This is Part II of a four-part series. In Part I, I wrote about how time seems to collapse in a liminal space, and without a sense of time, it’s easy to lose our bearings. Since Part I, I’ve been diving deeper into proprioception research and discovered something big: the body doesn’t just sense position – it senses movement, effort, force, and heaviness through populations of receptors working together. In other words, the body doesn’t rely on just one signal to regain proprioception. The same is true for the soul. Today I want to map the four stabilizers that create those ‘populations of gentle inputs’ for inner sensing.

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100 Liminal Days is an experimental project of embracing my current transitional season after exiting my business by sharing an honest, real-time account of my self-initiation experience in daily posts. I’m using The Artist’s Way as a guiding tool, and sending shorter weekly recaps only via my newsletter. Visit Day 1/100 to learn more and sign up to get the weekly recaps delivered to your inbox.

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Extracting Data From 100 Liminal Days

If you were to look back at Day 1/100, you’d see that I didn’t just jump into this project, I climbed the ladder to the high diving board and took an immediate deep plunge into my subconscious world. I was on a mission, and I thought moving faster and deeper would mean I get out of this liminal space even quicker.

By Day 29/100, I was questioning if any of this was even helping, asking if this was purposeful discipline or self-flagellation. I had clearly gone too deep, too fast, and I was becoming even more shaky than when I started. I pressed on, but with some awareness that I needed to give myself time to integrate a bit before continuing to plunge deeper.

Then on the evening of Day 32/100, I had a dream of diving into a body of water at a rapid pace, and on my way down I thought, “I sure hope I hit bottom soon so I can push off and reach the surface again before I drown!” But I didn’t reach the bottom. Just as my momentum slowed, I turned around and swam back to the top as quickly as I could. As I surfaced, I was able to take a much needed gasp of air at what felt like the very last minute.

Thankfully, I was able to interpret this dream very easily – my psyche was telling me two things:

• that I am not going to reach the bottom,
• and that I must choose to come up for air before diving deep again.

Leading up to the night of the dream, I noted in my Week Five check-in that I was noticing how my ability to stick to my daily practices was faltering a bit for the first time in the project. (I think this would have happened sooner if I hadn’t been on vacation for two weeks just after Week Two!) As I study the data of this self-initiation experiment, it’s clear to me now that I must find a rhythmic tempo with balance work that first creates stability and continuity, and then add in less frequent heavy work – those deep dives – to regain my soul’s ability to know who I truly am, what I want and like, and where I am and where I’m going.

In other words, navigating through a liminal space with confidence doesn’t happen just because you dug deep and discovered your calling, and it also won’t happen just because you started meditating and journaling daily. The liminal space asks you to linger, to stay a while, because there is no single way out of the in-between space.

The Four Stabilizers

There have been four core stabilizers keeping me steady enough to continue my soul excavating dives with the right cadence. This post is meant to share ways I am doing balance work before I take another deep dive with some weights on.

1. Temporal Stabilizers

The body’s sensory system that gives us healthy proprioception – that is, the body’s ability to sense where in space our limbs are – is a fascinating, unconscious function of our incredible bodies. The body’s temporal mechanisms are constantly running a “forecast” of our body’s position a few milliseconds ahead. It’s also creating a memory bank of movement to recall timing patterns like how long it takes to reach for something. Additionally, it synchronizes with external rhythms like breath, walking pace, and even music. And all the while, this complex system is coordinating movement for multiple parts of the body synchronistically.

If we map this over the soul’s experience upon entering a liminal space, it’s as if the liminal scrambles our soul-forecasting signals. We can’t sense where our choices today will lead emotionally or spiritually. Our timing is off because time doesn’t exist the same way in this middle zone. That’s why regaining our sense of time is the first order of business.

One of the quickest ways to re-establish temporal coherence is to give ourselves a consistent daily rhythm and create time boundaries as a form of self-protection. This might look like giving yourself a consistent wake-up and bedtime, taking a lunch break at the same time each day, or scheduling a dharma sprint with notifications off.

Just like the body, our soul stores memory of patterns, so when we commit to daily practices like meditation, prayer, and journaling, this helps us bring back temporal stabilization. These practices have been the most important daily habits along with at least one daily dharma sprint to focus on the day’s number one thing.

2. Somatic Stabilizers

The body has specialized sensors that detect how much force our muscles are actually generating and what load we’re carrying. These receptors distinguish between how hard we think we’re working versus how much force we’re actually producing. They also recalibrate what “normal” carrying capacity feels like based on our current strength and energy levels.

In a liminal space, this capacity gets scrambled too. We lose the ability to accurately sense what we’re emotionally and spiritually carrying versus what we think we should be able to handle. (Like me diving deep fast thinking it was fine when it clearly wasn’t!) We might feel completely overwhelmed by tasks that used to be routine, or conversely, we might push ourselves beyond our actual capacity because our inner load-sensors are miscalibrated.

Somatic stabilizers help us reconnect with what we’re actually carrying right now, not what we carried before the transition. This might look like daily body check-ins, qigong standing practice to literally sense weight and balance, or breathwork that helps regulate the nervous system when we’re carrying too much.

For me, the 5-minute zhan zhuang standing practice called Wuji has been a way to physically practice just being in the liminal space. It trains the same sensing capacity for emotional and spiritual burdens that it does for physical load and prepares me to catch more Qi or life energy – just like the sails of a sailboat.

3. Relational Stabilizers

The body also maintains an unconscious awareness of boundaries – where you end and the environment begins, how close others are, what feels “too close” or “too distant.” It uses visual cues and balance to constantly orient relative to surroundings and other people. Oour brain also maintains a map of our body’s edges and reads relational information through physical contact – the pressure and reciprocity in handshakes, hugs, and even how we position ourself in a room.

In a liminal space, the soul’s relational sensors may malfunction, too. The boundaries between our authentic self and others’ expectations become blurry. This is why it feels like we don’t know who we are anymore. We might find ourself grasping at ways to help others and “show our value.” Without our old role or external validation, it becomes harder to maintain our authentic position in relationships.

Relational stabilizers help us maintain orientation to our true self amid social dynamics that can destabilize during transitions. This might look like daily check-ins with yourself about where you are living authentically versus performatively, or speaking boundaries to others about what you need.

For me, Daily Pages is the main way I tell myself the truth about what I’m feeling about myself and toward others. Then at the end of the day, I highlight wins and great things and journal about how those things connect to my purpose or dharma. This helps me regain that sense of relational stabilization.

4. Meaning Stabilizers

The body maintains an internal map that serves as a coordinate system for all movement and position. This central reference system uses fixed points including gravity, visual horizons, the consistent relationships between body parts, to determine where you are and which direction you’re moving. When the body needs to interpret any movement or position change, it refers back to this stable internal map.

In a liminal space, our meaning-making system, or our spiritual and moral coordinates, can feel scrambled or unreliable. The values that used to guide decisions might feel distant or unclear. For me, I started questioning some of my core beliefs about God, money, and creativity. Without this central reference system working properly, even small decisions can feel overwhelming because we’ve lost our internal compass.

Meaning stabilizers help us maintain connection to our core coordinate system when external circumstances are shifting. This looks like daily practices that reconnect us to our fundamental values and spiritual touchstones. They become the “fixed points” that remain true even when roles, plans, and circumstances change.

So, my daily practices of writing Daily Pages, meditation, prayer, and qigong have been more than healthy habits. They have been a grounding presence anchoring me to my dharma – even my world feels unsettling.

Integration of Daily Practices is the Balance Work

I had already been doing most of these daily practices for more than a year before starting this 100-day project, but I didn’t fully understand how stabilizing those would be, especially as I intentionally took these expeditions into my soul’s deepest caverns. But as I review my experiment, the truth is glaringly obvious: these practices are helping me linger in the liminal and shake off that feeling of lostness and being without direction. It wasn’t immediate, but the evidence is clear that these practices are critical in a liminal season.

If you are also in a transition season of life, I encourage you to start with writing Daily Pages. Julia Cameron says to handwrite three pages of stream of consciousness journaling. I write two (because my handwriting is small and this still takes me 30-45 minutes) and I’ve heard other coaches recommend typing your journal entries for 20 minutes instead. You don’t have to follow anyone else’s rules on this. The key is to take time every single day to tell yourself the truth. If you only have time for ten minutes, do that.

That diving dream taught me something crucial: I needed to come up for air before going deep again. These four stabilizers are my way of maintaining calm waters on the surface and restoring my capacity to breathe and integrate what I discover in the depths. But to make the most of this liminal space, diving deep again still needs to be done – just with better timing and preparation. In Part III, I’ll explore the heavy work practices that let us dive deep and return with treasures, rather than drowning.

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