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Finding Safety in Uncertainty - Befriending Liminal Spaces · #BeMoreLobster

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Trusting the in-between.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you are in a season where you feel stuck, uncertain, or you're desperate for some clarity, then this is the episode for you because we are going to be having an amazing conversation about the power of liminal spaces.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: So grab a brew and let's dive in for this amazing conversation.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to the podcast.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And talking about liminal spaces is one of my favorite things.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And only now because I have an understanding around them and a perspective shift on them, which I'm going to share with you today.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you can think about liminal spaces as natural times in our life of transition and potential transformation.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: They are these in-between moments of life when we've left something behind and we haven't yet stepped in to what's next.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes, that change also comes with an identity shift.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you think about who you were pre and post-children, or you think about who you were pre- or post-menopause, or who you were before you got divorced, or who you were in a different job, we're constantly going in this, you know, in these transformations of identities.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So by nature of their experience, liminal spaces can come with a sense of uncertainty and unsafety and fear.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to dive into all of that in this episode.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to just share with you sort of the liminal space that I think has made the biggest impact on me recently, and maybe that, like I say, just because I know more about them now, is actually around my business.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'll cut it really, really short, but basically, when my dad got sick and passed away, I just kind of stepped away from my business because I didn't have the emotional or the mental capacity for it.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when I started to come back in, there was just this feeling inside that I didn't want to do it in the same way.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be on social media all the time.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be working like 15 hours a day.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be sacrificing my relationships and my health because of my business.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be stuck behind a laptop all day.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be isolated.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: There were so many things about what I didn't want, but I didn't know what I did want.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that made me feel very, very uncomfortable.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: In that uncertainty, I had lots of narrative in my brain about how that meant that I was kind of useless, I was inadequate, I was insufficient because I didn't know what I wanted.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of woman who's nearly 50 doesn't know what she wants.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: All the things came out.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was only when I let go and I lent in and I started to think about, you know, just allowing myself to be in this space and trusting the wisdom of my body to bought my thematics in that things started to shift.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: So let's just talk a little bit about why liminal spaces can feel so uncomfortable.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as human beings, we have a craving or a need for certainty.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Some of us need more certainty than others.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's the six human needs.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: But there is an element of our desire for certainty.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: When we have certainty, there is a sense of safety in our body.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And as human beings, we are driven by safety.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about in this in one of the other episodes about how when our body doesn't feel safe, we create patterns and shapes to create safety for ourselves.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: As human beings, we are wired to move away from pain and towards pleasure, towards something that we want to have.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we find ourselves in these liminal spaces, in this new identity, in this unknown, there are all kinds of fears and uncertainties that come up.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we naturally want to get out of these liminal spaces as fast as humanly possible because we believe in the exit, we find the emotional stability and the mental stability that we want because right now we don't have it.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: What I noticed for myself was that before I made peace with and actually got excited about the liminal space as a way to practice and trust my thematic wisdom and create, found that what it did is it kind of got me into a limiting pattern that I'd recognized before, which was in forcing the answers, searching with my brain for clarity, creating answers with my brain.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And to be honest, it just became so exhausting.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it and it didn't give me the answers that I wanted, it didn't give me the feeling that I wanted.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: So when we're in that fear of not knowing, when we're when we are in a liminal space and we attach ourselves to the uncertainty and we attach ourselves to the fear, and we attach ourselves to the belief that we have to get out as quickly as possible, we start to force answers.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And those answers might not be the best thing for us.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: So let's bring a somatic element into this.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: We want to create safety.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: How do we create safety in a liminal space, in a space that is uns that is by nature uncertain and possibly filled with a little bit of fear and a lot of you know lack of clarity?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: How do we find safety in that?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: We can start by reframing it as a powerful place of possibility.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: We can put it in a place of understanding that when we use this to lean into trust, when we use it to start to listen to our body, when we start to say, well, how how else might this look?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Or what else could this feel like?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: We start to expand on possibility and we attract different options.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: We find ourselves in more clarity rather than forcing that level of clarity.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So what truly becomes possible when we surrender to that in-between?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: When we stop resisting the unknown, we make space for options, we make space for clarity to arrive at us.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: We get these intuitive hits, we have ideas that we wouldn't have had before because we've created space.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: We've, if you think about how you feel, if okay, so do this for me now.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Think about how you feel in your body, the kind of shape you take on when you feel overwhelmed, when you feel anxious, when you feel uncertain, when you feel desperate.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: It feels quite constricting, probably, maybe a little bit dark, maybe very sort of heavy and static.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: When we think about reframing that to that place of possibility, to options, to trust, to even allow ourselves to feel a little bit of excitement, and we can tell ourselves, hey, I'm really safe being here.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: There is an expansion, there is a fluidity, there is a movement.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's just letting you know from the from a somatic perspective, this is totally okay to be in this liminal space.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's totally okay to not have the answers.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's totally okay to be a little bit scared.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's totally okay to have no pathway out because I'm enough and I'm sufficient and I'm safe and I can trust myself to just be here for as long as I need.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that last part, as long as I need, that's the bit that's really tripped me up time and again.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I kept giving myself, well, I'll just give another month.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just give another month.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there's all the narrative around that.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, what you want to do is to be able to ground and create some safety in these times of uncertainty is you can do things like your breath work.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: There can be movements, you can have mantras.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't have to know right now was a fabulous mantra that I still use now.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have to know right now.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: I can be in this space for as long as I need.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: What's going to bring me joy in this moment?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: What's the next best thing that I can do?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Using these questions and feeling that response in your body is a great way to navigate these liminal spaces.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to almost imagine it like if the liminal space was a physical space that you were in, what do you want to fill it with?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: If what comes out of the liminal space is what you put in it, what are you going to put in that liminal space?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: What self-talk are you going to put in?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: What practices are going to be you're going to put in?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: What new things are you going to put in?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that when you tap into that intuition, when you tap into that wisdom, what you get out is a response and a and a and a creation of all those amazing things that you have put in.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I like to think about liminal spaces being somewhat of a test, a test of trust.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And when I talk about thinking about ideas that you wouldn't have had before, I've got to just share this thing with you that I saw on, I think it was Instagram this week, about a woman in the UK, a young, quite a young woman who had um found out somehow that I think it was 8 billion tons of soft toys get taken to landfill every year.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And she was so distraught, she's like, I turned my life upside down.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And she basically starts to save some of these soft toys.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: She she uh she kind of like gets them all clean, she does them all up.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think she's got a shop maybe in London, I'm not sure.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: But she basically adopts these animals out.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: And had she tried to think that with her brain, I'm quite sure that that wouldn't have happened.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: But she put herself in the space where these ideas came to her.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe she wasn't in a liminal space, but and I digress a little bit there, but it this is the power of the intuition when you put yourself in a space of possibility.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I want you to think about now, wherever you're at, if you feel like you're in that space of uncertainty, if you're scrambling to get a pathway out, if you're beating yourself up because you don't have clarity, if you feel like you should be in momentum and you shouldn't be suspended in this kind of like transient space, I want to tell you, please be in that space and love every single second because you are creating yourself.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: You are literally creating a pathway with your energy.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: You are going to find things that you couldn't find before.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when you learn to trust like that, magical stuff starts to happen.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to be willing to change that shape of needing the certainty, of needing the clarity, of needing that momentum.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: So listen, the liminal space is not a waiting room.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: It is a zone for transformation if you wish to have it.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: I would love for you today to think about sitting in your own liminal space.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: How can you be in that liminal space and make friends with it?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: How can you be in that liminal space and feel excited by it?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: How can you be in that liminal space and feel grounded and certain in it?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: How can you be in that liminal space and know that it's here for you?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that when you sit with it and you make it your friend, transformation, magical transformation is available.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you love this conversation today, come and join more of them in my free Facebook group, Seeking Simplicity.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: There'll be a link somewhere around this.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you can also join the book club, which is totally free as well.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: We meet every week at 7 p.m.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: UK on Zoom and have incredible conversations.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a beautiful community over there, and I'd love for you to come join us too.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: I will speak to you again in the next episode of the Seeking Simplicity Podcast.