Practice of Patience – Reflections on Living in Liminality

Most times, I could see that they were being cordial in the superficial ways our society expects us to be nice and courteous. To them, I would give the plainest answer possible, which was that I sold my business, experienced some health issues, and now work part-time as a consultant. This was usually enough to satisfy the unwritten expectations of social norms.

However, there have been a few times when I would take that deep breath, look in the person’s eyes, and see that something within them was longing to hear my story. To them I would tell the details of my heartaches: death, loss, reckoning, abandonment, addiction, and separation. I could feel their hearts open in loving compassion without any desire to fix or appease me. I then told of the courageous choices I had made, such as selling my thriving business to create space in my life, dancing on stage despite my physical challenges, and sharing vulnerable writing that called my soul. In the telling of my story, I could see their eyes light up and could sense that they too had stories to tell. They told of their heartaches, different from mine in content but similar in context – full of suffering from loss and reckoning with identity. They also spoke of courage – leaving unhealthy situations, handling crises with grace, and following their own wildly creative callings.

In these conversations I felt our shared human struggle of living in liminality: a place of having let go of many old ways of being, but not yet fully embodied in emerging ways of being.  Navigating this liminal space has been so challenging for me because the pull of habitual ways of thinking and behaving have been so deeply embedded, and trusting myself to create the future I desire has elicited so much fear and resistance. I have repeatedly tried to force myself to change, and through change to achieve some fixed mental image of who I’m supposed to be, what my circumstances are supposed to be, and how I am supposed to be living my life. After numerous failed attempts through force and control, I am learning that relaxing my mental habits of resistance, loving my messiness with compassionate patience, and trusting the divine presence in my unknowns are more effective practices in navigating the in-betweenness of life, as described in this poem Practice of Patience:

Practice of Patience

Wanting the undesirable parts to vanish
And accepting those parts still exist today

Desiring answers to the uncomfortable unknown
And receiving the answer now is … not yet

Yearning for visible circumstances to change
And trusting that unseen change is arising

Enduring the tension of liminal space
And relaxing into this moment, again and again

-Tejal Tarro

Resistance is waiting for fleeting moments of inspiration to write, versus doing the daily work of sitting down to write. Resistance is allowing my addiction to numbing myself take over versus lovingly accepting my discomfort with the unknown as part of my daily reality. Resistance is getting very busy with lots of activities that give me a false sense of safety, security, and validation versus taking risks and investing energy in building new skills and deepening connections more aligned with the future that is calling me.  Resistance is even getting consumed with endlessly healing my wounds and fixing my deficiencies. Resistance is prioritizing other people’s drama as mine to resolve or soothe. Resistance is, in one flashing moment, getting hooked on some ideal of future perfection, deeming it impossible and resigning back into dull procrastination.

To relax these habits of resistance, I am beginning to shift my relationship to resistance itself: from one of judging and shaming my shortcomings to one of accepting my imperfections with compassionate patience, and even a little cheeky humor. One would think that this light attitude would give me permission to slide into complacency or stagnation, but somehow just the opposite seems to happen. Since resistance is a defense mechanism meant to protect what feels raw and tender within me, it would reason that inflicting harsh self-judgement and shame would elicit even more defense. When I ease my defenses by allowing myself to keep opening into the present moment exactly as it is, without judgment or shame, what feels vulnerable within me eventually alchemizes into the passion and commitment to change.

The passion and commitment to change, and the outer circumstances reflecting change, is where the practice of patience comes in. Trusting the divine presence in the unknown, and trusting that unseen change is arising, is not one simply of faith or trying to placate my restless mind. It is opening myself up to new possibilities of how change may work. I, like many of us, especially in the West, was raised in belief systems of individualism and materialism. In an individualistic world, we are encouraged to pursue our own goals for self-fulfillment, which has many benefits, but it also leads to the tendency to view challenges we face as personal failings versus a natural consequence of systemic challenges. In a materialist world, reality is confined only to what our minds can perceive through observation and reason. In this view, the uncertainty and ambiguity of change elicit fear because safety and security can only exist in what can be seen and explained.

For example, in this phase of my life, I feel a deep passion to transform my physical health because I sense how it directly impacts my capacity to express the person I am becoming, especially artistically through writing and dance. In the past, I have tried to improve myself physically, but it was mostly to conform to some social ideal of body perfection, which never held much sticking power. So with this commitment to change, I find myself navigating in-betweenness. In some areas, like exercise and movement, I have integrated so many great new habits into my life. In other areas, I still struggle with habits that hurt my physical health, like emotional eating and overstimulating my nervous system with screens.

While there is likely some truth to that, it also discounts that I live in a fast-paced, plugged-in world so disconnected from nature that it is understandable how my nervous system can become so easily dysregulated. This wider lens of the systemic challenges doesn’t excuse my behaviors, but rather it allows me space to see that perhaps seeking support with regulating my nervous system may be the better path to sustainable change than forcing restrictions on myself (which has never worked).

As it relates to materialism and my tendencies for numbing, there are some changes that I have been contemplating for a while, namely giving up caffeine and alcohol. I had a long list of reasons why it made sense, but I kept sliding back into drinking coffee when I felt tired and saying yes to that glass of wine in social situations. Then one day, the desire to stop caffeine and alcohol just arose, rather unexpectedly, and the decision to stop seemed easier. There is nothing specific I can point to for why that change at that time, but what I did notice was that it seemed to accompany my decision to take my writing and performing more seriously. I also noticed that similar desires to reduce mood-altering substances surfaced with friends on similar journeys of transformation – people having parallel experiences without us having talked to each other. It felt like my change was a microcosm of a bigger macrocosmic change that could not easily be explained. A materialistic view would dismiss this possibility of macrocosmic forces as unreal, but opening to this possibility that we are on some collective journey through the mysterious unknown inspires resilience, faith, and courage within me. Since those of us with even a little humility know that our minds can never really understand this existence, why not choose a possibility that elicits hope rather than fear?

This desire to change physical health is on a personal level, but I can see how this practice of patience can apply to transformation and leadership in society. As leaders, we are often so focused on implementing the external content of change, usually through force and control, that we miss the internal context – the signs of resistance, both within ourselves and with others. Becoming deeply intimate with resistance, without shame or judgment, can create openings to relax our defenses and allow space for fear to alchemize into courage. As leaders, we can also create space to help others become intimate with resistance by sharing our own vulnerable stories and listening with compassion to theirs, gracefully guiding the conversations to stay focused on the context of our inner experiences versus the content of our outer circumstances.

Patience is an often-overlooked virtue of leadership, especially in today’s fast-paced and restless culture. When we can widen our lens of transformation to move from individualistic to collective, then perhaps we can address more systemic challenges preventing sustainable change. When we can release our grasp on materialism, our habits of controlling and forcing certainty to appease our minds, then we perhaps can more gracefully accept the ambiguity and uncertainty that is inherent in all change. Instead of wasting our vital creative energy seeking quick answers, perhaps we can allow ourselves to simply create without fixed expectations, patiently relaxing again and again into trusting that divine love is ever-present in the liminality.