Date: 10-06-2025
Tags: liminality
Source: Journals Randolph Black
I have felt for a long time that I’m in a season of incubation. Like something is wanting to be birthed through me, only I’m not entirely sure of what it’s going to shape up to be.
It’s been incredibly difficult to be poor. & on top of that, to have absolutely NO desire to re-enter the workforce. Each day I feel more & more estranged from society, & on some days, I feel deeply worried that I may never return. That I’ll just float away into my own little world & perhaps lose touch with reality altogether.
It’s comforting to find evidence that others have experienced what I’m going through now. In fact, Marion Woodman wrote an entire book about this “incubation” phase of individuation called, The Pregnant Virgin. In it, she speaks directly to this “interval of poverty” as a time of gestation for the new Self. She says the poverty (whether literal or metaphorical or both) is like protection for the soul’s growth. It’s a time when the old identity & familiar structures (ambition, achievement, stability) have fallen away, but the new life has not yet materialized.
Woodman describes this collapse of old structures as a “necessary emptiness” & claims that the soul must be completely emptied of all that is false before new life can rush in to fill the void.
During this liminal phase, money, ambition, & external validation disappear. It’s like a fast for the psyche. A fast from all that once nourished it (approval, control, productivity). This phase isn’t punishment though. According to Woodman, it’s more of a protection for the fragile new consciousness, which could easily be overwhelmed by old patterns if abundance came before its time. The poverty becomes a sort of cocoon that slows you down, forces you to go within, & keeps the ego from running off & trying to use the new energy in old ways.
”Poverty (or dryness, or emptiness in terms of productivity our outer-world efficacy) can be a womb that protects the emerging soul.”
When you’re carrying something new within you, you must protect it through solitude & discipline & trust, until it’s ready to emerge. This is a lot like a mother’s womb, enveloping the infant in a dark void of safe containment. Hence the “pregnant virgin” archetype.
This phase of the soul’s gestation is extremely uncomfortable to the ego, who is used to identifying with work & productivity. In a way, as the false self dies to its addiction to external worth, the ego dies with it.
In this uncomfortable suspension, you are not yet who you will become, & you cannot “produce” in the ways you once did. You’re swallowed up & “metabolized” by something greater.
What makes all of this even more painful is that the world doesn’t understand or value these liminal states. They are not outwardly productive & therefore the world sees no use for them. However, according to Marion Woodman, this “interval of poverty” is where deep & profound soul transformation takes place.
A great wave of relief came over me when I read that there is in fact an end to this excruciating phase. Eventually, something shifts, & the emptiness reveals itself to have been all along not emptiness but a womb. New life emerges from the stillness. New forms of work, art, & purpose in the world.
Productivity returns, but it comes from a much deeper place. From the true Self. The soul.
Rather than striving for success, you learn to live with a deep sense of meaning, attracting to yourself, through your authenticity, a rich & aligned life.
Though this winter season has been long & dark, & dry, & empty (at least in the outer world), I will hold to faith that Spring emerges. Always. & I’ll trust that this new life that is forming in me will be so worth the wait.
“In the interval of poverty, the ego learns humility. It cannot create the new life. It can only wait, tend, and trust the process.” - Marion Woodman
Links to:
The voice of truth must begin as a voice of doubt and questioning The symbol of the bear as resurrection