The Crack: How I Found the Space Between Stories

People used to have a strange reaction when I talked about what I used to call the Crack. Some thought I was joking. Some thought I was being crude. Some just couldn’t hear past the word. That was partly intentional back then. I needed something that didn’t sound holy, something that wouldn’t turn into a teaching or a brand or a promise. But over time, I realized the word itself had started getting in the way of the thing I was actually pointing to.

So I don’t use it much anymore.

What I was trying to describe has nothing to do with shock value. It’s quiet. Almost boring, actually. It’s the smallest possible space—so small you usually miss it—between an emotion and the story you tell about it.

That space is real.

And it’s the only place the machinery can’t reach you.

I didn’t find it through meditation retreats or spiritual discipline. I backed into it the hard way, while trying to understand why my own suffering kept looping no matter how much insight I thought I had. I started noticing something uncomfortable: every time I thought, I feel this way because…, the rest of the sentence filled itself in instantly. The reasons arrived fully formed. The memories lined up. The villains were cast. Even the future got drafted on the spot.

It felt less like discovering truth and more like activating a program.

The moment I identified with the feeling, the story assembled around it as if it had been waiting for permission.

One day, while watching this happen yet again, I pictured two emotional poles—shame and pride, anger and righteousness, grief and blame. And right where they nearly touched, there was a thin gap. Not an answer. Not relief. Just awareness. No commentary attached.

That gap felt more solid than any belief I’d ever had.

Years later, when my life actually collapsed—when my marriage ended, my health failed, and I found myself living in a tiny trailer in the desert—it showed up again. I had every reason in the world to lock into the story. Betrayal. Failure. Humiliation. Rage. The narrative was airtight. It made sense. It was justified.

And that’s when I saw the choice.

The pain was real.

The story was optional.

I could let the meaning form, or I could stop just short of it. Same sensation. Different relationship. When I didn’t finish the sentence—when I didn’t turn the feeling into identity—something strange happened. The emotion moved. It didn’t root. It didn’t loop. It passed through like weather.

That’s what I now call the Between.

It isn’t bliss. It isn’t detachment. It isn’t pretending you don’t feel things. I still feel everything. Anger. Fear. Shame. Grief. All of it. The difference is that none of it becomes me.

In the Between, emotion has no job. It doesn’t need to teach me anything. It doesn’t need to justify itself. It doesn’t need a backstory. It can just move.

And without identification, the loop collapses on its own.

Every tradition gestures toward this space in its own language. Non-attachment. The observer. Regulation. Presence. But the moment it becomes a teaching, it turns into another story. Another thing to do right. Another way to fail.

This isn’t that.

This is practical. Almost mechanical.

When something hits, don’t ask why. That’s the hook. Stay with the raw signal. Let the body feel it without finishing the sentence. Without assigning motive. Without choosing sides.

The body discharges.

The story starves.

Over time, something settles—not happiness, not transcendence, but clarity. You become very difficult to manipulate from there. By people. By systems. By your own old patterns.

Everything I write comes back to this. Egregores. Inversion. Story loops. The harvesting machine. None of it matters if you can’t locate the Between for yourself. Because that’s where the machinery loses its grip—not through force, not through healing narratives, but through non-participation.

You were never required to suffer to be worthy.

You were never broken for feeling what you felt.

You were only ever asked to believe the story that formed around it.

And the moment you stop believing it—even for a breath—the field settles on its own.

You don’t need to clear anything.

You don’t need to be fixed.

You don’t need a new story.

You just need to notice the space you’re already standing in.

That’s the Between.