The Waiting Practice: Staying With the In-Between

This practice is for the woman who is suspended. Not in crisis, not in resolution — somewhere in the corridor between the two. You haven't sent the message. You haven't decided to stop wanting to. You are waiting, and the waiting has weight. This is not a practice that will tell you what to do. It won't move the timeline or clarify the other person's feelings. What it can do is help you be with yourself while you wait — actively, with your whole body, rather than disappearing into anxiety or distraction. Waiting is usually treated as empty time. Something to survive until the real thing begins again. This practice asks a different question: what if you are not waiting for your life to resume, but actually living it right now, in this exact suspended moment? This is not a reframe meant to comfort you. It is a genuine practice of presence — in the hour you are in, on the threshold where you are standing, as the person you still are, even here.

What You Need

• When you are holding yourself back from reaching out and need support staying in that choice.
• When you don't know if this is ending or pausing, and you need to be somewhere while you don't know.
• When the waiting feels passive and you want to inhabit it as something you are doing, not just enduring.

The Ritual

1. **Name the Hour** — Look at the actual time. Say it out loud or write it down — not as a timestamp, but as an acknowledgment. You are here, in this specific hour, on this specific day. The waiting has a location. You are not floating. You are standing somewhere real, and it is now.
2. **Place Your Feet** — Stand up if you can. Feel the floor. This is the threshold practice — the literal act of standing still without moving toward or away. Stay there for one full minute. Notice how it feels to not reach and not retreat. Your body knows this tension. Let it be known.
3. **Say What You Are Holding** — Not what you want to happen. Not what you are afraid of. Just what you are carrying right now. Write one sentence that begins: 'I am holding...' It might be hope. It might be grief. It might be something that doesn't have a clean name yet. One honest sentence is enough.
4. **Give the Hour Back to Yourself** — Do one small thing that belongs entirely to you — not related to them, not performed for anyone. Make tea. Step outside. Read a page of something. This is not distraction. It is a quiet act of remaining your own person inside the waiting, which is the whole point of this practice.