By Tom Lancaster
It is often said that the only constant in life is change, yet navigating transition is fraught with fear, doubt and uncertainty. We all want to do more, be more, experience more, leave a bigger legacy for those that come after us. Yet we stay the same.
Paralysed by the infinite; terrified of making the wrong choice; convinced that we haven’t got what it takes; We want to change something in our lives but as soon as we start down that path, everything in our reality starts to crumble and we retreat back to the safety of the known.
Sound familiar? I’ve been through this cycle a thousand times. But I’ve also made significant changes in my life. Four times I have moved my entire life to a different country with no idea what I would do when I got there. I’ve had at least 10 careers over the last 20 years, from performing with fire to running feature film sets. I’ve started 5 businesses, and failed dramatically with 4 of them. In 2011 I set a new Guinness World Record, and I have another one on the horizon.
I have become a master of liminal spaces.
“If you want to hold the liminal space, make sure you are prepared for the Primal Scream “
The Liminal Space and the Dark Night of the Soul
So let’s make it real. What is the liminal space?
The Liminal Space is the space in between. The space between no longer and not yet. The space between the known and the unknown. Between where I am and where I want to be.
You’ve decided to quit your job and start a business that is more aligned with your purpose. You’ve noticed a limiting pattern in your life but haven’t yet released it. You’ve moved to a new city or country and haven’t found your groove. These are all liminal spaces.
Like Tarzan in the jungle, you’ve let go of one vine but haven’t yet caught the next. For this brief time, you are flying. But you are also falling.
The liminal space is where we shed those parts of us that no longer serve us – the people, the beliefs, the stories – in order to step into a new way of being. Guided by our inner wisdom, our higher self, we step into a truer alignment with ourselves, and in doing so, we necessarily start to question everything we previously believed to be true. Nothing makes sense any more and we feel like we are living in a void.
We are going through the process of death and rebirth. The thing is, more often than not, it just feels like we are dying. Sometimes we haven’t even made a choice to follow our dreams, instead it feels like the events of life are thrust upon us – an unexpected pregnancy, a lost job, or illness can all shift us out of our known reality into something beyond.
But even when we have made the choice consciously, when we have answered the call to adventure with a resounding HELL YEAH, we almost always still have to endure the dark night of the soul before we can return to the shire having fully integrated this new way of being.
So what is the dark night of the soul? And how can we navigate these choppy waters and come out the other side stronger, more aligned, and more intentional?
In my experience, we receive many calls to adventure throughout our lifetime. At first they are gentle nudges, as if the soul is whispering “Hey, what do you think about this?” For some of us, this is enough, and if we are present enough to answer the call at this stage, the transition can be relatively easy. But for most of us, the soul has to try a bit harder. The gentle nudge becomes a shove, and the voice becomes louder and more insistent until finally we have no choice – the diagnosis comes in, the endless wishing for time off suddenly manifests in the shape of redundancy, or the partner leaves, taking the kids.
If you look back at your life, I’m sure you will be able to see some clear messages from your subconscious that you either did or didn’t listen to. For me, the big one was the voice inside telling me to move to Vancouver. It was a 15 year odyssey for my soul to get me to pay attention and actually do something. I always knew I would end up here, but it was always off in the distance, part of some vague future that I couldn’t grapple with.
But the messages got louder and louder. Still I missed the deadline of 30 for the working holiday visa, too afraid to take action. And I got more and more disillusioned with life. My relationships suffered, my depression worsened, and I did everything EXCEPT listen to my intuition. I even moved to a different country…just the wrong one! I took the safe option and moved to Qatar, where my parents were living and I knew I had a safety net.
This isn’t the piece to talk about all the ways my intuition told me to move to Vancouver, but it is important to note that they got louder and louder. Eventually I bit the bullet and took the plunge in 2018, when I bought my plane ticket. And on march 25th, 2019, I boarded the plane at Heathrow and set off into my new life.
So what about this dark night of the soul business? Despite my excitement for this new adventure, this was really the beginning of my dark night of the soul. A period of intense self discovery, of grappling with my story of who I was and how the world is. I had an extremely romantic notion of how my life would magically transform now I had finally answered the call, and at first, it did.
I moved in with one of my oldest university friends, and we embarked on the relationship we had both wanted for the 15 years we had known each other. I went back to school and was excited to be learning and growing again after what felt like forever. I was blown away by the beauty and scale of the wilderness in British Columbia.
But the honeymoon period soon passed, and I realised that all the old feelings were still there. It became apparent how hard it would be to find a job. Despite knowing that I had found my spiritual home, at least for now, the depression got worse, my partner and I started fighting, my money started running out. It seemed hopeless.
But this time, something was different. I had changed my context by moving to Vancouver, and this changed the way things looked. Even though my entire worldview was collapsing, my old stories were suddenly exposed as stories. In this new context, they didn’t make sense, and they couldn’t hide in the same places. So they came out to fight, and the battle has been bloody.
The one thing that never changed was my conviction that I was pointing in the right direction. That the decision to come to Vancouver was one that would eventually yield great results.
The battle was bloody, but in the process, I discovered myself. At times I didn’t know which way was up, but looking back, every single step of the process was perfect. The pain and anguish and suffering of becoming something new was all perfectly orchestrated. The people, books and teachers that came into my life at exactly the right time, all pointed me in the direction of my higher self. All provided a new piece of the puzzle.
Death and Rebirth
In order for us to become something new, the old version of us has to die. It sounds bleak, but you can’t be at once a caterpillar and a butterfly. Unless you’re at a fancy dress party, but even then it would cause confusion!
During the process of death and rebirth, some of the things you might encounter are: Feeling Stuck. Spinning your wheels. Everything is doomed to fail. Feeling like you just want to go back to wherever you came from before where you knew how things would play out. Feeling unsafe. Confusion. Nostalgia. Lack of motivation. Fear. Anxiety. Depression.
If you are in the process of creating something that doesn’t exist yet, and you are experiencing one or many of these, don’t worry. In fact, embrace it. Be curious about it. Listen to your body. Quiet the mind with meditation and allow the voice of inner wisdom to be heard.
The only question you really need to ask yourself in this phase is this:
“Is what’s on the other side of this aligned with who I really am?”
The caterpillar enters its cocoon, and literally dissolves into goop. I’m sure if it had any self awareness at this point, it would be feeling pretty fed up with life right about now. But it has no idea that it is about to become a butterfly.
When we are experiencing the dark night of the soul, the liminal space between who we were and who we are becoming, we can feel like the caterpillar/goop. But the goop stage is a necessary part of the process of metamorphosis.
If we can ground ourselves in the knowledge that no matter how goopy we feel, the butterfly will eventually spread its wings and fly, then we give ourselves permission to have faith. Faith in what we are becoming.
For the last two years I have been operating on faith. I haven’t known what the butterfly will look like, but I have never let go of the faith that it will fly. And it is taking shape. There is work to do still, and there always will be, but what that work is gets clearer and clearer every day.
So wherever you are in your hero’s journey, can you connect to the butterfly that is forming within you?