Beyond Words

Autumn is in my hair, in the air. And things are surfacing. Not memories exactly—more like signals. Or like the opening of that old show Get Smart, where Maxwell walks down a corridor with door after door opening and then closing behind him—temporarily encapsulated. Safe, yet stuck.

That in-between feeling. I’ve known it before. Bali was a season like that for me. A whole chapter of transition—like adolescence, or those first beautiful, chaotic years after school—where everything softens and reshapes, and nothing quite fits the same again. It was there I was first invited into what I’ve come to understand as the third space: a place where ritual didn’t just honour change—it gave it shape, rhythm, and meaning.

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In Jungian psychology, the third space is sometimes described as a liminal zone—the psychological in-between. The space between stories, identities, the self we’ve been and the one not yet fully formed. Jung believed real transformation happens here: not in certainty, not in the rush of everyday life, but in the suspended space where we loosen the grip on who we think we are.

And open up. Let something in. Live life as version 4.0 for a while.

The Balinese live it. Bali itself lives it. During my time there, I was welcomed into a rhythm completely different to my own. Ceremonies weren’t something to observe—they were something to enter. You didn’t explain what you were feeling—you offered it. In ritual, change wasn’t just acknowledged; it was called forth, welcomed, witnessed, and held.

I didn’t have the language for it then. I just knew something real was shifting.

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Let me tell you about one ceremony in particular that stays with me: my first melukat, a water purification ritual. It was under the guidance of my dear family friend Iluh—who also happens to be one of the most beautiful women I know, inside and out, from the village of Kutuh Sayan in Ubud.

She had me hanging onto her tiny waist as her bright red Scoopy rattled us down what felt like a 90-degree angle—a hand-poured cement path winding through wild, tangled gorge forest. Ferns, orchids, heat so muggy it pressed against your chest, and a kind of wild aliveness I’ll never forget.

She dressed me in a sarong in a small shack that faced an open rice field. Ducks and koi watched us. I struggled to be modest. Iluh just giggled and smiled, held my hand, and led me up ancient stone steps to a temple in the trees.

We made an offering. She explained nothing.

And then—those pools. Crystal clear spring water channelling down from a roaring stream above us, funnelling through the mouths of gods and demons carved in stone. Eight of them in a row. Each one offering something different.

I was asked to hold a wish in mind as I drank from each spring, lifting my hands in prayer, ducking my head three times beneath the flow. Trying not to fall, trying to keep my thoughts in order. Stillness and connection were just beginning to take root in me—twin white whiskers, nudging their way toward something unseen, deep beneath the surface.

There was nothing to do but trust Iluh’s word: that my prayers would be received.

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I stepped onto the threshold of the third space there—literally. Through the body. Through the ritual. The cold water. The tug of a soaked sarong. The scent of offerings. The sound of prayer echoing in the stone.

It’s deeply physical and completely non-verbal. Nothing is demanded of you, yet you need to give. And when you do—something is released.

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Later, when I encountered Jung’s idea of active imagination, I recognised it—not as a theory, but as something I had learned in the holy water.

He proposed that the unconscious doesn’t speak in logic, but in image, metaphor, sensation. That we don’t reach the deeper parts of ourselves by dissecting—but by engaging. Reading his words was like recognising the scent of a flower I’d once inhaled but never learned the name of. I had already breathed it in—through ritual, through silence, through water—but Jung gave me the language to understand what I had lived.

Writing helps me remember that. Helps me return to the feeling of possibility. The sense of wholeness. It’s the reset button. Install update now.

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In early conversations with therapists and practitioners, there’s often a sense of recognition. These rituals don’t sit outside their understanding of healing—they complement it. Not a replacement for clinical frameworks, but something that can sit gently alongside. A different rhythm, grounded in culture and ceremony, that supports what their work is already holding—just in another form.

This isn’t about replacing the clinical with the spiritual. And it’s certainly not about chasing the spectacle of spirituality. Accepting the invitation into these third spaces is quiet, considered work—a way of expanding what healing can mean: beyond frameworks, beyond language, into something felt, embodied, and respectfully held.

Yes, it takes me so many words to finish Beyond Words. But maybe that’s just it. Language carries us to the threshold. The rest is lived.