I’ve had a second baby, seven years after my first. My body remembered the wonder, the repetition, the slog. Yet I was shocked, once again, by the jarring instability of this phase: ecstatic one day, unbearable the next.
I imagined someone from my old life seeing me on the street, stained, ragged and muttering non-linear thoughts about my immediate needs. I was too tired to be embarrassed so I laughed, a kind of unhinged, maniacal laugh. After all, I had been there once before.
In the early weeks, I steal moments to breathe, plead and pray. When my baby sleeps, I stretch out on the floor, feeling the painful tension in my back and neck. I promise myself that I will reconstitute my life, find a new routine and carve out time to work, write and exercise.
This is a promise I cannot fulfil. And each day I find myself back lying in the same spot, fantasising about a life that is familiar – not necessarily my old life, but a life in which I can predict what will happen tomorrow and the next day.
The postnatal period can be described as a birth in itself – a momentous transition, a portal, an unravelling that can break a person or, at the very least, dismantle who they once thought they were.
Placed squarely in the liminal – a state of being in-between, on unsteady ground, or no ground at all – the reference points that once governed one’s life radically drop away. In the social sciences, liminality is a transitional process which involves changing social roles and a break away from the limits and parameters of the old to make way for new patterns and paradigms.
During my baby’s nap, I go out for a walk under the broad blue sky and for the first time in days, I can hear my own voice. I try to stay close to the felt sense of being so sharply in the middle of two versions of my life. I inhabit the sense of waiting that liminality elicits, trusting that something (or someone) new will emerge.
And, unlike the first time around, I am not frightened.
In Buddhist thinking, not knowing is a state that is not to be feared but allowed. This may seem peculiar in these modern times, where we are told knowledge is power and a clear, certain vision for the future is the key to success. From the Buddhist perspective, not knowing better reflects our strange human predicament.
As the renowned Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says, “Uncertainty is all we have.” Put another way, awareness of this continual ambiguity represents the only firm ground we can stand on.
And yet each day we endeavour to shore up our existence by acting out familiar and comfortable scripts, repeating habitual ways of being and doing and living as if things will remain the same if we control certain variables.
This is a kind of magical thinking (and behaving). In reality the ground beneath us is quicksand that buckles at our feet the more we panic. The winds of life twist and turn in ways we could never have predicted and the art is to surrender to the ride.
Birth, death and significant life transitions bring this truth into conscious awareness; but liminality is ever-present. We perpetually exist between the last thing and the next. The practice is to notice the transition without anxiously leaping ahead.
As the days pass I sit on my meditation cushion as though it is an egg yet to hatch. I can’t recognise myself or my life and somehow this is OK, even freeing.
Roshi Joan Halifax, a Buddhist teacher, speaks of the fruitful darkness which captures the power of remaining present with the unknown. At points in our lives, she says, we find ourselves in the dark, no longer compelled by the same agenda or self-concept. We can’t see the horizon. But we know that change is afoot. The future is pregnant with possibility yet the shape it will take cannot yet be grasped.
According to many cultures, including Native American and Tibetan worldviews, the dark is inevitable, brimming with potential, and something to open to and learn from. We find ourselves in the dark at an endpoint or on the cusp of something new. These periods can feel like crises of identity or meaning. This can be true for us individually and collectively (and the places they intersect) as our lives become impacted by social instability, precarity and unexpected change.
We may not have the language to describe what we are going through. But the invitation is to maintain curiosity and intrigue rather than clutch at the familiar and firm up our existence.
With patience, the liminal bears fruit. We wake to the astonishing wonder of our changing lives.
My newborn and I doze together. The sense of me has morphed into something unfamiliar. The future is barely decipherable and I stay close to the peculiar contours of not knowing much at all.
A saying from Buddhist circles in the 1970s comes to mind: “The bad news is you are falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.” I fall into a deep, blissful sleep.
Dr Nadine Levy is a senior lecturer at the Nan Tien Institute. She coordinates its health and social wellbeing program and the graduate certificate in applied mindfulness
