After one incarnation ends and before a new incarnation begins is a gap called the bardo. Whether between lives, between phases of life, or between thoughts, the gap is pregnant with possibility, yet unformed, and often unidentified. Most of us are too busy planning the future or too afraid of space and not-knowing to recognize the gap.
But it is precisely this phenomenon, liminality, as the British anthropologist Victor Turner names it, or the bardo as it is called in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, that offers the opportunity for transformation. While waiting on the threshold of a new life, shifting takes place. This seemingly empty moment when nothing is happening is exactly the time to pay attention, for it is here that new life is created. It is most important to pay attention now, for it is here in the bardo that our thoughts take shape and direct us to our future birth.
Diary of a Pilgrim 