Transformation is amorphous. No matter how many clients—individuals and organizations—I guide through it, I still catch myself feeling lost in their experience. When we are in it, it is all-consuming. And it takes real discipline to pause, step back, and get your bearings.

Recognizing where you are in your transformation journey is the first step to working with it. Even this step can be complicated as the journey is both non-linear and concentric. Non-linear in the sense that we do not move neatly through stages in a sequence; concentric in the sense that the effects are nested: the dimension of a life or organization that is transforming, the life or organization overall, the surrounding family or community, etc.

For all of these reasons, I find principles to be a useful tool because they can be practiced at any scale or stage of transformation. Today, I would like to offer seven principles for moving through change with intention. The principles are organized around a three-part transformation journey, but they are relevant across the board (see: non-linear). I find that some principles come naturally to people, and others require more work. You are likely skilled at some, and have overlooked others. Luckily, we all get to try again.

If you are mid-transformation—as an individual, a leader, or a guide—use these principles to bring intention to the journey. Notice which principles already feel alive, and which ones feel uncomfortable. Commit to putting one principle into practice and reporting back. (Yes, to me!)

The Departure
1. Host your own funerals.
Name and ritualize what is ending. Marking the moment allows the transformation process to begin in earnest.

Culture has permission structures for what counts as a loss, and when we deserve to grieve. We sanction some thresholds as worthy of a ‘break’ or a dark period, and others we expect people to go on as if nothing happened. This is bullshit. Ruptures do not abide by societal rules. Change is loss, and loss is grief. We must forget society’s permission structures, and honor the significance of life’s thresholds on our own terms.

Hosting your own funerals is a practice of naming what is ending, and honoring its significance. This ritual, even if it is small and simple, sets you up to work with the ending, rather than deny, avoid, or rush through it.

In her threshold story, Priscilla quite literally compared the end of her dream career—20 years at P&G—to her father’s celebration of life. She said, “My boss made it so that I could go back to Cincinnati for a week of transition—an opportunity to say goodbye and have a proper send off and closure. It reminded me of my dad’s funeral, a capstone to this chapter of my life. Just like attending his funeral, it showed me what life is really about.”

Priscilla’s story represents the concentric nature of transformation: the professional dimension of her life affecting her broader life affecting her team and therefore her organization. By hosting her own funeral, Priscilla created a way to honor the ending at all scales.

Try this:
Start with naming what is ending for you personally, and honoring how it got you to where you are now. Then, design your funeral-like ritual, alone or with others.

My threshold storytellers have shared many ways of marking endings, from creative expression (a play, an album) to symbolic release (a river bath, a 160-mile hike, a primal scream into a hole). Funerals can be playful and irreverent, and the natural world is a present and receptive witness.

In many cases, the ending is situated in a group or organizational context. Marking these moments can feel more counter-cultural but, in my experience, provides equal if not more emotional relief. Grief is held between people as much as it is within people. Leading in these moments can be quite simple: a statement about what is ending and how it served the group, followed by a prompt for others to consider the same.

What matters is that you mark the moment in a way that is meaningful to you and—importantly—in a way that allows the emotions to flow through you.

And finally, remember: the ritual marks the ending, but does not render it complete. Endings take their own time, correlated to the time it takes the emotions and energy to move. Stuck energy = stuck endings.

2. Seize the clarity of endings.
Hold onto the fleeting insights that kickstart change. This clarity can and will slip away; anchoring it provides a rudder through the unknown.

As Priscilla pointed out, endings provide reminders about what life is really about. And, in some cases, what we do not want it to be about. There is a tragically inverse relationship between what we celebrate as our achievements during a life, and what we remember at its end.

Seizing the clarity of endings is about giving these moments of clarity the gravity they deserve. Allowing them to do the good work of breaking you out of a too-small way of experiencing the world.

In threshold stories, there is always a moment of clarity. People describe it like an internal voice they hadn’t known was there. This voice delivers messages like, “This is a trap” while watching people lost in screen-land in the airport lounge, or “The small is big” while gazing out of a window from what previously felt like a cage, or “I do not need fixing” after the rapture of an abnormal psychology lecture.

Without the context of a life, these moments don’t hit. In the context of a life, these moments are the center point around which transformation ripples. Seizing the clarity of endings, for yourself and for those around you, means trusting the inner voice that delivers this message. Trusting yourself as a knower.

Try this:
Start with going over the clarity you have received, but likely discounted. These messages may be from actual endings, or should-be endings. Write them down. Ask yourself what they push up against, or why they are hard to hear. Then, consider if the messages still feel true.

If nothing comes to mind, try tuning into your internal voice. This may require turning down the volume on external sources of noise—limiting screen time, clearing an hour on your calendar, getting up before the rest of your household to be with your thoughts.

People experience these messages in different ways, and you will start to recognize the voice of your inner knower—to activate what Dr. Lisa Miller calls Awakened Attention: a receptive, bottom-up mode of perception that helps us notice what calls to us without a strict agenda.

These same practices apply as an individual or a leader moving a team or org through transformation. The difference is how you work with the clarity, and the concentric circles it ripples through. What needs to change in your life—internally or externally—to be in alignment with this truth? Who else needs to hear this message? How and when do you share it so that it can land?

Seizing is a dramatic act internally, but the way it plays out is much slower and gentler–and, of course, messier.

The Unknown
3. Design your holding container.
Create intentional time and/or space to protect your journey through the unknown. Busy-ness and the familiar are tempting escape routes to avoid the pain of grief and uncertainty.

People prefer the devil they know. In the stories I’ve witnessed, an equation has become evident: people descend into the unknown when the pain of the present > the perceived pain of the unknown.

Designing your holding container is a strategic way to make the unknown less devilish. It is a way of creating psychological safety: I’m going to be with these painful emotions, allow myself to unravel, but only in the safety of this container.

My threshold storytellers have shared many ways they have done this for themselves—and they come down to containing through time and/or space. Emily dubbed her holding container, “The Summer of George” as a way of bringing levity to a much-resisted ending, and giving herself permission to fully depart her professional world for a period of time. Natalia used her artistic practice as a space “to externalize the pain so that I could see it.”

My sense is that creating a holding container for being with the unknown is largely instinctual, but we can do better by bringing intentionality.

Try this:
Start by noticing when and where you are naturally engaging with the unknown—where the big questions and emotions come up. Then, consider how you might formalize it, by giving it a name, putting it on your calendar, or time-boxing it.

There is likely a compromise between the time the journey is asking for, and the reality of what your life allows. Start small—even a regular hour with a journal, on your bike, or in the presence of a therapist, or coach.

A dedicated hour works well in an organizational context as well. I have participated in and led Corporate Grief sessions, Real Talk series, and other forums that create permission structures for harder questions and emotions to be surfaced, witnessed, and discussed.

Finally, remember that a holding container is not a fixed object. It can and should evolve with the journey of moving through the unknown––as you exhume yourself, and resurrect your original wonder. We’ll go there next.

4. Exhume yourself.
Spend time finding out who you are underneath the trappings of your life. When your time and attention is not dictated by external forces, only what is true remains.

The holding container begins as time and space to be with big emotions—grief, fear, anger, and for some people, newfound freedom. But, at some point, the container transforms into something else. Threshold moments crack people open in a way that leaves them raw, which is both tender and a real opportunity to come home. To re-center around the clarity that arrived with the ending.

Exhuming yourself is a process of unearthing who you are and what matters to you underneath all the roles and responsibilities your life has built up around. The clarity of your ending no doubt challenged this self-construct.

Speaking of constructs, in Megan’s threshold story, she shared a process called ‘deconstruct reconstruct’ from Ayse Birsel’s book Design the Life You Love. While I haven’t been through this process myself, the spirit of it resonates across threshold stories. Underneath the deconstruction of a threshold moment, people are able to look at the component parts of their lives and ask: Is this giving my life meaning? Through deconstruction, Megan arrived at the pillars of wellbeing and design, which are now the foundation of her life and work as a Sleep Alchemist.

Underneath a lot of noise and pain, there exists an essential self waiting to be exhumed.

Try this:
Start with breaking your life into its component parts. I like the dimensions of life for this (e.g. family, career, health, community, etc), but categorize in a way that makes sense to you. Then, identify what, if anything, brings meaning to your life in each of these component parts.

Finally, look across your ‘meaning map’ for common threads. These will point you in the direction of pillars—also known as priorities—to reconstruct your life around (I recommend 4 max). As you move through your days, use the pillars as a filter: Does this bring more of my pillars into my life? If yes, continue. If no, abort, or at least question.

Pillars work at an organizational scale as well. They represent the meaning an organization is creating for its stakeholders. Any effort outside of those meaning-making activities is likely off track.

As your pillars start to take shape, write them down, pin them up, dance with them, talk about them. See what comes in.

5. Resurrect your original wonder.
Explore, experiment, play. By putting yourself in new contexts and relationships, and allowing yourself to be a beginner, the spirit of curiosity will guide you into your next chapter.

Your original wonder is a feeling that comes online when you access a deep part of yourself, your unique way of seeing the world. Here are ways threshold storytellers describe the feeling: being fully expressed, at home in themselves, in their own world, in a flow state, lit up, and deeply curious. Magic happens when people create from this state, yet so few grown-ups spend time here.

Resurrecting your original wonder is about using these feeling states as a guide. It looks like being curiosity-led, returning to lost passions, doing things with no outcome, being bad at something. It does not regard the act of creation as precious, but rather as primal.

In her threshold story, Anna described her experience at Swedish Immersion Camp as a time when she discovered “what home feels like in my body, in my days, in how I’m moving and thinking in the world.” By using this felt experience as a guide, Anna surfaced the pillars that give her life meaning—science, art, participation, operational excellence—and also played with them, connecting dots across them. Through an emerging set of experiments and projects, she is integrating what she’s learned thus far in her career with “a dream of my nine-year-old self: to see that there’s opportunities for people in overlooked places and that what you sense, what you know, is valuable.”

Incredible experiences have gotten you to where you are; your sense of wonder reconnects those experiences to the truth of who you are.

Try this:
Start by spending unstructured time that allows your original wonder to come forward. This will be uncomfortable at first with a deep pull to return to the familiarity of a schedule, routine, and known outputs. Resist.

Put yourself in new contexts, go off script, return to long lost hobbies. Let yourself be surprised. Allow people who no longer fit to fall out of your life, new people to come in. Follow pings. Connect with people whose lives inspire you. Let it be messy.

Over time, some experiments will start to stick. Some curiosities will take hold. These are like cairns on your trail to emergence.

At an organizational level, this principle points to the origin story of a company. What was the spirit of the organizational child? What energy was alive in the beginning, and what has gotten buried in the name of efficiency, profit, or professionalism? Use this information to reconnect as leaders and teams, and with the meaning of the work.

Once you have a written sense (pillars) and a felt sense (original wonder) of your guideposts, you are ready to begin emerging.

The Emergence
6. Reconstruct with grace.
Little by little, day by day, allow yourself to emerge. Through new daily rhythms, new relationships, and a re-authored story, the transformed self takes hold.

We come to the third act of the transformation journey with unrealistic expectations. Whether it’s through Hollywood or social media, the transformed self presumably arrives in a moment, neatly, and with a bow. This is fake news. The real story is much slower, more beautiful, and more real.

Reconstructing with grace is a process of both/and: sinking and swimming, clarity and fog. As Francis Weller teaches, “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.”

This maturity is present in the reconstruction process, but there is also a feeling of beginning anew, “like a baby deer” as Paul put it. And being a baby deer means giving yourself grace. In her threshold story, Julka shared how she approaches this stage of the journey as a series of micro-experiments. She is reconstructing by running a series of experiments “to see if I like publishing. Each little experiment leads to seeing other pieces of it, trying other things. It helps me see which parts of it I like and don’t like.” The experiments allow Julka to hold the ideas lightly, while also changing how she spends her time, who she meets, and how she tells her story.

Yes, endings bring clarity. But more often in life clarity arrives through action, not before it.

Try this:
Start by extending the experiments and curiosities that started to take hold in The Unknown phase of the journey. Perhaps they were more private or quiet, and in this stage you start to share them with others—to take your emerging self a bit more seriously, and begin introducing them to the world.

Speaking of introductions, play with new ways to introduce yourself. See what feels good. Write it down. Update your bio or LinkedIn. Find people and places to test out your story. Stay close to the ones who really listen, who are walking an edge with you, who see you as you are now. Remember that your confidence has been shaken, your new sense of self is forming. Be gentle.

In an organizational context, we tend to expect a leader’s declaration, a big launch, a rebrand. Much like the unrealistic expectations of individuals, organizations participate in the illusion that we have to project full confidence and certainty rather than emerge over time and with honesty. The honest story is always more well received.

As you reconstruct, when you least expect it, fun things start to happen.

7. Log deposits of self-belief.
Track the micro-moments that build faith in your emergence. Creating a new path is the best kind of hard work—noticing the small wins will get you through the rockiest of hard days.

The Emergence is slower than we want it to be. Grown-ups do not like feeling like beginners. For both of these reasons, it’s important to keep track of the moments that build your self-belief. This is a good practice all of the time, and especially important when you are getting your sea legs in a new part of your life journey.

Logging deposits of self-belief is a commitment to yourself to let the small wins go in. When your default is to minimize your progress, or deflect recognition of your new orientation to life, The Bank of Self-Belief is here to track your balance.

In threshold stories, I’ve heard these self-belief deposits in two forms: through actions and signs.

Vanina, a career marketer, reflected on applying for her first non-marketing job: “It felt amazing—like I have found something in me that is outside of this box of marketing. I was able to put together a coherent narrative about my interest, projects I’m working on for myself that give me a unique perspective. It helped me see that I’m making progress on finding my own path, even if this doesn’t work out.”

Zach reflected on an experience while leaping into uncharted entrepreneurial waters: “I’m not one that does the signs thing...but I asked. And, involuntarily, a pink flamingo popped into my head. The next day, Michelle brought home a takeout burger from a restaurant. Sometimes they’ll stick little toothpicks through your sandwich. There was a little pink flamingo at the top.”

Actions and signs; signs and actions. This is the dance that fills up people’s self-belief accounts.

Try this:
Start by creating a weekly prompt for yourself—in your journal, outsource it to AI, whatever works for you. What has happened this week to build belief in my emerging self? This might be about how you honored your pillars and priorities, how you tried something that made you uncomfortable, how a synchronicity crossed your path, or how you were able to see yourself in a new way.

Be generous with your response! Turn off your hyper-critical mind.

For organizations, these early signs often show up as employees standing up a little straighter, using different language to describe their work, and taking ownership in new ways. These signs are easy to miss. As a leader, remember you have the keys to the bank vault.

Over time, deposits in The Bank of Self-belief will accrue and compound.

And, some days you will feel deep in the fog again.

As promised, the journey is non-linear. But my hope is that you will have the presence of mind to slow down, step back, find your bearings. And to take your next step through working with the principles once again.

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I’m Ashlea, a designer, coach, and facilitator on a quest to reframe how we orient to and experience life’s thresholds—individually and collectively. If this work resonates, if you put the principles into practice, or if you just want to chat thresholds and transformation, I’d love to hear from you. Find us time here, or message me directly. We’re in this together, friends.

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The air is different in a Threshold Story session. The atmospheric pressure is noticeably less than any other social form in my professional life. I noticed this early on, but it has taken me nearly a year to trust it.

Many of my professional hours are spent one-on-one with people: prospective clients, coaching clients, research participants, potential collaborators. Each of these experiences shares the social construct that we are gathered to get from point A to point B. To scope the challenge, deliver on the brief, move toward the goal.

Threshold Story sessions do not fit this mold. They exist outside of the productivity paradigm.

I’m sure I am not alone when I say that I have long been shaped by the mold of productivity. As a consultant, coach, and leader, my value is in my ability to move a person or group of people from here to there in service of a goal. This is a useful skill, and one I have spent decades cultivating. But I am more and more aware how incomplete it is when it comes to our mental model of leadership.

I used to teach design leadership to creatives at big tech companies like Google, Dropbox, and Intuit. One of the frameworks I offered was a spectrum of leadership modes: from Coaching on one end to Directing on the other. We would practice fluidity across these modes, and learn to identify when each was appropriate — Directing when there is high risk and low time; Coaching when there is lower risk and more time.

At the time, this felt like a full spectrum—dynamic and empowering. But Threshold Story sessions continue to demonstrate its limitations. All of these modes are oriented around productivity. They assume someone or something needs changing or fixing, and the goal is always defined as moving people towards something outside of themselves.

Which makes me wonder: Is there a missing mode on the leadership spectrum? Or, perhaps a different spectrum altogether?

The missing leadership mode
Witnessing is presence without a predetermined goal.

Much like play, which is often defined as exploration without a predetermined goal, the open-ended nature of witnessing is what gives it its magic.

When people arrive in a Threshold Story session, they are often curious: Where is this going? What is this in service of? I share that desire for answers. And, I sense that once I have them, my ability to be a witness might be diminished.

Emergence is at the heart of play, and the heart of witnessing. The orientation is inside-out as opposed to outside-in. The inner self knows the terrain it needs to explore, the depths of what it needs to express.

As each person retells and, therefore, relives the most significant experiences of their lives, I see them marvel at what they have endured and survived. The underlying tone of, “You’re not going to believe this” which is really, “I still don’t believe this” makes it evident that the person telling the story is as much a witness as I am. Together, we are witnessing the immensity of who they are and what they are capable of. We are returning to their rarified moments of clarity, when their inner knowing felt inseparable from their outer lives. Forty-five breathless minutes later, it is evident that while I provided the invitation and held the space, the real act of courage is the experience of fully witnessing yourself.

Gabor Maté talks about “small t trauma” as the emotional wounding that takes place when we are not listened to. Witnessing is one way to heal those wounds. Not to change or fix what someone is feeling but to hold it with them. To traverse the vast emotional landscape of their lives alongside them. To acknowledge its truth and beauty and impossibility and pain all at once.

To be a witness is to lead someone toward themselves.

Completing the crossing
I didn’t set out to create a threshold ceremony, but I have learned that there is something ceremonial about the experience of being witnessed in an intentional container. It marks a life transition—even one that occurred in the past—and allows a sense of completion that may not have been available at the time.

Part of integrating significant experiences is re-authoring your story. There is the story of what happened, the chronology of it. And then there is the meaning you give it, and who you become as a result.

The invitation of a Threshold Story session is to share the chronology. But what invariably happens is that storytellers uncover a new way of relating to their experience.

We can’t re-author without opportunities to witness and be witnessed.

Sometimes this re-authoring happens live. Becca realized she was telling her story differently than she ever had before—a shift from “that was bad, but this good thing came out of it” to “this good thing could not have been born without the prior thing.” She was witnessing her own evolution in her relationship to her wound, and her story.

Sometimes the re-authoring happens beforehand. Joanna shared that just the invitation to reflect on her life through the lens of threshold moments returned her to a childhood dream of working in film. While she still considers herself “swimming in her threshold,” her dream to open a cinema club—”a place in our neighborhood with one screen where you can see stories that change your life”— is alive again.

And sometimes, re-authoring comes later. Like a new chapter is finally able to begin after honoring what has been. The week after we spoke, Erica reported that she “accidentally on purpose” started a professional community, and aligned her peers around the need for change management. Weeks after we spoke, Alessa started sharing her story and wisdom more publicly, Nili began dream-painting her next chapter, and Paul plunged even deeper into his truth.

The timing of ceremonial completion is mysterious. The value of leading people toward themselves is not.

Inside-out leadership
The orientation toward the self is present in therapeutic contexts, but it is left to the individual to bridge that work to their professional lives. One of the great hungers I am hearing—in threshold stories, in coaching sessions, and in people’s responses to the tools I have been building—is for connection between the corporate and the spiritual.

The corporate world is externally oriented, centered around a productivity paradigm. The spiritual world is internally oriented, centered around a healing paradigm. Both worlds are real and needed, but the gap between them is no longer sustainable.

We see this at the individual level in burnout, in the collapse of trust in institutions, in the broad desire to opt out of other people’s games and design your own. We see it at the collective level in resources directed at what we all know are the wrong problems, in narrow and extractive definitions of success, in the slow erosion of the systems we built to hold us together.

What all of this points to is an incomplete understanding of leadership. We have built our institutions around outside-in leadership: moving people toward external goals, metrics, and markets. What’s missing is inside-out leadership: the capacity to witness, to act from a place of what’s true, to lead people toward themselves.

The Threshold Project is my attempt to practice that, and to make the case for it. I have been living this question for nearly a decade, and I know I am not alone.

The breaking point is near. How far away from ourselves do we need to go before we turn our idea of leadership around?

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I’m Ashlea, a designer, coach, and facilitator on a quest to reframe how we orient to and experience life’s thresholds—the moments that return us to an inside-out way of being. If any of this resonates, or if you have a story to share, I’d love to hear from you. You can sign up to share your story here.

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My life is going through a series of endings.

Sit with that statement. Notice how it makes you feel.

My life is going through a series of completions.

Sit with that statement. Notice how it makes you feel.

This one-word distinction came into sharp focus last week as the wheel of my life is undeniably turning over, and I realized that the language I use to describe it changes not only how I relate to it, but also how others relate to me.

It all comes back to our relationship to death.

The next right step
So few endings feel welcome in modern culture. Our world is designed to continue in a neverending scroll, to deliver in a neverending subscription, and to progress in a neverending line up and to the right. This open-endedness has become so ubiquitous that I have started to see signs of people treating liminality as background noise, as if the in-between is a chronic state to be managed.

I have been tracking the exceptions—the welcome, and even universally loved endings—in my life. The end of the school year. The end of winter. The end of an arduous project. The end of treatment. The end of preschool payments. The end of a legal negotiation.

Each of these has a rightness to it, following an expectation of a known time frame (a school year, a season), or an understood sequence of events (a project plan, a treatment plan). So many endings in modern life lack the expectation setting, the structure, the understood nature of endings and beginnings. It’s no wonder we resist and deny them.

Rites of passage existed precisely to solve this problem. A rite is something ordered — a structure imposed on an experience. A passage is a traversal, a movement across. Together, rites of passage helped people experience the unfolding of their lives as the next right step. Ancient cultures recognized that life doesn’t create this meaning on its own. It’s on us to impose the structure: separation, liminality, incorporation. By ritualizing the ending and the beginning, people can move through it, feel it as real.

We have lost the plot on life’s cycle.

In my own life, I am in a moment-to-moment negotiation between the pull of our death mythology and what I know to be the deeper story.

My daughter is in her final week of preschool. She will soon begin Transitional Kindergarten at her brother’s school, and I will no longer be the mom of “little kids.” My company is in the aftermath of a 9-month acquisition negotiation that did not come to pass. The company’s future is unclear, and I am no longer bolstered by the psychological safety of a future paycheck. My women’s circle, which has held me through all of this and more, is in a period of shapeshifting, and I will no longer be held by its monthly new moon rhythm.

I can claim that I am taking the next right step in my parenting journey, my professional journey, and my friendship journey. But without actual rites of passage, it is difficult to feel that I am taking the next right step. To experience not just the ending and loss, but also the completion and renewal.

Our mythology around death colors our mythology around all endings.

In our mythology, death is failure—something that went wrong. Death is an interruption, always untimely, a life cut too short. Death is the opposite of life, to be avoided at all costs. These myths run so deep they are in the water. And it is very hard to get them out.

Proximity to death
Threshold moments are how we practice dying.

The threshold that led me down this rabbit hole—my near death experience—was quite literally proximal to death. But what I have learned from witnessing ~70 threshold stories is that our experience of proximity to death is not so literal. All kinds of endings—beliefs, identities, relationships—feel like a death.

After my near death experience, in my need to make sense of things, I spent a lot of time listening to Zach Bush, MD—a doctor who specializes in hospice care, among other things. He recounts stories from his experience bringing patients back from death, and years ago I captured this quote in my notes app:

“Death is not an end point, it’s a transformation moment. Beyond this frail biologic shell that we walk around in. What if we need a death moment to transform completely? To let go of all the preconceived notions of what it means to be human?”

What I can say from my visceral experience with death is that what the living perceive and what the dying experience are not the same. Death is not the one-sided story we are led to believe. It is also peace, acceptance, release. It is truth, clarity, perspective. It is an opening, a homecoming, permission to live more fully.

When I remember those final moments, in my first life, I am surrounded by the energy of emergency: beeping machines, a swarm of medical students, loud voices, and very little sense of choice. I am grateful for the medical team that did their good work to keep me alive. And, in their desperation to continue my life, I missed the magical first hours and days of my son’s life.

In our desperation to continue life, we miss the beauty of life as it is.

This reminds me of the poignant question posed around the twin races for immortality and AI productivity: Once we have all of this extra time, what will we do with it?

Our death mythology assumes a life mythology that prioritizes things worth living for, like connection, beauty, care, and meaning. But our life mythology is actually the opposite, centered around ideals of productivity, wealth, power, and individualism. When death is not real, it’s all too easy to build our identities around our careers and titles, followers and bank accounts.

So we are desperately holding onto a life, trying to extend it at all costs, yet lamenting the quality of the days we do have. Try to follow that logic, and see where it gets you.

Our death mythology has a gravitational pull. Even after an experience that challenges everything you thought you knew about death, the culture slowly draws you back into its story. But that story is changing.

A new relationship to death
Death doulas and Death Cafes. Eco-burials and human composting. Grief memoirs, my beloved Max Ritvo poetry collection. Dying for Sex, The Collected Regrets of Clover. The Pitt. Medical Aid in Dying bills, ‘death literacy’ and preparation. EndWell and IANDS.

All of these and more suggest that our relationship to death is changing. In a world overflowing with false promises, people are hungry for emotional realism and honesty about the cycle of a life, and the inevitability of death.

Many of my storytellers have been living in this world, anchored there by various artifacts acquired in their threshold crossings, in proximity to death. Lynds has Derek the Defib, her dependable defibrillator, which I noticed her place her hand on like a touchstone throughout our conversation. Paul has his exhumed self whose reflection catches him in the mirror, reminding him he is looking at his second life. Becca has her talisman business, Pound Jewelry, which she compared to a heart monitor whose vitality mirrors her own. Becky has her fire-headed daughter; Mimo has her encounters with hummingbirds; Emilie has the moon; Alli has rainbows and fireflies; Jenn has a post-it on her computer. I wear a ring inscribed with As Above, So Below—my reminder that this is just one plane of existence.

Threshold crossers share an intuitive understanding that staying connected to death is staying connected to life.

In that spirit, I have recently taken to a practice that I am calling Morbid Questions. They arise in moments of choice, when one path feels easier, more sensible, more affordable—all too easy to choose in a life that never ends. Morbid Questions are like mini pattern disruptors, little pings on the well-worn pathways inside my head.

From the other side of this threshold...?

I hear the outcomes of Morbid Questions in the choices my storytellers recount to me post-threshold: Flying the family to Florida to go to a World Cup game. Leaving medicine as a profession. Writing a children’s book. Saying yes to sex despite exhaustion. Walking the neighbor’s dog every day. Getting over it. Choosing joy. Starting an unthinkable business. Leaving a profitable one. Facing terror. Ending life as they’ve known it to begin life again.

So, is my life going through a series of endings, or a series of completions?

My relationship to death tells me it is both/and.

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I’m Ashlea, a designer, coach, and facilitator on a quest to reframe how we orient to and experience life’s thresholds. Thank you for reading, ‘heart’ing, commenting, sharing. For going on this journey with me.

I am looking for 30 more people to share their story with me. All types of threshold stories are welcome. You can sign up to share your story here.

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One of my storytellers, Natalia, posed this question, and it perfectly captures the spirit of a tool I have been working on: The Oracle of The Threshold. A deck of cards does not replace rites of passage, but having the language to recognize the significance of our experiences, and their role in our lives, is an important step.

Throughout my listening project, many people have arrived at our session saying, “I’m not sure if this qualifies as a threshold.” As if I am the arbiter of the significance of your life experiences.

Thresholds have the potential to be initiatory. But only if we can relate to them as significant, and allow them to do their work. The tendency I see is that people relate to thresholds as setbacks, hurdles, or detours in their otherwise productive lives. Until they are in the thick of it, and realize it is so much more than that.

My hope with The Oracle of The Threshold is that the cards enable people to recognize their experiences for what they are: initiations into adulthood, leadership, and the transformed self.

Here are the eight archetypes of crossing. You can download the full set on The Threshold Project website. If you work with them, I’m so curious to hear what comes through for you.

The Rupture:
"It was like a slit opening in my reality, and suddenly all these stuck ideas and beliefs just started to fall away." —Julka

The Long Corridor:
"I reached a point where I was more curious about what having kids could bring to my life than I was committed to defending what I thought life already was." —Ben

The Body’s Veto:
“My body continued to throw things at me until I listened...it just got a little louder and a little louder." —Becca

The Identity Death:
“Losing my identity as this whimsical, adventurous, carefree person. I was like, I am not that anymore. I cannot be. I know the world's suffering too deeply now” —Becky

The Leap:
“What next? I had no idea. So I decided, I'm going to experiment with the things that I find interesting or I have a connection with, and I will connect the dots later.” —Natalia

The Return:
"Dance has come back in this really interesting way. What I'm doing to fuel myself, and show up with presence, is to go to a dance class." — Meija

The Borderlands:
"I’ve become a hybrid... switching between whether I'm an Indian or just an Indian living in America. It takes mental power to build from scratch when you take the base from under your feet." — Shalvi

The Deluge:
"My membrane was so porous from the grief of my dad that when the hurricane came and everybody’s grief was there... it was all happening at once and I couldn’t filter it out." —Jenn

Working with the Cards

Reflect: Which archetype feels most alive for you right now?

Connect: What support do you need to let your current crossing initiate you? What support can you offer someone in your life?

Self-assess: Which archetype are you in, which have you crossed, which are you avoiding?

Reframe: Draw a card and ask, What if this is also true?

Zoom out: Which archetypes have we lived through together? Which one is most alive for us now?

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I’m Ashlea, a designer, coach, and facilitator on a quest to reframe how we orient to and experience life’s thresholds. Thank you for reading, ‘heart’ing, commenting, sharing. For being here.

As always, thank you to all of the people who have shared your stories with me. You can sign up to share your story here.

I realized last week that I have migrated to the comfortable position of being the scholar of thresholds and transformation, rather than the subject. Of course, I am the subject whether I own that location or not, but the center of my attention and meaning-making has shifted: more outside observer than a soul amongst souls.

I keep thinking I will tell my story from “the other side”—once I have reached The Emergence, when I have a conclusion, a neat ending with a bow. But the more time I spend in The Unknown, the more obvious it seems:

The outside world cannot deliver a neat ending.

The resolution resides within me.

This is a slippery truth to hold as I keep finding myself waiting for an employment agreement, terms, a title or a salary. As if having one of those things will allow “real life” to begin again, qualifying the time I am living through now as “not life.”

All of it is life because it is happening.

This life/not life dynamic is so peculiar. How did I decide what qualifies as “real life”? Whose version of “real life” am I living?

As far back as I can remember, I was attracted to the experiences that felt outside of “real life”. The blizzards, the blackouts, the camping trips, the minor catastrophes, any time or space that created permission to live in a different world. To hunker down, eat whatever was in the pantry, stay up too late, sleep in someone else’s room. When I look back on these “not life” times, I think I felt more at ease because I wasn’t trying so hard to understand the game of life, much less follow the rules.

Outside of normal life, the game was different, no one knew the rules. We were all making it up together. Which you could say is true of all of life, but during “normal” times I had a persistent feeling that everyone else understood the game, got the manual and the player’s handbook, while I was left to figure it out on my own.

This set up a construct that I am still getting to the bottom of: that there is “real life” also known as the game, and then there are “exceptions” which are all of the times when I am excused from the game, opted out of the game, or somehow on the bench.

Over time, and in my own way, I came to love the game. I found myself in creative environments where the rules were minimal and malleable and the currencies were more relational than transactional. My work counted as part of the game—it was legible and respectable—but somehow felt outside of it.

Then I reached a threshold: the birth of my son. Parental leave granted me a 6-month excuse from “the game”—a time I enjoyed so much I hesitate to talk about it because I know how hard the fourth trimester can be for so many new moms. But mine took on a different flavor. After a Near Death Experience—a threshold that cracked me open a in way I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand—I was not only giddy to be alive, creative energy was moving through me so quickly, all I could do was get out of its way.

Organizations aren’t set up to receive this kind of creative energy. It doesn’t fit within the bounds of the game. Even a world-renowned creative organization like the one I called home wanted to vibe off of my creative energy, but that is different from being able to receive or channel it: to say yes to new ideas, to radical ways of doing things, to risks and experiments. To the future.

So I rode the wave of that creative energy right on out the front door into the vast ocean of independent creative life. I followed hunches and synchronicities, invested in myself, figured a lot of boring life shit out, and started swimming and surfing during “work hours.”

That was 8 years ago—today.

In the beginning, it felt like I had completely opted out of the game. Moving from a big job in a big city to an unknown path in a small town was radical. For me, my experimental, entrepreneurial choices felt radical. Much of my life looked like I was playing the game: I worked at a desk most Mondays-Fridays, supported my family, developed intellectual property, and created impact for my clients. But the feeling of it was different: it was within a world I built. The game board and the rules were my own.

The enduring lesson from that threshold was this: the first half of life is about getting really good at someone else’s game. The second half of life is about designing your own.

The interesting thing about thresholds is that the clarity they bring fades over time. I don’t think people return to their pre-threshold set point, but nearly all of my threshold storytellers have reported fading clarity. This is true in my experience as well. Add to that, since Covid the dominant game is more and more present in my small town.

The dominant game is big and loud and apparently spreading. My escape velocity was high but not quite high enough. Little by little, old voices and shoulds have crept back in: Should I have been more vocal about my ideas? Should I have practiced more “I” and less “we”? Should I have been thinking more long-term?

This is what brings me to my current threshold. The one where I vacillate between waiting for an external marker of change and trusting my internal markers. The one where I am tested on my ability to fully inhabit the world I built for myself.

At this point, I would say I have been in The Unknown for the better part of a year. It’s a threshold I had tried to choose, but hadn’t been able to get myself there, so the universe chose it for me.

Just to give you the shape of it: I have been wanting to pursue this topic of darkness, how it changes us, for years. But it is so damn hard to commit to my own creative practice, to prioritize it above paid work, above clients and deadlines and deliverables—essentially, other people’s needs—that it has only progressed in fits and starts. Until I reached this threshold.

The threshold being a period of time where my company has been going through an acquisition, client work has been on the back burner, and rather than fill the gaps with other “work” I have allowed this creative impulse to flow through me to where you find me now.

What is interesting about this threshold experience is how slow and diffuse it feels. I am engaged in an active choice to stay in The Unknown, to resist the impulse to panic-apply for jobs or accept contract work that tells me how to spend my days, and relieves the vital discomfort of following a creative thread for long enough to figure out where it’s going.

There is so much pressure to know where it’s going. The project, the relationship, the job, the life. Where is it all going? And what if it’s not going anywhere, but this right now is it?

One of my storytellers this week opened up my thinking on this topic. Paulina, a wise and philosophical soul, shared how she questioned whether she could tell a threshold story because she has not yet emerged on the other side. Rather, she described how since her threshold 8 years ago she has existed in an initiatory landscape, a never ending process of becoming. She no longer perceives the goal as exiting the liminal space, but rather learning to exist within it.

But what about the neat ending?!

I keep wanting my story, all of the stories, to land with a clear thesis, a meta-framework, an insight that contains all insights. Yet, I continue to be met with the complexity of life and the beautiful mess of being human.

The initiatory landscape does not have another side. It is vast enough to spend a lifetime exploring. Importantly, it has a creek that runs through it. The creek represents energy moving through the body. Creative practices, spiritual practices, your practices of choice—that is what keeps the creek flowing and full and healthy.

That is the enduring lesson of this threshold that feels like it wants to come through: your creativity will save you.

The world I built has a different quality. My creativity is the signal that I am still inside my world, not someone else’s.

When the creek is flowing, I am home.

All of it is life because it is happening.

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I’m Ashlea, a designer, coach, and facilitator on a quest to reframe how we orient to and experience life’s thresholds. Thank you for reading, ‘heart’ing, commenting, sharing. For being here.

And, as always, thank you to all of the people who have shared your stories with me. You can sign up to share your story here.

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“How do you know we’re not going to fall, Mom?”

This question, from my son, repeated multiple times, as we crossed the suspension bridge over Deer Creek. It captures so much about how we are all feeling.

The slight vertigo, the unanswerable question, the unknowable outcome, and the call for faith.

We stood at one end, looking out across the 150-foot bridge, watching its graceful movement. I took his hand, calmly guiding him forward. A quarter of the way, he turned back. We set out again, slowly, feeling the sway in our bodies. I willed other hikers to stay off the bridge, in hopes of minimizing the undulations, while knowing my efforts were futile.

This brief crossing held so much. In nearly every conversation I am having, there is a moment of recognition: we are in the middle of something, unsure if we’ll reach the other side, asking some version of my son’s question.

The truth of it is that I couldn’t tell him we weren’t going to fall. I have just crossed enough bridges to trust the experience. And so have you.

It reminds me of what many of my threshold storytellers refer to as “mature transformation.” Their stories are instructive, and the lessons are a reminder that thresholds are not merely experiences to survive, they are when life is its most potent.

Mature transformation doesn’t mean you feel the discomfort less, it means the feelings are more instructive.
“That was my first time understanding that stress can affect your gut. It was affecting my physical being, forget my mental being, which was already in shambles. My body had started giving up.”

Shalvi was describing the impossible yet common decision we face at a threshold: to stay or to go. While her heart knew it was long past time to leave her job, her “calculative mind” convinced her to stay. And her body paid the price. Until she was willing to listen.

Mature transformation means shifting authority from the controlling mind to the truth-telling body. Using the body and all of its signals and sensations as valuable information. Being willing to pay attention, to get up close to the edge that Nadia described:

“I don’t think I realized that emotions sit so close together. There is a very thin line between joy and sadness. And the deeper you get into one, the more the other is accessible.”

With maturity comes the ability to move through these feelings, to trust that you can go in and out of the depths, work with the full range, and all of its information.

Back at the suspension bridge, as my son’s guide, I was more attuned to the sensations in my body, as a means of being present with the sensations in his. This let me know when to squeeze his hand, when to remind him to bend his knees, and when to breathe.

Mature transformation doesn’t mean you need less help, it means you’re more willing to accept it.
“I can get drunk alone, but I can’t stay sober alone.”

Through recovery, Hugh confronted our cultural ideal of self-sufficiency, admitting that he “hated asking for help” and had to learn the hard way to call his sponsor regularly. Threshold experiences tend to collapse a key pillar of life as we’ve known it, and we have to find new life underneath. As Hugh said, “If I took alcohol away, then what? I was scared.”

Moving through the unknown includes a series of impossible situations. And while no one can face the unknown for you, they can stand with you as you move through it. While our cultural narrative casts the need for help as a sign of weakness, mature transformation tells a different story. As Nadia described:

“I’d been someone who was so proud of not needing help, but I was missing an opportunity to be more connected. Some people just knew how to show up, without all the questions and the texting. They took whatever their gift was, and extended it: dropped off a meal, took the kids to the park.”

As we crossed the bridge, I didn’t ask my son what he needed, I put myself in his body, and offered what I would have wanted.

Mature transformation doesn’t mean you move through the unknown faster, it means you trust the timing.
“I’ve been in a long corridor where I didn’t even realize there was a door I was reaching for. I can look back and see that the corridor entailed a shift from feeling like I need to leave something to feeling like I’m moving toward something.”

Alex’s metaphor represents the invisible internal progress that prepares people to take a leap. He reflected on a period of three years, and the subtle clues along the corridor that had led him to the threshold moment. None of this progress was on a timeline, or evident to the outside world.

The corridor is dark, and extremely uncomfortable. With maturity comes the realization that we cannot rush the transformation journey, but we can time bound our experiments. As Nili shared:

“Four months into not working, I decided to create a year-long experiment for myself. I gave myself goals, and I ran the first year of my business as a pilot. Creating a binding box really helped me build confidence.”

She goes on to admit that there is no end to this transformation story: the questions are still open, the ground is still unstable. The ambiguity is different, but it is still present.

I reminded my son, more than once, we didn’t have to make it across today. It isn’t a race, and there are no winners. We can come back tomorrow.

Mature transformation doesn’t mean you’re in control, it means you learn to recognize where you have choice.
“I knew I was going to lose my hair. So I was like, well, I could lose my hair and we could cry while we shave my head. Or, I could design a hair salon and put pictures up of different hairstyles, and let my kids take the money.”

Nadia’s rupture—her diagnosis and hair loss—were not voluntary. But she found choice and agency in designing the experience, for herself and for her family. She credits her ability to hold two possibilities side by side to growing up speaking two languages, learning there is more than one way to understand the same thing.

Choosing the path of joy, as Nadia called it, doesn’t mean there is no grief or loss or sadness. It means you can be a participant in your journey, rather than a victim to it. The author of your emerging story, rather than a character in it.

Alessa described the ultimate choice that comes with mature transformation: “The change wasn’t a decision, you’re just changed. The acceptance of that change was the decision.”

On our second crossing, I saw other hikers approaching the bridge, and asked my son: Do you want to continue, pause, or turn back? I could have asked him: Do you want to sing, hop, or dance the rest of the way?

Mature transformation doesn’t mean you abandon the old self, it means you integrate what got you here.
“I wanted to integrate the better parts and the darker parts into what I’m doing. For my scars to be valuable and useful to the work, for me and for others.”

The name and the experience of Natalia’s business, One Red Dot, are expressions of her integration—a journey of reconnecting with all the former versions of herself through art, therapy, following her curiosity, and relearning to trust her instincts. She had left a painful situation behind, but she hadn’t abandoned herself.

In so many stories of transformation, I hear a reflexive instinct to leave all that was behind. As if the pain of the journey wasn’t worth it if life is recognizable on the other side. With maturity, transformation is not such a clear cut before-and-after. Integration is an expression of gratitude for what got you to where you are, and an awareness that the most significant change is internal, not external. It’s how you show up for life, not the shape life takes.

For Hillary, EMDR played a critical role in her integration journey, specifically with how her brain files the memory of a traumatic birth experience. “Those memories can still be real and true and part of my story, without being the portal through which I view all parenting.”

With my son, this wasn’t our first experience with this suspension bridge. As we approached, he was filled with anticipation. He remembered the thrill and fear from previous crossings, and seemed genuinely curious how his body would respond this time around. I think he was disappointed that the sensations were as wild as always, but I felt more prepared to assume my role as threshold guide.

Maybe this is why when we reached the other side, he asked, “Can we do it again?”

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I’m Ashlea, a designer, coach, and facilitator on a quest to reframe how we orient to and experience life’s thresholds. Thank you for reading, ‘heart’ing, commenting, sharing. For being here.

And, as always, thank you to all of the people who have shared your stories with me. You can sign up to share your story here.

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Who doesn’t love a good FAQ? There are the questions you have, but haven’t had a chance to ask, and then there are the questions others have that you hadn’t realized you wanted to ask. Everybody wins.

As I speak with more and more people about Threshold Work, many of the same questions come up again and again. And for me to figure out my answers—what I really think—I have to write my way there. Usually more than once.

So, here we go. The top 8 questions about Threshold Work, asked by many of you, and in many ways answered by many of you. Synthesized by yours truly, with a few detours from my rambling mind.

1. What is a threshold?
   Since I began my listening project, my definition of a threshold has evolved. Or, more accurately, I have been refining my definition of what constitutes a threshold through listening to people’s interpretations. Here’s where I’ve landed:

   Threshold: Markers in our timeline that break us out of our story, and shift our frame on reality.

   Consciously or unconsciously, a threshold causes a shift from, “I experience life in this way” to “I can experience life in so many other ways.”

   Thresholds can be sudden or gradual, dramatic or subtle, chosen or forced, a single moment or a slow unraveling.

2. How do I know if I am coming up on a threshold?
   The common thread across stories is that leading up to a threshold people experience the limitations of the self as they have known it—the self being your “worldview,” the way you “move through the world,” or your “beliefs and expectations” about what is possible in this life.

   This often shows up as a widening gap between the inner self and outer self—as the inner self continues to develop and grow, and the outer self is continuing to move along the well-worn grooves of your life. The grooves no longer fit, but they are safe and comfortable.

   The inner/outer self gap can manifest emotionally or physically. Emotionally, people describe a gradual stagnation: “waning enthusiasm,” “emptiness,” “the need to unhook from what wasn’t working.” Physically, people report: “major bloating and gut issues,” “ruptured appendices and kidney stones,” or simply “not feeling like themselves.”

   Julka put this beautifully: the “body and spirit often know essential truths about one’s life, but the brain won’t allow the knowing to come through” because it is focused on rational calculations and maintenance of the status quo.

   As much as we want to anticipate and prepare, in many cases, people do not know they are coming up on a threshold. Which is perhaps the most important thing to know: the signs are often clearest in retrospect, and learning to recognize them after the fact is its own preparation.

3. How can I prepare for crossing a threshold?
   You can’t fully prepare for a threshold, any more than you can prepare for grief — the experience will ask something of you that no rehearsal could have anticipated.

   But you can build capacity, and as long as we lack cultural initiation practices, your life is the curriculum to do so. For some, this curriculum begins at 7, for others at 67; for some, it is a slow drip and for others a flood.

   What it builds, as far as I can tell, is a mindset of “I can survive that”, a much wider and more fluid emotional range, and a stronger foundation from which the seven skills I identified in Leading through rebirth become accessible.

   I have no doubt you have many of these skills already. The trick is being able to access them, even when things are hard. Not to project manage your threshold—as I have been known to attempt—but to be present and compassionate as you move through it, and to trust that it is the curriculum of your life.

   A form of preparation Jamie named is to cultivate people he called Threshold Guides in your life: those who have crossed and can hold you when your turn comes.

4. How do I know if I have crossed a threshold?
   At dinner in NY a few weeks ago, someone new to my work asked me this question, and my instinctual answer referenced a quote Paul shared that is attributed to Confucius:

   “We have two lives, and the second one begins when we realize we only have one.”

   How one ‘realizes’ such a thing is the question. It’s one thing to know in your mind that you only have one life (and to spend most waking hours avoiding that knowing). It is another thing to have an embodied understanding of the precious and fleeting nature of life.

   Getting up close to death—your own, or that of a loved one—is one way people come by this embodied understanding. But it is not the only way.

   In modern life, many people experience identity risk as worse than death. By identity risk, I mean those moments where someone honors who they are at the risk of their sense of belonging and status—like Melissa described shedding the “Gold Star Girlie” persona that was born of “a fear of not being enough.” Or, the moment when someone experiences the person they thought they were becoming crash down around them, leaving what Amy called a “scorched earth feeling.”

   These moments test the limits of: I can be separate and still belong; I can be myself and still be loved. They are thresholds as much as proximity to death is a threshold. They shift the frame on reality, and what is possible in this life.

   You know you have crossed a threshold when the realization that you only have one life is no longer just an idea. It lives in your body.

5. Does my threshold count?
   Many people are hesitant when they begin their threshold story session with me. Unsure if the life experience they have to share qualifies.

   I once shared this hesitancy to claim the climaxes in my own life. I believed my thresholds weren’t severe enough to count—as if there were a leaderboard for suffering. But what I’ve learned is that no one grants you “threshold permission.” The outside world may rank losses as major or minor, worthy of grief or not. The inside world doesn’t work that way.

   What you thought you wanted but didn’t get may be your threshold. What seemed small—a move, a friendship ending, a role shift—may be your threshold. The truth you keep showing up for everyday may be your threshold. What matters isn’t the size or type of your crossing. It’s what it does to you: how it shifts your vantage point, expands the container of your reality, and adds new choices to the menu of your life.

6. What is Threshold Work?
   Threshold Work views life’s built-in journey as the developmental path. It is about being with the process of life and its big moments, not as experiences to fix or change, but as experiences to honor, trust, and witness.

   At its core, Threshold Work explores past threshold crossings as moments of perspective. Through retelling and somatic experience, we are able to stand on both sides of a threshold, recognizing the before-and-after states that have passed so that we are more equipped to move through the ones to come.

   This means giving language to your ‘before state’ (your worldview, beliefs, mindset, persona) so that you can more clearly see what shifted. It means acknowledging your natural threshold skills, the ones you have cultivated, and the ones that need attention. And, it means identifying the Threshold Guides in your life, and where you can pay that forward.

   It is worth noting that “before and after” sounds more neat and resolved than it is. I do not believe the collective threshold we are in will have a clean other side; rather, uncertainty is something we learn to live with, and the unknown is where we learn to come alive.

   Thresholds are where we practice this—being present while we are in it, rather than waiting for a resolution that may not come.

   In short, Threshold Work is the curriculum for modern life. For how this is taking shape in practice, see Q8.

7. What drew you to this project?
   There are many ways to make sense of our lives. I happily collect them, and I added one to my collection last week via Richard Rohr’s teachings on the Enneagram. As a fellow 1, I relate to Richard’s description of his life’s work: legitimizing disorder. The 1 is often referred to as The Reformer. We tend to like order, we have perfectionist tendencies. As my original Enneagram teacher, Jane Tight, said, “The 1 walks into a room and immediately sees what is wrong with it.” Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

   Through the lens of the Enneagram, I see how my work is legitimizing disorder—in other words, this project is my attempt to give meaning to pain and suffering. To put my healing in service of others’ healing.

   I can trace this back to a few moments in my life, but ultimately it was my experience crossing the threshold between life and death when my son was born—and the resulting “after state”—that crystallized my interest in this work. For more on this story, you can read my previous essay, Buzzing presence.

8. What are you doing with all the stories you’re collecting?
   One of my storytellers, Monicka, generously suggested that I have a responsibility to create something worthy of what I am witnessing: the lived experiences, the hard-won wisdom, the beauty woven with suffering. I feel this responsibility more and more with each story I listen to—and it exists on multiple levels.

   First, to myself: I am creating what I most need to exist in the world. And, by that, I mean I am creating meaning from my own experience making choices that feel right and true in my bones, but require a counter-cultural conviction that I have to show up for day after day. Much like B described the daily act of authenticity required in coming out again and again, introducing themself with they/them pronouns, I encounter the normative leadership-as-ascent framework on a daily basis, and it is an act of authenticity to live and lead in a different way.

   Then, to my storytellers: Many threshold storytellers have closed our session with words of gratitude and also an offering, “If there is anything I have said or lived through that will help someone, please use it.”

   Lastly, to my kids: My kids are my proxy for civilization. I can’t wrap my mind around all of humanity, but I can feel into the future I want for a 4- and 8-year-old. I want them to belong to a world where leadership is conceived as an inside-out activity, where the good life includes more than power and money, where people’s choices consider the more-than-human predicament, and where we honor and support the natural cycles of a life.

   More specifically: What am I doing with all the stories?? My standard answer is that I am allowing it to emerge. But I have reached a point in this process that I can say with some confidence: I am working on a book proposal (working title: Leading Through Rebirth: The Missing Curriculum of Modern Leadership), and I am developing some Threshold workshop material. I would love some signal of interest in these directions to encourage me down the path (or direct me elsewhere) and to know who to include as sample chapter readers, and workshop attendees. A heart or comment goes a long way.

   ---

Are these the questions you had? What else are you curious about thresholds, Threshold Work, Leading through rebirth, and Stories of Transformation?

As always, thank you to all of the people who have shared their stories (and their tears) with me. You can sign up to share your story here.

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There are many names for the era we are living through — from systemic terms like Joanna Macy’s The Great Unraveling to mythological terms like Francis Weller’s The Long Dark.

Call it what you like, we are living through a rebirth. I find this equal parts thrilling and terrifying. When I come home to myself, I have the conviction that each of us is on earth at this time for a reason. Not just those with titles or platforms — all of us.

Whether you identify as a leader or not, you are responsible for leading your life. And leading your life is where leading through rebirth begins.

It is where you have gained the most critical leadership skills. Not in a corporate training room, with a fancy coach, or in a business book.

Yet, no one acknowledges these hard-won skills, much less cultivates them.

We draw a false line between leadership development as a professional activity and the rest of life — where we experience the real lessons of navigating loss, showing up through difficulty, and emerging on the other side.

The good news is that you likely have many of the necessary skills — you just may not recognize them in yourself. I know I didn’t.

When I started to listen to Stories of Transformation, I wasn’t connecting the dots between threshold crossings and The Long Dark. But the relationship is too obvious not to call out, especially at this moment.

We are at the beginning of an era defined by loss, grief, uncertainty, and disruption — and therefore by beginner’s mind, possibility, and the urgent need to build something new. The leaders this era demands are not those who can execute against a clear plan. They are those who can move through the unknown — and bring others with them.

If formal leadership development was the preparation for the optimization era, Threshold Work is the preparation for the era we are entering now.

I am 57 Stories of Transformation into my listening project, and what I am witnessing grows clearer with every story: the most important leadership skills cannot be trained. You earn them through crossing a threshold into the unknown.

These skills follow the arc of the Universal Map for Transformation — The Skills of Departure, The Skills of The Unknown, and The Skills of Emergence. The people living these skills are the leaders we need now. And if you have crossed a threshold, you may already be more prepared than you know.

The first threshold crossing is always the one you didn’t choose. And the first skill it demands is the one we’re least prepared for: knowing how to leave.

The Skills of Departure
Even something as common as a colleague leaving can be experienced like a death. And yet in most organizations, there is no model for honoring the loss. There are no rituals, no permission to grieve, no acknowledgment that something real has ended.

More significant professional and organizational losses are even less likely to be honored: the target you didn’t hit, the scandal that was exposed, the funding that was taken away, or the humans replaced by machines.

Every loss has its cost. The more the loss is minimized, the higher the cost.

Threshold crossers have an instinctual ability to honor the loss and let it move through them, and others.

B reflected on their experience leaving a leadership role and decade-long tenure at their firm: “It felt like we were never going to see each other again. And if it’s the last time we’re going to talk, we need to say something of importance.”

A colleague’s departure shakes people because it brings their own choices into focus. They can leave, or they can turn the work into something that brings them alive. Like facing your own mortality, both options are scary. Both are enlivening. A leader who can name the ending, rather than letting it pass unacknowledged, creates the conditions for something true to emerge in its place.

What makes this skill possible in a professional context is almost always cultivated somewhere more personal first. Emilie shared an exchange she had after losing her mom to Lewy Body dementia: “I’ve been thinking lately, what can be the gift of my death? A goal would be for me to live and die in such a way that my death becomes a source of growth for others.”

The person leaving is often the one most equipped to create meaning through the ending. B did this by methodically documenting their work — not just as a handoff, but as a way of seeing whether what they had built could stand on its own. Priscilla turned her last trip to headquarters into what she called a living funeral — a deliberate farewell that brought to the forefront “what life should really be about.”

Each loss carries the same invitation — to honor what was before moving into what could be. A leader’s ability to hold the ending, and all of its beauty, is what makes the next beginning possible.

Then comes the part with no map.

The Skills of The Unknown
If The Departure feels like a death, The Unknown feels like a freefall. Paul described his sudden heart attack and the resulting loss of his high-status persona as being “dragged screaming into a new reality without any sense of what was going to happen.” Consciously or not, most leaders are doing everything they can to avoid this — showing up, as Natalia described, “measuring up to what an executive is, trying to be what I thought everyone needed from me.” This understanding of leadership leaves little room for The Skills of The Unknown.

I didn’t realize I was avoiding anything, I was so wrapped up in being all things to all people: from office mom to occasional therapist, P&L owner to creative fuel. That felt like who I was. Until I was forced into the territory of the unknown.

Whether force is necessary is the tricky part. As Emilie astutely questioned: “Would one ever willingly put themselves in enough of an unknown situation to trigger the truly transformative experience?” What I have learned from my experience, and from my storytellers, is that once you’ve lived through the unknown, you learn not only that you can survive, but also that you likely underestimated how many skills you have for navigating it.

The skills the unknown demands fall into three practices: coming home to yourself, stepping outside your story, and staying in the dark long enough to emerge changed.

Natalia described the time before her descent as “ruminating 24 hours a day, all I could do was stay vigilant.” While her partner had tried to break her out of this reality, it was her daughter’s tears and an innocent question — Why are you like this? — that cracked it open. After an initial period of doubt and self-questioning, she arrived at the essential question: “Where is the person I have known all these years, and is she going to come back?” Coming home to yourself begins with knowing you’ve left.

Ashley experienced her own shift after a move from New York to London, thrust into full-time parenting while she found childcare and learned a new market. From that unknown place, she was able to see the “stark difference between what I thought was a good balance and what was actually frenzied and unhappy.” She joked that it “shouldn’t take moving across an ocean to design your life” — but it does often take a pattern disruptor to step outside the story you’ve been living inside.

Stepping outside your story can happen relatively quickly. Staying there is harder. Priscilla, an experienced threshold crosser, named her biggest fear as “converging too soon, trading corporate life for corporate life” — and it is exactly that fear, held honestly, that becomes the skill. Trained as an engineer, she developed a practice: ask What if...? and collect data until a possible future begins to take shape. The question moves, eventually, from whether something will happen to when and how.

A leader’s ability to move through the unknown with a steady presence is what will separate chaos from emergence.

And then, sometimes without noticing, the ground begins to return.

The Skills of Emergence
Emergence is what we most want from our leaders — it’s the stage we want to skip to, as if it arrived out of thin air. Sometimes it feels like it does. This was my experience, returning to a leadership role after maternity leave. My departure and journey through the unknown were invisible to everyone around me; after six months, they received a neatly transformed package. One they didn’t fully recognize, but were happy to benefit from. Who doesn’t love a transformed leader, fully in their power?

That power emerges as the spark of the creative self — the self who has been there all along, underneath all the layers of a borrowed life. Monicka put a fine point on this, after discovering the thread that connects her work: “Your most authentic identity is your most creative identity.”

The creative self knows it is not enough to move away from something. We need something to move toward — for ourselves, and those around us. I have yet to hear a story, my own included, where the storyteller didn’t have an inkling of what they wanted to create in the world.

The Skills of Emergence are the skills of allowing that inkling to come forward and take shape: dreaming your way to what’s next, and experimenting your way there, often in parallel.

Pre-threshold, possibility is hard to access. People are depleted, “moving through honey” as Nili put it, unaware of what might exist on the other side. After crossing, the possibilities can feel almost overwhelming — once the creative, dreaming self is nurtured. This nurturing can be smaller than you think.

Nili recognized this in her current experience of transformation: “I’ve been building this realization that I need to dream. My commitment to myself this week was to look for inspiration, to use my watercolors to start drawing a future: Is it a house? Is it a social life?” This dreaming practice sets the financial and professional considerations aside, and allows the heart to lead.

After leaving her executive role, Natalia asked herself: What next? She had no idea. “So I decided: I’m going to experiment with the things that I find interesting and I will connect the dots later.” This led her to art classes, a coaching certification, and writing a play. Each practice provided distance from her former reality — and more importantly, the perspective to “get out of the bottle and read the label,” to see how much more expansive her reality had become.

A leader’s ability to dream their way to what’s next — and experiment their way there — is not what we train for. It is what we do to remember we’re alive. And in the era ahead, it is what we owe each other.

I have learned a great deal about leadership on the job, and through formal development. That learning has merit. But in the coming era, the necessary competencies look different. The skills of leading through rebirth are earned in the most personal corners of a life — and we can no longer afford to leave them unnamed.

Mimo gave me a model for where to begin. As she approaches her 40th birthday, she is writing 40 Lessons that honor the various forms of Mimo: the immigrant, the student, the founder, the parent.

What are your leadership lessons? Where did they come from? And which ones will serve you and us as we lead into a brave new world?

I’d love to hear them.

Thank you to all of the people who have shared their stories (and their tears) with me. You can sign up to share your story here.

No one calls it that; rather, people use phrases like: “the wheels really came off”, “thrown into the deepest deep end”, “scraping away of the veneer.”

If we all go through the experience of descent, why do we still believe it’s optional? And what might be possible if we saw it not only as necessary but also beneficial?

The majority of leaders I work with express that they have lost touch with themselves. The leaders who don’t express it just haven’t realized it yet. What they are describing is the loss of personal sovereignty — the authorship of their own lives, the capacity to act from their own knowing rather than the expectations of others. Descent is when we reclaim it. Yet there are so many reasons we don’t.

Here is my attempt to capture the top 10 reasons we avoid the journey that reconnects us to ourselves.

1. We’ve been sold a lie: growth is up and to the right.
“I don’t think I would have ever ended up where I am if I had gone in this sort of like up and to the right direction.” - Melissa

This sentiment comes through people’s threshold stories again and again: gratitude for where they are, and an awareness that the descent got them there. Importantly, there is also a recognition that at some point in the descent, they made a choice.

Mimo reflected on how grateful she is to her 13-year-old self who, “had to learn how to belong, how to shift, how to grieve, and also how to choose to grow within all of that.” All of that being immigrating to the US from Ethiopia and losing her father within a year.

The value of descent, and the non-linear path, is truly the foundational belief behind my threshold work. And yet, I too am still trying to unwind the cultural conditioning that ‘up and to the right’ is the ideal path.

This is the founding lie. The real story includes descent.

2. Capitalism needs you to believe the solution is outside of you.
“Brands I used to hold in such high esteem hijack people’s super vulnerable moments—when their identities are in flux and brains are malleable. Brands attach themselves to those moments and monetize it.” - Priscilla

Whether it’s the “golden handcuffs of a paycheck” or the idea that “plant medicine is a silver bullet,” there is no shortage of external solutions distracting us from listening to the quiet whispers of our inner selves.

I’ve purchased many of these solutions.

None of these solutions invite the questions of descent: “Who am I? What is my worth? Do I still have worth with no job, no marriage, no baby?”

When we look inside of ourselves, we join threshold storytellers like Neetu in finding that “the medicine has been inside of me the entire time.”

Capitalism wins when we keep looking outward. Descent turns us around.

3. No one shows us their descent.
“We’ve shamed shame—we are good at broadcasting the peaks, but not the troughs” - Amy

Everyone descends at some point. There is no life that is free of loss. And yet, the inner monologue I hear again and again—in threshold stories and in my own mind—is, “What is wrong with me?”

The answer is: nothing. The feeling is: everything.

Without norms and spaces for sitting with people in their low moments, we not only set ourselves up to go it alone—privately and in shame—we also miss the opportunity to have a model for descent when it’s our turn.

You are not special. People have been descending since the dawn of time.

4. There is no guidebook, protocol, or how-to.
“All the things that I was used to seeing in slow, linear, thoughtful, flow-charty ways—that all went out the window.” - Paul

Ruptures, and the descent that follows, are extremely disorienting. This can be paralyzing, as fear, anger, or sadness flood the system. As Morley described, “I couldn’t access the part of myself that knows how to seek support.”

What I am finding is that support looks different on a journey of descent. I too want a guidebook (hence, the Universal Map for Transformation), but as the philosopher Alfred Korzybski said, “the map is not the territory.” The territory is yours and yours alone. Or, as Paul put it, “Only you know the best practice. You are the best practice.”

This may look like a clean break from a former reality. It may be a bifurcation: familiar by day, while descending at night. It may be contained to one area of your life while all others remain the same. It may be wholly internal, invisible to the outside world.

Ascent has too many guidebooks. Descent has too few.

5. You have to go down with no idea when you’ll come back up.
“I don’t know if I’m getting stronger. I don’t know if this will make sense to me later on. I have no idea where I’ll be a few months from today.” - Shalvi

Descent is the ultimate test of our patience, trust, and faith. Some things can’t be rushed. Gripping, contraction, and denial slow the journey, while acceptance allows the path to reveal itself.

It feels like a labyrinth: I can find my way back to where I started. Or, I can continue deeper in and trust that I will find my way through. From where I currently sit, I feel like I can see light on the other side. But is that light a week away? A month? 6 months?

The timeline seems to be correlated to my ability to feel steady in my self-worth—consistently making decisions born out of a deep bodily knowing, rather than a desire to please.

The only way through the labyrinth is deeper into it.

6. Your own mind will work against you.
“The body and spirit often know, but the brain won’t allow the knowing to come through.” - Julka

Thresholds create distance and, therefore, perspective. The ability to see your life, and all of its expectations and norms, in a new way.

Shalvi described how her “brain was being very calculative about mortgages and bills,” forcing her to stay until her body physically shut down. In Julka’s case, it took a concussion to remove her mind from the driver’s seat enough to listen to her body. Reflecting on this experience, she said:

“My mind had been getting in the way because I had no idea of what I was capable of post-leap. But somehow my body didn’t have those same fears; it had much more clarity on what I needed.”

The body will take you down if the mind doesn’t.

7. Descent lacks positive reinforcement.
“I am being asked to learn how to feel good about myself when I am not, quote unquote, delivering value to anyone.” - Amy

Whether it’s in school or in a professional setting, so many of us have built our identities in response to positive reinforcement, “acing tests, getting promotions, and getting pats on the back.” Melissa described her pre-descent self as a “gold star girly” who believed she “had to perform to feel this love.”

External recognition disappears in the land of descent. There is no ego stroking, people pleasing, or feedback loops. There are no KPIs or performance metrics.

But there is a reckoning about what matters. During her descent, Melissa found that all the things she was once praised for suddenly became “hilariously not important.” She is not alone.

Descent is when we learn to reinforce ourselves.

8. Descent feels like giving up what you’ve worked so hard for.
“I basically spent 20 years of my life earning and saving money so that I could afford to get divorced.” - Priscilla

Crossing a threshold has its costs. The harder someone has worked for their identity, their place in life, the higher those costs can feel. For one storyteller this was the cost of immigrating to the US, for another it was the cost of becoming a doctor, and for another it was the cost of developing a well-loved persona.

Even when it no longer fits, there is a safety and comfort to the lives we have built. As one storyteller described, “Moving away from my old life required a painful cognitive dissonance. So much of my identity is tied to my work, and being a ‘corporate person’.”

With some distance, people recognize that what they worked for is still part of them, and was necessary in getting them to where they are. They move from an old self / new self mentality to a sense of integration.

But in the descent, it feels vulnerable, “like a baby deer,” relearning how to be a human but without the benefits of a child’s mind.

The cost of descent is real. So is what grows in its place.

9. The people we love often don’t change with us.
“He was clear he wanted to be married to the previous version of me.” - Holly

We want the people we love to change with us. And, in some instances, they do. Like in Paul’s case, in which he described he and his partner going through parallel health journeys and “clinging to a rock like seals.”

But, there is no way to know, no guarantee. In many cases, the relational outcome is unresolved for what feels like an impossibly long stretch of time. These entanglements are what bind us to who we were. But that self has limits.

“What I realized, as a creative, is that I can’t pour from an empty cup. There is no autopilot,” Melissa recounted. Her boss told her, “People just miss the old Melissa.” The old Melissa was dead.

Descent shows us who we’re being true to.

10. It’s uncomfortable. Period.

Descent can be lonely, shameful, exhausting.

So much so that one experienced threshold crosser expressed her biggest fear: choosing too soon. Shortcutting the unknown territory would allow her to escape the discomfort, but it might also land her in another version of the same inauthentic life.

Descent can also be liberating, thrilling, relieving.

So much so that people express things like, “I literally don’t recognize myself in the mirror.” and “Square, pragmatic me is no longer.” and “My past self was unconsciously cosplaying my present self without as much depth or substance.”

Descent is uncomfortable. It is also the only way home.

One thing that descent is not: optional.

The people who are least prepared for descent seem to be those with privilege and without a spiritual background.

Privilege—in love, luck, or wealth—can lead to an “arrogance about how grief or disaster or tragedy doesn’t touch you.” Adversity is the training ground of life, and descent is part of that training, regardless of when or how it arrives.

A spiritual belief system—like Buddhism or Sikhism—can embed a different understanding of the value of descent: a teacher, rather than a punishment. One storyteller recounted a line from scripture: pain is a necessary antidote to help you remember who you are.

I question my own preparation as I’m encountering the phrase ‘imminent collapse’ in reference to all that is going on in the world. I live in the same economy, world order, and energy system that you do, yet somehow I feel like the collapse can happen over there, while I am safe over here.

I wonder whether this is delusion or self-preservation, whether a collective descent, like Covid, is somehow easier than a solo journey, and what flavor of wonderful we will find wrapped in the terrible this time around.

Only the descent will tell.

Thank you to all of the people who have shared their stories with me. You can sign up to share your story here.

“I feel like we don’t have a vision for our lives any more. We got married, bought a house, had kids, renovated our house... Now what? I don’t know what we’re preparing for or building toward, it just feels like endless routines broken up by vacation.”

This week, Julka brought that question back into focus. She had come to share her Story of Transformation — and arrived with something extra: a talk she had given on eagle fledging, which she now realized is the ultimate threshold.

From the moment an eagle is born, it is preparing to fledge. Baby eagles move through stages building up to this important moment: hatching, nestling, branching, fledging. Each stage prepares them for the next, building strength and skills and confidence.

Until one day, they leap into the unknown.

Julka learned about this by watching eaglecams in California and Wisconsin. While she had watched the baby eagles prepare day after day, it was still emotionally intense to see them step off their branch 150+ feet in the air.

In Stories of Transformation, I do not hear people talk about necessary steps in their development. Rather, they describe a choice between continuing with endless routines, or freefalling into the unknown. The eagles have something we don’t.

There has to be another way.

The Freefall

“I started to get glimpses of myself and a desire not to choose [my known life] any more. But when I would think about it, it felt like falling off a cliff.”

Leading up to a threshold, many people describe an awareness that they need to break free from their current life: their beliefs, behaviors, and identity. They know something needs to end, but it’s scary to ‘unhook’ from life as they’ve known it. To create an ending without knowing what is beginning.

One of my storytellers, Paul, described the period of time before his heart attack like he knew a train was going to hit him. He was even asking the train to hit him. Not because he wanted the suffering, but because he needed a forcing mechanism to break free from his current reality.

Either life forces us into the next stage of growth, or we stay the course.

Both options have their cost: the pain of being dragged across a threshold, or the pain of continuing to live inside an identity that doesn’t fit.

Much like the eagles, our early years come with rites of passage: getting your driver’s license, graduating, leaving home, earning your first paycheck. Each of these thresholds invites us into our next stage of growth.

Rites of passage give us enough of a sense of what is beginning, of the necessity of moving into the next phase, without giving us all the answers for what that phase will be like.

Think back to getting your driver’s license. While it may have been scary the first time you got behind the wheel of a car on your own, it was not a freefall. Not only had you been preparing for it, you had likely participated in the systems (driver’s ed, your first ID) and rituals (curfew, family rules) around it. And you had a sense of what was available on the other side (freedom, autonomy), making it easier to accept what was ending (being driven around).

Then, we reach midlife.

The rites of passage all but disappear, but the desire to grow continues.

These are the stories I have been listening to: adults charting their own path through developmental stages, with no sense of how life has prepared them for the next stage, no rituals or systems to guide them or give meaning to the transition, and no idea what’s available on the other side.

No wonder it feels like a freefall.

“I am at this point of importance, but I feel unprepared to dive in. Like I’m on a diving board but I can’t see the pool water...yet.”

The Plateau

My dear friend Kari left the New York executive career path to find a more soul-centered alternative. The years that followed had many phases — one of which included a period of time when she moved home. If we subscribe to the ascension narrative, this feels like a failure.

But threshold work offers a different view: Kari was making a strategic choice to extend her time in the unknown, to stay in The Sacred Dark long enough to allow something new to emerge.

We praise detours, leaps of faith, and crooked career paths in theory. The actual experience of going off the ascension trajectory is something else — ripe with shame and self-judgment. It feels like failure. And yet it is exactly where the most significant growth happens.

What I realized this week is that when you zoom in on the right half of The Universal Map for Transformation, it’s an S-curve. The pattern is simple: experimentation, rapid growth, plateau. It describes the life cycle of products and businesses — and, it turns out, of people.

Listening to Stories of Transformation, many people have described a period of time preceding their threshold that felt like they were “going through the motions.” I have experienced this myself, not always realizing it while it was happening. This is the plateau stage—life is familiar and legibly ascending, but the inner life has outgrown the outer life. Like an eagle stuck on the branch, over-optimized and under-challenged.

Without rites of passage, rituals and systems to guide the transition, it’s no wonder it feels like our options are to continue going through the motions, or to freefall.

What ends up happening is the forced threshold crossing. For eagles, this is called fludging — an accidental fledge. The eagle is large enough to survive flight but hasn’t chosen the leap. Then something dislodges it: a gust of wind, a sibling crowding the branch, a moment of imbalance. And suddenly it is airborne, not by choice but by circumstance. It survives — often it even thrives — but the leap was never its own.

This is what one storyteller described as “being dragged kicking and screaming across the threshold.” It is painful while it’s happening, and seen as a necessary gift in hindsight. Like being pushed from the nest, it drops people to the bottom of the S-curve — into the unknown, into The Sacred Dark.

The Leap

So what can we learn from the eagles? How might we experience the exhilaration without the kicking and screaming? There are no easy answers, but we can create scaffolding. Here is what has served me.

Find your fellow edgewalkers.
Notice how you show up around different people. Are you defaulting to your legible, optimized self? Or, are you allowing your emerging self to come forward with its vulnerabilities and curiosities? This is a signal for who might be your fellow edgewalkers—people who are willing to live at the edge of their known self, and accompany you as you leap and traverse the unknown. They are likely people who have leapt themselves, or who are coming up on their own edge. Find ways to share a branch with these people, to witness and encourage each other. To normalize the emotional roller coaster, to ritualize big moments, to share systems of support.

Trace your thread.
Taking a big leap implies leaving everything that came before behind. After crossing a threshold, it can feel like your former life has been burned to the ground. But, upon closer look, life has prepared you for this moment. One storyteller described her preparation as going to the “uncertainty gym”—the prior thresholds she had crossed, and the skills and tools collected as a result. Another storyteller described how she came to view her career changes not as “pivots” —which implies a sharp break from the past—but as a creative thread, adding “beads” on a continuous, evolving line. And yet another storyteller described the shift from intellectualizing the work of human-centered design to embodying it. Be willing to connect unlikely dots, to see cumulative growth, to ask yourself: How has life prepared me for this moment?

Experiment at your edges.
If you’ve reached a plateau, and are coming up on an edge, you are likely noticing the areas of your life that feel charged, on that line between longing and fear—like standing on the edge of a branch. Allow yourself to stay with that feeling: What patterns do you notice about when it shows up? What experience might be available on the other side? Create small experiments to identify what makes you feel alive. For one storyteller, this looked like sending two emails a day to potential collaborators sharing her emerging work. For another, it looked like getting in front of the camera to see herself differently. And for another, it looked like enrolling in an herbal medicine course, unclear where it was going. Your edge is about a part of yourself that is longing to be seen. Play with it.

When I watch the eaglecams, I can feel the elemental nature of life: as magical and mystical as it is fleeting and precarious. The nest feels small, and the view feels expansive. I am left wondering: if we strengthened our nests—our communities, our rituals, our rites of passage—would we be emboldened to experiment toward the expansive future we long for but can’t yet see?

Thank you to Julka for inspiring this essay, and to all of the people who have shared their stories with me. You can sign up to share your story here.

Buzzing presence. That is the feeling I’ve been after.

It came to me as I was sitting in my car at a stoplight, on my way to pick up a kid, or drop off a library book, or some other quotidian task. I sat there waiting, watching the cars go by, with an energy in my body that is usually only accessible through an intense breathwork session, a moment in awe of the natural world, or other out-of-body experiences. Definitely not at stoplights.

But in that moment, thanks to the contrast of the location, the feeling was utterly apparent: time didn’t exist, everything felt light and possible, my awareness was expansive, my body hummed with aliveness.

I had reached a stage change.

I can’t exactly pin point when the stage changed.

The aliveness has come and gone over the past six months, as I have been deep in the territory of the unknown, what I have come to call The Sacred Dark. But through these months, buzzing presence has been a temporary state, on an unpredictable, stomach-dropping swing—between contraction and expansion, faith and fear, belief in myself and utter nihilism.

The stoplight feeling was different. It was steady, grounded, subterranean.

So much happened during that red light: I noticed the feeling, and received a name for it. I realized the feeling wasn’t new, it was anchored in my body. And then the version of myself who had been buzzing all along came back into focus, revealing the true purpose of the topic I have been circling all these years, the thread I have been following, the origin story of The Threshold Project.

Proximity to Death

My son was born almost nine years ago. During the long and miraculous journey of his threshold crossing to earth, I crossed the threshold between life and death. I now know that what I experienced is called a Near-Death Experience, or NDE, but no one used that language with me at the time. The language was all clinical, about blood loss and collapsing organs, Bakri balloons and transfusions.

I do remember my OB calling to check on me a week or so after I was home with Powell. I was still in a suspended dream state, but the feeling of her message was: you got a second chance.

I can’t say that I took her message to heart. I didn’t choose to be changed, I just was.

Over the following maybe two years, I was so fully and undeniably alive. Like a more full version of myself, who had always been inside of me, emerged. She had infinite trust in herself, faith in the universe, awareness of her power, agency over her life, and capacity to handle whatever came at her—including the intensity of newborn life.

She was in a state of buzzing presence.

When I returned to work after parental leave, my colleagues noticed the change, saying things like: “Woah, you came back powerfully.” As a result, every leadership door felt open and, surprising everyone, I chose a different path.

Within a year after Powell was born, I had left New York City, moved to California, bought our first home sight unseen, started my coaching training, left IDEO, and started my business. Big fears no longer felt scary. Risk calculations inverted. The life I had long imagined began to feel not only possible but inevitable.

Does time heal or dilute?

As time passed, my stage changed again. I didn’t realize it at the time, and I can’t pinpoint a moment. It was slow enough that I didn’t even experience a loss. Until I did. Little by little, old fears and norms and stories and muscle memory crept back in.

And without a name for what I was doing, I started trying to find my way back to the aliveness I knew was possible. To return to that other realm, if only I could find the key.

The search has been longer and less miraculous than bringing a child into the world. It has unfolded in fits and starts, over a good five year period. It has looked brash at times, like the late night email I sent my team declaring that I must leave. It has looked practical at times, like the conversation with our financial planner about the practicalities of taking a sabbatical.

In the tumult, one constant has remained: a sort of internal knocking that will not be ignored.

I never took the sabbatical; the sabbatical took me.

The threshold chooses you

“Would someone willingly put themselves in enough of an unknown situation to trigger the truly transformative experience?”

This question was posed by one of the people who has shared their Threshold Story with me. In many ways, I take her point. But my experience also tells me that what constitutes a threshold is different for everyone—and for some, it is the thing they thought they wanted, like marriage or becoming a parent. Also, the threshold is only the invitation. Meeting it is a choice.

In my case, I haven’t summoned the courage to choose the threshold, but I have chosen to meet it, at least over the past six months.

As I sensed my familiar professional world falling away, I instinctively started building the structures to support my journey through the unknown. I found a community of brilliant, compassionate people to ensure my inputs were rich and varied. I followed my intuition to hire a coach. I reined in our monthly spending to relieve my scarcity nerves. This has proven to be just enough scaffolding to allow me to descend into the unknown.

That’s not to say it has made the experience easy, but it has made it tolerable. It has held me just enough to meet my inner self, to allow my intuition to come forward, to follow my instincts and curiosities not knowing where they would lead, to invest in myself.

There is a pain and a beauty to life in The Sacred Dark. A depth and a richness. And just as I was getting better at trusting the swings, I reached a stage change.

I almost miss them. They keep me honest—and, in their own way, alive.

The Clearing

It was at the stoplight that I realized I was no longer swinging. I had emerged from The Sacred Dark into The Clearing.

The Clearing has a different feeling—my energy is consistently open, expansive. I am in constant dialogue with some power outside of myself. I just know. My knowing is so clear. Call it a download, divine intervention, my guides, intuition. The directionality of the knowing is palpable, visceral. Like the momentum is behind me, I just have to steer.

The Clearing is a fundamental shift in how I move through my days. I feel free, in flow, attuned to my own needs. Time feels generous. When my focus or energy wanes, I do not fight it. Earlier today, I got up, grabbed a bowl of pumpkin seeds, and went outside to stand in the sun. Next thing I knew I was sweeping our patio, moving my energy from my head back into my body. The break felt long but when I came back inside it had been less than 20 minutes. And I was ready to focus again. Another wave of energy moving through me. Not in a productive way, but in a ‘follow the yes’ way. Do the next right thing.

This is the energy of dancing with the universe.

From inside a threshold

I am in the middle of the story.

There is no neat ending, no moral conclusion. I don’t know how long my buzzing presence will last. I don’t know when my outer reality will catch up to my inner experience. And I certainly don’t know what threshold will choose me next, or when.

But I do know this: the most personal is also universal.

Your threshold is your invitation. My wish is to support you in saying yes.

100 Stories of Transformation is live, and I am opening up slots into May and June. I would love to hear your story. Find a time here.

My experience sitting with each person was profound in a way that was surprisingly different from coaching, or even spending time with a friend. Something about an open-ended invitation to share, an implicit agreement that there is nothing to change or fix. But I sensed there was something else that made the experience distinct. It was while reading The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer that I found language for it.

“The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity.”

My experience listening felt like I had found a way to skirt the dominant economic system and participate in a different economy—one where the giver and receiver were interchangeable, the payment embedded in the service, the gift its own reward.

I had to follow the thread of that exchange — the listening, and what it made possible for both of us. And so I posted an invitation on LinkedIn:

Since then, I have listened to over a dozen more stories: of threshold crossings and transformation, from deep in The Sacred Dark and from a place of hindsight. The storytellers are mostly people I barely knew or had never met, but whose stories illuminated aspects of my own experience that I hadn’t been able to put into words.

Today, I would like to share 5 themes I am finding in people’s stories. I hope they will illuminate something for you too.

Theme 1: Thresholds invite a reckoning between the inner and outer self.

Thresholds are, by nature, disorienting. They are passages between worlds. Whether it’s the loss of a job, the unexpected difficulty that follows a marriage, or the sudden absence of a familiar presence in your life, thresholds are a break in our identity and perceived reality. They take us out of our story.

When our story is broken open, many people continue to show up as if they are living in their pre-threshold reality. In some cases, going through the motions is a much-needed distraction; in others, the threshold is too heavy, confusing, or shameful to name.

Listening to Stories of Transformation, I hear things like: “I’ve never really talked about this before.” or “This is the first time I’ve told this story.” or “You’re the only person I have shared this with.”

This reluctance to share buys time for the inner self to catch up but it also leaves the inner self adrift, navigating the threshold crossing in isolation.

Part of what makes the listening project therapeutic is that externalizing the experience is part of metabolizing it. Narrating it is part of integrating it. Whether that is with a loved one or a stranger, the inner self is practicing a way of being in the world that honors who it is becoming.

Theme 2: Threshold crossings are an invitation to revisit fundamental questions.

One of my storytellers was let go last year from a company after 27 years of service. With a little distance from that experience, she reflected:

“For so long, my experience was: This is the container that I’m in, this is the box my world operates in. Everything was on a track and when you’re in that track formation it’s easy to adhere to what you think you should be doing.”

Now that she has left The Box, she described the questions she’s been asking herself: What do I want to do? When have I inspired others? What lights me up? What do I want from my second chapter?

This return to fundamental questions echoes throughout Stories of Transformation. The rupture, the break from the reality that was, reminds people that they are in the driver’s seat of their lives, that they have agency. Other questions that have come up include:

Who am I now?
How do I want to spend the time I have left on this planet?
How do I want my days to feel?
What will I be proud of when I look back at my life?

In many cases, thresholds take an abstract awareness of our limited time on earth and move it toward an embodied awareness. This, rightfully, changes the questions we are asking—and the urgency with which we respond.

Theme 3: When the familiar is stripped away, we are left with the primal impulse to create.

Speaking for myself, routine life can feel like a life of consumption. Before I even have the curiosity, need, or desire, there is a solution or product waiting for me. That is the algorithmic life.

And even deeper than that, as James Hollis says in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: “Virtually all of us lack a deep sense of permission to lead our own lives.”

What I hear in Stories of Transformation is a reclaiming of that permission.

As one of my storytellers shared, she had carried a product idea with her for years, but it had felt out of reach, scary, or too big to commit to pursuing. In her words:

“I was so scared of everything else that was happening that the idea of placing that first phone call to the factory was no longer intimidating. My biggest fears seemed small in the face of the unknown. For the first time, I had this experience of ‘everyone can create, we are all wired to create.’”

The Sacred Dark strips us back to that essence, to our role as creators in the broadest sense of the word. We are creators of our lives, our communities, our art, our businesses, our relationships.

The Sacred Dark is scary, yes. And it holds the highest potential for waking up to our agency as creators.

Theme 4: Threshold crossings are pro-social.

Threshold crossings, and time in The Sacred Dark, are uncomfortable, destabilizing, humbling, and even painful. No one is immune to these experiences, just as no one can predict which experience will bring you to your knees, and break you free from your former reality.

But what we can predict, and what has come through in every story I’ve witnessed, is that these experiences affect not just our interior worlds, but the relational field. When we have been through The Sacred Dark, we are more likely to recognize the other as a complex human in a complex context with their own story and suffering.

This experience led one of my storytellers, a person in recovery, to engage in his own listening practice:

“14 years ago, I started going to a prison to visit incarcerated people. We call them residents, not inmates. The motto is: Listen, listen, love, love. My role is simply to look them in the eye and listen.”

A decade-plus commitment may sound like a grand gesture — and it is. It is also what becomes possible when a threshold crossing is metabolized rather than buried. We emerge more permeable to the suffering of others — more willing to show up for it. This is what pro-social looks like when it takes root: the recognition that we are all, in some form, doing time in The Sacred Dark together.

Theme 5: Threshold crossings are the territory of spiritual formation.

“Spiritual formation...is a way of being that emerges alongside or through struggle.” - Lisa Miller, PhD

My experience of listening to Stories of Transformation affirms Lisa Miller’s research—and I didn’t recruit, filter, or ask for the dimension of spirituality. It came though on its own, in different ways for each storyteller. Some examples:

“Call it spirit, or connection to the beyond, nature has a way of putting ideas in my head.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences. Before [this experience in The Sacred Dark], I was playful about it, but now I just don’t believe in it.”

“My mom always talked about the moon, she told me I was born on the full moon. And then the night she passed it was a Wolf moon. The moon was full and huge and bright. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to go there before, but now I have an openness to the mystical.”

“When I’m falling, the only thing that catches me is my spiritual practice.”

“The most powerful evidence I have that god exists is that he removed my obsession to drink.”

The rational, achieving mind wants to interrogate these experiences. To chalk them up to coincidence, or to make them make sense. But is that the point? Or can we learn to be guided by other ways of knowing, to speak the symbolic language of the universe?

Many of the stories I have been listening to are live transmissions from The Sacred Dark.

People are sharing from the messy place of not knowing, of wrestling with possibility, of imagining multiple futures, and swinging between self-doubt and conviction.

In all honesty, this is where I find myself, in this current cycle of transformation.

But in some cases, I am listening to people reflect on a cycle of transformation with some distance, with the clarity of hindsight.

What lets me know that they have entered The Clearing, that they have emerged into a new reality, is that they are able to see their former self clearly. To look back and appreciate that person for how far they got you—and to recognize the emergent self who is more congruent, more fully their own.

My vision is a world that orients to thresholds as invitations to return to our innate aliveness, agency, and congruence.

My first step in that journey is to continue the listening project. My goal is to witness 100 Stories of Transformation this year. To create a space where people practice who they are becoming.

Do you have a Story of Transformation? Are you in The Sacred Dark? The Threshold Project is live, and I would love to be your witness. I’m listening to 3 stories a week through the end of the year. Choose a time here, and please share widely.

I want you to have the experience of befriending darkness.

But darkness is scary, you might think. I don’t want to befriend darkness.

I understand.

Here’s what I know: darkness is inevitable. No one gets through life without facing the unknown.

So why not learn to be at home in it?

Here are six practices to feel more at home in the dark. For each one, I’ll share the general principle, and some specific examples of how I’ve seen it in practice. Take what resonates, remix or leave the rest.

1. Tend the vessel
   Yes, it’s boring and basic, and I may sound like your mom nagging you. But, really: Are you getting enough sleep? Moving your body in ways that feel good? Eating real food? We’re all living inside of a body, right here and right now. That body needs care. It is the foundation for how you meet everything life throws at you.
   
   One tend-the-vessel practice that I have been known to evangelize is the Cultivate What Matters annual planner. In addition to the bigger picture perspective the planner’s process provides, each month includes a simple tool called the Tending List.

   

   The Tending List is broken into monthly, weekly, and daily. The daily rhythm is where this work shows up most clearly: items that are both radically basic and extremely important. For example, if you work from home and it’s winter, you might need daily accountability to go outside, or get dressed, or eat somewhere other than your desk.
   
   When you are uncomfortable in your own body, it is impossible to befriend the dark. Escape feels like the only strategy.
   
   Start here.
   

2. Honor your tethering
   There are times when life throws everything up in the air at once. But, more often than not, some dimensions of our lives remain constant, tethering us as we navigate the unknown.
   
   As one of my clients was approaching a major professional threshold, he noted, “I am not transforming my marriage, where I live, our foundational security in our lives. This foundation is giving me the courage to take a leap.”
   
   I use a tool called Cycles of Life with my clients to bring awareness to where life feels tethered, or steady state, and where it feels up in the air, nearing completion, or ready for reinvention.

   

   For each dimension of life, which phase are you in? What changes do you anticipate on the horizon? Anticipated changes might be the result of age, health, aging parents or children, or shifting needs and desires.
   
   After you’ve done your analysis, consider which dimensions of life are inviting you to cross the threshold into the unknown. Which dimensions are tethering you, providing a foundation from which you can befriend the darkness?
   

3. Reduce the noise
   Life is so loud. I’m neurodivergent and extra sensitive to sensory inputs, but I think the overwhelming stimulus of daily life affects us all at this point.
   
   This state of constant stimulus makes it nearly impossible to discern our desires, feelings, and inner voice from the noise of the outside world. Known as “digital-neural blurring,” the brain struggles to distinguish between the rapid-fire external reality of social media and the self-generated, internal stream of consciousness.
   
   A friend recently extended the media diet metaphor to metabolism: ‘If you are busy metabolizing the pain of the world, how will you ever get to the pain of your own life?’
   
   The noise isn’t just distracting—it’s replacing our inner life entirely.

   
   Reducing the noise is uncomfortable at first, but essential if you want any chance of befriending the darkness.
   
   Practices to try: Tech Shabbat, establishing phone free zones in your home, turning your phone into a dumb phone. Notice what emerges when you create space—there’s a well of creativity underneath all that noise.
   

4. Name that feeling
   Because life is loud, and our internal and external signals are mixed up, it can be difficult to notice, much less to name, how we’re actually feeling. Not your standard ‘fine’ or ‘good,’ but the ability to interpret more nuanced sensory and emotional messages.
   
   This is an actual skill that we are not taught. Somatic practices have been rising in popularity, but I still find disassociation to be a common coping strategy, and people’s emotional vocabulary to be extremely limited. I often suggest people print out the Feelings Wheel and put it on their fridge as a daily reminder to check in.

   
   This awareness is especially important when befriending the dark because feelings are more dynamic and even volatile when you are in the unknown, outside of the focused attention of meetings and deadlines, and the predictable routines of daily life.
   
   When you notice a big shift in your internal weather system, ask yourself: Have my external conditions changed (safety, comfort, support), or has my mind latched onto something that needs releasing?

   
   More often than not, it’s the mind that’s gone sideways. Acknowledging this can be grounding, and gives you agency in how to channel the feeling. For example, getting out of the mind and into the body by cooking, drawing, gardening, folding laundry, stretching. It doesn’t really matter what it is, it’s about breaking the rumination loop.
   
   The loop is an escape route, the body brings you back to yourself. The body befriends darkness.
   

5. Exchange stories

   Darkness can be an isolating place. I am no longer surprised when a client tells me I am the first person who has ever listened to their threshold story. It’s not that they don’t have friends and loved ones. It’s that we tend to think we are burdening others with our hardship, our messiness, or our confusion, when really the opposite is true.
   
   People want to be needed, they want to listen. And suffering connects us to other sufferers, which is everyone.
   
   As a wise client pointed out, “Sharing what I’m going through keeps me from going down the shame spiral.”
   
   The barrier is often finding the starting place, the conversation opener, but it can be as simple as: I am going through a lot of change right now. Can I tell you my story? It will help me make sense of it myself.
   
   One of the most direct routes to befriending darkness is to go there with someone. To witness and be witnessed.
   

6. Court darkness
   There is a Buddhist expression, “Not knowing is most intimate” which I interpret as a sensory aliveness that is unique to moving through the unknown. We move through the familiar with varying degrees of autopilot, often multi-tasking, and disconnected from our environments. But the unknown is an invitation to be fully present.
   
   Life thrusts us all into the unknown at some point, but we can also make a practice of going off script, making the unpopular choice, slowing down, choosing the thing that spins up resistance, and staying, especially when it’s uncomfortable.
   
   These are all moments of courting darkness, inviting it into our emotional field, and dancing with the unknown. The practice is small: What’s one thing you could do this week that feels uncertain but alive?

   ---

Maybe you’re in the unknown as you read this. Maybe you’re anticipating a major threshold, or on the other side of one that has shaped you in ways you can’t yet put into words.

Regardless of your location, being with the unknown—calmly, gracefully, expansively—is a practice. And befriending darkness is the path to experiencing yourself more fully.

It was a last minute decision, brought on by a prompt in The Book of Alchemy: What have you been avoiding in favor of an alluring distraction?

What I uncovered, to my surprise, is that I’m avoiding the real work of journeying through the unknown in favor of the alluring distraction of feeling productive.

While my calendar is open, and my bank account is dwindling, I am still tethered to the known rhythms and routines of someone who is on the clock. From the outside, these months that I am referring to as my pseudo-sabbatical look just like any other months of my adult life. From the inside, the experience is uncomfortable but tolerable.

For most of my adult life, I have derived comfort from my calendar telling me where and when I am needed, and what problems to focus my attention on. I have been validated by clients and teammates appreciating my perspective and follow through. I have allowed myself to rest at the end of the day because of what I have accomplished.

This reality has been surprisingly easy to replicate in the absence of clients and teammates, meetings and deliverables. I have recreated the familiar experience of busy-ness, allowing myself to feel held by my daily rhythms and routines.

And since I have received positive reinforcement for productivity my entire life, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was avoiding anything.

Until I responded to the prompt in The Book of Alchemy:

My routines are like a fortress I have built around myself so that I never have to sit and wonder: What is driving all this doing? And, what would happen if I just stopped?

Escaping the fortress

On Thursday morning, I hedged on whether I would actually venture to the coast right up until I was in the car. As I backed out of the driveway, I was negotiating with myself whether I really needed to drive out to the coast or if it was enough of a detour from my routine to hike on the far side of the ridge behind our house.

I made it to the coast, aware that what should have felt like a day of freedom felt more like an act of forced resistance.

The hike I chose had been its own fortress up until a few weeks ago. A longheld stretch of private land, The Estero Americano Coast Preserve was recently returned to The Wildlands Conservancy. As I passed through the entrance gate, I felt the symbolism of this transition in my own journey.

Passing a group of older men, I nearly jogged up the ridge trail, my sightline focused on my feet and my phone in my hand. If I was going to escape the fortress, I was at least going to get my heart rate up, and record some voice memos of my thoughts.

But then, the vista point:

Just the memory of it has a full body effect. My lower belly relaxing, breath deepening. Allowing the earth to support me, as it always does, but with an awareness that I am being held. Even outside my routines.

Falling in love with the pain

My friend Morley is a world-class storyteller who has a unique ability to transmute pain through humor, recognizing synchronicity, and meaning making. She wouldn’t claim those things about herself, but I experience them vicariously every time I speak with her.

Last week, she shared a story about her recent book club. The gathering had been hosted by a local author whose work is about writing your sales pitch from a place of inner worth. Morley was excited for the session, and wanted to make a good impression. However, when the time came for her to give her pitch, she started bawling. The pain that inspires her work is too raw to distill into a sales pitch. While Morley collected herself, the author-host managed to gracefully move the group along. At the end she returned to Morley, and said, “You need to fall in love with the pain.”

As Morley and I excavated this experience, something became clear: one of the roles of The Sacred Dark in our lives is to distance us from what we thought gave us worth and stability, so that we can find that worth and stability within ourselves.

When I reflect on my own journey, I can see a slow distancing from what I thought gave me worth in the world: my big city life, my profession and job title, my ever-accruing certifications, my network. Specifically, when I left IDEO, I went from an ego-centric inner narrative of, “I will never work in consulting again” to a deep void of, “Who am I without the platform of a name brand and a title?”

As I have distanced myself from these external markers of worth, I have been invited again and again to relate to myself as inherently worthy. To separate my ability to do from my permission to be.

It has been a long process of falling in love with this pain.

This love isn’t abstract; it has a shape in my daily life. On a good day, this love looks like pausing at the playground after school to look out at the hills, and appreciate that I am able to be present with my daughter before 5pm. It looks like joining the local elders for their weekly discussion group to imagine a better future. It looks like creating for no one other than myself. It looks like following my ASD ‘special interests’ for longer than a 9-5 can tolerate. It looks like reframing my platform as my community, my great love project as my children, and my legacy as my garden. It looks like trusting there is meaning in the psycho-spiritual hub I have come to call home.

On many days, the pull toward something bigger, more important, and knowable is still there—a byproduct of our shared delusion that if we ascend ascend ascend, our life will have meant something in the end.

When Death Teaches Life

One of the rabbit holes I’ve gone down during my pseudo-sabbatical is Near Death Experiences, or NDEs. I am fascinated by the idea that it is not until we are on our deathbeds that life’s ultimate truth is experienced: our innate connectivity and completeness.

People who have experienced NDEs describe it as reaching an edge you can’t go back from. Or, like having a foot in another world. Once you recognize the miracle of your own life, your relationship to life fundamentally changes.

I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but I had an NDE when my son was born and I hemorrhaged nearly half the blood in my body. I watched myself from above in the OR as the care team removed my jewelry and prepped my body for emergency surgery to reconstruct my uterus.

My experience following my NDE was simultaneous reverence and invincibility. I was overflowing with this strange new life force that carried me through the depths of post-partum into a creative reimagining of the shape of my life. Within 6 months, I had moved across the country, left city life, bought a home sight unseen, begun my Neuro-Linguistic Programming certification, and started my own business. The universe’s support was so visceral I didn’t even look before I leapt.

I can still touch into the truth of that experience, the full-body awareness of a loving universe. I know that it changed me. And yet, I still get pulled back into the fortress where my worth requires proving.

And so I return, again and again, to The Sacred Dark, in small and large ways, so that I can feel in my soul what my mind can’t seem to understand.

The Light Hidden in Darkness

“To the world you may be one person; but to one person you may be the world” - Heather Cortez

My son’s preschool teacher had this quote in her email signature, and it always struck me as a profoundly simple reminder of how we humans get in our own way, especially in the age of social media and influencers and everyone as a free agent.

We put so much energy into being more than one person to the world—Ascend! Ascend! Ascend!—that we miss the opportunity to be the world to one person, starting with ourselves.

This is what The Sacred Dark teaches: how to be the world to ourselves first.

The mythologist Michael Meade says that one of the old definitions for the human soul is ‘the light hidden in darkness’. The Sacred Dark is where that light becomes visible, where we are able to see our own inner light.

When I descend into The Sacred Dark, when I leave the grid of the familiar, when I untether from other people’s needs and expectations, when I get lost on the coast with a child’s backpack full of snacks, and rest my weary eyes on the horizon, that is when I experience my own inner light.

She is the one who doesn’t need to prove her worth through doing. The one who doesn’t need to optimize or monetize her time. The one who seeks resonance over rightness. The one who experiences our innate connectivity and completeness.

She trusts that life is revealing itself, and will keep revealing itself, until her soul’s journey is complete.

It is her light—my soul’s light—that most wants to be seen and witnessed during this brief human existence.

Not by the world. By me.

If there is a more life-affirming endeavor than learning to witness your own inner light, I don’t know what it is.

“Did I think I would be transformed? I wouldn’t have put it in those terms. I didn’t know what would be waiting for me on the other side other than grief.”

This is one of many reflections I’ve heard that indicates our inability to anticipate and recognize our own journeys of transformation. In the dozens of stories I’ve listened to, I hear people struggling to name themselves as the hero(ine) in their own journeys.

If you’re not the hero(ine) in your own life story, who is?

I’m increasingly convinced this dissociation stems from having only one map for transformation in our collective imagination: The Hero’s Journey. And that map has been diluted from its original intent.

As a child of the 80s, The Hero’s Journey landed in my life as interpreted by Hollywood. And when I listen to people’s stories, I know that I am not alone. The image of transformation we carry looks like conquest, not descent. Like retrieving treasure, not becoming it. Like going out into the world, not down into yourself.

This misunderstanding isn’t just confusing—it’s harmful. It is arresting our development.

Even though I’m studying this topic, I recently found that I’m still caught in this cultural confusion. Over the holidays, a group of friends was sharing our words for the upcoming year. I was initially excited by the word that emerged for me—Quest—but later realized the dissonance this poses with my work. My work is about descent.

This tension—between quest and descent, between going out and going in—is a product of how the Hero’s Journey became our dominant map for transformation. To understand the confusion, we need to understand how we got here.

The Hero’s Journey: Original Intent vs Cultural Impact

Campbell’s Original Framework
Joseph Campbell introduced the Hero’s Journey framework in 1949 through his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. As a comparative mythologist, he noticed a similar narrative structure across the myths, legends, and religious stories he studied from across the world.

Campbell’s thesis: All hero myths follow the same essential pattern because they arise from the collective unconscious and address universal human psychological experiences.

He originally synthesized the common pattern into a 17-stage “monomyth” that has since been simplified into 3 primary stages:

1. The Departure
   Ordinary World; Call to Adventure; Refusal of the Call; Meeting the Mentor; Crossing The Threshold

2. The Initiation
   Test, Allies, Enemies; Approach to the Innermost Cave; The Ordeal; Reward

3. The Return
   The Road Back; The Resurrection; Return with the Elixir

Hollywood’s Interpretation
George Lucas used Campbell’s framework directly to create Star Wars in 1977. Then in 1992, Christopher Vogler adapted the Hero’s Journey for screenwriters in The Writer’s Journey. Vogler’s adaptation emphasized adventure, conquest, external enemies, and tangible treasure—elements that translate well to screen.

It worked so well that by the 1990s, the Hero’s Journey had become the framework taught in film schools, used in writers’ rooms, and applied to everything from marketing to personal development. But it was Vogler’s version that was popularized—action-oriented, externally focused, optimized for box office—not Campbell’s original psychological depth.

Here’s what got lost, as Campbell himself wrote:
“The passage of the mythological hero may be over-ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward—into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified.”

Campbell understood the journey as descent. Hollywood led us to believe it is a conquest.

Quest over descent

The cumulative effect of popularizing The Hero’s Journey via blockbuster movies is that we have flattened our understanding of transformation and what it looks like to be the hero.

The cultural code has become:

• Transformation = leaving your ordinary world

• Growth = overcoming external obstacles

• Success = bringing back treasure/defeating enemy

• The hero = active, conquering, achieving

These codes aren’t wrong—they describe one kind of transformation experience. But they’re not the only way, or even the typical way, that transformation happens. The real work more often looks like:

Transformation through staying, not leaving
“In the stillness, I had to face and confront what I had pushed down for the past 40 years of unworthiness.”

Growth through surrender, not conquest
“I will be a mother, I just don’t know how. I will work again, but I don’t know if I will get a new role or start my own business.”

Success as becoming different, not acquiring something
“I got to a point where I built a life where I really felt good without a partner. I didn’t need a partner, I wanted a partner.”

The hero as receptive, dissolving, integrating
“It’s like a metaphysical shift - there is something in me that’s much bigger and it will hold me through any obstacle I will face.”

The Harm: The Meaning We Make of Our Journeys

The meaning we make of our experiences determines how we move through them. If we only view transformation as quest, the meaning we make of most of life’s thresholds is that they are an interruption in life’s ascent. Rather than meet the threshold with loving presence...

We grasp for the familiar.
“The temptation to find another job and get back on track is so strong.”

We seek a silver bullet.
“I thought: plant medicine will heal me, clear all the stuff, reveal to me what I need to do next.”

We avoid talking about our experience.
“I was like, oh, this is a sad topic, so I don’t want to talk to people about it.”

We overlook our internal change.
“I’ve had all of these experiences—a car accident, losing my parents, the pandemic—but I have mostly gone back to my old ways of life.”

The expectation that transformation will look like a grand external adventure, and that anything else is to be avoided, means we’re missing the majority of the opportunities life presents. We’re missing experiencing ourselves as the heroes of our own journeys.

Our cultural script pathologizes descent—as depression, anxiety, malaise, and even general stuckness. But what Campbell, Jung, and many others before us were clear on is that descent is a necessary stage of transformation, uncertainty allows for critical unknowing, dissolution creates space for what wants to emerge, and darkness is where vision is born.

If we’re all waiting to be called to an external conquest, how can we honor the real internal work of transformation?

We need a different map.

An Alternative: The Transformation Map

The Transformation Map centers The Sacred Dark not as a stage to pass through, but as the container for transformation. The map is oriented down and through, not out and back. It honors the internal journey as the heroic one.

Let’s look at this map in contrast to our modern conception of the Hero’s Journey:

Receiving the Call → Not “call to adventure,” but call to threshold, to what must change

Casting Off → Not crossing into new territory, but releasing what was, letting the familiar go

The Sacred Dark → Not “the ordeal” to survive, but the womb-space where transformation gestates. This is where transformation actually occurs.

The Star Compass → Not a mentor giving you tools, but an emergent navigation that forms from the inside out. You can’t force it or plan it.

Anchoring the Transformation → Not returning with treasure, but returning as changed. You are the medicine.

As I’ve begun sharing this map, it is abundantly clear that people are hungry for language that describes their lived experience of transformation in generative terms. Being in the dark is sacred, and it’s time we recognize it that way.

The Developmental Leap

The Transformation Map is more than just an alternative framework. It represents a developmental shift we need to make—individually and collectively.

A mature consciousness is not born somewhere out there. It’s uncovered through descent—within ourselves, within our souls. It prioritizes soul work over ego work, and recognizes the importance of supporting each other through darkness, not just celebrating each other’s victories.

This shift is urgent because we’re facing collective thresholds that require it.

We all know our current thresholds can’t be ‘quested’ through: climate collapse, meaning crisis, institutional distrust, AI-driven identity upheaval. These require descent—letting what was dissolve so what wants to emerge can be born.

That December day when ‘quest’ emerged as my word for 2026, I was cuddled up with my son watching Kubo and the Two Strings. What I realize now: Kubo’s story is one of both quest and descent. On the surface, he searches for his father’s armor. But the real journey is a descent into family memory, grief, and identity. The treasure he brings back isn’t armor—it’s understanding his own story.

Transformation isn’t an either/or.

A quest without descent is just tourism—going somewhere new and coming back unchanged. A descent without questing spirit is depression—going down with no faith you’ll emerge.

What 2026 requires—for me, for all of us—is both: the uncertainty and trust of descent, and the courage and curiosity of quest.

That’s what it means to be the hero of your own transformation.

It was a pre-dawn Winter morning and I was dragging my suitcase, Starbucks in hand, body braced from the cold, through my least favorite place in New York City: Penn Station.

That’s when it came to me: I will move here.

You’d think that clarity would have emerged on a rooftop overlooking the Hudson, watching the sunset with a cocktail in hand, but no. That’s not what happened. It came in the least romantic setting possible, when I was cold and not-yet-caffeinated and just trying to get to the train.

This is how The Call works. It arrives when we least expect it—not in the moments we’ve set aside for reflection, but in the ordinary moments when our defenses are down.

What does The Call sound like?

At the time, I was living in temporary housing in Chelsea, working on a project with the Department of Education. I was at Penn Station to Amtrak my way down to Washington DC for a week of client meetings.

Meanwhile, my familiar life was waiting for me in San Francisco. To my conscious mind, I was on a 6-month adventure. To my subconscious, I was trying on a future life.

In my experience, The Call is both an emerging awareness and a discrete moment.

The Emerging Awareness
Oftentimes, the emerging awareness sounds like quiet whispers from a voice inside of you. In this cycle of transformation, I heard whispers like, “Wasn’t it nice to be close enough to family to know what they would like for Christmas?” In many transformation journeys I’ve witnessed, the whisper is a hesitant suggestion that it’s time to leave a job, but the golden handcuffs make it hard to hear.

Another way The Call arrives is through outside perspective—from a friend, a boss, a coach. As Nora shared, it was her mentors who helped her see her situation clearly enough to bolster her emerging awareness. For Henry, it was a counselor’s invitation to say out loud what he already knew—alcohol and marijuana were the most important things in his life—that allowed him to hear The Call.

For many, it is time in nature that reveals The Call. As Bristol put it, “Nature has a way of putting ideas in my head.” It makes sense that when we are connected to something larger than ourselves, de-centering the ego, we are more likely to hear The Call.

Finally, as Aaron described, The Call can arrive through what feels like pressure—positive or negative. Positive pressure might look like someone acknowledging the value of your expertise in a way that expands your sense of possibility. Negative pressure might look like unexpected envy when a friend achieves success, or awareness that you are filling a void with busy work.

This isn’t good or bad, it’s just information. As students of transformation, our only job is to notice. To listen.

The Discrete Moment
At some point, the emerging awareness crystallizes into a discrete moment.

Going back to my morning in Penn Station, the message that “I will move here” arrived after what were probably months of quiet whispers, outside perspective, and other signs and signals trying to get through to me.

When I was ready, I heard The Call.

What precipitates The Call?

As I have been studying transformation, I’ve wanted to categorize its types into neat lists with titles. Personal or Professional. Optional or Required. Identity or Context. I’ve tried every sorting mechanism I can think of.

But here’s what I’ve learned: The Call is precipitated by multiple forces aligning—internal readiness meeting external circumstances. The reality is that life is messier than neat categories suggest. There might be a lead dog, but in hindsight every transformation story I’ve witnessed demonstrates that only when internal and external forces align do we heed The Call to transform.

For example, when Mandy was reflecting on what precipitated a significant personal and professional transformation, she couldn’t point to just one thing: “Is this because of what I went through with my mom’s end of life? Is it the midlife crisis age? Or is it that I stepped off of the career treadmill for the first time in my life?

She couldn’t separate these forces. And that’s the point.

It’s not possible, or even worthwhile, to pull these forces apart. Our lives are a complex web, and no change happens in a vacuum.

But let’s assume that we have more choice around some cycles of transformation than we do others. For Bristol, she had heard The Call that her marriage needed to end during the pandemic. However, for many reasons, she felt it wasn’t a “convenient time” to get divorced.

Just as my Penn Station epiphany didn’t wait for a more fairy tale moment, Priscilla’s Call to end her marriage didn’t wait for a more convenient time. I am convinced that The Call arrives in Kairos—the Greek word for “the opportune moment.” As many recovered addicts will tell you, “I got sober in God’s time.”

When we get to the moment of The Departure, you will see how we have more agency over the timing.

I’ve heard many people lament that they missed the opportunity to transform. I relate to this regret in that I feel I have been heeding the same Call for nearly a decade.

Our job as students of transformation is to give ourselves some grace, and trust that divine timing aligns internal and external forces.

What if I don’t hear The Call?

Our brains are wired for safety. So it’s no wonder that it takes divine intervention to nudge us into the unknown.

My experience is that quiet whispers are always present—we’re just not always tuned to the right frequency. This is where practices like prayer or meditation, time in nature, journaling, and conversations with trusted outsiders matter. They help us hear what’s already trying to get through.

But here’s the other truth: sometimes we’re not meant to transform right now. Sometimes staying put is the work.

Our job as students of transformation is to discern between staying put because you’re still preparing for the adventure and staying put because you’re afraid.

How do I respond to The Call?

The Call and its response are often at play at a subconscious level. Aaron described it as “a long corridor, a preparatory phase” where he didn’t even realize he was moving toward a threshold. Like many things, only in hindsight can we see what we were up to.

In many cases, the preparatory phase presents demands that take our attention away from responding to The Call. Whether it’s the logistics of preparing for end of life, tying up the loose threads of a marriage, or creating a transition plan for your successor, The Call is often followed by very practical tasks. It reminds me of the days leading up to my son’s late arrival, and the long list of to-dos I completed—seemingly just in time.

At a soul level, we know when we can let go.

After I received The Call at Penn Station, the train ride to Washington DC—which usually felt interminable—flew by as my mind raced through everything that would need to unfold. From ending my lease in San Francisco to negotiating a move package, from sharing the news with my family and friends, to selling many of my belongings. The list was long, and it was just me I was accounting for back then!

My full response to The Call took nearly 6 months—from that cold January morning on the Amtrak train to my arrival in NYC during Pride weekend in June. I remember the timing specifically because my first full day in the West Village was overwhelmingly joyful as only a Pride weekend can be.

What I’ve noticed, and what people report, is that the distance between The Call and its acceptance shortens with experience. This looks like an internal “yes” in response to The Call, while separating the “when” and “how” into their own explorations.

Transformation moves through stages, and the first stage culminates with an internal “yes.”

Creating Tethering
Once your “yes” is clear, it’s time for another piece of shared wisdom: Create tethering for yourself before your Departure, before you enter The Sacred Dark.

Tethering includes any stabilizing force to ground you as you adventure through the unknown. Aaron, for example, took mental inventory of the aspects of his life that would remain unchanged, from his marriage to his community. Bristol knew she could lean on her family and the alumni network for support. At the time, I had my professional identity as an anchor even as my geography shifted.

Other practices for tethering include: anticipating potential destabilizing changes (aging parents, menopause) that may draw your attention; revisiting or clarifying your vision or values to provide yourself a guide through the unknown; reflecting on questions to frame the journey ahead: What transformation has life been preparing me for? What new way do I want to see or experience myself?

Tethering doesn’t eliminate the unknown—it just ensures you’re not navigating it completely unmoored.

My much younger self (I moved to New York in 2010) hadn’t acquired this wisdom, but the universe was watching over me, and I was well tethered as I set out on that journey.

As students of transformation, our job is to take it one step at a time, starting with the internal response.

What does this stage of transformation look and feel like?

I’m excited to employ a new word to describe what The Call felt like: stiction.

Stiction (a portmanteau of the words static and friction) is the force that needs to be overcome to enable relative motion of stationary objects in contact. Think of it like that jar of olives that seems like it will never open and then, woah! If you’re me, you spill the olive brine.

When I learned this word, it felt like the perfect descriptor of what I often experience in the transition from The Call to The Departure. All of this built up stuck energy unleashes into momentum. The jar finally opens. The resistance breaks. And suddenly you’re not just thinking about transformation—you’re moving toward it.

I have also heard this moment described as an awakening, a sudden sense of urgency, derived from a shift in perspective. As Mandy described her newfound awareness: “Do it now. Anything you want to do, do it now.”

More dramatic shifts like this often follow altered states of consciousness, or being up close with the life and death cycle. These experiences amplify our awareness that life is short and we are unconditionally loved while we are here. From that place, heeding The Call of our inner knowing becomes not just possible but inevitable.

As students of transformation, our job is not only to tune into these experiences in our own lives, but to be a witness to these signs in the lives of those around us.

What comes next?

This may feel like a long journey, and it’s only the first stage on the universal map of transformation. But here’s what I want you to know: The Call doesn’t demand immediate action. It’s an invitation, not a deadline.

Your job right now? Simply notice. Listen. Pay attention to the whispers, the outside perspectives, the moments in nature when something shifts. The internal “yes” will come when you’re ready.

Once you’ve heard The Call and responded with that yes, once you’ve created tethering for yourself—then you’re ready for The Departure. And that, my friends, will be the subject of the next essay.

Until then: What Call might be trying to reach you? What are you not quite ready to hear?

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Thank you to all of the people who shared their stories and experience to contribute to this essay. All names have been changed.

If you are interested in sharing your story, or getting on the list for Transformation School, please reach out.

What if the “guidance” and “synchronicities” we experience in The Sacred Dark aren’t metaphors—they’re real, measurable connections to a field of consciousness that extends beyond our bodies?

This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s an emerging understanding in consciousness science that changes everything about how we understand transformation—and what becomes possible when we practice it.

The Paradigm Shift: Your Brain as Receiver

Last week I attended a conversation between Dan Brown, author of The Secret of Secrets, and Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Science. They were discussing the science that informed Brown’s most recent book—the science of non-local consciousness.

The model most of us grew up with, and the one that still dominates, is that the brain generates our thoughts, hopes, and dreams. Consciousness is a product of neural activity. When the brain stops, consciousness ends.

The emerging model looks at the brain differently: as a receiver, not a generator.

What if the brain is an antenna tuned to a universal field?

After decades of research, what was long considered fringe science is starting to gain traction. Scientists like Dean Radin, Lisa Miller, and Joe Dispenza are producing rigorous studies on non-local consciousness—the idea that awareness isn’t confined to the brain but extends beyond the physical limits of the body to connect with a larger field. And translators like Dan Brown—through his bestselling book—are seeding these ideas into mainstream consciousness.

I’m grateful for this work because I know not everyone operates the way I do: I can look at a pile of data and remain unconvinced. But hand me one raw experience and I’m a believer.

I’ve had many raw experiences that confirm non-local consciousness exists. My daughter’s spirit arriving in the Redwoods, asking to join our family before she was conceived. My son’s sudden curiosity about his great-grandmother—on what would have been her 100th birthday, a woman he never met. The tarot cards I pulled last week that spoke directly to my current path into the unknown.

These weren’t coincidences. They were information from the Field, received through my antenna.

You have an antenna too. And it’s already working, you may just be dismissing what you receive as coincidence, or weird timing. What if you started paying attention?

The Star Compass: Revealing Your Navigation System

I’ve been developing a universal map for transformation that articulates the stages we all move through when navigating threshold experiences. At the center of that map is something I call The Star Compass—the emergent navigation system that guides us through The Sacred Dark.

Listening to people’s stories, and reading ancient texts, the constellation of the Star Compass is clear: synchronicities, divine presence, intuition, guidance, an unexplainable knowing. Every account I’ve heard suggests that the constellation forms when you slow down, relax your attention, let your eyes adjust to darkness, and learn to see by different stars.

But here’s what the conversation between Dan Brown and Dean Radin clarified for me:

The Star Compass assumes non-local consciousness.

It’s not a metaphor. It’s an actual tuning-in to the universal field. When we talk about “receiving guidance” or “following synchronicities,” we’re describing real information from a source beyond our individual minds.

The Star Compass is the symbolic language of the universe.

There are many ways to be in dialogue with this symbolic language. My own Star Compass currently includes:

• Prayer – staying open to and receiving guidance

• Embodied Practices - ecstatic dance, labyrinth walks, breath work

• Nature Listening – subtle reminders that come through from more-than human world

• Wisdom Systems – triangulation through archetypal wisdom and timing (tarot, astrology, oracle cards...)

• Containers – a coach, new moon circle and other communities that came to me through deep intuition

• Human Design – honoring my energy as a projector, designed to wait for invitations (and they come)

I understand if these sound like superstitions. But here’s the thing: you’ve experienced this, even if you don’t name it this way. And you can continue to tune your receiver.

Try this:

Think about some of the most important decisions you’ve made in your life. How did you actually make them?

Maybe you made a pros and cons list. Maybe you did research. But chances are, the rational analysis didn’t get you to the answer, it helped you justify your intuition.

You just knew.

That knowing didn’t come from thinking harder. It came from somewhere else.

What if you reauthorized that part of yourself? The part that asks for guidance, that looks within, that just knows. What if you trusted it as much as you trust data and analysis?

That is the energy of The Star Compass.

Why This Matters: Transformation Is Pro-Social

I’ve been listening to transformation stories—understanding the quality and texture of the stages people move through and what supports their journeys. One thing strikes me consistently:

Journeys of transformation are inherently pro-social.

People who move through The Sacred Dark don’t emerge more self-focused. They emerge more compassionate. More interested in service. More able to hold complexity and paradox. More connected to something larger than their individual survival.

This isn’t random. It’s the universe’s architecture.

When you practice accessing non-local consciousness—when you experience yourself as connected to a field larger than your individual mind—it fundamentally shifts how you relate to others. You can’t experience that kind of connection and remain purely self-interested. The boundaries soften. The zero-sum thinking loosens.

From a story I listened to this week:

“Since getting sober, I’m doing things I never would have imagined I would do. Someone presented the idea of going to prison to visit incarcerated people. To look them in the eye, and just listen. It is one of the most meaningful things I have ever done. You can be free in your heart and still be locked up in prison...One of my favorite definitions of humility: It’s not thinking less of myself, it’s thinking about myself less.”

He didn’t become more compassionate through rational analysis—he accessed something larger through recovery. He tuned his receiver. And that access fundamentally changed who he is and how he shows up in the world.

This connects to what Dan Brown and Dean Radin discussed in their conversation:

The materialistic paradigm is nihilistic. If consciousness ends at death, if we’re separate biological machines competing for resources, then the rational strategy is to amass what you can in your 87 years. Secrets maintain power. Competition is survival.

But if the science shows that consciousness continues beyond death? That we’re nodes in a connected field? That this life is one stop on a longer journey?

As Brown said: “That changes everything. Society will transform. It will be a much different world.”

From Boardrooms to Breakfast Tables: Tuning the Antenna

So why don’t we already operate this way? Why do boardrooms run on spreadsheets and politics instead of tuning into the Field?

Because we’ve been trained out of it.

“Be rational.” “Trust only what you can measure.” “Intuition isn’t real.”

We’ve built a system that rewards ignoring the Field and punishes tuning into it. We call people who access non-local consciousness “woo” or “irrational” or “not serious.” We’ve professionalized decision-making to exclude the very dimension that might hold our most important information.

But the Field doesn’t go away just because we ignore it. It’s always there, offering guidance, showing us timing, revealing what wants to emerge. Entering The Sacred Dark simply teaches us to access it again—to trust the knowing that goes beyond the thinking mind.

Now imagine if we brought this explicitly into collective decision-making.

Not replacing analysis with prayer. But adding a dimension most groups are missing: access to information beyond what individual minds can compute.

Imagine an executive team facing a tough decision. Instead of just analyzing data and arguing positions, someone says:

“We have a difficult choice to make. Before we decide, let’s take a moment of silence. Let’s ask for guidance toward the highest good—not just for shareholders, but for every living being affected by this decision.”

This isn’t naive. The most effective leaders I’ve worked with already do this. They “sleep on it.” They “go for a walk.” They say “I need to sit with this.” They’re tuning into the Field, accessing information their rational minds can’t provide about timing, unintended consequences, or what’s trying to be born. And then discerning what the information is guiding them towards, and choosing how to respond.

What if we made this explicit? What if we taught it as a skill? What if we normalized it in families, teams, organizations, governments?

The Work Ahead

Here’s what I’m coming to understand: transformation practices aren’t self-help. They’re not about optimizing your individual life. They’re training for the world we need to build.

Every time you practice tuning into the Field—through prayer, meditation, sitting in silence, asking for guidance—you’re strengthening your receiver. You’re learning to access information beyond what your individual mind can hold.

And every time you do this, you become a little more compassionate. A little more service-oriented. A little less driven by fear and scarcity.

This is the path to collective transformation. Not through convincing everyone of the right beliefs, but through each of us learning to navigate by the Star Compass—trusting that the Field is real, the guidance is available, and we’re all connected to something much larger than our individual minds.

A deep bow to all of the teachers and guides, explorers and storytellers who inspired this essay.

Not a step-by-step guide or a linear process, but a territory we all move through—whether we’re navigating divorce, professional reinvention, organizational change, or cultural upheaval.

For the past few years, I’ve been studying transformation at every scale: personal, professional, organizational, cultural. I’ve been living my own 8.5-year journey through professional and identity transformation. I’ve been witnessing others map their experiences. And I’ve been researching what contemplative traditions and initiation practices teach us about navigating the unknown.

Here’s what I keep finding: the map is the same. The stages are universal. Only the signature is unique.

Let me show you.

The Universal Map

Here are the five territories every transformation moves through:

1. Receiving the Call
The point of rupture, the threshold. The call can be catalyzed externally—divorce, diagnosis, job loss, AI, tariffs. Or internally—a deep soul longing that lets you know you’ve outgrown the life you’ve known.

2. Casting Off
The threshold into the unknown, leaving the shores of the familiar. Sometimes this happens instantly (the sudden nature of external events). But often there’s a delay: time to handle logistics that keep the mind in familiar territory, or time to build courage to depart a marriage or career.

3. The Sacred Dark
The realm of the unknown—a place of mystery, dreaming, and possibility, as well as confusion, discomfort, and disorientation. This is where vision is born, where we reconnect to the soul’s deepest longing without the noise of the familiar. Contrary to common belief, this is not an inward journey alone. It is a journey of expanding the self into its widest and most exalted form—of allowing the relational field to emerge that affirms self-worth, belonging, reverence for life, and sacred knowing.

4. The Star Compass
The navigation system for The Sacred Dark. An emergent constellation that forms over time to guide us deeper into the unknown. The Star Compass cannot be project managed. It’s on its own timeline, emerging the more you trust it, and respond from a place of resonance. For some, it’s synchronicities. For others, daily practices. For others, people who witness what you can’t yet see in yourself.

5. Anchoring the Transformation
The process of rebuilding a familiar landscape—but one that’s broader, more expansive, with choices previously unimaginable. Like the hero’s journey, it’s when the medicine of The Sacred Dark becomes a gift you can offer others. But anchoring isn’t the end. The map remains. New calls will come. You’ll cast off again. The difference is: you’ll know the territory.

Why This Map Matters

I’ve witnessed many people map their transformative experiences—divorce, job loss, health crises, the rupture of Covid. What strikes me is how many feel they missed the opportunity to transform.

Life handed them a threshold, and for whatever reason, they snapped back to the familiar as quickly as possible. Life looks more or less the same as it did before the rupture.

Francis Weller would say they “wasted a perfectly good heart attack.”

We tend to admire people when they’re on the other side of a rupture—when they’ve taken a big leap, made a choice that previously felt unimaginable. Those choices are the result of relating to rupture as threshold, not tragedy. They’re the result of a supported initiation—having the guidance, container, patience, presence, discipline, and faith to allow The Sacred Dark to do its work, rather than rushing back into the light.

This work is not for the faint of heart.

I’m sure we’ve all wasted a perfectly good heart attack.

Or maybe—and this is important—life was exactly as we wanted it to be. And the heart attack just woke us up to that reality. Fortified our gratitude for what is. I wouldn’t call that rupture a waste. I would call it a wake-up call.

Either way, the map remains. Understanding it helps us recognize where we are and what’s needed. It helps us support others navigating their own thresholds. It helps us practice voluntary descent before involuntary rupture forces us through.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Here’s a composite story from the mapping work I’ve been doing:

Sarah received the call when her company restructured and her role disappeared. She spent three months applying for similar positions, trying to recreate what she’d lost—the delay before casting off. Finally, she stopped applying and gave herself permission to not know what was next, to ask deeper questions. She cast off into The Sacred Dark.

For months, she felt unmoored. She tried journaling, therapy, long walks. Nothing seemed to work until she stopped reaching and started receiving. Slowly, synchronicities emerged: a friend mentioned a program she’d never heard of, a book sparked an old interest, a stranger at coffee asked a question that cracked something open. Her Star Compass was forming.

Eventually, she began building something new—not a return to her old role, but work that integrated parts of herself she’d kept separate for decades. She anchored a transformation that expanded who she could be. She emerged different, wider, with choices she couldn’t have imagined before the rupture.

The map was the same. The signature was uniquely hers.

My Own Journey Through the Map

I received the call 8.5 years ago, after my son was born. I’ve been in and out of The Sacred Dark since then. I’ve anchored some transformation—I’m not the same person I was in 2017. But the call to transform remains, which brings me back to The Sacred Dark yet again.

This is what I’m learning: identity transformation is the work of a lifetime. At a macro scale, we move through the map over decades—birth, midlife, death. At a micro scale, we move through it in specific experiences—the loss of a relationship, a career transition, a health crisis.

And here’s what surprises me daily: that having tools doesn’t mean using the tools to navigate The Sacred Dark. The unknown is disorienting. Even as I study the map, write about it, and teach it, I can lose touch with my ability to access what I know.

This is why I’ve been prototyping curriculum for Transformation School—a body of practices and prompts for learning to navigate The Sacred Dark, not through expert guidance, but by becoming your own teacher, and with the support of a community. One of the prompts is to map your own transformation journey, noticing when you were in the known versus the unknown.

What emerges is never a clean before and after. Instead, people discover they were holding multiple realities: one part of life dissolving, another part providing steady ground. One part of life transforming, and rippling into other dimensions. Occasionally, our entire lives are thrown wholesale into the unknown. But more often, there are constants—family, community, daily routines—that hold steady while one dimension transforms.

The Star Compass: How We Navigate

How do you navigate in the dark?

As we settle into The Sacred Dark, slow down, and let our eyes adjust, we develop new sight. We learn to navigate by different stars.

Some people orient by basics—sleep, movement, nourishment—the anchors that keep the body steady when the mind is unmoored.

Others tune to synchronicities: the unexpected phone call, the book that falls off the shelf, the stranger who says exactly what you needed to hear.

Others build daily practices: prayer, morning pages, deep listening. The rituals that create rhythm when everything else is chaos.

Still others find their constellation in relationship: a guide, a circle, witnesses who hold what you can’t yet hold yourself.

The tools are less important than the practice of trusting them. Each person forms their own Star Compass. But we all need one.

The universal map is what allows us to support each other—even when our specific journeys look nothing alike. We can recognize the territory. We can say: I know where you are. I’ve been there. Here’s what helped me find my way.

Learning to Be Your Own Teacher

Transformation School is about learning to study your own map, to build faith in your ability to navigate The Sacred Dark. To trust that the tools will emerge when you need them. To know that casting off into the unknown, while terrifying, is also where everything that wants to be born can emerge.

I don’t know much about what’s ahead in 2026, but I feel certain we will all need that faith. And my deep hope is that we create and sustain that faith together, and hold each other across the thresholds ahead.

How do we build faith in our ability to navigate the unknown? How do we learn to trust that descent won’t destroy us?

We practice.

Last week I left the realm of the familiar and landed in Placencia, Belize—a narrow peninsula between the Caribbean Sea and a lagoon, 16 miles of tropical unknown. Our family’s chosen Thanksgiving tradition: skip the turkey, leave the country, practice stepping into new terrain together.

We arrived late at night. I couldn’t see the shape of things yet, but I could feel and smell the tropics. Enough to know I’d departed my known environment and entered something else.

Recognizing the Pattern

Our first morning, we set out in search of the nearest grocery store. As we were greeted by uniformed schoolchildren and our mouths watered at the smell of fry jacks, I felt myself descend into familiar emotional terrain.

This low-key depression is my body’s response to the initial experience of otherness—a pattern I’ve learned to recognize from travels all over the world. It is an experience of disorientation as I am finding my bearings as an outsider, settling into the rhythm of ‘Bilezean time’, feeling uncertain of my welcome, and aware of the detritus of American culture that precedes me.

But here’s what years of travel have taught me: I can recognize this state, name it for what it is, and trust my soul to hold both the beauty and the difficulty. The sunrise and the litter. The big smiles and the jaded eyes. The discomfort and the vitality.

This is the first gift of travel: learning to stay present with disorientation instead of fleeing it.

Travel is Perspective Work

Travel literally shifts our vantage point—and in doing so, it shifts what we can see about ourselves, and how we perceive our world.

Standing on that narrow peninsula, I could see both the Caribbean and the lagoon at once. Two bodies of water, two horizons, held in a single view. The lifelong lesson in this was nearly screaming at me: You can hold multiple truths simultaneously. You do not have to collapse into either/or.

Back home in Petaluma, I’ve been wrestling with my professional identity, and whether I have truly stepped into the space of transformation. My hypothesis has been that as long as the familiar is available, I have not entered The Sacred Dark. I have made myself wrong for clinging to known roles and titles. But here, surrounded by locals who move fluidly between Creole and Spanish, share stories of Mayan culture and corrupt governments with equal enthusiasm, and ride the seasonal waves of agriculture and tourism, I could feel my either/or thinking soften.

This is the medicine of perspective work: not just seeing differently, but being changed by what we see.

The medicine is available without getting on an airplane—in the sacred container of prayer, under the night sky, wrapped in the arms of a fleeting life, from the depths of a visualization, or in an altered state of consciousness.

But travel offers something particular: it expands the terrain from which we can see.

The Structure of Initiation

The book that accompanied me on this journey was Francis Weller’s latest series of essays, In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty. In the first essay, titled “Rough Initiations,” he outlines the circumstances that occur in any genuine initiatory experience:

We leave the world that was known. The diagnosis, the accident, the death of a beloved, all shatter the world we once occupied.

There is a radical alteration in our sense of self. The familiar self is shaken and disrupted. We don’t know who we are anymore.

There is a realization that nothing will ever be the same. We can never return to the world that was. We are left radically changed by the encounter.

The stakes of my tropical vacation are not the same as the death of a beloved—but the structure is identical. This is precisely why travel matters as practice.

We leave the world that was known. In Belize, I left my routines, my roles, my pace, my familiar coordinates. Just as divorce or diagnosis forces us to leave the world we once occupied.

There is a radical alteration in sense of self. Without my usual identity markers—community member, coach, teammate, school volunteer—I had to discover: who am I here? Just as involuntary rupture forces this question.

There is a realization that nothing will ever be the same. Even now, back home, something has shifted. The part of myself that knows how to hold multiplicity is awake again. Just as we can never return to the world before the rupture.

Travel is low-stakes descent for high-stakes transformation. We choose the disorientation, knowing we’ll return home in a week. But our nervous system doesn’t know that. It experiences the uncertainty of the unknown. And in doing so, we build our capacity to stay present when the real opportunity to transform presents itself.

Required vs. Optional Transformation

Life presents us with two kinds of transformation: required and optional.

The required ones come for us all. Death. Diagnosis. Divorce. Job loss. These threshold moments won’t take no for an answer. They force us into the unknown whether we feel ready or not.

But there’s another kind: the optional transformations. The ones we choose to enter. The sabbatical. The vision quest. The entrepreneurial leap of faith. The travel that’s more than vacation.

These optional descents are how we build faith in our ability to navigate the unknown.

They’re dress rehearsals for the inevitable ruptures. When we choose disorientation—whether it’s a week in Belize or two hours at yoga—we teach our nervous system: I can leave the familiar. I can tolerate not knowing. I can trust the unfolding.

This explains why I keep getting on airplanes with small children. Not despite the cramped legroom and the exhaustion, but because of it. Every voluntary descent builds my capacity for the involuntary ones that will come.

And they will come. For all of us. The question is: will we have practiced?

I have entered The Sacred Dark, the stage in transformation that feels uncertain, unknown, untethered. While I can still feel the pull back to the familiar, day by day, I am finding my way. My eyes are slowly adjusting to the dark, and I am starting to sense the bounds of the unknown space around me.

I would characterize this transformation as more chosen than forced. Which means it takes real presence and attention to stay in The Sacred Dark, to trust that a brighter light will emerge on the other side. In other words, to continue to do the hard and real work of studying transformation—treating my life as a laboratory—rather than spending my days networking, chasing leads, or panic-applying for jobs I don’t actually want.

My ability to stay present in The Sacred Dark is the work.

If I can’t stay present to and believe in my own transformation, how could anyone else?

How can the universe guide me on a path I am not committed to?

This daily practice is 8 parts surrender and 2 parts paying attention: the work of noticing, and making subtle adjustments that allow me to endure the discomfort of the unknown.

‘Why endure?’ you might ask.

Seeking a new snail shell

talks about the ongoing process of “deciding when it’s time to discard the snail shell of a too-small story and when to move into something that fits you better instead.” This metaphor captures the feeling I am experiencing: pushing up against the edges of the familiar. Or, more acutely, like something is trapped inside of me that is trying to get out.

While it might temporarily feel good to snap back to the known, I know that I will inevitably find myself in this space of transformation. As noted in a prior essay, this journey is 8 years running, and I have tried to leave the shore of the familiar more than once. The discomfort is present either way; returning to the familiar is nothing more than prolonging the inevitable.

Putting on a scuba mask

When we find ourselves descending—feeling more than we want to feel, getting too close to the core wound—it’s common to pull back up to the surface and gasp for air. This tendency is akin to what I am describing as the pull of the familiar. But the work of transformation requires a different choice.

When I was completing my masters certification in Transformational NLP (neurolinguistic programming), one of my teachers—Carl Bucheit, PhD—shared a metaphor that not only stuck with me, but also continues to inform my hypothesis about The Sacred Dark. He said,

“When you feel yourself going down, put on your scuba mask and keep going. Eventually, you’ll come out on top.”

The depths of the ocean are a place of incredible pressure and darkness. And the creatures who survive there evolve to emanate their own light. We are no different. Here’s what I know in my bones, even if I can’t yet prove it:

The deeper our experience in The Sacred Dark, the greater the transformation.

Staying present in The Sacred Dark is a process of peeling back layers, removing noise, emptying out. A one-day detox does not produce the same results as a full-on elimination diet. My deepest desires, my whole self—she is buried down there somewhere, and only I can spend the time allowing for her to come through.

As I descend deeper into The Sacred Dark, here are three lessons I am carrying forward. Perhaps they will be useful on your journey as well.

The ego’s grip

Who’s in charge if not the ego?

My theoretical idea of The Sacred Dark was that it’s a place where the ego would step down, or at least step back. What role could ego possibly plan in the deep, dark unknown?

Instead, I am finding that the work of separating my egoic self from my soul self is constant. My egoic self is conditioned to logic my way to an answer. My soul self is quiet, open hearted, a listener.

My egoic self: You name it, you own it.
My soul self: What is missing here?

My egoic self: Get out in front.
My soul self: Be open to guidance.

The ego’s job is to maintain identity coherence.

The Sacred Dark is a rupture in our identity’s coherence.

With time, I am experiencing more clarity and conviction from my soul self. But it is a moment to moment practice to notice which self is in the driver’s seat, the origin of my thoughts and actions.

When ego is driving, I feel contracted, urgent, reaching. When soul is present, there’s spaciousness, even in the uncertainty.

The lesson: The ego doesn’t disappear in The Sacred Dark—it must be coaxed along, moment by moment, choice by choice.

Resistance tolerance

Can small choices help to prepare for big change?

Last weekend, I had a rare half day to myself. What might seem the obvious use of this time (Treat yourself! Take a nap! Go shopping!) is not readily on my menu. Productive Ashlea runs the show, and she was ready to attack the list.

From The Sacred Dark, my daily practice has served as a pattern breaker. It has pulled me out of autopilot. While the urge to attack the list was strong, my noticing was stronger. There is a 2+ hour yoga class on Sundays with live music, a consistent community, and deep soul. I haven’t been in years (since becoming a mom of two.)

I went to yoga.

This is such a small, quotidian example. However, the resistance for two plus hours was real. And, the reward for enduring it was also real. I felt reborn that afternoon.

My capacity for discomfort ticked up a notch that day.

The lesson: Journeys through The Sacred Dark require us to build our resistance tolerance—not through one big brave act, but through small, repeated choices to stay present with discomfort.

Glimmers of light

How can we develop the discipline to hold possibility?

The stars are only visible when the night is dark.

This is my experience with glimmers of light—of new and previously unimaginable possibilities—starting to shine through in The Sacred Dark. These glimmers of light are slowly forming a constellation that feels like my own personal navigation system, my Star Compass. But it’s one thing to spot a glimmer of light, and another to hold the constellation in view, and navigate by it.

My experience is echoed in this beautiful line from an Ann Patchett’s personal history, Glowworms, in the September issue of The New Yorker:

“That’s the thing about your own death—you can hold the truth of it for only a few minutes, and then it reverts back into abstraction.”

Glimmers of light are starting to come through. Possibilities of what might be on the other side of this transformation are starting to take shape. But it takes real discipline to hold the truth of those possibilities for more than a few minutes, and to make choices that navigate toward them.

The lesson: The Sacred Dark requires a delicate balance between surrender and discipline, allowing possibilities to emerge while holding the truth of them.

These are a few of the lessons I’m learning by staying present in The Sacred Dark—by building resistance tolerance one yoga class at a time, by noticing when ego grabs the wheel, by practicing holding possibility even when it slips from view.

Collectively, these lessons, along with being a witness to other people’s transformation journeys, are shaping my vision for Transformation School, and the critical role of The Sacred Dark. Thank you for meandering with me through the depths. Stay tuned for more.