(*Photo Credit MyAliya.com* This photo was taken at dawn while flying from Las Vegas to the east coast. While the bottom half looks like a calm ocean, it's actually a blanket of clouds)
Liminality.
I’ve been repeating the word a lot lately. Obsessively, actually. Slowing it down and over-enunciating each syllable to analyze the vibrations on my tongue like Humbert Humbert did to Lolita. Lim-in-al-it-y. I’ve been using the word as often as I can in conversation.
Liminal is from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”, or the bottom part of a door that must be crossed in order to enter. It’s characterized by ambiguity and disorientation. When you stand at a threshold, you are in both rooms, yet neither room at the same time. So the liminal state is one which is neither here nor there. Like a teenager who is not a child, yet not an adult. Like an illegal immigrant who has made a home for herself in a new country, yet the government refuses to consider it her ‘home’. Like twilight is neither night nor day. Like lucid dreamers are neither awake nor sleeping.
In Tibetan spirituality they also speak of this existential ambiguity as ‘The Bardo’, literally meaning the “intermediate state” between lives. It’s written about at length in the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’—a text that teaches that this state is an opportunity for achieving liberation from rebirth.
In Sanskrit the name is antarabhāva.
And that’s how I’ve been feeling for the past months. Intermediate. Like I am in two places and no places all at once. Nomadic in no man’s land– even the slogan for my blog is “everything in between”. I guess this is pretty typical for any Pisces like myself though. I once read that Pisces is the only mutable water sign in the zodiac, denoting a perpetual ‘sea of change’. And damn, have I been feeling seasick.
I had begun writing about the melodramatic woe-is-me pain of liminality for this blog entry…honestly, it was really obnoxious…oh, the uncertainty, oh, the confusion! Poor me! But the Sunday before last something happened that made me think twice about the concept.
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“Wake up.” I told myself.
From the burning sensation in my eyes I knew it was early. Too early to be awake. Yet still, I called to myself again.
“Wake up.”
I thought of every reason why I shouldn’t get out of bed. It’s early. Alexander is away for the weekend so I’m off of mommy duty. I’m tired. I’m lazy. Did I mention it’s early?
“Wake up.” I heard with more urgency. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!!!!”
I somehow managed to peel myself away from my pillow and slink over to my open double windows. A hot pink streak sliced through an otherwise slate-gray and bluish sky. I looked at my cell phone. 5:15AM. I hadn’t woken up this early without an alarm clock in years.
I stumbled downstairs to the kitchen, drank some water, said a quick morning prayer and meditated back in my bedroom for about an hour. The undisturbed time was priceless. With everyone in the house still fast asleep, I decided to take a few minutes to play with some Matrix Energetics concepts. I’ve been learning about Matrix for about a year now – it was first introduced to me by my mentor Lisa Rhyne and friend Margarete Brandenburg. Created by Dr. Richard Bartlett, Matrix is based on the laws and concepts of quantum physics which say (among other things) that our reality is actually comprised of wave-patterns of light and information. It teaches a way of tapping into that grid of info. In (my own) simple terms, it’s a method of using our energy to create positive change. According to the official website though, “Matrix Energetics is not a “thing” to be defined – it is, instead, a pathway to transformation…What are you doing when you “do” Matrix Energetics? You are creating and transforming reality at the quantum level and observing the macro effects of that change.” You can find more detailed information on M.E here and here. And, of course, I’m always willing to answer whatever I can of my personal experiences with it via email or the comment section.
To some, this all may seem to be a whole lot of bullshit bogus hocus-pocus. But as someone who has been on both ends of the M.E experience (giving and receiving) I can attest to the fact that it’s very real—backed by scientific evidence, scholarly writings, and countless miraculous creations. One of my favorite quotes is of the famed Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri who once wrote “Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide”. This, to me, is very applicable to Matrix Energetics in that it seems to be ‘magical’, but is really just the art of applied quantum physics.
As mentioned before, I’ve been playing with this for about a year now. Initially I was having a great time letting go and simply “noticing what I notice” as Dr. Bartlett so famously repeats, but recently I had been in a bit of a slump –and consequently practicing became less and less frequent for me. So this particular morning, while fully relaxed by my solitude and embraced by the rising sun, I decided to attempt a “two-point” –one of Dr. Bartlett’s tools for collapsing a wave and creating change. The method is simple enough (basically, point to a spot with one finger, point to another spot with another finger, drop into heart space (relax), let go, and notice what you notice). But often times I’d notice nothing. That’s not to say that I’ve never been able to notice changes. In the past I have had ‘success’ with M.E and collapsing waves – I’ve gotten rid of headaches and menstrual cramps. I’ve intuitively picked up on my mentor’s multiple injuries from a previous car crash. I’ve made people feel so much good energy that they’ve had to sit down for fear of falling. I’ve attempted to help my mother with her chronic lower back pain but she got a bit freaked out and made me stop when she felt like something had been gently placed on the base of her spine, and I was clearly across the room. To this day I wonder what positive shifts would have been made for her if she had let me continue.
But I digress…
“What a perfect morning this is”, I thought to myself, perched on the pillows on my bed. “The birds are busy chirping about the news in Ecuador…” I knew it was a silly thought to think, but it’s just what I imagined in the moment. The fast-paced, high-pitched twittering sounded as if a group of immature birds were gossiping about some breaking news. And for whatever reason, I felt that this news had traveled all the way from South America…Ecuador to be exact. This slightly irked me. Not that the news had traveled from Ecuador, but that they were loudly gossiping about whatever it was they were talking about.
With this silly, nonsensical, and seemingly unrelated thought floating past my mind, I held my hands to the sky to two-point. What exactly I was two-pointing, I had no idea. By the time I had found my space I wasn’t even thinking about the silly birds anymore. I just held two ‘random’ points as often suggested, exhaled, and waited.
But unlike the other times I’ve held a two-point, something different happened. With eyes open, my room started to almost …wobble? It looked as if the room was filled with gas –you know, that wavy distortion you see while looking at the air above a gas-grill in use. It didn’t scare me –I was intrigued by it. I realized that wherever my eyes went, the wobble would follow, waving and flowing. There were tiny silvery grid-lines through everything now. They were thin, subtle, and gleaming faintly like spiderwebs in sunlight. And my focus was causing the lines in the grid to bend and curve.
And that’s when I noticed it. All of the birds had stopped chirping.
They didn’t stop abruptly –more like a choir of birds were singing in the round and one-by-one had finished their verse. Or maybe they had all stopped at once but my altered state made it seem differently. I really don’t know. I sat there for a moment, five to seven seconds maybe, with my hands suspended in air like a conductor, still holding the two points. Silence. The type of total silence only felt at dawn (save for the gentle white-noise hum of the fan on my desk). And as I slowly lowered my hands, the birds started singing again…but now with a totally different song. This time the tone was deeper and slower and more relaxed. It was a much less anxious song than sung by the birds before. It felt calmer; a more mature conversation.
I wish I knew what types of birds were singing. I would have loved to pass this story along with the poetic specifics of “the cardinals stopped chirping and the sparrows began” or something like that. But, sadly, I know nothing about birdsongs. In my excitement, I’m not even sure I could identify either song if I heard them again. All I know is what I felt, and what I experienced. And my connection to it was very real.
“Oh my God!” I almost screamed in my head “I did it! I noticed what I noticed! I raised my hands to the sky and the birds switched songs!”
Did I ‘make’ the birds change songs? No, not exactly. This isn’t a case of having ‘power over’ something. I liken it more to surfing. I don’t surf, but surely I’m not off-base in saying that surfers don’t ‘control’ a wave; they ride it. They connect to it. They synchronize with it. From that place of focused intent and allowing, they are able to shift and move along the wave –and that interaction affects the wave itself. The wave then bends itself to the curves and dimensions of the surfer’s board and body parts; it molds, and morphs, and changes to the touch. Only this ‘touch’ is of consciousness.
It was then that I realized the difference between cognitively understanding with my left brain that I need to “drop down, let go, and notice what I notice” versus a deeper, right- brain, heart-based trust in the process of what’s happening whether I realize it or not. In that instant, I ‘got it’. It was a revelation.
And this revelation was important to me, because despite the positive feedback I’ve had practicing M.E with people before, none of it felt ‘real’ enough to me. Whatever that means. All I had was people telling me “Yes, good job. I felt that.” and I’ve just had to take their word for it. But I wanted to feel something I did on my own. I know it’s silly, because I’ve also been on the receiving end of so-called ‘energy work/play’ and know how real those experiences are for the recipient. In fact, I’m one of the lucky who have been two-pointed by Dr. Bartlett himself. With the twitch of his hands from five feet away from me, I instantly went from being perfectly composed and upright, to being sprawled out on the floor in hysterical, tearful, side-splitting laughter over absolutely nothing. I know it’s real. But still, despite the fact that Matrix is about so much more than physical ‘healing’ and transformation, my ego wanted to see concrete changes. I wanted to be able to tell stories like Mina Bast’s fascinating account of instantly un-breaking a broken arm. So when I felt my connection to the birds….when I saw the wave….when I heard the silence…when I knew in my heart that the new song somehow came in connection with my subconscious focused intent…it was incredibly and inexplicably special to be able to experience those shifts with my own senses.
But still, of course, I found that it wasn’t enough.
My insatiable Ego immediately complained. “Well, how much does that SUCK that no one was here to witness that?” As if just my knowing wasn’t adequate. As if the worth of my story was to be measured by the reaction of others. As if, in some ironic, twisted, and cruel joke, now the experience can only be ‘real’ if validated by someone else.
I feared no one would ever believe me. This is the type of shit that people tend to get labeled ‘crazy’ for regardless of if it actually happened. I no longer care about that ‘crazy’ label that gets hurled at misunderstood people all too often…but I still cared about my validation.
It was from this place of fear that I attempted to two-point once more, telling myself to remember not to intentionally try to play with the birds again –that wave had already passed, both literally and figuratively. So I held my hands in the air again with serious determination, fighting for the ability to perform a similar feat in front of someone else next time. Then I thought really hard about not thinking about the birds, then thought reeeeeaaallly hard about trying to notice something other than the birds, and then I caught myself and started thinking even harder about not thinking at all.
Obviously, this time I noticed nothing besides my busy mind.
“It’s okay,” I told myself with patience stained with a vivid shade of disappointment. “This is exactly what the human experience is all about.”
This surely wasn’t the first of my metaphysical experiences…but I am nowhere close to understanding them. Liminality. The space in between the spaces. I realized that I would have to find a way of discovering comfort in this ever-morphing place of the undefined, simply because I don’t know how long I’ll be floating here. I know I am capable, but I’m not yet manifesting what I want consistently. I am not completely ignorant, but nor am I a wise-woman. I hover between the earthly and spiritual. I see-saw between the two, unsure of where my balance is. My feet are planted in the mud, yet my head remains in the sky. Lotus-like. I understand a bit about what’s happened in my past, and I try to live in the now, but it’s difficult for me when I don’t know what’s to occur next. Sometimes this scares me. The knowing that I am not-knowing. The destruction of old divisions of what is (or is not) ‘real’ means that there’s no more comfort in our silly little distinctions. There are no more boxes in which to neatly place everything and pack them away in our minds as having been figured out. Who am I ? Or, better yet, what am I? And what am I supposed to be doing here?
But perhaps when my mind stops yipping and yapping, I can silence myself…then change my tune. I can sing a different song about the space in between– a deeper, more relaxed, less anxious song. Because what I’m realizing through my personal Aliya is that the ‘not-knowing’ is okay. I get scared of the unknown because my ego is threatened by it. And that is exactly why liminality can be productive. Perhaps, as the Tibetans suggest, there is liberty to be found through the liminal. And there’s ultimate freedom in being fearless of the forecast.
I rolled onto my back and looked at my cell phone again. The day was still just beginning. Light filled my room through the sheer curtains, bathing my skin with summer warmth. I wanted to fall back asleep but was too excited by what had just transpired. I kept replaying the scene in my head, hearing the birds silence and switch songs. I must admit, in the instant replay I imagined there was someone there with me to bear witness to it all. I laughed. What to make of it? What to do with it? Every cell in my body felt energized and electrified and infinitely powerful. I felt…alive.
I inhaled deeply. “Wow,” I thought to myself, burying my head into my pillow, “What a perfect way to start Independence Day”.
