Over the past six months, it felt like life was piling on the toughest lessons it could bring me. For weeks on end, I’d find myself either crying from a new revelation that I discovered about my life or triggered by a disappointment I couldn’t avoid. There were plans deferred, frustrating rejections, and losses that shattered every “plan” I tried to make for myself — leaving me and the hope that I had for my future hanging in the balance.
While there have been previous times when I’ve found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place, this time around was even more unfamiliar than before. At the time, it felt almost impossible to get unstuck from the place and circumstances that I found myself in, and the possibility of gaining clarity seemed hopeless. What I soon came to realize was that I couldn’t change my situation until I put a name to what I was dealing with.
This season of uncertainty I was experiencing is known as a liminal space. This refers to “the place a person is in during a transitional period. It’s a gap that can be physical (like a doorway), emotional (like a breakup), or metaphorical (like a decision).” In my case, it was like life’s waiting room, where you know it’s time for a change, but that change hasn’t quite happened or manifested yet. It’s the in-between time. The middle ground. The “waiting season.”
Through all those months of processing, being in solitude, crying, and journaling until the pages caught fire, I had no idea that there was actual language to what I was living. I just assumed it was some sort of mid-mid-life crisis coupled with the final stages of my Saturn Return. But it wasn’t until I listened to an episode of The Soft Life by Saddie Baddies Podcast that I could finally put words to what I was experiencing all this time.
According to Priscilla O. Agyeman, MPH, public health professional and founder of the digital platform Saddie Baddies™, a liminal space is “the space between what was and what could be. It’s anywhere that's in between two stationary spaces,” she tells xoNecole. “On a deeper, more personal level, a liminal space can be something like a divorce, having to make a heavy decision where you're between two options, or moving to another location.”
Emotional liminal spaces can also look like a job loss, getting engaged or married, a long-term situationship ending, a romantic or friendship breakup, rejection, losing a spark of creative interest, rejection, or simply adulting.
For Priscilla, the concept of home and relocation had been a reoccurring theme when it came to liminal spaces. Specifically in 2020, where during the height of the pandemic, her landlord decided to abruptly end her lease two months early. “I remember my soul just feeling so depleted and tired. I literally had a nervous breakdown because I was like, how can you do this in the middle of a pandemic? How can you be so inconsiderate?” she shares.
That time of unsteadiness showed Priscilla the power of asking for help during the toughest moments of her liminal space, and she was soon able to leverage the support of a close friend to find a new but temporary place to live.
There she began to reintroduce herself to grounding practices that allowed her to get back in touch with herself. “I had to make really big behavioral changes. If not, I was going to slowly lose my sense of self because everything that I was working towards in terms of having my own space was stripped of me,” she says. “But in that liminal space, I got some major roots that developed my resilience, my character, and able to handle life's curve balls.”
During that time of her navigating the liminal space of moving, Priscilla recalls the inner mantras that anchored her while not losing sight of what was to come. “I had to keep reminding myself to stay present because if I focused too much on the past or too much on the future, I’d feel so much stress internally,” she shares. “Meditation helped me to quiet down the noise of worrying about the future and focus on the present moment and what was in front of me.”
“[What] I had to use was just to remind myself that this is temporary. You are doing exactly what you need to do in this moment. Everything is aligning perfectly for you. Really just affirming myself because if I didn't do that, I was really going to let my environment take over what I was feeling,” she continues. “Instead, I wanted to change the narrative. I wanted to flip the switch and learn how to adapt.”
Getting Unstuck From Your Liminal Space
When working to get unstuck from your liminal space, there is a delicate balance between planning for what you desire while remaining present in uncovering what this time is trying to teach you. One tip that Priscilla speaks to in doing so is the importance of creating an exit strategy. “An exit strategy is your plan to get out of a situation or environment that's no longer serving you,” she says. “In between the problem and the solution is a strategy. What's going to get you between point A and point B?”
When creating your exit strategy, consider the following:
1. Know Your Threshold and Make a Deadline:
“What is an action item that you can take to get yourself out of this situation? When it came to my living situation, I knew that I couldn't stay for more than six months. I knew that there was a threshold that I could tolerate as someone with specific needs for my home environment. I had to find a solution that was going to be easy for me to transition into and that could be more long-term.”
2. Get Clarity and Don’t Move Out Of Desperation:
“It's really about simplifying the process, taking a time to step back from the situation, and motivating yourself because you want to get out of this space. But doing it in a way that does not move out of desperation. Be diligent and strategic. You don’t want to get yourself back into another shitty situation. Take a step back and reevaluate what is actually going on with you and what's going to be the desired outcome.”
3. Embrace the Quiet Moments:
“If you want to discover what your liminal space is trying to teach you, the first thing is having some quiet time. When I came to those moments of clarity, before I was able to develop a strategy or do anything, I had to have quiet time. For me, that's going on a walk, being outside, figuring out what it is that I'm currently feeling, and then letting those emotions come up.”
4. Talk to Someone You Trust:
“Talk about it with someone you trust. It doesn't need to be your entire Instagram feed. But I think finding at least one or two people in your corner that you can talk to, whether it's a friend, whether it's your partner, whether it's a family member, whoever, just talk to a therapist. Obviously, talking to somebody who can really help you to see another perspective because they might also have solutions. They might also be able to offer help.
5. Be Observant:
“If you really want to see what your liminal space is teaching you, be observant. For example, if you've been itching to move to a new city, have you been seeing signs that this is a place where you could thrive? Being observant requires you to be present. So what are the things that you have been seeing repeatedly, whether it's actually seeing them or having recurring dreams, thoughts, or people mentioning certain things in passing? A lot of times that could be God showing up in ways that you may not have even noticed.”
Having been in a liminal space myself, I can attest to how challenging it can be to stay encouraged and motivated when you’re unsure of when your number will be called from life’s waiting room. It can have an impact on your mental health and become emotionally and physically taxing. But in order to get to the other side, you have to lean into that discomfort and receive the lesson that life earnestly wants to teach you through this liminal space. Because it’s not happening to you, it's happening for you.
“See the possibilities. I tend to say that this is proof of concept that good things can happen and that better things are on the other side,” Priscilla says. “When you look at your life, where have you been stuck and gotten yourself unstuck? That's proof of concept. That's proof that you are able to get out of it,” she says.
“Look at your own experiences as data, proving to yourself that I've gotten out of this before, and I know I'll get out of this too.”
Let’s make things inbox official! Sign up for the xoNecole newsletter for daily love, wellness, career, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
Feature image by Martin Novak/ Getty Images
RELATED
Skylar sees things differently. At the time, she was shooting content on her iPhone. Temi came into the picture with a new perspective, an understanding of tech, and, eventually, a camera. “He doesn't give himself enough credit,” Skylar says. “He wasn't just my tripod. He wasn't just standing behind the camera and going ‘click.’ He was giving advice. He was giving me insight to how I could look at things from a different perspective. And I was like, 'Oh, he’s an artist.' I think it was maybe a heartbeat of that kind of energy of like, ‘Baby, can you take this picture?’ And it turned so quickly into, we're partners. We can work together in a way where we're advancing each other's creative thinking.”
The pair often says they’re two sides of the same coin. Skylar is an Aquarius. She attended art school, paints, and loves poetry. She’s more than happy to let the couple’s management firm and agency, Kensington Grey, handle their admin work. And, she loves to sleep in. Temi, on the other hand, wakes up early. He’s a Virgo. He loves a to-do list and regularly checks in on the couple’s brand partnerships spreadsheet to make sure everything is on track.
Because his storytelling was steeped in his love of technology, he didn’t always think of himself as a creative person. “Where I [am] the dreamer who wants to pluck things out of the sky and spend all day with my head in the clouds, Temi [is] so good at grounding me and helping me figure out how to make things make sense on paper. We just work together in such a complimentary way,” Skylar says.
It’s been more than six years since Brooklyn-based couple Temi and Skylar started dating, and nearly four since they cemented their working relationship. On TikTok and Instagram, the couple’s travel, fashion, and home content regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. They’ve worked with brands such as Coach, Aesop, Away, and Liquid IV, bringing their vibrant perspectives to every campaign they execute. Still, nearly two years since both Temi and Skylar committed to full-time content creation and creative directing, the couple says their romantic connection remains their priority.
“We told each other we would much rather go back to full-time jobs and preserve our relationship than to be full-time freelancers, barely getting a night's rest [and] barely kissing each other because we're so busy shooting,” Skylar says.
Working from home can make it hard to separate work from personal life for any entrepreneur. It can be even more challenging when your business partner is also your lover. Temi and Skylar had already used couples therapy as a tool to help them effectively communicate with one another. When they ran into challenges while working together, their therapist helped them set physical boundaries to help combat the issues.
"We told each other we would much rather go back to full-time jobs and preserve our relationship than to be full-time freelancers, barely getting a night's rest [and] barely kissing each other because we're so busy shooting."
“It actually took us doing very specific physical things to create boundaries between work and play in our relationship,” Skylar says. “So, for instance, we will only have conversations about work when we're out of bed or we're at the table or in the office. Initially, when we started, we had to light a candle to say that, 'Okay, this is a space where we're connecting, we’re not talking about work.' We needed really hard boundaries at the top. And then it became a little bit more organic.”
The boundaries have been crucial to implement, especially because the couple began working together so naturally. When the pair first met, Skylar was NY-based a social strategist for BuzzFeed and was using content creation to drive business to her lingerie company. She was shooting her own content. Temi was working for Microsoft in D.C. He’d recently traded in his DJing equipment for a camera. “I've always loved taking pictures,” he says. “Even when I was a kid, my African mother would wake me up at 3:00 a.m. [during a] party, and be like, 'Come take the family picture.'”
Growing up, Temi says he watched his parents support each other and be the true definition of partners. He knew he wanted the same for his own relationship. But, the couple also wanted to make sure they were being financially responsible. The pair didn’t quit their traditional jobs until they’d saved up two years' worth of their cost of living. And, Temi received his Master of Business Administration from New York University with the knowledge that it could either help him advance in his corporate career or be applicable to his business with Skylar.
Temi and SkylarCj Hart @hartbreakToday, they say their working relationship is more of a “quiet dance.” They still implement some of the boundaries they learned in therapy, but they also lean into their natural strengths and deep love for one another. When we speak, Temi has planned a date for the couple to see Princess Mononoke in 4K IMAX and added it to their Notion so they can factor it into their busy schedules. “I fully plan to date for the rest of my life,” he says.
Skylar says the couple doesn’t just wait for date nights to check in with one another, though. This often happens in the mornings, after Temi has made her peppermint tea and poured himself a cup of coffee. When they ask each other how they slept, she says, it’s not just a “nicety.” It’s a genuine question meant to foster connection.
“A lot of it happens during the day in the midst of work. We'll stop and we'll hug. Or we’ll slow dance in the kitchen,” she says. “Sometimes it's hard to set a whole date night when you have 7,000 things going on. So, we must grasp these moments and check in when we can. And I think it's become so organic to us that I actually didn't even realize how often we do it. But all day long, we're like, 'Are you good? I felt like your energy shifted,' because we're best friends, we just know. We just feel it happen.”
What’s better than being in love? Building wealth while doing it. Watch Making Cents here for real stories of couples who make money moves together.
Featured image by Cj Hart @hartbreak
Anyway, one of them was recently expressing in the chat that, although, according to her doctor, her hormone levels seemed to be fine, she felt like certain perimenopause symptoms were telling her otherwise. She’s probably right because the reality is you can be in a state of perimenopause — the transitional phase that comes right before menopause — anywhere from 4-10 years (keep in mind that the average age for entering menopause is 51).
And so, after hearing about some of what she was experiencing and recommending things like evening primrose oil and raspberry leaf tea, it reminded me that I should also pen an article on seed cycling — a practice that is gaining more traction when it comes to all-natural ways of keeping certain hormones in balance.
If you’re curious about what seed cycling is all about, I’ve got a few details that may interest you — and might provide you with some perimenopausal relief — below.
What Is Seed Cycling and Why Is It Becoming More Popular?
GiphyProbably the easiest way to define seed cycling is it’s all about consuming certain seeds during certain times of the month in order to balance out your hormones — well, not only balance hormones but boost fertility and also decrease symptoms that are directly related to menopause.
The thought process of seed cycling is if you consume certain seeds during the first half of your menstrual cycle, it will help to balance out your estrogen levels; then if you consume certain seeds during the other half of your menstrual cycle, it will balance out your progesterone levels.
So, which seeds are you supposed to take?
Flax and pumpkin seeds during the first 14 days of your cycle and then sesame and sunflower seeds during the last 14 days. And what if your period isn’t on a 28-day cycle? Well, then what you would do is take flax and pumpkin seeds during your follicular phase (the first day that you start your period through the day that you ovulate) and sesame and sunflower seeds during your luteal phase (the time that happens right after your ovulate and ends once your period starts). And why these seeds in particular? Were they just pulled out of thin air? Nope.
Flaxseeds contain phytoestrogenswhich is a form of plant-based estrogen. Estrogen is low at the beginning of your menstrual cycle, so phytoestrogens can help your body build up your uterine lining. When you are going through the latter stages of perimenopause/menopause, estrogen levels can significantly decrease; phytoestrogens can help to bring your levels back up. That said, as far as periods are concerned, flaxseeds can help to regulate your cycle (which can also make it easier for you to conceive, if that is something that you are trying to do). As far as perimenopause and menopause are concerned, they can help to make their symptoms more bearable.
Pumpkin seeds are a rich source of magnesium and manganese which help to ease PMS symptoms and reduce menstrual discomfort. When it comes to perimenopause and menopause, magnesium can reduce anxiety and depression and help you to sleep better which can reduce symptoms that are associated with both conditions. And manganese? Manganese helps to regulate blood levels and improve bone density. Pumpkin seeds also contain a considerable amount of zinc that helps to regulate hormones. Fertility-wise, pumpkin seeds can increase testosterone levels and they can help you to have a healthier pregnancy.
Sesame seeds also have phytoestrogens in them; however, the reason why sesame seeds are recommended for seed cycling is because the zinc, selenium, vitamin E, and fatty acids in them are what help to give your progesterone levels a boost during the second half of your menstrual cycle. Progesterone not only creates a healthy uterine lining, if an egg isn’t fertilized, but it also helps your body to shed the lining. When it comes to perimenopause/menopause, progesterone is needed because it can help reduce the impact of hot flashes and menopause-related insomnia. When it comes to conceiving, sesame seeds can help to reduce inflammation and boost your immunity — making it easier for your body to get pregnant.
Sunflower seeds are loaded with vitamin Eand that alone makes them great when it comes to your menstrual cycle and dealing with perimenopause and menopause-related symptoms. That’s because vitamin E helps to reduce period discomfort and, if you happen to have heavy cycles, it can help to decrease the amount of blood that you lose during your cycle as well. For those dealing with perimenopause and menopause, vitamin E helps to bring relief to symptoms like hot flashes and vaginal dryness. Sunflower seeds can also aid in fertility, thanks to the fatty acids in them that can make it easier to conceive.
So, as you can see, there is a method to the madness when it comes to the seeds that are selected for seed cycling. Okay, but how do you actually incorporate seed cycling into your lifestyle? Good question.
How to Do Seed Cycling in Order to Receive the Most Optimal Results
GiphyIf you want to try seed cycling in order to see if it helps you and your hormones out, this is what you will need to do:
During days 1-14 (again, your follicular phase), you will need to take one tablespoon of ground flaxseeds and one tablespoon of ground pumpkin seeds.
During days 15-28 (again, your luteal phase), you will need to take one tablespoon of ground sesame seeds and one tablespoon of ground sunflower seeds.
The strategy here is if you do this consistently for 3-4 months, you should start to see an improvement when it comes to the imbalance of your hormones. It should also go on record that some health experts recommend adding 1200-1500 mg EPA/DHA to the follicular phase of seed cycling and evening primrose oil to the luteal phase. That’s because EPA/DHA are fatty acids that help to reduce bodily inflammation and evening primrose oil helps to decrease PMS symptoms as well as hot flashes.
As far as side effects go, there currently aren’t any drastic ones that have been reported. The main thing to keep in mind is that you may experience some gas, bloating, or changes in your bowel movement patterns for a moment. That’s because certain seeds are filled with fiber.
How These Seeds Will Benefit Your Health Regardless
GiphyNow that you know more of what seed cycling is all about, you might be wondering if it’s truly worth your while. The truth is that research is still being conducted which means that there are articles out in cyberspace that tend to Elmo shrug seed cycling more than anything else. My two cents? I mean, the fact that the four seeds listed have other health benefits, if you’re someone who prefers to take all-natural approaches to your health, it can’t hurt to up your intake of flaxseeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, and sunflower seeds anyway. Here are a few (additional) reasons why.
Flaxseeds. Aside from the fact that flaxseeds are a beneficial source of fiber and protein, they are also good for you because they are rich in omega-3s (which reduce inflammation and decrease cholesterol levels), they can help to keep your blood sugar levels in check, they are good at assisting with weight management and they can strengthen your digestive system.
Pumpkin seeds. If you’re currently trying to eat less meat yet you don’t want to do it at the sacrifice of your daily protein needs, pumpkin seeds are the answer to your prayers. They are off-the-charts when it comes to how much protein is in them (almost nine grams per serving), plus they contain a solid amount of copper, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, zinc, and antioxidants. If you want to improve your bladder health, pumpkin seeds can help to make that happen. If you want a stronger heart, pumpkin seeds offer support in that department.
Something else to keep in mind is, that since pumpkin seeds have antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidative, and anti-ulcerative properties in them, they can also help your body to heal from minor issues and wounds faster — which is always a good thing.
Sesame seeds. If you are looking to get more fiber and protein in, lower your cholesterol and blood pressure levels, keep your bones in good shape, uptick your vitamin B intake, and/or strengthen your immune system, these are the areas where sesame seeds can be of great assistance. Something else that’s cool about sesame seeds is they have a reputation for helping to keep your liver and kidneys in peak condition as well.
Sunflower seeds. As far as snacking goes, probably the most popular seeds (on this list, anyway) are sunflower seeds. If they are something that you enjoy indulging in, you can feel good about that since they contain properties that fight cancer, help to regulate your thyroid, assist with preventing muscle cramps, provide you an energy boost, reduce your blood sugar levels, and make your gut (where 80 percent of your immunity resides) healthier.
Hmph. Looks to me that if you take these seeds in, your health is only going to improve — if that includes when it comes to your hormones, then that is just a bonus.
___
Now that you know more about seed cycling, of course, it is totally up to you if you want to give it a shot. Again, though — since all of these seeds are good for you, what do you have to lose in trying it?
I don’t see one damn thing, y’all. Not one.
Let’s make things inbox official! Sign up for the xoNecole newsletter for love, wellness, career, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
Featured image by Daniel de la Hoz/Getty Images