A colleague paused after I corrected her pronunciation of my name for the third time, then laughed. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, tossing her head back. In that moment, I felt myself floating somewhere between belonging and rejection, suspended in a liminal space I would later recognize as sacred ground for practice.
As the daughter of professional immigrants from India, I’d spent decades navigating spaces where I was perpetually translating myself for others’ comfort. My parents chose my name after seeing an actress named Sarika—they liked the name, thought it was easy to pronounce, and loved that it meant “bird.” Others found it more difficult than my parents expected. For twelve years in private school, I accepted mispronunciation rather than correct my beloved first-grade teacher. College became my first attempt at reclaiming it, and graduate school brought small victories. But in academia—the space I’d hoped would celebrate diverse voices—I found myself in an endless cycle of correction, accommodation, and quiet rage.
I remember the day a senior colleague told me her friend with the same name pronounced it differently. Great. Another professor asked whether she’d been saying it wrong “this whole time,” suddenly making me responsible for comforting her about my own identity. In meetings, I would introduce myself carefully, then watch my name dissolve into whatever felt easier for others to say. Each interaction reinforced the quiet dissonance of being suspended between worlds.
In the Borderlands
Liminal spaces—those thresholds between what was and what might be—became my unwelcome expertise. As a woman of color in predominantly white academic institutions and professional fields, I lived perpetually in the borderlands. Too brown to disappear, too accomplished to dismiss, too authentic to fit the model minority myth.
The meditation teacher Pema Chödrön writes about groundlessness as the fundamental nature of existence, but experiencing it daily in professional settings felt less like spiritual wisdom and more like chronic vertigo. I wanted solid ground—institutional support, collegial respect, a name pronounced correctly. Instead, I got what the Buddha might call excellent conditions for practicing nonattachment.
My yoga practice, which began after knee surgery in 2008, had introduced me to ahimsa—nonviolence—but I was beginning to understand this principle required fierce discernment. Years of studying the Yoga Sutras taught me satya (truth-telling) and the power that emerges when we align with reality rather than wishful thinking. Traditional interpretations emphasize not harming others, yet I was learning that excessive accommodation could be a form of self-harm. The constant contortion to fit others’ comfort zones was violence against my own authentic presence.
Through my fertility journey and yoga teacher training, I had learned to recognize resistance—my tendency to escape difficult emotions rather than observe them. Years of contemplative practice had shown me how mental agitation creates more suffering than the original pain. I began to see that institutions, too, often follow this same pattern—resisting, appeasing, or escaping instead of finding ground within discomfort.
When Systems Become Teachers
Three years into my tenure-track position, the lessons intensified. After hand surgery and a miscarriage, I requested support from individuals at every level from my program to the dean. Each request was denied. I was told to “expect to be hazed” and assigned additional work left by a departed staff member. I was expected to lead a morning student-teaching orientation before a medical procedure that same day. When I requested a meeting with the dean to discuss these concerns, it was denied; instead, my program leader scheduled a meeting with an associate dean to showcase my accomplishments as her own. The institutional message was clear: Your suffering is not our concern, your labor is our resource, your voice is inconvenient.
Yet even as I navigated this hostility, something unexpected emerged. Colleagues from across the university began reaching out—senior faculty who had reviewed my work, peers who witnessed the procedural violations, administrators who recognized the pattern. Letters were written documenting satisfactory evaluations and questioning the lack of due process. A petition emerged from an entire department, signed by professors I barely knew.
This paradox deepened the liminal space I was learning to inhabit. I was simultaneously being rejected and embraced, dismissed and defended, silenced and amplified—all within the same institution. Traditional Buddhist refuge practice assumes clear categories: helpful sangha, harmful forces. But what happens when the same system contains both?
In traditional Buddhist practice, we take refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha when external supports fail. But what happens when the sangha itself becomes complex territory—some members offering refuge while others create harm? What happens when the very institutions meant to nurture wisdom become sources of both suffering and unexpected solidarity? I found myself developing what I came to call “liminal practice”—the cultivation of inner refuge while remaining open to support that emerged from surprising places. This wasn’t the spirituality I had imagined. It was grittier, more complex, and surprisingly liberating.
Morning refuge meditation became essential. Before checking email, I would spend ten minutes establishing what could not be taken from me: my breath, my inherent worth, my capacity for compassion. This practice evolved from years of working with difficult emotions during my fertility journey, learning to meet myself exactly where I was rather than where I thought I should be. Some mornings, this felt like putting on armor. Other days, it was like remembering I had wings.
Name practice transformed daily humiliation into mindfulness bells. Each mispronunciation became an invitation to choose: correct with patience, let it pass with equanimity, or use it as a teaching moment. The Buddhist concept of skillful means guided these choices—what response would serve wisdom and compassion in this particular moment? Years of contemplative practice had taught me that resistance often amplifies suffering, so I learned to meet these moments with what I came to call “fierce acceptance”—acknowledging the harm without drowning in it.
Self-compassion as radical practice required daily cultivation. During the pandemic, I began every graduate class with a simple check-in about self-care. Tending to my own well-being first created space to genuinely support my students. This wasn’t selfishness; it was the recognition that compassion fatigue serves no one. In a profession that demands endless self-sacrifice, attending to one’s own needs becomes an act of resistance.
The Resignation as Right Action
After receiving notice of non-reappointment from institutional leadershipdespite positive evaluations, I sat with the familiar vertigo of liminal space. Anger, hurt, and confusion swirled through me. But underneath, something steadier emerged—a clarity I hadn’t expected. The decision to resign wasn’t reactive; it arose from what the Buddhist tradition calls right action—a response rooted in wisdom rather than emotion. With my PhD earned fifteen years earlier, I had the credentials and experience to know my worth. More importantly, I had spent years developing practices for surviving hostile institutions. Now those same practices were pointing toward something different: the courage to detach.
Buddhist detachment doesn’t mean not caring. It means caring deeply while releasing attachment to outcomes we cannot control. Fertility struggles had taught me the power of surrendering to truth—accepting what is while still working skillfully with what’s possible. The same principle applies to institutional relationships.
I could not control institutional bias, but I could control my response. I could not force colleagues to pronounce my name correctly, but I could stop accepting environments where basic respect was optional. This wasn’t giving up; it was what contemplative practice had taught me about working skillfully with resistance rather than being consumed by it.
My research on teacher well-being and preparation—work that emerges directly from my contemplative practice—was teaching me what I most needed to learn personally. How do we create educational environments where everyone can flourish? The question had begun with my fertility journey, deepened through yoga teacher training, and now extended to my academic work. Sometimes the answer is walking away from environments where flourishing isn’t possible. When I wrote my resignation letter, documenting patterns of discrimination while offering constructive recommendations, I was practicing what I had learned through years of working with difficult emotions: how to speak truth without being consumed by anger, how to set boundaries with compassion, how to transform personal suffering into service for others facing similar challenges.
Bio-Ecological Wisdom Applied
Traditional ecological systems theory places individuals within concentric circles of influence—family, school, community, and culture. But my experience suggests something different: We can place ourselves at the center of our own systems, as conscious practitioners rather than passive recipients of institutional forces.
This shift in perspective—from being acted upon to acting with awareness—transforms everything. Culture isn’t only something that shapes us; it’s something we actively create through our daily choices. The microaggressions, the denied support, the institutional hazing—these become opportunities for practicing compassion, setting boundaries, and modeling different ways of being.
When I resigned from my tenure-track position, it wasn’t out of anger or vengeance. It was engaged Buddhism in action—speaking truth to power with clarity, not reactivity.
The Gift of Not Belonging
Living in liminal space teaches what traditional belonging cannot: the freedom that comes from not needing anyone’s permission to exist fully. When institutions fail to provide refuge, we discover the refuge that was always there—our own capacity for awareness, compassion, and right action. We also learn that refuge can emerge from unexpected quarters, that solidarity often arises precisely where systems attempt to create isolation.
The colleagues who spoke up, who documented procedural violations, who wrote letters of support—they weren’t practicing Buddhism, but they were practicing something essential: the recognition that individual dignity and institutional integrity are inseparable. Their actions reminded me that even within hostile systems, there are always people working for justice, even when that work requires courage.
My name means “myna bird” or “songbird” in Sanskrit—a creature that learns by listening, then speaks truth in many tongues. Perhaps this is the gift of liminal living: developing fluency in translation without losing one’s authentic voice.
The Buddhist path has always been about finding the middle way between extremes. For those of us living in the borderlands of institutions, this might mean cultivating fierce compassion—the willingness to speak difficult truths while maintaining an open heart. It means practicing detachment from outcomes while remaining fully engaged in transformation.
Invitation to the Margins
If you find yourself suspended between worlds—culturally, professionally, or spiritually—consider this: the margins might not be places of exile but training grounds for a different kind of wisdom. The disorientation in liminal space may be less pathology than awakening. As Thich Nhat Hanh reminded us, we can discover the magic of the present moment even within the most challenging circumstances.
Your experience of not quite fitting might be preparing you to help institutions and fields become more spacious. Your practice of maintaining authenticity under pressure might be exactly what the world needs. Your cultivation of self-compassion when systems fail might be the most radical service you can offer.
In traditional Buddhist cosmology, bardo refers to intermediate states—the spaces between death and rebirth where transformation becomes possible. Perhaps our professional borderlands are bardos too, pregnant with possibility for both personal awakening and collective healing.
The mud of marginalization can bloom into the lotus of wisdom, but only if we sit with the discomfort without trying to escape it, tend to our inner lives while engaging in outer transformation, and trust that the ground beneath our feet—however unstable it feels—is exactly what we need for practice.
Decades after that first mispronunciation, my name still teaches me the courage required to exist authentically in hostile territory. And my contemplative practice continues to transform professional challenges into opportunities for both inner liberation and outer service. This is what it means to find refuge in the liminal space—not the refuge I expected, but the one that was always there, waiting for me to come home.
Dedication: For Chachi, whose life began in the liminal space of Partition and who taught me, until her final days, that the margins are where we discover our truest strength.
