So welcome everyone.
And thank you.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for being here.
And let me say at the very start Who I think is listening?
Because I suspect this talk has found a particular kind of person.
And I would like you to feel met rather than addressed.
I think you're between things.
I think something in your life has ended or is ending or has loosened its grip.
A job,
A role,
A relationship,
A chapter,
A version of yourself.
And the next thing The thing that is supposed to come after has not arrived.
Or it has arrived but it has not yet steadied.
It does not yet hold your weight.
And you are standing right now in the gap.
In the part with no name.
The part between two lives.
And I think you are uncomfortable in a way that is hard to explain to people.
Because from the outside,
Not very much may be visibly wrong.
There is no single catastrophe to point at.
There is just this groundlessness.
This constant low level of unease.
This sense of moving through your days slightly unanchored as though the floor has been replaced with something that mostly holds but that you no longer fully trust.
I am not going to do the thing.
The wellness internet does with this.
I am not going to tell you this is happening for a beautiful reason.
I am not going to tell you you are exactly where you are meant to be.
And I am definitely not going to tell you the universe has a plan for you.
And the discomfort is just the plan being shy.
Some of that may even turn out to be true.
But said now to anybody in the gap,
It would be a lie.
A lie of toxic positivity which is not really positivity at all.
It is just their refusal to let a hard thing be hard.
And you have had quite enough of being told to feel differently than you feel.
So here is what I will actually do.
I am going to take the in-between seriously.
I am going to tell you what is genuinely happening to you in your nervous system,
In your sense of self.
In the part of you that some traditions would call the soul.
I am going to be honest that it is hard and honest about why it is hard.
And I'm not going to rush you out of it.
And then we can explore together.
Something that is not a solution and something that is not silver lining.
Something much quieter and I think far more useful.
I am going to talk to you about faith.
And I am going to mean something very specific and very practical by that word.
Something that has nothing to do with certainty.
And everything to do with how a person stands on ground they cannot yet see.
So.
Let us begin by naming the thing properly.
Because part of what makes the in-between so disorienting is that our culture has almost no language for it and almost no respect for it.
There is an old word.
And it is worth knowing.
Liminal.
It comes from the Latin lemon.
Which simply means a threshold.
The worn stone strip at the bottom of a doorway.
The bit you step on as you pass from one room to another.
A liminal space is a threshold space.
There is the living.
There is the arriving.
And there is a long strange essential middle part.
Where you have genuinely left the forest in.
But I have not arrived at the next.
So you belong fully to neither in that state.
So,
Older cultures did not treat that middle part as the problem.
They did not treat it as dead time to be hurried through.
They actually build rituals around it.
They marked it.
But they gave it a container and a name.
And elders who had been through it before.
When a young person was no longer a child but not yet an adult.
The culture did not say get on with it.
The culture said,
Yes,
This is the threshold.
We see that you're on it.
We will hold the edges of it for you while you cross.
We do not say that anymore.
We have almost entirely lost the ritual container for the in-between.
So when you find yourself there.
.
.
Between jobs,
Between relationships,
Between identities,
Between the person you've stopped being and the person you've not yet become.
There is no cultural structure waiting to hold you.
There's no elder at the door.
There is just you alone in the unmarked middle with a phone in your hand.
And a quiet voice somewhere asking,
With rising urgency,
Why is this taking so long?
And what is wrong with me that I have not sorted it out yet?
So I want to lift that particular weight off you right at the start.
The reason the in-between feels so unbearable.
Is not that you are bad at it.
It is that you are doing alone and unsupported.
A thing that human beings were never meant to do alone and unsupported.
You are crossing a threshold that your ancestors would have carried across by a whole community.
And you're crossing it in a culture that does not even believe that the threshold exists.
Of course it is hard.
You're doing something genuinely difficult.
With none of the scaffolding,
The difficulty was always meant to come with it.
Let me take you into the body.
Because there is something specific happening in your nervous system right now.
And once you understand it,
A great deal of what you've been calling weakness or anxiety or failure is going to reorganize itself into something far more bearable.
Your nervous system has one job above all others.
Just one.
To keep you alive.
And the way it does that job is by prediction.
All day,
Every day,
Beneath your conscious thought,
Your system is running a model of the world and asking,
What happens next?
It is built to forecast.
And when its weather forecasts come true.
When the day unfolds roughly as predicted.
It registers something it experiences as safety.
Not happiness necessarily,
Remember,
Safety comes first.
The deep low animal sense.
That the ground is where the ground was yesterday.
Now consider what a life transition does to that system.
A transition by definition It's the collapse of the prediction model.
The whole map.
The one that told you who you were,
What your days contained,
What came next.
That map no longer corresponds to that territory.
And the new map has not been drawn.
So your nervous system,
The great forecaster,
Looks ahead to forecast the next thing.
And finds that it cannot.
It runs the model and the model returns nothing.
Uncertainty,
The unknown.
And here is the crucial point.
The point that explains everything you've been feeling.
Your nervous system does not have a separate calm category for uncertainty.
It does not have a settling that says the future is merely unclear.
How interesting.
To an evolved survival system.
Uncertainty and danger are processed by the same machinery.
A future it cannot predict is read,
At the deepest and most worldless level,
As a threat,
Not metaphorically but literally.
The same circuitry that would fire if a predator stepped out of the trees is firing now.
Low and constant.
Simply because you cannot see what is coming.
This is why the in-between does not feel like a neutral waiting room.
It feels like standing in an open field,
Knowing something is out there.
That hum of unease you've been carrying.
That is not a character flaw and it is not you failing to cope with it.
That is healthy,
Intelligent,
Correctly functioning nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do.
Which is to treat the unknown as dangerous and to flood you with enough discomfort that you are strongly motivated to resolve it.
So your body is not malfunctioning.
Your body,
If anything,
Is working a little too well.
And once you see that you see the trap.
Because the nervous system,
Desperate to end the intolerable not-knowing,
Will push you,
Push you hard towards the fastest available exit.
And unfortunately,
The fastest available exit from the in-between is almost never the right door.
It is just the nearest one.
I want to talk to you about the nearest door first.
Because this is where people lose their transitions.
Not in the difficulty itself.
Putting the escape from difficulty.
When the groundlessness becomes unbearable.
The nervous system goes looking for ground,
Any ground.
And because it cannot find the real ground The real next chapter has not formed yet.
It will reach instead for what I call a false floor.
A false floor is something that ends the feeling of falling without actually being where you are meant to land.
Now,
This might resonate with some of you.
A false floor can look like rushing into the next relationship before you have finished feeling the loss of the last one.
Because being in a relationship,
Any relationship,
Makes the groundlessness stop.
And the stopping feels so much like rightness that you mistake one for the other.
A false floor can also look like grabbing the first job,
The first plan,
The first version of the next thing that presents itself.
Not because it is right.
But because deciding anything quietens the alarm.
It can look like a sudden total certainty.
I know exactly what I'm doing now.
That arrives not from genuine clarity but from your system's sheer inability to tolerate one more day of not knowing.
It can even look like collapsing back into the old life you had just begun to live.
Because the old prison is at least a known prison.
An unknown prison reads to the nervous system as safer than an open feed.
None of these are stupid.
I want to be clear about that.
There is no contempt in this.
Every one of them is your survival system being clever and being fast.
And doing its honest best to get you out of a state it has correctly identified as aversive.
But here is what I've watched.
Again and again in this work.
The people who suffer most in transitions.
Are very rarely the ones who found the in-between heart.
The in-between is hard for everyone.
The ones who suffer the most are the ones who could not bear the in-between.
And so reach for a first floor and then had to live sometimes for years on a floor that was never meant to hold a whole life.
There is a line I came across that has stayed with me.
From someone writing about exactly this.
They said,
That prematurely rebuilding your identity interrupts the deeper workings.
That the threshold state exists precisely because something in you is reorganizing itself at a structural level.
And they're escaping the in-between too quickly,
Simply rebuilds.
Were collapsed.
Read that slowly now.
The discomfort is not the malfunction.
The discomfort is renovation.
And if you flee the building every time the work gets loud,
The building never gets built.
You just move back into old rooms and call it peace.
So the first hard honest thing I will ask you of is this.
Before you take any door and there will be a door and you will take it.
Pause long enough to ask one question.
Am I walking through this because it is genuinely mine?
Or I am walking through it because I cannot stand the corridor.
And the question is not easy to answer.
But asking it,
Even asking it badly,
Is most of the work.
It is the difference between a transition that transforms you and a transition you merely survive by grabbing the nearest wall.
I have been honest with you about how hard this is.
Now I want to be equally honest about something else.
And I want you to hear that It is not a constellation prize and it is not me sweetening the difficulty.
The in-between is not empty.
It is not that time.
It is not your life on pause while the real life gets organized somewhere offstage.
The in-between is doing something.
And what it is doing cannot be done elsewhere.
Think about this now.
What actually has to happen for a person to genuinely change?
Not to rearrange the furniture of your life,
Just to change.
The old structure of the self has to really come apart before a new one can form.
There's no way around that.
A self does not upgrade tidily.
Like a phone,
With the old version running smoothly right up until the new one boots.
A self comes apart.
And there is a period.
And there has to be a period.
Where the old you no longer fits.
And the new you is not there yet.
And in that period you feel formless.
That is you right now.
Not as a metaphor to make you feel better?
But as an accurate description of the process.
The formlessness that you're experiencing is not the absence of progress.
It is the form the progress is taking right now.
You cannot feel like a finished thing right now because you're not.
Your mid sentence.
And no one can read a meaning of a sentence that is only halfway said.
It is the only place where the old self can fully dissolve.
And the dissolving is not the disaster.
The dissolving is the necessity for a staff of becoming.
This brings me to the word I mentioned at the start.
And the word is faith.
And I want to spend real time here,
Because this is the heart of it.
This word has been so badly handled that most people flinch at it.
And I don't want you to flinch.
I want you to be able to use it.
So,
Here is what faith is not.
Faith is not certainty.
Fate is not the belief that everything will definitely work out.
It is not a confident forecast about the future dressed up in spiritual language.
If I stood here and told you it will all be fine,
Trust the process,
The universe has your back,
Good vibes only,
That is not faith,
That would be prediction.
But that would just be your anxious nervous systems craving for a guaranteed outcome.
Wearing a robe.
And it would collapse the instant the future fails to cooperate with you.
Because it was never built to hold certainty,
It was built to deny it.
So,
Real faith.
Real faith is something else entirely.
And it is far sturdier.
Because it does not depend on the future behaving.
Faith is the capacity to keep standing and keep walking on the ground you cannot see.
Faith is the capacity to keep standing and keep walking on the ground you cannot see.
It is not knowing that the bridge is there.
It is being willing to put your weight down anyway.
And the mystics across every tradition understood this.
And they never described faith as a feeling of security.
They actually described it in the opposite way.
Now,
Me or this talk is not aligned with any religion,
But the Saint John of the Cross called the deepest stretch of the spiritual journey the dark night.
Not a punishment,
Not a failure,
But a necessary passage where all old familiar lights go out.
Where you can no longer feel the presence that you used to feel.
And the only thing left for you to do is to keep walking in the darkness.
He did not say dark night means you've lost your way.
He said the dark night is the way.
Now the Sufi spoke of Fana.
A dissolving of the small constructed self.
And they did not pretend it was comfortable at all.
They knew it as a kind of annihilation.
But they trusted that what dissolves the false self is the same love that is forming the true one.
And in the Bhakti traditions,
There is this recurring tender idea that the times the divine feels most absent,
Most silent,
Most withdrawn.
Those are not abandonment.
They are a deeper kind of folding.
A holding you cannot feel because it is too close and too large to be an object of your senses.
What every one of those traditions is saying in its own language.
Is the same practical thing.
And that's the thing I want you to carry with you if it resonates.
You do not have to be able to see the ground in order to be held by it.
The not seeing is not the evidence of failing.
And sometimes the not seeing is simply the texture of the deepest part of the crossing.
So when I say have faith,
Here is precisely what I am and what I am not asking.
I am not asking you to believe it will work out.
I don't know that.
You don't know that.
Honesty matters too much to pretend otherwise.
I am asking you for something smaller and braver and entirely within your power.
I'm asking you to be willing to take the next single step in the dark.
Not the whole staircase,
Just the next stair.
Without first demanding a guarantee about whether the staircase ends.
So faith is not a feeling that arrives and makes the fear go away.
Faith is a thing that you do with the fear still fully present.
It is the decision to keep moving as though your life has a shape.
Even on days you cannot feel the shape.
That is possible.
Now let us bring this into the body.
Because faith as I have described it is not a thought you can think your way into.
It is a state you have to practice standing or dancing.
This practice will not remove.
Uncertainty Nothing honest could do that.
What it will do is it will heat your body.
That it can be in uncertainty and survive it.
That is the only thing that actually helps.
Not the end of the in-between.
The discovery that you can stand inside without being destroyed by it.
Let's do this just for a few minutes and see how you feel.
So begin.
By letting your body arrive fully into this moment.
Wherever you are.
Not the future.
The future is precisely the thing your mind cannot hold right now.
So we are going to set it down.
Just here.
Just the bread.
Just a chair.
Just the room.
Just this exact moment.
Which is the only place that has ever actually been solidified.
And feel the surface beneath you.
The floor.
The chair.
The ground under the building.
Feel how it is holding you.
Completely.
Without any forecast.
Know it is this The ground beneath you is not holding you because of what happens next month.
It is not conditional on your plans working out.
It is holding you now.
Regardless of what happens in your future.
The present moment is solid,
Even when the future is not.
Let your body feel the truth of that.
There is ground here.
It has always been grounded.
It is only the future that has no flow yet.
And you are not required to stand in the future.
You're only ever required to stand here.
Now.
I want you to bring to mind gently.
The uncertainty itself.
There might be a situation in your life or not.
Uncertainty,
Not knowing.
The unformed next chapter.
Just see what that does.
To your system.
Do not push it away.
Let it be here,
In the room with you.
And notice where your body is holding it.
For most people,
There's a place.
The chest,
The stomach,
Throughout the shoulders.
Where the not knowing lives as a physical sensation or tightness a bracing,
A hum,
Find a tune.
Now just place your attention on it.
The way you would place a warm hand on something that hurts.
And now,
Instead of trying to make that sensation go away,
I want you to do something that will feel counterintuitive.
I want you to let it be there and keep breathing anyway.
I want you to let Let the sensation be there and keep breathing anyway.
You are not going to fix it.
You're not gonna resolve it.
You're simply going to stay present,
Breathing.
With the uncertainty fully switched on.
This is you.
Teaching your nervous system.
The single most important thing that it can learn right now.
That this sensation however unpleasant,
Is survivable.
That you can feel the groundlessness and not be destroyed by it.
Every breath you take while staying with it is a small Real rap music.
And you right now are building the muscle of faith.
And as you do that.
.
.
Let a few sentences move through you now,
Slowly.
Like stones set down one at a time.
I am in the in-between.
I am in the in-between.
I am not lost.
I am crossing.
I do not need to see the whole way.
I only need to see the next step.
This formlessness is not the absence of my life.
It is my life in the middle of becoming.
The ground I am standing on right now is holding me.
I will let that be enough for right now.
The ground I am standing on right now is holding me.
I will let that be enough for right now.
I can feel afraid and walk anyway.
That walking is what faith is.
And now just for the next few seconds.
I want you to let yourself be held.
Not by certainty,
Because there is none.
But by something much larger and much quieter.
Whatever that word points to for you.
The divine,
Life,
Love,
The same vast holding the mystics kept pointing at.
You do not have to be able to feel it clearly.
Remember.
Sometimes,
The not feeling is just because it is too close and too large to be felt as a thing.
Simply let yourself consider the possibility.
That you are not in fact crossing this alone in an empty universe.
Something is holding the edges of the threshold for you.
The way the elders did.
And your only task.
Is to keep walking.
One honest step at a time.
Rest here,
Held with the uncertainty still in the room.
Still breathing,
Still intact and still here.
Still breathing,
Still intact.
And still here.
Now.
Whenever you are ready.
With no hurry.
Just level every movement returned to your body,
To your hands,
To your feet.
And come back.
But come back having felt even for a moment.
What it is to stand in the in-between without being broken by it.
That memory is the ground you're actually building.
Not the ground of a settled future.
The ground of a self that has learned it can stand on a threshold and not fall.
As we come to an end.
I want to give you a few honest,
Plain things to carry.
Stop measuring this transition by how long it is taking.
There is no correct duration for the inbetween.
Lower the bar for a day dramatically and on purpose.
In an ordinary settled stretch of life,
You can ask a great deal of yourself.
In the in between you cannot and you should not even try.
Some of the energy that would normally be available to you is being spent on the sheer work of metabolizing uncertainty.
So a day in which you simply stayed reasonably steady and did not reach for a false floor.
That is not a wasted day.
In the in-between,
That is a very successful day.
And the last thing.
I want to say something directly to you in the gap.
That what you're doing is not nothing.
Can feel like nothing.
It can feel like waiting,
Like limbo,
Like a humiliating pause in a life that everyone else seems to be getting on with.
It is not nothing.
To stand in the in-between,
To feel the full groundlessness of it,
To resist the false floors and to keep taking the honest next step in the dark without a guarantee,
That is one of the most courageous things a human being can ever do.
Most of the bravery in human life is not loud and it does not look like bravery.
It looks like an ordinary person on an ordinary uncertain evening choosing to stay standing.
That is you.
That is what you're doing.
And I want you to know that it counts.
And it's enough.
The bridge appears in the end mostly.
To those who were willing to walk towards where it would be before they could even see it.
So.
.
.
Keep walking.
One honest step.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for being here.
Take whatever resonates and you can come back to this whenever you need to.
Take care of yourself and until next time,
Namaste.
