The Liminal Space Is One of Power
Why periods of transition hold more agency than we are taught to recognise
Author’s Note
The themes explored here—liminality, transition, and the quiet power of thresholds—are examined in greater personal and narrative detail throughout Elegant Transitions. This essay establishes the conceptual ground; the chapters that follow in the forthcoming book explore its embodiment through lived experience.
Human beings are uneasy with thresholds.
We are trained—socially, economically, and psychologically—to value stability, continuity, and clear trajectories. Transitions are framed as interruptions: conditions to endure briefly, manage efficiently, and resolve as quickly as possible. Within this framing, the space between what was and what will be is treated as a deficiency rather than a condition.
Yet across cultures, disciplines, and wisdom traditions, the opposite has long been understood.
Liminal space is not a void.
It is a site of concentrated potential.
Liminality: A Brief Orientation
The term liminal derives from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. In anthropology, liminality refers to the middle phase of rites of passage—the period following separation from a prior status and preceding incorporation into a new one.
Over the course of my life, I have encountered many such thresholds: relocating across regions and identities; shifting from corporate life to the academy; moving from undergraduate to graduate study; pivoting disciplinary focus from History and Sociology to Consciousness and Human Potential; transitioning from practitioner of Transcendental Meditation® to Certified Teacher; evolving through partnership, marriage, and family life; relocating again to assume responsibility for revitalising a regional meditation programme; and progressing through initiatory paths within Freemasonry, Rosicrucian study, and other spiritual traditions.
In each instance, an earlier self gave way to a more integrated one—sometimes to the quiet discomfort of others, sometimes to my own. I am reminded here of a passage from Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, where Don Juan Matus suggests that the task of initiators, and the burden of initiation itself, becomes less difficult once one arrives at an inescapable truth: that we are beings who are going to die (Castaneda, 1972, p. xiv).
With that recognition, liminality takes on its proper character:
Old identities loosen
Social roles become ambiguous
Familiar hierarchies are suspended
The future has not yet been named
The initiate is no longer who they were—but not yet who they will become.
Crucially, traditional societies did not treat this phase as accidental or disposable. It was structured, protected, and often held as sacred, precisely because it was recognised as the interval in which transformation was genuinely possible.
Modern life, by contrast, offers little guidance for inhabiting liminality. We encounter transitions—career disruption, displacement, grief, illness, awakening—but are given no shared language for navigating them with skill. As a result, many attempt to escape the threshold as quickly as possible, mistaking speed for progress.
In so doing, we often miss the very power the moment contains.
Why Liminal Space Feels Uncomfortable
Liminality destabilises certainty.
The mind, accustomed to prediction and control, experiences this destabilisation as threat. Without familiar reference points, anxiety rises. Identity, seeking relief, reaches for anything that promises coherence.
But discomfort is not evidence of error.
It is evidence that old agreements are dissolving.
When the familiar frame no longer holds, deeper patterns become visible: habits, assumptions, dependencies, and internalised narratives previously masked by routine. This is why liminal periods often feel emotionally charged. They surface material not to punish, but to be seen.
From this perspective, liminality is not a problem to be solved, but an environment to be navigated.
Power Without Control
As I have come to understand through direct experience, the power of liminal space does not reside in domination or certainty. It resides in orientation.
At thresholds, we may lose control over outcomes—but we gain heightened access to perception. Choices made here often carry disproportionate influence, not because the moment is dramatic, but because the system is more fluid and therefore more responsive to subtle adjustment.
Small decisions—how we speak, what we prioritise, whom we trust, how we treat others—can meaningfully redirect what follows.
For this reason, many wisdom traditions caution against hardening during transition. Defensive contraction forecloses possibility. Attentive presence keeps channels open.
In liminal space, character is not performed; it is revealed.
And in that revelation, what one has cultivated—or failed to cultivate—becomes unmistakable.
Liminal spaces also refine discernment through absence.
Not every threshold is met with guidance, reassurance, or response. Some are met with silence. Some with delay. Some with the quiet recognition that a door once presumed available does not open.
Such moments can initially be experienced as refusal or withdrawal. Over time, however, they often reveal themselves as clarifying forces. Absence strips away assumption. It exposes where expectation has been projected rather than reciprocated, and where orientation must mature beyond familiarity, hope, or prior affiliation.
In this way, withholding becomes instructive—not as punishment, but as signal and redirection. It redirects attention away from what will not respond and toward capacities, relationships, and inner resources that can. Discernment, in liminal space, is learned not only through presence, but through recognising where presence is no longer offered.
The Appearance of Helpers
Accounts within liminal anthropology frequently note another recurring feature of thresholds: the appearance of unexpected assistance.
Anthropologically, such figures are described as guides, guardians, or helpers of the threshold. Psychologically, they may manifest as chance encounters, timely conversations, or moments of recognition that restore orientation. Literary traditions echo this pattern as well—one thinks, for instance, of Santiago’s encounters in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, where guidance appears precisely when it is most needed.
Along my own journey, I have encountered many such individuals—remarkable not by title or station, but by the precision of their presence. They offered kindness, humour, instruction, perspective, and—at critical moments—a listening ear free of judgement or scorn. I have often described such persons and moments as signposts along the road to becoming.
Their role was not to remove difficulty, but to prevent disintegration.
What matters is not whether such encounters are interpreted symbolically, spiritually, or pragmatically. What matters is recognising that support often arrives obliquely, rather than through the channels we assumed would carry it.
Liminal space reorganises our understanding of where help comes from.
Reframing Transition
If liminal space is indeed one of power, then the essential question shifts.
Not:
How quickly can I get out of this?
But:
How am I being invited to stand while I am here?
This reframing does not romanticise hardship, nor does it deny material realities. It simply restores agency where we are often taught to feel only vulnerability.
Transitions do not ask us to abandon discernment.
They ask us to refine it.
They invite us to loosen what no longer serves, attend carefully to what is emerging, and resist the urge to collapse complexity into premature conclusions.
A Quiet Responsibility
There is a quiet responsibility that accompanies the recognition of liminal power.
Those who learn to remain present within thresholds—without numbing, bypassing, or hardening—become stabilising presences for others. Not through instruction, but through example. Not through certainty, but through coherence.
In an era marked by widespread transition—personal, cultural, ecological—this capacity matters.
Liminal spaces are multiplying.
The question is not whether we will encounter them, but whether we will learn to inhabit them wisely.
In my own experience, sustained contemplative practice—particularly meditation—has functioned as a form of advance preparation. Small, consistent deposits made long before moments of crisis have repeatedly proven invaluable when thresholds arrived.
Whether through meditation or another disciplined inner practice, consistency matters. The inner reserves built in ordinary times often determine how one moves when certainty dissolves.
I know this practice has steadied me more than once.
And I suspect it may do the same for others who choose to cultivate it.
Suggested Practice / Guided Reflection
Standing in the Liminal Space
For periods of transition, uncertainty, or reorientation
Time: 8–12 minutes
Posture: Seated comfortably or standing with both feet grounded
Begin by allowing the body to settle.
There is nothing you need to fix in this moment.
Nothing you need to resolve.
Take two or three natural breaths—
not deepening the breath, simply noticing it.
Now bring to mind a transition you are currently living inside.
It may be obvious, or it may be subtle.
Do not name it yet. Simply allow its presence to be felt.
Notice where this transition registers in the body.
Is it felt as tightness, openness, fatigue, anticipation, or ambiguity?
Without analysing, gently acknowledge:
Something is changing.
Now silently ask yourself:
“What has already ended, even if I have not fully released it?”
Do not search for an answer.
Let whatever arises arise—and whatever does not, remain quiet.
Pause.
Then ask:
“What has not yet taken form, but is beginning to announce itself?”
Again, no effort.
No narrative required.
Rest for a few moments in the space between those two recognitions.
This is the liminal space.
Notice that, even here, you are breathing.
Even here, awareness is stable.
Even here, you are not without ground.
Now ask one final question:
“How am I being invited to carry myself while I am here?”
Not what should I do next—
but how am I to stand in this moment?
Let the question echo softly.
When you’re ready, allow the attention to return to the room,
bringing with you the understanding that transition is not absence—
It is a threshold.
—
About the Author
Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a consciousness scholar, executive coach, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work—spanning The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explores how Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social-systems transformation intersect in the evolution of both the individual and society.
He is the Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship, and President of Serat Group Inc., the parent company of Transcendental Brain, a consulting and educational platform bringing consciousness science into leadership and institutional development. He also serves as Host of the On Transcendence Podcast.
Alongside his wife, Mina, he co-directs the Cambridge and Metropolitan Boston TM Program and serves as Host and Founder of International Meditation Hour (IMH), a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.
He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.
To learn more about him, visit: https://www.barutikmtsisouvong.com/.