In today’s post, I’m writing about what feels like a breakthrough that came through a synchronicity that made me laugh and weep at the same time. While I continue to tread carefully into exploring the depths of myself and return to the surface for a deep breath to integrate what I’m discovering, I’m recognizing a need to shift 100 Liminal Days from mind to body, from excavation mode to expression mode, at least for now.

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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 in the footer of this page to get the weekly recaps delivered to your inbox.

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The Synchronicity That Made Me Weep

Have you ever laughed while crying? I don’t mean the laugh until you cry kind of tears. I mean a rare instance where you simultaneously feel one emotion that makes you weep and another one that makes you laugh at something that just clicked for you suddenly.

As I sat in a lecture for my qigong teacher training this morning, a simple analogy about how qigong helps us prepare the fascia in our body to become like a sail catching wind struck me with this cocktail of emotions causing me to weep and laugh about how funny God can be sometimes. Feeling these emotions from something so simple caused me to pause and remember that the spiritual life is so weird at times, but confirmation of our “right path” can come in the tiniest of moments.

My Native American Cliff Dream and the Lecture Collide

You may remember in Day 12/100 when I was sharing some things I discovered during my quarterly journal lookback that I had documented a powerful 30-second dream I had on April 23, 2025.  In the dream, I was standing on a cliff overlooking a deep canyon. I witnessed a Native American chief standing on the very edge of the cliff, holding his arms out in front of him in the shape of a circle. The pose is a qigong pose called Embracing the Tree.

A rush of wind came down from the heavens, through the circle and into the canyon below him. As it passed through his arms, I heard a sharp, loud sound that reminded me of the sound a sail makes when it finally catches wind. It was a pop – almost like thunder – and the fringes of his shirt were flapping softly as if controlled by a constant flow from above as the air passed through what now resembled a portal. 

This was the end of the dream, and when I interpreted it later, I came to understand this dream message as some kind of activation for my soul, especially when I connected that the dream happened on the same day I was asked to preach at my church for the first time. It was deeply meaningful to me, a big dream.

And today – six months later – I’m watching this lecture about Qi, Gong, and Huang as part of my teacher training. When the teacher begins talking about Huang, or the “sinew body” (think, all of our connective tissues: tendons, ligaments, fascia, and cartilage) he shows how the standing meditation poses like Wuji and Embracing the Tree are meant to open up the fascia so it can more easily “catch the Qi like a sail catches wind!” He literally used those words. This was the moment I wept and laughed.

Last week, I registered a new LLC as an action to support my goal of deeper financial awareness and to create a new business in the future. I originally submitted a request to use “Gray Consulting, LLC”. It’s very practical and generic, so it is flexible for anything I decide to do later. But that name was too similar to several others and my request was rejected. Two days later, I tried again with a new name that was accepted: Embracing the Tree, LLC. I chose this name simply because it is my favorite qigong stance, and I wanted to give a little nod to my dream about the cliff portal.

The synchronicity here feels like a powerful confirmation that the qigong teacher training is the right path for me right now.

From Mind to Body: A Shift in Dharma

As I’ve been on this pursuit to understand more of my dharma and go do my life’s greatest work, I assumed that my dharma would flow from my intellectual well. I’ve spent a lot of time cultivating my mind and knowledge over the last decade or more. I love “thinking” tasks and using my mind to solve problems. I also feel a connection to a spiritual calling.

But when I look at my track record of what has led me to evaluate my life and make powerful shifts, the catalyst for these powerful changes has started in my body. In 2022, when I was first noticing how I constantly lived in pain and was experiencing various symptoms of burnout, I picked up a book titled The Mindbody Prescription. This was the first moment I realized that my physical symptoms were due to emotional unrest. With that understanding, I quit drinking alcohol and slowly began a journey of tuning into the voice of my body through somatics and Internal Family Systems (IFS therapy).

It is my body that has been key in opening my eyes to the truth of my state of being and has been the most reliable guide as I’ve increased my bodily awareness and elevated my consciousness. This connection leads me to believe that perhaps the well to draw from in this season is less about my thinking mind and intelligence and more about my body’s innate intelligence.

It’s Time to Focus on Building My Huang, Not Building Wealth

Em and I enjoyed a long date yesterday – first visiting a few thrift and vintage stores, then happy hour at the cutest little bookstore in Hyde Park (First Light Books), followed by a shared dinner and dessert at the cult-classic Austin gem, Magnolia Cafe. We purchased a new book together – The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. As we sat outside the bookshop, our conversation was around money, my latest notions that I lack a high desire for making money, and I ended up realizing something key for this season.

It’s not that I don’t want to make money, it’s that I want to be compensated fairly for my efforts. And, I am noticing a pull toward some part-time work that is manual labor. I want to do physical work like gardening or construction. I don’t want to choose work for the money, but whatever I do, I want to be paid my worth.

I feel like I am in a stage where I don’t need to latch onto something I can imagine myself doing for the next decade. I need to instead lay a cornerstone of my future work by symbolically building my Huang – that is to practice tuning into my body through physical work and qigong so my life’s greatest work – my Qi – can flow freely through me.

Wuji: Learning to Stand in the Void

One of the standing meditation postures in qigong is called Wuji, meaning “the ultimate nothingness”. To quote an excerpt from Skee Goedhart’s website:

As with all Taiji / Qigong, complexity and mystical truth lie behind even the most seemingly trivial movement. Such is the case with Wuji, according to the ancient, Chinese texts before the universe existed there was emptiness and ‘a great void’. This was known as Wuji, or ‘the ultimate nothingness’, ‘the absence of extremes / extremities’. At a certain point, out of this emptiness, complexity and substance was born including the formation of duality (Yin / Yang).

When a Qigong practitioner stands in Wuji she/he literally personifies that pre-existent state. The posture expresses ‘no extremity, no separation’ and being ‘without differentiation’.

This also feels like a synchronicity to me – standing in Wuji is literally standing in a liminal space. It is absent of extremes. I just wrote on Day 30/100 about how I know I tend to the poles of extremes, and this project is meant to help me hone my skill of balancing and tapping into those extremes only when needed.

This feels like a call to master Wuji – not just the body’s posture, but to embody it as a lived experience.

Trusting the Body’s Blueprint

What a weird path I am following. I can barely comprehend it in my mind, but my body and soul are intuitively knowing the way. As strange as it seems, this mystical blueprint offered within Taoism is magnetically pulling me towards dharma that looks different than I expected. I’m accepting these shifts and shifting my goal from this need to mentally understand my path to letting my body speak the direction.

Standing in this void, this liminal space, has always been about surrender, not forcing. It has been a hard lesson for me to fully accept, but I’m seeing how when I am truly not striving, that sail can catch the wind. With this in mind, I’m giving myself permission to slow down the excavation mode and begin practicing the art of Wuji – literally and figuratively. I will practice this qigong stance, but I’ll also use the movement of my body as a means to express myself creatively through qigong and perhaps digging in the dirt, too.

Last night, I dreamt that I dove into a deep pool and descended quickly. On the way down, I wondered if I would touch the bottom, hoping I could use the floor to push myself up back to the surface. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to hold my breath long enough to make it back to the top. But I never reached the bottom, I just turned back to the ascent as soon as possible, and surfaced from the water at the exact moment I could hold my breath no more. Once again, this dream is another message telling me to let this work integrate.

As Jung says in his Collected Works, “If one tries beyond one’s capacity to understand, one is driven to repression.”

I am so thankful for this confirmation coming at just the right moment, encouraging me to keep going with some adjustments.

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