Some people arrive in this world with the knowing of which room they belong in.
I arrived at a doorway: the threshold, neither here nor there.
I’m Ru, a poetess, writer, founder of Liminal Lessons, and architect of RUIA: Re-Awaken Your Inner Archē
But before any of that, I have always lived in the between; more comfortable than on one side of things. Between languages and lineages. Between the self I was handed and the one who kept whispering herself awake at 3 am, insisting there was more.
I did not choose the liminal. The liminal chose me, and if you are reading this, I suspect it has claimed you too. Ibn ʿArabī gave this kind of between-space another language: the barzakh, an isthmus or interval that both separates and joins what lies on either side. Neither one thing nor the other, yet participating in both.
What Is the House of Liminal Lessons?
Liminal Lessons is not a self-help space.
I say this deliberately, because the phrase self-help has been used to sell morning routines with no interior life, satin pillowcases, and aimless writing dressed as shadow work. Aesthetics as a substitute for depth. I have nothing to offer the person seeking to feel better without looking more closely at themselves at every level of their being.
The core philosophy behind the work sprouts from the understanding that there are phases in life that contract and phases that expand. However, life is the most honest and most true when we are transitioning between these so-called “absolutes”.
The philosophy behind the House begins with a simple observation: life contains periods of contraction, expansion, stability, and transition. Some of our most disorienting moments can also be unusually revealing, precisely because we are less rehearsed inside them and more able to notice what no longer fits.
Liminal Lessons is a school that translates threshold experience into language, instruments, and structured self-study so that, in periods of in-between, we can understand ourselves more clearly.
This is a space for those willing to meet themselves in the between. I am the first student of everything I build here. I write from inside the becoming, not after I pass it.
Why I Built the House
Anthropologist Victor Turner described liminality as “betwixt and between”: an interval in which an earlier position has been left behind while the next has not yet fully taken form. He also wrote of liminality as a realm of possibility, where established structures temporarily loosen.
That is the territory Liminal Lessons takes seriously.
I built Liminal Lessons because I could not find what I needed: a space that took the in-between seriously. Not as a pit stop on the way to becoming, but as the site of the most important work a person can do.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter Eight
I spent a long time trying to understand my dragons. But understanding is not the same as meeting them. This space began as, and remains, the record of what happens when I turn around and sit down to meet my dragons. Not slay them, not even befriend them, but greet them and understand them.
The Work
The House now takes three principal forms:
Liminal Lessons is the publishing house: essays, letters, poetry, field notes, and practical explorations of identity transition.
House Instruments translate that work into tools for orientation and self-study, beginning with the Liminal Self-Audit Kit and The Threshold Atlas.
RUIA: Re-Awaken Your Inner Archē is a six-stage curriculum of inner study, moving through six Gateways of being: Physical, Mental, Emotional, Spiritual, Creative, and Relational.
My first published book, Zephyr, belongs to the literary branch of this same inquiry: the attempt to give language to what refuses ordinary speech.
The Lineage I Carry
I come from Punjab, India, from a literary and spiritual landscape in which poetry and mysticism have long met one another.
Bulleh Shah stood in the doorway of his own undoing and sang: “Parh parh ilm hazaar kitaabaN / kadi apne aap nu parhya nahin“, roughly translated to, “I studied until I could judge the world, but I never studied myself.”
He is not an ancestor I claim by blood, but by devotion.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote from the threshold of love and resistance, from the space where the personal and the political refused to untangle.
Rumi’s poetry repeatedly moves toward encounters that exceed ordinary categories and argument. What reaches me in him is the insistence that transformation requires more than winning an argument with oneself.
And Jung, Western, formal, unfashionable to some, gave me another architecture for becoming: individuation, the long work of bringing previously divided or unconscious parts of the psyche into a more conscious relationship. His later engagement with the alchemical coniunctio, explored extensively in Mysterium Coniunctionis, gave symbolic language to the tension and attempted union of opposites.
I do not treat Jung and the mystics above as saying the same thing. I keep them in conversation because each gives me a different language for what happens when a human being becomes less divided against themselves
These are not books on a shelf sitting idle until referenced. They are the grit and bones behind my work.
There Is No Perfect Day, but Every Day Is Perfect
I do not claim to be a therapist, a guru, or an answer. I am someone learning to ask more precise questions, and building a place where you might learn to do the same.
My work draws from depth psychology, philosophy, Sufi and contemplative traditions, mythology, poetry, embodiment, and symbolic explorations of the feminine.
PERSONAL SYMBOLIC NOTE
I was born on the evening of June 15, 1997, during the waxing gibbous moon, itself a liminal phase, suspended between new light and fullness, never entirely one thing. My Sun occupies Gemini, the sign of the seam: the intelligence that lives precisely where one thing ends and another begins. My birth chart carries almost no fixed energy, no signatures of staying– and is saturated instead with the Mutable: the grammar of crossing, releasing, adapting, and turning. I was not built to be a fixed point. I was built to hold the door open.
If you found your way here, perhaps something in you already recognizes the question. The door is open. Come through, if you are ready.
Liminal Lessons is yours to explore.
Ru is the founder of Liminal Lessons and the architect of RUIA: Re-Awaken Your Inner Archē. Her debut poetry collection, Zephyr: A Poetry Collection, is available on Amazon.
☸︎ Read the Essays.
⚝ Explore the Poetry.
Sign up for the official Liminal Lessons newsletter, The Liminal Letters, below. And if you want to reach out, my inbox is open.
⛺︎ Join the Ruia Founding List.