teach you the lesson it wants to.

This Is What Liminal Lessons Is For

Liminal lessons exist because the in-between deserves more recognition and better company than it usually gets. Across the four rooms of this space- the reflections of The Muse Era, the poetry of The Echo Series, and the essays and embodied practice of Liminal Lifestyle, and the six-pillar curriculum of RUIA; the work is the same work mystics were always calling our attention towards.

Here, we learn to stay on the threshold long enough actually to learn what it came to teach.
You’ll find essays written from inside specific liminal moments, not safely after them. Explorations of the traditions- mystical, psychological, mythological- that have mapped this terrain long before any of us arrived at it.

May these published pieces give us a map to navigate these windy terrains of life. And, I hope, language for the parts of your own life that have felt too in-between to name.
If you’ve ever felt most like yourself in the exact moment you couldn’t say who you were…
Welcome.
You don’t need to have your identity settled to be here. That’s not a prerequisite. It’s the entire premise.

A Blessing for the Threshold

May you stop confusing the doorway for the destination. I wish your body tells you the truth before your mind invents a smaller one. May the reed remember it was cut for a reason. And may you let the in-between finish teaching you before you rush yourself toward the next room.

Questions at The Threshold

Dive deeper into the House.

1. Glimpse the liminal way of life centered on slow living, spiritual remembrance, and sensuality.
2. Discover raw letters and reflections on the feelings and shifts that arrive when we are in the liminal stage.
3. If you like existential poetry that threads myth and identity, flip through the echo series.