The Space Between Lives
There's a space between the hallway and the doorway. Between who you were and who you're becoming. It's called liminal space.
That's the space I share with people who come to my healing retreats. Life before. Life after. And the in-between — where we walk down the hallways of your own life and work, find the doors to open, peek inside, and ask yourself: is this where I want to go next?
That's where I am right now.
And based on what I'm hearing from friends, watching on social media, seeing in the messages people send me — I'm not alone in this. Almost everyone I know is in this space too.
It feels like being stuck. But it's different. You know something is coming. You can feel it moving beneath the surface, even if you can't see it yet.
It feels like being pregnant (from what I've heard).
You know it's finite. You know there's an end somewhere. But the time is both flying and crawling. It's getting harder and harder. So much unknown. You can plan for it, prepare for it, but the truth is — the baby is in charge. The baby decides when she's ready. Not you.
The Baby That Wasn't a Baby
The dragon I'm birthing has been tapping me on the shoulder for two and a half years.
For much of that time, I thought it would be a real human baby. The problem was that I never wanted kids. I even told my husband on our first weekend together that it wasn't happening. It was one of my non-negotiables. It had ended other relationships because I knew it wasn't the path for me. But something had been floating around asking me to be her mom. Something insisting. Something that wouldn't leave me alone.
It wasn't until a week ago that I finally realized: it wasn't a human baby. It was more.
In August of 2023, my husband and I celebrated six years together with a road trip through Canada. We stopped at a bookstore while our rental car was charging, and I found Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. That book would change the trajectory of my life and my work — showing up at the perfect time for me to begin a writing practice that would ruin my handwriting and show me how my thoughts were a mess of my own making.
Cameron teaches simple practices for tapping into creativity. She believes all of us are artists in our own way — and that most of us take ourselves too seriously for creativity to actually flow. From artist dates to daily questions, her no-nonsense style lets you choose your own adventure through her beautiful lessons.
The most profound practice for me was actually a reminder. For years, I'd been teaching others how to journal, giving clients prompts to help them find their own wisdom. Julia teaches a practice called Morning Pages. I'm sure I'd learned it from her at some point, but I'd never known who to attribute it to. She shares that you start with a prompt — or just automatic writing — and dump out all your thoughts every day for at least three pages. Most of what you write isn't meant to be read by anyone. She even says you should burn the pages. But what comes out from underneath all the chaos? That's where the real creativity lives.
So one early morning, sitting next to a beautiful lake in a remote part of CCanadajust above the New York border, I poured my coffee and started day one.
The next day, I did it again. And I committed to doing it every single day. A new habit I was excited to have. Something to wake up for. To see what would come out of me. And although I'm not one for routine or daily practices — oh, the life of a Manifestor — I was grateful to find something that would stabilize my thoughts and quiet the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee that had been waking me up screaming and worrying every day.
This felt much more peaceful than trying to sweat them out first thing in the morning with a long run or weightlifting session.
The Phrase That Came Through Me
That first week of Morning Pages was profound. Mostly swirls and questions. But then a phrase came out. Onto the page. As if something else was speaking through me.
The path to enlightenment is an old dirt road just off the highway of success.
I could see it. Picture it. I drew it in my mind — where it was, how people accessed it, how I had first accessed it myself. Yet there it stayed. Rocking over and over in my head for eighteen months. Wondering what it came from. Where it would go next. What I would even do with it.
When the Dragon Started Circling
Only then did my life slowly start to burn at the edges.
My attention went to everything that felt like an emergency instead of to this little heart song — this Soul Song, as I would eventually call it. Because my understanding of what it meant to be a responsible adult would be forced into front and center. And I could see — I knew — this would change the world. But I couldn't tend to it. I couldn't hold it. I could barely hold myself.
The dragon was circling me in the spirit realm. Telling me I needed to claim her. And it was all I could do to keep myself alive as my world slowly began to burn to the ground.
How could I possibly take care of a dragon when I could barely take care of myself?
This liminal space. This in-between… had me holding on by a thread.
But now I know, the liminal space isn't a trap. It's the hallway you walk down before you open the door to what's actually yours. It's the threshold between the old life and the new one.
And the dragon? She was never asking me to have it all figured out. She was asking me to trust that on the other side of this burning, on the other side of this in-between, something entirely new would be waiting.
Something that only I could birth.
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