The liminal life

Between thoughts, an opinion and knowledge, a fact and a belief, certainty and doubt, the truths and untruths, unlearning, indecision.

Years, seasons, the seed and the harvest, weeks, days.

Puberty. Studying for exams. Waiting for the water to boil.

The interview, the job, the career, deciding, the determination and patience.

Meetings, relationships, pick ups, the message left unread, waiting for the page to load, waiting for the beat to drop, the tea brewing, waking and rising.

The invite lists and the celebrations, labour and birth, the cake cooling.

Who you were and who you're becoming. Aligning.

The moving out, packing and unpacking, the new neighbourhood.

Menopause. The diagnosis. Overwhelm and surrender, the fear and the safety, grief and gratitude, the joy and sadness, the blindspots and the breakthroughs, the failures and the wisdom.

Sleep and the dream just before it. The perfection and the unfinished. The applause after the final note.

Breaths. Heartbeats. The last day and the first.

The question asked and the pause before the answer, we are always, quietly, in between.

We tend to treat these moments as gaps to get through. The real living, we assume, happens on either side: in the destination, the decision, the diagnosis once it's named, the season once it's settled in.

The in-between gets rushed, medicated with distraction, or goes unnoticed.

There's a different lens on this, and it's the one this pondering well, ponders.

The usefulness of the empty part

In Taoist thought, there's a recurring image drawn from chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching:

• a cup is useful because of its hollow interior

• a room is useful because of the space the walls make possible

• a wheel turns because of the hole at its centre, not despite it

The form gets the credit, but it's the emptiness doing the work.

I think the in-between is like that. It looks like nothing, no clear season, no settled identity, no answer yet. But that apparent nothing is exactly what makes movement possible.

Once something has taken shape, a role, a routine, a belief you've held long enough to stop examining, it takes real force to move it. In the gap before it sets, nothing has hardened yet.

That's not a lack. That's availability.

It asks something different of you

Winter has a way of being. Spring has a way of being. Once you're inside a season, or a job, or a relationship you've settled into, you can coast a little; habit does some of the work for you.

The threshold has no established way of being. Nothing is automatic there. You actually have to show up.

That's part of why liminal moments feel more alive, even when they're uncomfortable. The interview before the job exists. The pause before the answer. The diagnosis, before there's a plan. You're unusually present in those moments, not because you chose to be, but because nothing else is available to lean on.

Naming the discomfort

I don't want to only romanticise this. Ambiguity is genuinely harder to hold than clarity. Not knowing what season you're in, literally or otherwise, can feel unsettled, even a little frightening. That's real, and worth naming rather than dressing up as purely beautiful.

What I've found is that the body has a way of holding that discomfort that the mind, on its own, struggles with. When I can't think my way out of the in-between, movement gives me somewhere to put it. Qigong, in particular, works directly with this: using breath and slow, deliberate movement to let qi move through uncertainty, rather than bracing against it. You don't need the season to be resolved to feel more at ease inside it.

Kinesiology works with this in a different, complementary way. Where qigong moves qi through the body, kinesiology listens to the body: using muscle testing to find where a transition is actually being held (a stuck belief, an old stress pattern, an emotion the mind has moved past but the body hasn't) and gently clears it. If qigong is about generating flow, kinesiology is about finding where the blockage is and releasing it. Together they cover both directions of the same work: creating movement, and understanding what's in its way.

An invitation, not a rush

If any of this has been sitting with you (the sense of being between one thing and the next, without quite knowing what either side looks like yet), I'd love for you to bring that into the room on Sunday 16 August.

We're marking the shift from winter into spring with a qigong workshop built entirely around this threshold: working with the qi that's been dormant through winter, and talking about what it means to move through transitions with more grace and less gripping, in the body and in life.

No need to have it figured out first. That's rather the point.

If group movement isn't quite the right fit for where you're at, I also offer one-to-one kinesiology sessions for working through a specific transition more privately.

Reach out and we'll find what suits.

Details and tickets for Sunday 16 August can be found here

PS - If you join us on Sunday - you go into the chance to WIN a 75min lymphatic facial with AlongcameAmy valued at $225.