Thank you Bob Johnson, Tania Kirschli, and many others for tuning into my live video with Amanda Saint! Join me for my next live video in the app.
There’s a moment in the conversation where the word bardo stops feeling like a spiritual concept and starts feeling like a lived reality.
Amanda introduces it through How You Live Is How You Die—that traditional idea of the space between death and rebirth. And then, almost immediately, the definition softens and expands.
We move through the bardo again and again.
when a version of us ends
when a relationship shifts
when the ground beneath us changes
when something new is forming, even if we can’t see it yet
It’s that in-between space where nothing quite fits anymore, and if you’ve felt disoriented lately… there’s a reason.
Teri shares her own bardo, and it doesn’t arrive gently.
It arrives in December, in Minnesota, with the presence of ICE in her city. What unfolds over the following weeks feels like a slow-motion unraveling—videos, tension, fear building day after day—until the death of Renee Good on January 7th cracks something open in the collective.
People split into instinct.
rage → taking to the streets
freeze → staying home, unable to move
Teri recognizes herself immediately frozen. Even her writing—her anchor, her work, her offering—feels suddenly hollow. Frivolous. Disconnected from what’s happening right outside her door. She retreats into a kind of self-imposed sheltering, moving only between home and small, necessary outings.
A walk with her dog becomes a confrontation. ICE vehicles in a familiar parking lot. And then—this is where everything shifts—something cracks.
I have to do something.
She invites a Buddhist Chaplain to stay in her home as he attends local protests and legal observer training to bring home to his own community. invitation. And Teri lets herself feel again. Within days, the world outside intensifies—strikes, massive protests, more loss.
And then, on January 26th, she writes her first “good news list.”
What started as a way to survive begins to evolve into something much bigger:
a body of writing about Minnesota culture
interviews with women in resistance
the unfolding of Fierce Love
the early roots of the WOMN project
The frozen stillness becomes movement.
The bardo is chaotic. It carries panic. It pulls us backward toward what was familiar—even when we know we can’t return. Healing doesn’t recreate what existed before. It reorganizes us. It strengthens the places that broke. It expands the capacity for something larger to move through.
Writing is how we remember ourselves.
Teri describes it as something that happens in the body—in the bone marrow. A remembering that thinking alone can’t access. Writing gives form to what feels shapeless. Amanda adds another layer: when we write from that in-between space, the words themselves begin to guide us.
And then the conversation widens. The Bardo is collective.
There’s a shared recognition that something larger is happening: systems breaking down, old ways dissolving, a global sense of instability. It feels scary because it’s unknown. And yet there’s a quiet undercurrent of trust. Every bardo we’ve lived through—no matter how painful—has led somewhere better. And sometimes, unexpectedly… more joyful.
Because the bardo doesn’t just break things down. It opens channels. Creativity rushes in through the cracks.
Writing the Bardo is a cohort writing program that Amanda is offering as part of The Mindful Writer, starting in June.
A space designed for exactly this kind of moment.
writing from liminal space
guided by yoga nidra (a deeply restorative, in-between state)
supported by prompts, reflection, and community
