Liminal Spaces and Thresholds

There is a moment most leaders reach and few talk about.

The things that used to work have stopped working. The role that fitted no longer quite does. Momentum has gone quiet, and you cannot say why. You are not failing, exactly. But you are no longer where you were, and you are not yet anywhere else.

This essay is about that place. It has a name, and it has been mapped for thousands of years, and the maps are more useful to a CEO or founder than almost anything in the leadership literature. They tell you what the place asks of you, what it costs to leave, and what kind of help actually reaches you there.

The threshold

The word liminal comes from the Latin limen: a threshold. The stone sill you step across to pass through a doorway.

To the Romans the threshold was sacred, the visible line between one world and another. To cross it was to change state. To stand on it was to be in between: no longer in the room you left, not yet in the room ahead.

We still honour this without noticing. Enter a temple and you do not step on the threshold. You step over it. Church bells still ring the hours across old European towns, marking passage. Dante’s journey begins in limbo, a word with the same root: a place under neither law, neither condemned nor saved, waiting.

Life is full of these crossings, and most of us have already made several. Leaving home. Stepping into a first big role. Marriage, and divorce. Becoming a parent. A serious illness, your own or someone close. Losing a parent. Selling the company. Retirement. Each one has a before and an after, and a stretch in the middle where you are neither the person you were nor yet the person you are becoming. Leadership thresholds work the same way. They are simply less often named.

When you are in this place, your mind does not give you answers. It gives you images. A bridge. A border crossing. A waiting room. A boat far from shore. Every fairy tale sends its hero into a forest, and the story only truly begins when the path runs out. Or think of an astronaut drifting from the ship on a single oxygen line: total freedom and total terror, and they are the same thing.

These images do not explain where you are. They tell you which direction you are facing. If you are at a threshold in your own leadership, you will recognise that: knowing you are in unfamiliar territory long before you have words for it.

The oldest map of this territory is nearly five thousand years old.

The story of Inanna

This is the oldest threshold story we have, written down in Sumer around four thousand years ago. Here is what happens.

Inanna decides to go down. Inanna is the most powerful goddess in the Sumerian world: goddess of love, fertility, power and war, Queen of Heaven and Earth. Her sister Ereshkigal rules the underworld, the land of the dead, the one place Inanna’s power does not reach. One day, for reasons the story never fully explains, Inanna decides to go there. Nobody sends her. She is at the height of her power and she chooses the descent.

She prepares. She puts on seven items that represent her power and her identity: her crown, the beads at her throat, a second strand across her chest, her breastplate, her gold ring, the measuring rod she carries as a mark of authority, and her royal robe. Then she tells her attendant, Ninshubur: if I have not returned in three days, go to the great gods one after another and beg for help until one of them agrees.

She passes through seven gates and loses everything. The underworld has seven gates. When Ereshkigal hears that her sister has come dressed in all her regalia, she orders the gatekeeper to let Inanna through one gate at a time and to remove one item at each gate. So at the first gate the crown is taken. At the second, the beads. At the third, the strand across her chest. At the fourth, the breastplate. At the fifth, the ring. At the sixth, the measuring rod. At the seventh, the robe. Each time, Inanna asks why. Each time she is told: this is the law of the underworld; it may not be questioned.

She dies. She arrives in front of her sister naked. Seven judges condemn her. Ereshkigal looks at her with the eye of death, and Inanna is killed. Her body is hung on a hook on the wall, and it stays there for three days and three nights.

Ninshubur goes for help. On the third day, Ninshubur does what she was told. She goes to the first great god, Enlil, and asks him to rescue Inanna. He refuses: nobody comes back from the underworld. She goes to the second, Nanna. He refuses in the same words. She goes to the third, Enki, the god of wisdom, and he agrees to help.

Two small creatures bring her back. Enki does not send a warrior. From the dirt under his fingernails he makes two tiny beings, small enough to slip through the cracks in the seven gates. He gives them the food of life and the water of life, and tells them what to do. When they reach the underworld they find Ereshkigal in agony, groaning like a woman in labour. Instead of fighting her or bargaining with her, they simply groan along with her. When she cries out about her pain, they echo her cry. This is the first time anyone has shared her suffering, and it moves her. She offers them any gift they want. They ask for the body on the hook. They sprinkle it with the food and water of life, and Inanna comes back to life.

Someone must take her place. The underworld has one more rule: nobody leaves without providing a substitute. So Inanna climbs back to the upper world with demons walking beside her, who will take whomever she names. The first person they meet is Ninshubur, still in mourning clothes, still waiting at the gate. Inanna refuses to give her up: she is the one who did not forget me. Next they meet her sons, who are also in mourning. She refuses again. Then they reach her husband, Dumuzi. He is sitting on his throne in his best clothes. He has not mourned her. He has carried on exactly as before. Inanna tells the demons: take him.

That is the story. Here is what it tells us.

The lessons. The descent starts at the top, not the bottom. You cannot bring your regalia through the gates: the crown, the authority, the way of judging what is what. The stripping is not a punishment, and asking why does not help. And the lowest point is not a moment of insight. It is a hook on a wall.

For a founder whose company has outgrown the way he leads, or a second-generation leader taking over what her father built, or a CEO leaving a role that defined him, the regalia is different. The gates are the same. And the difficulty is always the same too: what has to be put down feels inseparable from who you are. The founder understands intellectually that others need more authority, and still intervenes in every important decision. The senior leader knows the role is ending, and quietly rebuilds the same identity somewhere else. The threshold does not ask what should I do? It asks what am I willing to stop being?

Then three things about coming back that most accounts of change leave out:

Everything that follows in this essay is a variation on these.

Three more thresholds

Other cultures tell the same story with different names. Each one adds something.

Persephone

Persephone is a young goddess, the daughter of Demeter, who is in charge of the harvest. One day, while Persephone is picking flowers, the ground opens and Hades, god of the underworld, seizes her and takes her below to be his queen. She did not choose this.

Her mother searches for her for nine days. When Demeter finally learns what has happened, she stops the harvest in protest. Crops fail everywhere. This is the first winter, and people start to starve. The other gods pressure Zeus to fix it, and he orders Hades to send Persephone home.

Before she leaves, Persephone eats some pomegranate seeds. That matters, because anyone who eats food in the underworld belongs to it. A compromise is reached: she will spend part of each year below with Hades and part above with her mother. Every year when she goes down, winter comes. Every year when she returns, spring comes.

What this adds: some thresholds are not chosen. The market turns, the illness arrives, the succession comes early. And you come back changed. Persephone went down a girl and came back a queen, and she cannot undo the seeds. Meanwhile, while she is below, everything above stops growing. If your momentum has stalled and nothing seems to work, that is what the descent looks like from the outside. It is not failure.

Orpheus

Orpheus is the greatest musician in the world. On his wedding day his bride, Eurydice, is bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus refuses to accept it. He walks into the underworld alive, playing his lyre, and his music is so sorrowful that the punishments of the dead stop and even Hades is moved.

Hades agrees to release Eurydice on one condition. Orpheus must walk ahead of her back up to the living world, and he must not look back at her until they have both crossed the threshold. If he looks back too soon, she returns to the dead for good.

Orpheus sets off. The dead make no sound, so he cannot hear her behind him and cannot be sure she is there. He walks the whole way in that uncertainty. He reaches the very edge of the threshold, with the light in front of him. And he looks back. Eurydice is there, reaching for him, and she is pulled back into the dark. He comes out alone.

What this adds: the danger is not only in the descent but in the return. At the far edge of a change, the temptation is to look back and check that the old identity is still there. That backward glance is what breaks the passage. Dumuzi refused to change; Orpheus could not trust that the change was real. Same failure, from two sides. The work is to keep walking without proof.

Liminal Saturday

The Christian story of Easter is told across three days, and most people only know two of them.

On Friday, Christ is executed. His body is taken down, placed in a tomb, and a stone is rolled across the entrance. The old world is over. On Sunday, the stone is found rolled away and the tomb is empty. The new world has begun.

But there is a day in between. On Saturday, according to the creed, Christ descends into hell. He is neither alive nor risen. He goes to the deepest place, breaks open its gates, and frees the people held there. The old paintings show him standing on the broken doors of hell, pulling the dead up by their wrists. The tradition calls this the harrowing of hell. A harrow is a tool that breaks up the ground; to be harrowed is to be torn apart. Both meanings apply.

What this adds: there is no shortcut from Friday to Sunday. He does not skip death to get to resurrection. The stone moves on Sunday because of what was done on Saturday. Most organisations want to announce the ending and the new beginning in the same breath and skip the day in the dark. It cannot be done.

Each story has the same shape: a descent, a stripping, a condition on the return, and something that cannot be undone. And in each, the temptation is the same: to find a way around the descent.

The in-between is not an obstacle to transformation. It is the means of it.

The void

Zen has an image for the gap between one chapter and the next: the enso, a circle painted in a single brushstroke that does not quite close. The opening is not a flaw. It is the space through which one movement ends and another becomes possible.

Organisational life spends a great deal of energy trying to eliminate that space. We fill the calendar, accelerate the decision, convert uncertainty into action items. But transformation has a rhythm that efficiency cannot abolish. A field lies fallow. A seed stays unseen under the soil. Winter comes before spring. Insight forced early is rarely new. It is usually a rearrangement of what you already knew.

Nor is it a straight line. Persephone goes down every year. You will be asked to descend again. The question is not whether the gap will come. It is whether you will have someone with you when it does.

What makes the crossing possible

Every culture has answered the threshold with ritual: initiation, vigil, pilgrimage, fast, retreat, rite of passage. The forms differ. The function is the same. Ritual creates a container around change. It says that one state is ending. It sets aside time outside ordinary time. It brings witnesses. It allows something to be given up. And it marks the return.

Lent does this: ash on the forehead, forty days of sacrifice, a community of fellow travellers, a known destination. The Lakota vision quest does it: four days alone on the hill, with a medicine person holding the quester’s intention from a distance and a ceremony waiting for the return. The Lakota knew what Ninshubur knew. The gate needs someone holding both ends.

Modern leadership has kept almost none of this. We mark appointments, promotions and exits. The deeper transition is left untouched. A founder becomes chair without ever confronting what it means to stop being the centre of the organisation. A new CEO inherits authority without any space to separate what belongs to the institution from what belonged to the person before. An executive leaves a thirty-year career and immediately starts building another identity, because nowhere in their world is not-knowing permitted.

Without a container, transition is not transformative. It is just disorienting. A small boat far from shore is a threshold; take away the boat and it is simply terror.

The container’s job is not to remove uncertainty. It is to make uncertainty inhabitable.

That is also why the most common mistake, made with the best intentions, is interpreting too early. When familiar meaning falls away, people reach first for explanation, and so do their advisers. We diagnose, we frame, we offer answers. Sometimes that helps. Often it closes the space before anything has had time to form. Enki’s creatures do not explain anything to Ereshkigal. They groan with her, and that is what opens the door.

Carl Jung had one instruction for this work: stay with the image. The same holds for what leaders actually say at a threshold.

I feel as though the company no longer belongs to me.

I have achieved everything I thought I wanted and I do not know why it feels empty.

I cannot tell which decisions are mine and which are my father’s.

The first task is not to solve the sentence. It is to stay with it long enough for it to reveal what it contains.

If you think you are at a threshold

The myths are diagnostic, and some of what they say can be acted on directly.

Name it. Much of the distress of a threshold comes from treating it as a problem that should already have been solved. Recognising that you are in a passage, with its own laws, changes the question from what is wrong with me to what is this asking of me.

Brief your Ninshubur before you go down. Decide now who will hold the thread: someone outside the organisation, who knows you are descending, and who will not simply reassure you that everything is fine. Inanna’s most practical act was giving instructions before the first gate.

Expect the stripping and stop asking why. Some of what made you successful will be taken at the gates: the control, the visibility, the certainty about what is what. Arguing with the law of the underworld wastes the energy you need for the walk.

Do not interpret too early. The first meaning you reach for will usually be the old mind reorganising familiar material. Stay with the image, the sentence, the feeling, until something you did not already know appears.

Do not look back to check. At the far edge of the change, resist the urge to reach for the old behaviour, rebuild the old structure, or test whether the old identity still works. That glance is what collapses the passage.

Notice what has not changed its clothes. Around any leader in transition there are habits, structures and sometimes relationships carrying on as if nothing has happened. Most of what cannot come along is a way of working, not a person. But it helps to see clearly which is which.

Thresholds and the work of Luminous

The word limen is the conceptual core of what Luminous was founded to address. The leaders and founders we work with are not, in the main, facing operational problems. They are facing passages. Each has its own stripping and its own gate, and each, if it is to be crossed rather than merely survived, needs what the myths have always required: a willingness to surrender what no longer fits, the capacity to stay in the not-knowing, and a guide who knows what is asked at that gate.

We have named four.

Beneath all four runs a longer question, which we call the Long Arc of Leadership: the shift from what can I build? to what is mine to contribute now? Many successful leaders reach a point where the conventional measures of progress lose their explanatory power and this question begins to surface. It cannot be answered through ambition. It needs a different relationship with time, identity and service, and it needs room to arrive. This is the opening in the enso.

Holding both ends of the gate

Every real threshold holds a tension. Something is ending while something else is trying to emerge. The old identity cannot simply be discarded, because it contains wisdom. The new one cannot simply be designed, because it has not yet been lived. The leader stands between them.

That is why the quality of accompaniment matters. We do not see our role as getting leaders off the threshold as quickly as possible, and we do not romanticise uncertainty for its own sake. The work is to create enough containment for a leader to see what this moment is asking of them: to recognise the patterns that brought them here, to separate what should be carried forward from what now has to be surrendered, to stay present while the answer has not yet appeared, and, when the moment comes, to cross.

Our work is to be Ninshubur at the gate: the one who does not forget, who holds the thread through the silence, and who knows where to go for help. And when the time comes, to be the small creatures who can slip through and sit with what is found there.

The threshold is not an interruption to the work of leadership. For many leaders, it is where the most important work begins.

Friday is behind you. Sunday has not yet come. Nothing visible is happening, and this is where the deepest work takes place.

The work is to survive the Saturday.

The mapping of the liminal and the reading of the threshold myths in this essay draw on Professor Juliana Kaya Prpic’s lecture “Traversing Liminal Spaces”, given at the CG Jung Institute, Zurich, in February 2026.