Dance of Death and Life: A Threshold Offering

Abstract

The topic of this dissertation is liminality: experiences involving ambiguity, betweenness, or unknowing carrying disruptive, creative, and transformative potential. The Research Problem for this study examined ways in which the embodiment of surrender might affect one’s engagement of difficult liminal experience. It was hypothesized that embodiment of surrender may potentially foster awareness of possibilities for transformation and new ways of responding in difficult liminal experience.

The Literature Review discusses liminality as a transitional phenomenon in ritual and sociocultural dynamics, then proceeds to broader application of the concept. Themes are presented from psychosocial theory, depth-oriented/psychodynamic psychology, arts practice, Authentic Movement, transformative learning, and spirituality.

The research methodology was Imaginal Inquiry, comprised of four phases: Evoking, Expressing, Interpreting, and Integrating. Poetry, meditation, writing, artmaking, and movement were intended to evoke the embodied experience of surrender in relation to liminality.

The study’s Cumulative Learning is that embodiment of surrender may inspire new ways of orienting to and engaging in difficult liminal experience, helping to actualize the transformative possibility inherent in liminality. Attentively embracing and expressing vulnerability is involved in opening to the unknown and offering oneself into the movement of an unfolding process. Such an orientation may encourage awareness of a source of connection, compassion, and coherence, enabling trust and reverence. An emerging sense of participation or being held in a larger mystery may support the capacity to sustain the emotional challenges and paradox of liminality.

Four learnings emerged. First, the embodiment of surrender in liminality may deepen one’s capacity to inhabit vulnerability, intensity, and ambiguity—following the emerging liminal process, despite the difficult experience of uncertainty and not knowing. Second, the embodiment of surrender may foster the beginnings of releasing patterns and structures that restrict one’s response to the experience of being at a liminal threshold. Third, embodying surrender amidst liminality may invite the potential for altering or expanding of one’s perspectives, responses, or ways of bearing suffering, difficulty, and paradox. Fourth, the embodiment of surrender may draw one toward an experience of connection, the sense of being held or supported amidst liminality.

Reflections are offered, drawing upon archetypal images, including the thin place, initiation, and cosmic dance, as well as themes in mysticism. This research offers a new perspective for efforts to engage challenges and potentialities of liminality.