It is our second day at the 2023 Firekeeper Gathering. As part of the morning check-in, members of the Firekeeper Circle voice what has been moving for them. Uncomfortable emotions start coming up. Then one of the Firekeepers shares a story.
They were visiting a children’s hospital. In the oncology ward, a girl asked them to write a song for her. ‘I don’t know if you will be there when I return,’ they said. She replied: ‘Then I will wait.’ They went back a few weeks later with the song. The girl was a cancer survivor. When the story finished, the Firekeeper started singing that song, and the group joined.
Another voice spoke: ‘What happens when it’s not a happy ending? What if the thing we share was also the moment of death?’ Those questions opened a threshold. The person speaking began to grieve for their mother, who was still alive but slowly and surely passing. Tears were flowing. For a moment, no one spoke. Then a handful of the Firekeepers moved closer, holding the person crying. A new song arose, and everyone joined. Something in the group had shifted.
The sequence that unfolded had not been planned. It could not have been. Yet it was not accidental either. Something had been cultivated that made it possible. Drawing on that moment, a 2024 conference paper by Anaïs Sägesser, Marco Gyger, and Luea Ritter reflects on what allows individuals to move together through discomfort rather than retreating from it. And how, by doing so, a group can experience itself as something larger than the sum of its parts.
The Liminal Space as a Space of Transformation
To address the polycrisis, we need more than material action out there in the world. Something in us, in the way we perceive and relate to the world, also needs to transform. But how? Particularly, how to transform in a way that respects the pluriverse, the fact that people inhabit genuinely different worlds? And how to transform not just as discrete individuals in a group, but as a collective? Those are some of the questions guiding the work of the World Ethic Forum: our inquiry into the preconditions for radically shared aliveness.
Critical to this level of transformation, the paper argues, is the willingness to enter liminal spaces: places of not-knowing, disorientation, and uncertainty. These are in-between spaces where previous perspectives or structures of meaning are no longer reliable reference points, while new ones have not yet fully formed. Where what was previously stable becomes fluid.
These spaces are delicate: potential comes with vulnerability. They need to be safe enough, or the nervous system responds with automated stress reactions, and the possibility closes. They also need to be curious enough that transformation actually happens.
What tends to come up in those spaces is something that transformative learning discourse frames as‘edge emotions’: forms of discomfort that arise when collective assumptions are questioned. The temptation is to avoid them, maintain the status quo, retreat to familiar ground. But the same edge emotions can also serve as an invitation to challenge assumptions, to sink deeper. In practice, what we observe is an oscillation between these two impulses: sinking deeper and seeking to get out.
The grief moment at the 2023 gathering was an instance of this. Edge emotions entered the room, somewhat unexpectedly. The group could have moved around it, bypassed the grief, and continued on with the day. Instead, it moved through it, and something deep shifted.
This did not happen by accident. The paper identifies several conditions that made the shift possible: the prior cultivation of trust, an acceptance of wider ways of knowing, a willingness to relinquish planned agendas, the ability to navigate silence, and the presence of co-facilitators holding space from different positionalities. All these had been intentionally cultivated through the design of the gathering, and the practices of the Firekeeper Circle.
As the paper concludes: navigating collective transformative spaces requires the willingness to stay with trouble and collectively hold uncertainties whilst navigating with care and presence. The Firekeeper Circle has been practising exactly this.
This post is based on: Sägesser, A., Gyger, M., & Ritter, L. (2024). Co-holding and co-navigating collective liminal spaces for transformative learning outside educational contexts. WorldEthicForum.