Thresholds

Finding yourself at the threshold means fully embracing the change that has already touched you. It is wrapping your hand around the threads that are attached to your soul, and instead of trying to rip them off, gently pulling the thread and moving towards the mystery in front of you.

Indeed thresholds are numerous in your life. If you are sensitive, you may feel the subtle underground fibrillation of the threshold long before it makes an outward appearance in your life. The blessing and the curse of this sensitivity is that you are aware that something is changing.

There comes a time when it is empowering to name the threshold. This time may come during your passage or many years after. If you are too quick to define the threshold, and attempt to wrap your willpower of control around it, you risk getting lodged in the birth canal. You need a soft body and surrendered mind to make it through.

Just as the mother’s body titrates between contraction and recovery you too must be squeezed and released many times to make it through the significant thresholds in your life. What would it be like to fully allow the discomfort of being pushed out of something? Surrender to losing a job, a relationship or an identity you’ve held for a very long time? 

The thrust of a threshold may appear self-inflicted or as if you are an unjust victim, but it is never fully either of those. Thresholds are always the inner blueprint activated by symbols, “accidents” and captivating conversations. There is something in you that recognizes in the outer world a reflection of the signature of your soul and it beckons you to move through the threshold.

Thresholds do not stand alone. Every threshold you’ve gone through has been like a tunnel that leads into a cave, whether small or large, you are meant to explore this cave and know it intimately, and eventually another tunnel will appear. The cave may contain a flowering garden or be a spacious echoing chamber; you may love what is in this cave or you may be in profound discomfort. You may be anxious to leave the cave you’re in and be pushy with your next threshold or you may be attached to the comfort of this once womb and resist your next transition. Eventually, you must allow yourself to be rebirthed, a process that dramatically combines your desires with a calling that is beyond you.

...a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit. And I think that, very often, how we cross is the key thing… when we cross a new threshold, that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing, then, we cross onto new ground where we just don’t repeat what we’ve been through in the last place we were. — John O’Donohue in conversation with Krista Tippet on OnBeing

Your task in the cave, the spaces between thresholds, is to know yourself well. Naturally, there are parts of your psyche that expire — if you can honor them and how they protected or supported you at one point in time it makes the release possible, not always easy, but possible. 

And your task in the threshold is to honor it for the sacred journey that it is; a rebirth. Place ceremony around it and, if you have trusted co-conspirators, allow them to witness you. 

The change taking place in your life contains beauty. It likely contains pain and confusion, as well. When it is appropriate, allow your perspective to alight upon the beauty within your passage. As John O’Donohue continues to describe,

Beauty in that sense {threshold} is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.