Learning to Live in Liminal Space
Synthesis Statement: Sessions 1-5
October 2025 — February 2026
Recognizing the Polycrisis
This program is available to anyone, but it will likely resonate most with those who feel a calling — people deeply troubled by the polycrisis unfolding in the world and wondering how they might help. Not merely to observe or cope, or simply optimize what sits within their own circle of influence, but to help steward something genuinely better. That sense of calling becomes the entry point. It is also, in many ways, the first practice: saying yes to a path whose destination is not yet visible.
The world we are asked to face is real, and in many ways it is dire. Ecocide. The human-driven disruption of the climate. An unstable and concentrating global economy. The erosion of civility. The weakening of democratic institutions and the rise of autocracy. These are not distant abstractions. They are the living conditions of our moment. The uncertainty circles not around whether the Old Story is ending, but around how it will unravel and over what time.
What does the world look like 10, 25, 50, or 100 years from now? As artificial intelligence displaces entire categories of work, as climate change reshapes the face of the planet, as wealth and power consolidate in new and intensifying ways, these questions are not rhetorical. They hang in the air. They are the reason this work matters.
The complexity of these problems exceeds our capacity to solve them on our own. We must admit that hubris helped bring us to where we are and allow humility to guide us forward. While science works hard to find solutions, will it reverse climate change quickly enough? Will we find a way to halt species loss? Will our concern for ourselves individually allow us to see past ourselves and care for others? For marginalized communities? The world’s poor?
Yet, the deepest truths of the world's mystical traditions remain the same. Stay humble. Stay open. Rumi writes: Be helpless, dumbfounded, unable to say yes or no. Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up…When we are able to make friends with that beauty, we shall become a mighty kindness. Jesus pointed out the difficulty for the self-sufficient man getting into paradise being comparable to a camel threading the eye of a needle. We need to be open, to be humble, and to be willing to receive help.
Practice as Foundation
And so, in this program we practice. Daily. We commit to some sort of spiritual engagement. Prayer. Meditation. We find music that inspires. We find and create poetry and art. We write. We create community. We transmit and receive transmission. These practices are not decorative. They are the means by which we shift our interior space so that we can better face and serve the exterior world.
Through this work we begin to recognize something uncomfortable: the Old Story is not only out there, in governments and corporations and markets. It is deeply entrenched in our way of life. It is the story most of us were raised inside. It shapes our instincts about time, productivity, sufficiency, and control. The interior reckoning and the exterior reckoning are inseparable.
To move away from the Old Story we must begin, slowly, to detach from it. Not through rejection or rage, but through a conscious stepping away. We ground ourselves in a space that allows us to see the dying old clearly, to live among its institutions, and yet not be enveloped by it. We give it no heart. Only our witness, our grief for those harmed by it, and our energy directed toward what may come next.
The New Story and Its Seven Qualities
If the Old Story is ending, what replaces it?
The program suggests that the New Story cannot be built simply by opposing the old. The more we focus our attention on what is dying, the more power we inadvertently give it. Instead, we are invited to become a seedbed for what is emerging, placing our attention, imagination, and effort into what is life-giving.
Seven foundational qualities help orient that emerging story:
Respecting women and feminine principles
Respecting the land as sacred
Time no longer seen as linear
Non-hierarchical dynamics of power and control
Communities of all types
Oneness
Love
These qualities are not inventions. They represent the recovery of wisdom that has long existed in indigenous traditions, spiritual teachings, and the natural patterns of life itself. Their suppression has caused profound harm. Their recovery opens the possibility of healing.
As the program reminds us: Through it all will run the axis of love, from the center of the Earth to the center of the cosmos, present in every cell of creation.
Each of these qualities names both a place where the Old Story has failed us and a direction toward something more whole.
Stepping into Liminal Space
The program then turns toward one of its central teachings: liminal space.
Liminal space is the threshold, the space between what was and what will be. The terrain of transition. A sacred space.
To enter liminal space is to consciously step away from the Old Story without yet having arrived in the New. This can feel disorienting. Our culture trains us to rush through uncertainty, to fill the unknown with activity and noise. This program asks something different: to dwell in the in-between.
From this vantage point we gain perspective.
When we make the subject the object, when we can look at the Old Story rather than only looking from inside it, its hold on us begins to loosen. We gain autonomy. We gain agency. We can live within the institutions of the old world without being captured by them.
Reflecting on this idea raises an interesting question:
Are we ever truly outside liminal space?
Once we loosen our attachment to certainty, life itself begins to appear as a continuous threshold, always unfolding between what has been and what may yet become.
To remain steady there requires practice. The simple orientation the program offers captures the posture well:
Witness
Grieve
Pray
Act
These four movements offer a way of orienting ourselves to the great challenges of the world. They describe a posture toward suffering and transformation. But they do not describe the texture of ordinary living.
For that, the practice of mindfulness, of stillness, of presence become essential. These allow us to inhabit each moment with awareness rather than reactivity. They are the ground from which witnessing becomes possible and from which compassionate action can emerge.
In some ways this is not unlike exercise or healthy eating. At first the effort can feel unnatural, even forced. But with time the body begins to recognize what is good for it. What once felt difficult begins to feel normal, even necessary. The longer we fall away from those practices, the harder it is to return. From the inside, though, it becomes clear that this way of being is simply the healthier place to live.
Witnessing, grieving, praying, and acting offer a way of responding to the world. Mindfulness and presence offer a way of inhabiting it.
Witnessing
Witnessing, we have seen, is a tool we use to allow ourselves to separate from the old. It allows us to recognize the pathologies, the hubris, the maladies, the corruption, the destruction — what the Buddha summarized simply as the suffering that emerges from the old story.
As we come into liminal space and allow ourselves to witness, we create that separation for ourselves. Not to dismiss reality, but to ground ourselves in a larger perspective.
Witnessing allows us to see and know much more, precisely because we realize we do not actually have to hold everything we see. We do not have to carry it. It is not ours. Or rather, it no longer needs to be.
And so the question arises: what do we do with what we witness? What do we do with tragedy?
We grieve.
Grieving
Grieving allows us to process the tragedy of the Old Story. It allows us to objectively see and understand it. It allows us to own our own participation in it and then let it go.
We must make peace with our shadow. We must make peace with our tragedy. We must make peace with our mistakes in order to move forward.
And so we grieve.
We grieve for the loss of what we love. We grieve for parts of ourselves and our communities that will never know full flourishing. We grieve for the losses and sorrows of the world. We grieve for what we expected but never received—for unconscious disappointment, loneliness, and a diminished experience of self. And we grieve for the unacknowledged and untended sorrow of those who came before us, for whom we can no longer help in any direct way.
Grieving opens the heart. If we allow it, it opens us to communion. One person’s grieving becomes everyone’s grieving. The more we allow for witnessing and grieving, the more we reconnect with our innocence and our deeper intentions, the more we allow ourselves to move toward love.
Operating from a place of love reshapes the world.
That is the basis of the New Story. A world created from love, from a sense of communion and oneness. From there hierarchy begins to soften. Time loosens its grip. The land is understood again as sacred. Masculine and feminine come back into balance. Communities begin to form around care rather than control.
Life begins to emerge in a more organic and unforced way.
And that emergence is seeded in liminal space, once we separate ourselves from the Old Story and choose to live differently.
If this reflection has been of value, you’re welcome to support the time and care that go into this work.