Letter #1 - One Breath At A Time
Welcome to liminal healing space.
If you’re here, you’re likely standing at a threshold. Perhaps trying to make sense and find a way to pick up the pieces after profound loss. You could be facing your own mortality or in the midst of a transformation you didn’t choose but must undergo.
Profound loss and major life transitions don’t just change how we feel, but how we show up, who we are being. We undergo a dissolution of the old self, something we all resist. While this is disorienting and a struggle, it doesn’t mean we have to suffer. Resistance to what is causes the suffering. It is painful opening and cleaning wounds, but as we do, slowly, sacredly, a new horizon begins to emerge. We begin to heal. Life breaks us open to be more of who we truly are.
After the death of my daughter, I chose to go there as completely as possible and I eventually arrived at a place where I only had love and gratitude for the short time we had together and the privilege of being her father and guardian. That was in 2016. I thought that was it, but transformation rarely moves in straight lines.
In 2023, I served as a ritual elder at a men’s rites of passage retreat—part of a team of sixteen volunteer men creating liminal space for others crossing their own thresholds. No one attends the Rites and is unaffected. And in the power of that holding, and witnessing of other men’s becoming, something within me shifted. I experienced the frozen present I’d been carrying dissolve.
This poem came to me shortly after.
One Breath At A Time
When your mask slips and the awkward tears roll down your face, rest
When the dance overwhelms, let the ground of being beneath, hold you
Look deep into the beloved and allow a blanket of love wrap around you
Have eyes of wonderment for a new dawn, and let the presence restore awareness of your untamed soul
All transformation happens in liminal space.
One breath at a time.
Trust what’s becoming.
Welcome.
Jason
liminalhealing.space