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Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, “threshold”) is the ambiguity that emerges in the middle of a fundamental transition. Liminality is the “in-between”, where the space and the participants no longer hold their past status, but have not yet fully transformed to their post-transition self.

Ness Labs • Liminal Creativity

a liminal period is a time when you’re on the threshold between identities, neither inside nor out, neither one thing nor the other. During their initiation into adulthood, the Xhosa youths are not boys anymore, but they aren’t yet men. An engaged couple are in a liminal period; they aren’t exactly single, but they aren’t exactly married, either. A

Martha Beck • Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

According to Wikipedia, liminality is “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stages of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.”1 They’re in between. They’re neither here nor there.

David Kinnaman • The Intentional Father

So we are on the topic of horizons and thresholds, limits and walls, and their appropriately hidden transversals (vertere, from the root *wer-, “to turn, bend”). From this place, we understand liminality to be that initiatory threshold where the limits of our knowing meets the horizon of our being.

Jeremy D Johnson • "Three Theses on Liminality"

Psychologically, liminal spaces feel like being in two places at once while also being nowhere. Mostly the latter. If you’re not aware that liminal spaces exist, being in one can feel like you don’t belong anywhere and that you’ve failed. It doesn’t seem like it, but you’re right on the precipice of a more consistently powerful version of yourself.

Katherine Morgan Schafler • The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control

liminal space

Richard Rohr • Falling Upward

These thresholds are initiatory. They are transformative. Full of bendings, turnings and reversals; where inner-meets-outer like a Möbius strip, an intermediary tidal zone of death and resurrection, morphological transfiguration. Fish-becoming-amphibian.

Jeremy D Johnson • "Three Theses on Liminality"

Being in limbo is all about learning to cope with the “in-between times.” As a result of a trigger, we’ve ended one period of stability or even one phase of life, and looking forward we don’t yet see another one beginning.

Richard J. Leider • Life Reimagined: Discovering Your New Life Possibilities

"Three Theses on Liminality"

Jeremy D Johnson jeremydjohnson.substack.com