(by Dr. Lori Noga)

The Tibetan word “bardo” describes the space between spaces—the liminal realm…

…between death and rebirth.

…between one life phase and the next.

…between who you were and who you’re becoming.

Here’s what the ancient texts don’t fully capture: how suffocating it feels to actually be there.

If you’ve ever found yourself caught between jobs, relationships, identities, or life stages, you know this space intimately. It’s not just uncertainty—it’s the weight of a thousand possibilities pressing down on your chest while simultaneously feeling like you’re drowning in quicksand.

Every direction feels equally urgent and impossible. The future looms like a wall you can’t see over, and the past feels like a door that’s already slammed shut.

The Darkness is Real

In the bardo, sadness doesn’t come in waves—it becomes the air you breathe.

Anxiety isn’t an occasional visitor; it’s your constant companion.

A whisper that you’re falling behind, that everyone else has figured it out, that you’re fundamentally broken for being stuck here. The overwhelm is so complete that even choosing what to have for lunch feels like trying to solve calculus while underwater.

This isn’t dramatic language. This is Tuesday for millions of people right now.

You wake up with that familiar tightness in your chest, that sense of drowning before your feet even hit the floor. Your mind immediately begins its inventory of everything you should be doing, could be doing, aren’t doing.

️The job search.

️The relationship status.

️The creative project.

️The health routine.

️The financial planning.

️The family obligations.

All of it equally pressing, none of it feeling possible.

Some people get lost here for months. Some for years.

And yes, some never find their way out, which is perhaps the most terrifying truth about the bardo—it’s not always temporary.

In our current mental health crisis, we’re seeing more people trapped in these liminal spaces with fewer resources, less support, and an increasingly complex world that demands certainty in an uncertain time. The bardo has become a place where people don’t just visit; they take up residence, sometimes permanently.

When Survival Becomes the Goal

What makes the bardo particularly cruel is how it strips away your usual coping mechanisms. The strategies that worked in your previous life—planning, achieving, moving forward—become useless here. Worse than useless, actually.

They become sources of additional suffering as you try to apply linear thinking to a fundamentally non-linear experience.

You find yourself googling “how to find your purpose” at 2 AM, as if the internet holds some secret formula you’ve somehow missed.

You make lists and vision boards and five-year plans, hoping that enough strategic thinking will catapult you out of this in-between space.

You compare your messy middle to everyone else’s highlight reels and wonder what essential life skill you’re missing.

But here’s what I’ve learned from multiple trips through my own bardos: the darkness isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s an experience to be lived through.

The bardo asks something of us that our achievement-oriented culture never taught us how to give: patience with the process of becoming. The willingness to not know. The radical act of sitting still in uncertainty without immediately reaching for the nearest distraction or solution.

This doesn’t mean the suffering isn’t real. It doesn’t mean you should just accept misery as spiritual growth. It means recognizing that some kinds of change require a death before the rebirth—and death, even metaphorical death, is never comfortable.

The Sacred Work of Not Knowing

What if the discomfort you’re feeling isn’t evidence that you’re doing something wrong, but proof that you’re doing something important?

The bardo demands a different kind of courage than our culture typically celebrates. Not the courage to charge forward or push through, but the courage to stay present with what is.

To feel the full weight of not knowing without immediately reaching for premature answers.

To trust that something is happening in the darkness, even when you can’t see what it is.

This is the sacred work that happens in liminal spaces: the slow dissolution of who you were and the gradual emergence of who you’re becoming. It can’t be rushed or strategized or optimized.

It has its own timing, its own intelligence, its own necessary seasons.

And while you’re there, while you’re learning to breathe underwater, while you’re discovering what it means to be human in the space between spaces, know this: the darkness you’re experiencing is real, and it’s also doing something essential.

It’s making space for what wants to be born.

If you’re in your own bardo right now, you’re not alone in that liminal space. And if the darkness feels too heavy, please reach out—to friends, family, or mental health professionals. The bardo is real, but so is support, and so is the possibility that what emerges from this darkness might be exactly what you didn’t know you were looking for.

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Originally published on Substack