Existing Between – Reflections on Layers of Liminality

A few months ago, I felt called to rebrand my website as Between Worlds. At the time, the decision came from a growing disenchantment with my previous branding, but also from a whisper urging me to clarify my message and become more accessible, so that those seeking a companion on this mysterious journey of transformation could find me.

I chose it because I found myself, yet again, between worlds of identity, between who I had been and who I was becoming, as layers of illusion and conditioning began to fall away. That reason still feels deeply true. But what I understand now is that Between Worlds is not just about identity. It is about belonging. It is about learning how to belong to myself while everything familiar is dissolving.

And I sense there are many of us living in that threshold – between who we were and who we are becoming.

Recently, I’ve noticed there are many more layers to this liminality.

On a social level, I live between cultures as a first-generation Indian American. I notice how often I’ve learned to become a chameleon, subtly shape-shifting into whatever allows me to fit in without disruption. Many can relate to this kind of betweenness – through race, gender, sexual orientation, abilities, or other social markers.

For years, belonging often meant adaptation. Softening parts of myself. Toning down my Indianness in certain spaces. Editing my Americanness in others.

But over the last few years, as I have reoriented to this liminality, not from a place of otherness, but from a place of uniqueness, I’ve found myself showing up more authentically. I’ve begun weaving my Indian culture into the ways I express myself in my American suburban life: through ritual, language, adornment, movement, and devotion. And I’ve become less apologetic about my American expression within Indian spaces.

I am learning that living between worlds can create enough distance from conformity to choose what is truly mine.

Paradigms, or our inherited belief systems, quietly shape how we live and lead. I have been deeply conditioned by beliefs around self-worth, measured in a strange swirl of productivity, output, selflessness, and external validation.

A few years ago, after undergoing radiation treatment for a benign vestibular tumor, my body changed the terms of my life. I was no longer physically, mentally, or emotionally able to sustain the pace I once had. The ways I had proven my worth no longer worked.

After selling my business, my attention turned inward. My days became slower, quieter. More time writing. More time resting. More time learning to dance. More saying no to external obligations and yes to the strange inner pull toward poetry, movement, and silence. From the outside, it may have looked unproductive, even selfish. But inwardly, something sacred was rearranging itself.

Still, living between these worlds of belief has been tender. One part of me still reaches for accomplishment and validation. Another part longs for a deeper way of being, one rooted in presence, creativity, and trust.

At times, this tension feels almost unbearable, not because I am lost, but because I can feel myself becoming in ways I cannot yet fully claim, as expressed in this poem, Existing Between.

Existing Between

-Tejal Tarro

What feels most unresolved now is how my soul’s longing to serve in this world will take form.

I still carry my former roles as facilitator and leader, but the old definitions feel too confining now. I also carry these newer expressions – poet, storyteller, dancer, but I have struggled to understand how they weave into something tangible.

What does service look like when it no longer fits the old structures?

Is it a retreat?
A gathering?
A poem spoken in a room of strangers?
A body moving in ways that awaken memory?
A ritual evoking the sacred in a room of leaders?
A newsletter inviting belonging within the mystery?

Over the last few months, I have found myself between my inner creative impulse and its outer manifestation. And this may be one of the hardest thresholds of all – when you can feel something alive inside you, but there is no clear blueprint for bringing it into the world.

And that seems to be another layer of Between Worlds.

There is the societal world of predefined roles and recognizable forms of service. And then there is the world of the soul, with its limitless, mysterious, and often impractical possibilities. This ambiguous space has often felt like a personal shortcoming. As though not knowing meant failing. But perhaps not knowing is its own form of wisdom.

As often happens on this wild journey, I receive clues when I am ready for them. This time, it came through my dear friend PJ Harder, who is also moving through a similar journey of creative emergence.

I was trying to explain, in what felt like a messy and inarticulate way, what I was attempting to create through Between Worlds. To my surprise, her eyes lit up. She said she understood immediately, and that it reminded her of Mother Night by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

I knew instantly I needed to listen. Within the first few chapters, I felt something unclench in me. What I had mistaken for confusion was perhaps initiation.

Dr. Estés speaks of the medial person – one who resides in the darkness where buried truths surface. The point is not to escape this darkness, but to reorient our senses so we can trust intuition, body, and subtle inner knowing.

What resonated most deeply for me was her framing of liminal, or medial, life as holding two ways of experiencing existence: the mind’s practical reality and the soul’s symbolic reality. She suggests we thrive when we can hold both because the soul gives us access to depth, creativity, and meaning, and practical reality gives those experiences shape.

I can see this clearly in my own life.

For most of my years, I lived primarily in practical reality, with symbolic reality hidden beneath the surface. But over the last few years, I plunged deeply into symbolic reality while practical life slowed to a quieter rhythm.

I dove into poetry, opening the mystical language of my soul.
I dove into dance, awakening the embodied wildness of my being.
I dove into spiritual practice, deepening my desire for liberation and prosperity for all beings.

And now, I feel something shifting again. Not away from the soul, but toward integration.

A call to bring the symbolic into form.
To let poetry become offering.
To let dance become medicine.
To let story become bridge.
To let ritual become invitation.

Perhaps this is the work of Between Worlds – not to rush toward certainty, but to become intimate with the fertile threshold where soul and world are still learning how to meet.