No Ordinary Space

What Yoga Nidra and my toe taught me about liminal spaces

I recently attended a Yoga Nidra class, expecting an evening of relaxation. I never imagined that a single toe could teach me about liminal spaces.

In Yoga Nidra, yogic sleep is the state between waking and sleeping—a place of deep rest and awareness.

At one point, the teacher invited us to "feel into" the second toe of the right foot.

And I couldn't feel it.

Not even a trace.

My mind erupted with anxious thoughts. Is this normal? Is something wrong? Is my toe dead? Will it fall off? Oh no—am I dying?

The questions cascaded, absurd in hindsight and urgent in the moment. I caught myself and quietly laughed at the drama unfolding in my mind.

After class, I couldn't stop thinking about how easily I had been derailed simply because I couldn't feel my toe. I had mistaken sensation for certainty. If I couldn't detect something, I assumed something was wrong.

Maybe I do that in the rest of life, too.

We become accustomed to reassurance arriving through movement, progress, emotion, achievement. We seek signs that we are on the right path: a burst of inspiration, a clear answer, a sense of momentum. Over time, we begin to believe that if we aren't feeling something, doing something, becoming something, then perhaps nothing is happening at all.

Yoga Nidra offered a different possibility.

It is less about forcing awareness and more about noticing what is here—and what isn't. And if sensation doesn't arrive, perhaps the invitation is not to panic or strive harder, but to sit quietly in the blank spaces.

Why would that matter? I wondered.

Then, not as an answer but as a possibility, another thought arose: What if the divine lives there too? Not only in what is vividly felt or clearly defined, but in those points of neutrality where existence isn't proven by sensation or certainty.

And if that were true, wouldn't I want to linger there a little longer?

All these months later, as I begin building a business, I find myself in that space again.

There are moments of excitement and moments of fear. Days when possibilities seem endless and days when all I can feel is the absence of clarity. I move in and out of emotion, wanting reassurance that I am doing the right thing.

But I remind myself that nothing is wrong simply because nothing is clear.

This, too, is a liminal space.

A strange neutrality I don't need to solve.

For now, I'm staying here.

Not because I know what comes next, but because blank spaces are better than too-tight ones.

And because, lately, this feels like where life begins again.