Today’s post is the check-in for Week Nine, Recovering a Sense of Compassion. Here’s how the last week has gone in my journey through The Artist’s Way.

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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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The Artist’s Way Week Nine Check-In

How many days this week did you do your Daily Pages? How was the experience?

I completed 6/7 days this week – first missed day for Pages in ages! 🙂 On Thursday, Em and I had massages scheduled early and then I dropped her off to head out to an airshow. My morning was consumed and I didn’t manage to get myself back to my practices. I had several missed practices this week, but I’m chalking it up to just part of the process to have some off weeks.

I continue to have a mix of Daily Pages that are about the mundane and even just blabbing to fill up a page at times, as well as days with surprising profundity. On Friday, I hardly kept to my schedule and I got lost in my artwork submission, and Saturday I had a full day of creativity flowing from me like a fountain! I was writing extra, journaling extra and having lots of big ideas in my Daily Pages. Even though I missed a day of Pages, it was as if ideas built up and spewed out the next day instead.

Did you do your Artist Date this week? What did you do? How did it feel?

I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t do my Artist Date this week. I had it all figured out and wanted to go to the Austin Studio Tour, a free city-wide art show spanning two weekends. I’ve never done it and thought that was the plan today. One of the tour stops is on my dog walking route, and as I walked by, I saw how busy they were. I realized I didn’t feel up to being in a big crowd alone and just called off my plans.

On the other hand, I went to church this morning for the first time in a while. That was super nourishing to me and reminded me that it’s worth putting in the effort to be there.

Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it?

There was one funny thing that reminded me of how small and connected the world actually is. The short story is that my next door neighbor was visiting a NYC glasses shop. When she told the clerk she lives in Austin, another woman in the store overheard her and said she just moved from Austin. After a couple more rounds of exchanges about where in Austin, they both realize they had been neighbors – the woman who had just moved was our tenant in our rental property directly next door.

And to really pile this on, right after the realization, the Austin neighbor looks up and sees a good friend from high school out of the window of the glasses shop. Both of the ladies texted Em and me telling about how they randomly ran into each other in the tiniest glasses store in NYC. As we were getting the text while grocery shopping, a man passing by us asked Em if she was a Delta pilot. He was a van driver at the airport and remembered Emily.

What the heck was this about? It was amusing to see so many synchronous run-ins at once.

Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.

The big thing for me this week was stumbling into this idea of “soul proprioception” that I am planning to expand on in some posts next week. This was an idea that just accidentally came out in my pages. Then I did research on what proprioception is for the physical body and how to improve proprioception, and I can see a clear parallel that is helping me understand how I could respond to a liminal space encounter again in the future.

Further, because this epiphany flowed from something I learned in qigong, I feel even more sure that qigong is my axis mundi – a practice I consider the “hub” of how I can serve others in the world. Ideas for services to offer, books to write, and art to make are coming out powerfully and I’m capturing a lot of notes to see where this leads.

The Artist’s Way Week Ten is about recovering a sense of self-protection. My intuition tells me that it will fit well with the ideas I’m sharing about doing balance work before we add in heavy work. More to come!

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