Grounded in Groundlessness

You know that feeling when the ground beneath you shifts? When the identity you've worn like a second skin no longer fits? When the job, the relationship, or the version of yourself you've known dissolves, leaving you standing in the space between who you were and who you're becoming?

It can be disorienting, unsettling, sometimes terrifying.

Rilke wrote “every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive." What if these endings are actually the beginning of something you can't yet imagine?

There's a word for this in-between space: liminality. From the Latin limen, meaning "threshold." It's the transitional space where one way of being has ended but the next hasn’t yet taken form. You're suspended in limbo.

And this is exactly where transformation happens.

I first learned about liminality years ago studying anthropology, but I only came to understand it through my practice. I remember sitting in meditation years ago after a major life change feeling lost, as if everything familiar had fallen away. My breath slowed on its own, the pauses lengthened, and I found myself dwelling in pure awareness - suspended in a timeless, nameless place that felt like the ever-present ground of my being. Resting there didn’t offer answers, but it did show me how to be with the uncertainty itself.

The space between two things—the madhya in Sanskrit—isn't just a gap to rush through and make it to the other side. It's a doorway, alive with possibility.

When we stay present in these transitions - the pause between breaths, the suspension between effort and release, the stillness where one thought dissolves before the next arises - something remarkable emerges. We touch the part of us that doesn't change—a steady, witnessing awareness that remains unaffected even as everything else shifts.

This is yoga’s gift in times of uncertainty: the capacity to ground ourselves in awareness, even when there's no solid ground to stand on.

Not the false stability of things staying the same. Not the illusion of control or the clinging to identities we’ve outgrown. But a deeper anchoring—in presence itself. In the underlying awareness that holds all our becoming, all our letting go.

When the structures we've relied on crumble, when the ways we've defined ourselves no longer serve, we're invited to discover what remains. What's here when everything else falls away? Who are you when you're not who you thought you were?

These aren't comfortable questions. But they're the ones that can set us free.

Here are some ways to practice dwelling in the threshold:

• Notice the pause at the bottom of your exhale.
• Feel the suspension between one pose and the next.
• Catch the quiet space where one thought ends before another begins.

These micro-moments of transition train you to trust the ground that's always been there—the one that doesn't depend on anything staying the same.