Crossing the Liminal and why I stopped reaching for the overhaul
On thresholds, forty days, and why I stopped reaching for the overhaul.
There's a particular season I've come to recognise, in myself and in the women I work with. Nothing is wrong, exactly. The business runs. The family is fed. The days are full to their edges. And still, life feels slightly out of pace. Time divided. Energy scattered. Decisions made from the surface because there's no room to reach any deeper.
For years, my answer to that feeling was the overhaul. The new routine, the restructure, the clean slate that starts Monday. I built a creative agency on that kind of energy, and eventually I optimised myself into exhaustion and called it commitment. When I finally stepped away from work, I stayed away for two seasons. Long enough to learn that the overhaul was never the medicine. It was the symptom.
What brought me back was smaller than anything I would have planned.
In the Kundalini yoga lineage, it is said that forty days is the beginning of change: the length of time it takes for a practice to move from effort into rhythm, and for your whole system to begin reorganising around it. The number recurs across traditions and across the shape of a human life, and I don't think that's an accident. Forty days is long enough to shift something real. It is also contained enough to sustain, which matters more than we admit.
The Kundalini Club is where I hold devotional containers and teach regular classes.
I met the teaching properly during my teacher training, when I committed to my first forty day practice. I assumed the practice itself would be the challenge. 30-40mins day; how hard could it be? The practice turned out to be the easy part. What rose up around it was the real work. The resistance. The elaborate stories about why I didn’t need to practice. Every strategy I had ever used to abandon myself, arriving right on schedule, as if it had been waiting for exactly this kind of commitment to reveal itself.
And then, somewhere past the middle, something softened. I stopped negotiating with myself and simply returned. Mat out, my dedicated kriya, a reflective thought, on with the day. Unremarkable, most mornings. The change didn't announce itself; it accumulated. My pace steadied. My nervous system settled. Decisions that had felt foggy began to answer themselves, quietly, from somewhere below the noise.
I've come to think of these passages as thresholds. Liminal time, between who you have been and who you are becoming. Our culture treats them as problems to solve at speed. The traditions I trust treat them as crossings to be accompanied. Not change for change's sake; a devotional return, repeated daily, until you're standing somewhere new and can't quite say when you arrived.
This is why I've built the 40-Day Threshold: a self-led daily practice for steadiness and clarity, held in community with other women, beginning at the spring equinox on 23 September, when the year itself crosses over. A guided three minute Sat Kriya. A short reflective prompt. Weekly voice notes from me. Inside The Kundalini Club, at the Equinox, we’re all walking our own forty days, together.
If you're in the season between, you don't need to overhaul your life. You need rhythm.
And if this found you at the right moment, Letters from the Threshold is where the first invitation will land when enrolment opens in August.
Let’s cross the liminal together, and see what unfolds.
With love, Ash
