Some people arrive in this world already knowing which room they belong in.
I arrived at the doorway.
I am Ru- poet, writer, and the mind behind Liminal Lessons and the RUIA framework. But before any of that, I am someone who has always lived between. Between languages. Between 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 Arabi called it the barzakh – the isthmus. The place that is neither ocean nor shore, yet touches both. “It is a limit between two things,” he wrote, “a real limit that neither of the two things it limits can transgress.”
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 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.
The lineage I carry
I come from Punjab. From a tradition where the poets and the mystics were not separate people.
Bulleh Shah stood in the doorway of his own undoing and sang: 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 understood that the space beyond argument – beyond the concepts of rightdoing and wrongdoing – was where the real meeting happened. He spent his life mapping that field.
And Jung- western, formal, unfashionable to some – gave me the architecture for what these mystics knew by instinct: that the self is not found. It is individuated. Forged in the long, non-linear, occasionally terrifying process of becoming. This is what he named the mysterium conjunctionis – the sacred marriage of opposites, neither dissolved into the other, but held in creative tension.
These are not books on a shelf. They are the bones of this work.
What are Liminal Lessons?
Liminal Lessons is not a self-help space.
I say this deliberately, because the words self-help have been used to sell morning routines with no interior life, satin pillowcases dressed as shadow work, and aesthetic as a substitute for depth. I have nothing to offer the person seeking to feel better without looking more closely.
Phases in life that contract and phases that expand. However, life is the most honest, most true, when we are transitioning between these so-called “absolutes”. The most confused, the most live, the most us.
Liminal Lessons is a portal that translates our experiences from within these phases into concrete written words. So that in those moments of in-between, we can understand ourselves better.
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 past it.
Why am I here
Victor Turner, who spent his life studying liminality as a social phenomenon, described the threshold state as betwixt and between– the moment when an old identity has been shed, and the new one has not yet arrived. Pure potentiality, he called it. Dangerous. Generative. Unrepeatable.
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.
Rilke wrote: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”
I spent a long time trying to understand my dragons. But understanding is not the same as meeting. This space began as, and remains, the record of what happens when I turn around.
There is no perfect day, but every day is perfect.
I am a published poet. I hold depth psychology, Sufi philosophy, and feminine wisdom traditions as my primary frameworks. I am not a therapist, a guru, or an answer. I am someone who has learned to ask more precise questions- and who has built a place where you might do the same.
If you found your way here, something in you already knows what it is seeking.
The door is open. Come through, if you are ready.
Now, if you’re ready to ‘unsettle’ into your own becoming… Liminal Lessons is yours to explore.
Ru is the founder of Liminal Lessons and the architect of RUIA: Realize Your Inner Archē. Her debut poetry collection, Zephyr- A Poetry Collection, is available on Amazon.
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