What is Liminal Space?
Liminal space is a place or state of transition—an in-between zone that exists on the threshold between what came before and what has not yet arrived. The term comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold. In liminal periods, individuals occupy an intermediate state, suspended between identities, between social roles, between one chapter of life and the next. The defining quality of liminal space is its in-between-ness: the sense of being suspended between two defined states.
Liminal space can be physical—hallways, airports, borders—or psychological: the period between graduation and starting a new job, the dissolution of a relationship before clarity arrives, or the dying of an old self during spiritual crisis. Turner saw liminality as a condition with its own character: a space where social structure loosened, where normal rules were temporarily suspended, and where something new could emerge. He described liminality as a state of ambiguity and openness, a place where transformation becomes possible precisely because the usual structures are absent.
Origins & Lineage
The concept originates in Arnold van Gennep’s Les Rites de Passage, first published in French in 1909 and translated into English by the University of Chicago Press in 1960. Van Gennep coined the term “liminality” in his work “The Rites of Passage,” defining it as the transitional period or phase of a rite of passage, during which the participant lacks a defined social status. Van Gennep described rites of passage as a three-part structure: separation, transition (liminal period), and incorporation.
Victor Turner, an anthropologist working in the 1960s, expanded van Gennep’s idea. Victor Turner (1920-1983) was a British anthropologist who studied rituals and symbols. While living with the Ndembu people of current-day Zambia, he studied their rites of passage. Turner’s foundational work The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure was first published in 1969. Turner’s genius was to take the existing three-stage model of “rites of passage” (formulated by Arnold van Gennep) and conduct a deep, microscopic analysis of the crucial middle phase. Victor Turner (1920-1983) studied rites of passage among the Ndembu people in Zambia and explored how the liminal phase dissolves social roles and creates a sense of unity he called communitas.
The idea of liminality has since moved well beyond anthropology. It shows up in architecture, psychology, theology, political theory, and cultural criticism.
How It’s Practiced
In spiritual and consciousness communities, liminal space is encountered both deliberately—through practices designed to access threshold states—and spontaneously during life transitions. Practitioners enter liminal spaces through journeys to the otherworld or spirit world through trance, shamanic journeying or plant medicine, and union with the divine through meditation, movement, chanting or other forms. In these spaces, practitioners are neither fully in ‘mundane’ consciousness, nor immersed in the spirit world or dream space, but in-between, so they can channel these energies and insights into their lives.
Breathwork, particularly retention practices, offers direct access to liminal states. Through holding the breath in and holding the breath out, practitioners report gaining access to a liminal, transitional space that is neither physically in them, nor outside of them. Other approaches include cultivating mindfulness through meditation, exploring the subtle moments between breaths.
Practitioners explore crossroads both literally and symbolically, recognizing them as potent spaces for decision-making and spiritual work, and align spiritual activities with liminal times like dawn or dusk. Dreams represent a particular form of liminal space. Liminal dreaming occurs at the edge between being awake and falling asleep, usually accompanied by hypnagogia (a hallucinogenic, psychedelic, swirling realm when falling asleep) and hypnopompia (the swimmy realm after waking up).
Liminal Space Today
Contemporary seekers encounter liminal space through dedicated retreats, spiritual direction, and consciousness practices. Retreats guide participants through an understanding of ways liminal space and transformation shows up around them and within them, exploring liminal spaces through embodied practices, sound, stillness and nature. Spiritual practitioners are drawn into sacred space, into liminality, where all transformation takes place—the realm where the old world is left behind, though the new existence is not yet sure.
Spiritual directors invite seekers to explore how liminal space—in-between seasons of transition—can become sacred ground for spiritual discernment. The contemporary practice emphasizes sitting with uncertainty rather than rushing to resolution. The instinctive response to liminal space is usually to get out as quickly as possible, often by numbing out the emptiness and silence. Yet if practitioners can learn to sit in it, embrace it, and be present with it, it becomes a place of powerful healing potential.
In complex industrial societies, Turner suggested, the experiences of liminality and communitas are often displaced onto “liminoid” phenomena outside the ritual domain proper, such as art, leisure, and popular entertainment. He coined the term “liminoid” to describe these quasi-ritual phenomena.
Common Misconceptions
Liminal space is not the same as the recent internet aesthetic trend depicting eerie, empty physical spaces. In internet aesthetics, liminal spaces are empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, uncanny, and often surreal. While these physical spaces may evoke liminal feelings, the anthropological concept refers to psychological, social, and spiritual transition—not architectural emptiness.
Liminal space is not inherently comfortable or mystically blissful. The liminal phase is a state of profound ambiguity and disorientation. The person in this phase (the “liminar”) is stripped of their old social status and identity but has not yet been granted their new one. It involves loss of familiar structures and genuine not-knowing.
Liminality is also not a permanent spiritual destination. Liminal stages are temporary states. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes). Extended liminality without incorporation can become pathological rather than transformative.
How to Begin
For those wishing to work consciously with liminal space, Richard Rohr’s writings offer an accessible Western contemplative framework. Rohr argues that religion’s unique function is to lead practitioners into liminal space—sacred space where deconstruction of the old “normal” can occur. His Breathing Under Water and teachings at the Center for Action and Contemplation provide entry points.
Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) remains the foundational academic text for understanding liminality’s role in human transformation. For ethnographic depth, his earlier work The Forest of Symbols (1967) documents Ndembu ritual in detail.
Practically, begin by recognizing current life transitions—career changes, relationship endings, relocations, grief—as inherently liminal rather than problems to solve. Discernment is different from decision-making. Decision-making asks: What should I choose? Discernment asks: What should I pay attention to right now? Discernment isn’t about forcing a plan. Simple practices like labyrinth walking, extended meditation retreats during threshold times, or working with a spiritual director trained in liminal accompaniment provide structured containers for this work.