YOUR MIDWIFE FOR THE LIMINAL
Meet the woman who followed the Pulse
Leah Clyne
Founder of Liminal Pulse
Somatic Practitioner, Transformational Guide
I've always been fascinated by the deeper questions of being human. Why we become who we become. What shapes the way we experience ourselves and the world. What actually allows us to change. And what else might be possible when we begin to question the limits of what we've always known.
I became endlessly curious, fiercely capable and very good at overriding myself - over-functioning, people-pleasing, looking after everyone else, working harder, achieving more and performing whatever version of me seemed most likely to secure safety, belonging and worth.
That drive took me through the mining industry, into biomedical science and eventually doctoral research in molecular neuroscience, trying to understand how tiny changes in the brain shape learning, memory and behaviour.
Meanwhile, life was conducting an extensive education of its own. Motherhood. Profound upheaval. Experiences that changed me. My own path through healing, embodiment and reinvention. Again and again I discovered that insight - no matter how intelligent, accurate or beautifully articulated - does not automatically change us.
We don’t experience life as minds observing from a distance. We experience it through a living body - through perception, physiology, relationship, emotion, pattern, imagination and meaning.
Today my work moves between those worlds. Rigorous science and lived experience. Somatics and spirituality. Psychology and symbolism. What can be measured and what can only be encountered.
I’m less interested in choosing between them than in what becomes possible when we allow more than one way of knowing into the room.
Because ultimately, I'm interested in more than helping people understand themselves or change what isn't working. I'm interested in what opens up beyond that: the freedom to experience life differently, to discover what feels meaningful, and to find their own way of participating in something larger than the patterns that once defined them.
THE MANY PATHS THAT LED ME HERE
Scientist
I hold a Bachelor of Biomedical Science and spent six years in doctoral research in molecular neuroscience, studying the mechanisms underlying learning, memory and neuroplasticity. During my years in academia, I also taught human physiology and pathophysiology, deepening my understanding of how the body functions in health and disease.
Perhaps the greatest influence of that era was teaching me how to think: to interrogate assumptions, understand mechanisms, evaluate evidence and remain curious enough to change my mind. I'm still a humble student of life, particularly in the places where emerging ideas, lived experience and established science don't yet fit neatly together.
That scientific lens still shapes how I practise. I weave relevant neuroscience and psychoeducation into my work when understanding itself can be useful - helping make a new possibility believable, because what we expect can influence perception, physiology and outcomes. Knowledge can become another lever for change.
Explorer
My curiosity has never stopped at the boundary of what can currently be measured. I'm deeply interested in consciousness, philosophy, symbolism, mythology, archetypes, altered states, astrology, Human Design, tarot, divination, ritual and the many languages humans have developed to understand ourselves, each other and our relationship with the larger world.
For me, exploration is experiential as much as intellectual. Breathwork, somatic practice, meditation, ceremony, working with the elements and my own evolving relationship with intuition have taken me into territories I could never have understood by reading about them from the outside.
So has nature. I live with my bare feet on the earth as often as I can, seek out mountains, oceans, waterfalls and rainforests, pay attention to animals, weather, seasons and strange little synchronicities - and remain deeply curious about what becomes possible when we meet life as something we're in relationship with.
Woman
I've lived enough life to know that becoming a woman isn't one initiation - there have been many. Trauma, betrayal, survival and reinvention. Relationships, male-dominated worlds, achievement and self-abandonment. Healing, motherhood, rupture and repair. Again and again, life has dismantled something I thought I understood and asked me to meet myself anew.
Motherhood has been one of the greatest initiations of all. I'm a solo mother of three young children, raising them while rebuilding a life and a body of work - an education in capacity, responsibility and self-leadership I could never have understood beforehand.
Nearly four decades of being a woman in this world have taught me something no qualification could: how much strength and softness, grief and joy, contradiction and complexity a human being can contain without any one chapter becoming the whole story.
Practitioner
My practitioner training brought many of these threads back into the body. I'm qualified in Somatic Release Breathwork, Root Cause Therapy, trauma-informed transformational and manifestation coaching, alongside ongoing study and practice in Embodied Processing and an ever-widening exploration of the influences that shape human change.
I don't work from the assumption that one modality contains the whole answer. What we call a “pattern” can live simultaneously through physiology, perception, emotion, belief, behaviour, relationship and unconscious protective responses. My practice is increasingly about learning to listen across those layers - drawing from different maps where they're useful while remaining attuned to the living, breathing person in front of me.
I don't believe healing should become an endless project of self-improvement, or that greater self-awareness is the destination. The work is in service of life: expanding our capacity to move beyond what constrains us, make aligned choices and inhabit more of the life available to us.
“I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
WHERE OPPOSITES MEET
The Liminal Pulse Philosophy
If all were one, nothing could truly be known, because there would be nothing to experience in relation to anything else.
Experience requires contrast. Self and other. Expansion and contraction. Light and shadow. Polarity gives us something to rub up against, somewhere between the poles to locate ourselves, and the possibility of movement between them.
We tend to treat those poles as separate realities when they are often different expressions of the same continuum. There is no discrete point where cold becomes warm and warm becomes hot - only temperature, experienced in degrees. Light becomes darkness through diminishing illumination. The lungs expand and contract, the breath moves in and out. Muscles tense and release. We move between activity and rest, connection and solitude, certainty and mystery, grief and joy, strength and softness. Even these distinctions blur at their edges, because life rarely exists neatly at either pole.
Human beings are no less complex. We learn to identify with certain parts of ourselves and exile others, yet what we disown doesn't disappear. It continues to live through the body - through our physiology, emotional reactions, relationships, perceptions and the unconscious patterns shaping our lives. Wholeness, to me, isn't the elimination of contradiction. It's expanding our capacity to meet more of our own spectrum - because freedom grows with the range of ourselves we can safely inhabit.
Light offers another expression of the same principle. Reflection changes with perspective. Iridescence reveals colours that were always present but invisible from another angle. A shift of only a few degrees can change what becomes available to perception. This is the territory of Liminal Pulse: contrast, perspective, depth, range, possibility - and the thresholds where something previously unseen can come into view.
And ultimately, the pulse brings all of this back into the body.
We don't encounter life as disembodied minds observing reality from somewhere outside it. Everything we know of ourselves and the world reaches us through this living sensory vessel, filtered through perception, physiology, history, relationship and patterning. This is where knowing becomes embodied. Where it becomes something we actually live.
Which brings me to the strange little symbol that represents Liminal Pulse.
The Philosophy, Made Material
Yin Yang metaphorically depicted as half brain, half disco ball.
The brain holds one end of the spectrum: neuroscience, cognition, intellect, analysis - our extraordinary capacity to understand, organise, question and make meaning.
The disco ball holds something different: play, experimentation, movement, reflection and joy. Its surface is made of hundreds of tiny mirrored fragments, each reflecting a different sliver of what surrounds it. Change the angle and you change what you can see. But those fragments aren't broken pieces. Together, they make a whole - one that catches light, moves it around the room and reflects things back to us from perspectives we couldn't otherwise see.
And, importantly, in the meeting of the two, one is compelled to dance with life.
Where they meet is the pulse - the heartbeat.
But the pulse is more than the meeting point. It is the movement between worlds - taking an idea, a desire, an insight, a possibility, something that may exist only in consciousness, and moving it through the body and into material reality.
Because eventually, we have to do something with what we know.
Speak. Move. Choose. Make. Risk. Act.
The pulse is life insisting on participation. The Eros beneath the intellect. The aliveness that compels us not only to understand our lives, but to enter them - to bring what exists within us into contact with the physical world and allow it to take form.
Just as yin meets yang, each gives definition to its counterpart, whilst each contains something the other cannot provide alone.
And perhaps this is also an expression of another old principle: as above, so below; as within, so without.
What exists in consciousness seeks expression in form. What moves within us changes how we meet the world outside us. Inner and outer are not separate realities, but exist in relationship - continually informing, reflecting and giving shape to one another.
In that sense, the Liminal Pulse symbol encodes the philosophy itself into form.
Brain and disco ball. Intellect and play. The measurable and the mysterious. Fragments and wholeness. Reflection and perception. Yin and yang.
And between them, the pulse - the living movement through which what exists within us can become something we actually live.
A philosophy made material.
The Liminal Pulse.
LIMINAL LAB NOTES
Keep your Finger on the Pulse
Curious minds. Open questions. The occasional delightful detour.
A little dispatch from the intersection of science, somatics, symbolism and the gloriously strange business of being human. Expect fresh perspectives, interesting experiments and ideas you might actually want to try in your own life.