The Part of You Still Waiting
So many of us enter our healing through a single door – a language that names our pain, a ritual that holds our grief, a community that saves our life. And for a time, that’s everything. But then something shifts. New questions begin to stir. Who am I now? What’s calling me forward? What part of me is still waiting to be met?
These questions name something I see again and again. Not the dramatic collapse, but the quiet insistence of something that refuses to stay contained by even the most helpful story you’ve been living. It’s that moment when the story that saved you starts to feel too small. When the framework that held you together through crisis begins to press against something in you that’s ready to emerge.
This is the threshold moment.
The Mythology That Saves Us
We all need a story to hold our suffering. When life collapses – through loss, betrayal, divorce, illness, the slow unraveling of everything you thought was solid – we reach for frameworks that help us make sense of the chaos. Therapy. Recovery programs. Spiritual practices. These give us language, ritual, and community. They offer a container for what feels uncontainable.
And thank god for that. This is necessary. This is life-saving work.
Most of life moves between two essential rhythms: coping and dealing. In crisis, we cope – managing the logistics, staying functional, surviving the storm. We can’t access our feelings yet because we’re too busy keeping ourselves upright. Then, when the immediate danger passes, we deal – feeling the impact, processing what’s been lost and gained, integrating what the crisis revealed.
We cycle between these states. Between the practical demands of physical survival – jobs, relationships, direction – and the deeper work of emotional and psychological healing. Forgiveness. Grief. The search for meaning. These are the engines of life, the rhythms that keep us moving through our days.
And then…
Something Refuses to Stay Quiet
After the mythology has held you. After you’ve moved through crisis and integration, maybe multiple times. After the story that saved you has done its beautiful, necessary work…
Something refuses to stay contained.
It’s not a problem needing logistics. Not a wound needing more processing. But a quiet, persistent insistence. A stirring that won’t be satisfied with stability.
This is what I call the unnamed unraveling. Not the dramatic collapse – not the crisis that brings you to your knees – but something subtler. The soul’s refusal to stay contained by even the most helpful story you’ve been living.
Maybe you’ve done all the work. You understand your patterns. You’ve processed your trauma. You’ve built a good life. And yet there’s this feeling… like you’re living in a house that’s become too small, wearing clothes that no longer fit who you’re becoming.
What part of me is still waiting to be met?
Healing From, Healing Into
Healing from something gets you to solid ground. It addresses what’s broken, processes trauma, restores stability. It saves lives. Absolutely necessary.
But healing into something – that’s different territory altogether.
It asks you to trust dissolving again. Not from trauma this time, but from readiness. It invites you into that disorienting space where life as you knew it no longer exists, but what’s being born hasn’t revealed itself yet. Where you can’t go back, but you don’t yet know what you’re moving toward.
Our culture calls this depression. Breakdown. Mid-life crisis. “Falling apart.”
I call it initiation.
An invitation to grow your soul.
Lost in the Liminal Space
Finding yourself fractured, alienated, or underserved by traditional therapy can send you into that disillusionment spiral all over again.
Maybe therapy helped you stabilize. It gave you tools, taught you to manage symptoms, helped you understand why you are the way you are. But something essential in you remains untouched. The questions you’re asking don’t fit the therapeutic frame. The stirring in you isn’t a disorder to treat – it’s something trying to emerge, and the clinical language can’t quite reach it.
Or maybe you’re cycling through modalities, searching for the thing that will finally land. You’ve done the work – god, have you done the work. You’ve read the books, attended the workshops, sat in the circles. And yet you feel lost in a way that has no diagnosis. Disoriented in a way that has no clear cause.
That lostness? That disorientation?
That’s the liminal space.
You’re between worlds. The old one gone, the new one not yet visible. And while therapy is often designed to help you cope with life as it is, to return you to functioning, threshold work is designed to help you stay in that uncomfortable not-knowing long enough to discover what’s trying to be born.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: if we don’t take the time to be in these passages – these thresholds – they don’t go away. They get buried. They emerge years later as unnamed depression, unresolved grief, a pervasive sense of meaninglessness even when life looks good on paper. These unhappy states are often alerting us to an unresolved transition, a threshold we rushed through or glossed over because our culture doesn’t know how to hold the in-between.
The Medicine in the Liminal Space
Here’s the truth: you can’t go back to who you were. That door is closed. The person you were before this unraveling – they’re gone.
But you can choose to stay small.
You can rush through the discomfort, grab the first new story that offers relief, fill the void with activity or achievement or the next thing you’re supposed to do. You can stay in the old mythology way too long because at least it’s familiar, at least you know how to perform it.
Or…
You can stay in the liminal space. That uncomfortable not-knowing between what’s died and what’s being born. You can let it do its work on you.
This is where threshold work lives. In that space where you listen to Spirit, to your inner being. Where you move away from illusions and get brutally real. Where you ask the hard questions that have no easy answers:
Who am I now?
What calls me forward?
What part of me is still waiting to be met?
Traditional therapy often moves toward resolution, stability, and return to functioning. And that’s appropriate for what it’s designed to do. But threshold work moves toward revelation. It holds you in the questions rather than rushing toward answers. It honors that you’re not broken – you’re becoming. It trusts that the discomfort has medicine in it, if you can stay long enough to receive it.
Because when you can stay with the questions – when you can let them work on you instead of rushing to answers – that’s when a wounding becomes a sacred wound. That’s when wounding becomes a doorway instead of a dead end. From “why is this happening to me?” to “what is this asking me to become?”
In Indigenous cultures, this is recognized as initiation. I feel deeply aligned to that language. We are constantly being initiated, but our culture has forgotten how to name it, how to honor it, how to give it the time and space it needs. So we call these moments “falling apart” when really, they’re invitations. Invitations to grow your soul, to shed what’s too small, to become more of who you actually are.
What Threshold Work Holds
I hold stories at any point in their initiation – in their raw, unformed moment. I walk with the resentments that won’t let go, the fear that wakes you at 3am, the betrayal that changed everything. I offer rituals and practices that honor what’s dying and what’s trying to be born.
But I also get curious. Ask questions gently. Mirror your words lovingly. Because if we don’t ask those hard questions in the liminal space – if we rush through or numb out or fill the void too quickly – we’re agreeing to remain small. We’re choosing the familiar cage over the terrifying freedom of not knowing who we’re becoming.
If you feel fractured by a system that wants to fix you rather than witness you…
If you’re alienated from frameworks that reduce your unraveling to symptoms…
If you’re underserved by approaches that can’t hold the mystery of what you’re moving through, that keep trying to return you to “normal” when normal is exactly what’s dying…
You’re not lost. You are being initiated.
And that liminal space where you feel most disoriented, most undone? That’s exactly where the medicine lives. That’s the place where the old mythology loosens its hold and something truer can emerge.
The mythology that saved you was perfect for its time. It held you when you needed holding. But after that? What new mythology is working through you now? What’s the story that wants to emerge from this threshold? What’s waiting to be born in you that the old container can no longer hold?
That’s the part of you that’s still waiting to be met.
And maybe – just maybe – it’s time to stop rushing past it. Time to stop apologizing for the dissolving. Time to trust that this uncomfortable not-knowing is not a problem to solve but a passage to honor.
Marion Woodman wrote: “A life truly lived constantly burns away veils of illusion, burns away what is no longer relevant, gradually reveals our essence, until, at last, we are strong enough to stand in our naked truth.”
This is the work. This is the invitation.