i cannot prevent the threshold
| I thought I was supposed to try to save you. |
| Have you ever told someone about a mistake you made or something you went through as a “cautionary tale”? Hoping that by sharing your experience, they would avoid your path; letting your word be enough to redirect them to a different experience or outcome? That used to be me. Sharing my story, over and over again, hoping that someone would listen. And by “listen,” I mean, take the story, and the lessons learned, look deep within themselves and course correct if what I said resonated and was impactful enough. There is still that thread to my work. I think I will always use story out of a desire to connect with you. But I cannot say with certainty that telling my story changed a life. Maybe it did. Maybe it has. Maybe, if nothing else, it lit a spark of recognition, of remembrance, of hope, of knowing that prompted the listener to begin to explore their own internal and external landscape in a new way. But there is a part of me who has always known that 45-50 minutes in front of an audience–or even a 10,000 character email–was going to have limited long-term effect. Because of context (often in the workplace where workplace culture is going to win out and/or in the middle of a really busy day). Because of the absence of time and repetition (the real changes in life often come from the micro choices we make again and again over a period of time). Because so many of us are experiential learners (life lessons just “hit different” if we actually walk through them for ourselves). There is a part of me who would “save” you if I could. My ego might get a big kick out of that even if I know that is codependent as heck. But recently, as I have been bringing Thresholds—my 12-week private client intensive for supporting people as they cross personal and professional thresholds—into the world, I notice something has shifted in my approach. I am not here to (futilely attempt to) save you from your threshold moments. And the part of me who craves a better world doesn’t want to save you. Because if a threshold is an invitation to return to your own wholeness, then I don’t want to interrupt that process. Just like you don’t want to interrupt a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Because if you “help” the butterfly emerge, the natural processes that prepare its wings are cut short. And the butterfly might never fly. At the same time, I don’t believe that the brutal nature of my experience crossing certain thresholds was necessary for the transformation to occur. Or it wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t been so freaking resolute in my hyper-independence. So locked in my adaptive patterns. So detached from my embodied experience that my body literally had to sit my ass down repeatedly and almost take me out of the game completely before I started to consider that I could live by different rules. Completely unaware that my nervous system adaptations were the very thing propelling me toward destruction and that there are more easeful ways to disrupt these patterns. I almost lost my way completely (and my life) because I was crossing thresholds alone without anchors to help keep me close to the shore. Without any sort of compass or navigation system or even a map. It felt like a one-way descent. I didn’t know that the processing of unbecoming and then becoming again is a universal process. I didn’t know that death and rebirth cycles happen every single day around and within us. I didn’t know that healing and transformation can be more easeful and more gentle than performance culture would have us believe. It didn’t occur to me to ask for help, support and resourcing beyond the bare minimum. I didn’t know that pleasure and play are actually critical components of nervous system healing and repatterning. I cannot prevent your threshold moments. I am not here to help you bypass the invitation. I will not help you eject prematurely from the messy middle, bypass the discomfort of uncertainty with easy solutions, or skim over the ways in which you may need to grieve and let your emotions move through you before you can move forward. That is not my job or my role. What I CAN DO is help you feel supported, held, less alone and to provide context, perspective, a gentle, yet powerful container and resourcing. I can help you begin to anchor yourself (and this moment) in the expansive potential of your own capacity for wholeness. If parts of you are holding on for dear life with protective mechanisms that are keeping you stuck, I can help you practice releasing your grip in reverent and contained space.If you pull yourself up from the ground of the familiar, I can help you hold the belief that more nourishing soil is available.If you feel unrooted, I can help you tend to your exposed roots.If you are shedding old versions of yourself or discovering new ones, I can help you honor where you have been and integrate your fractures. I can guide you through the process of working with your nervous system to dissolve outdated patterns and to let new stories and capacities emerge. I can reassure you that you are doing great. That your innate, soul level self hasn’t been lost. That your dreams and desires matter. … that creation is possible … that the universe is conspiring in your favor. I can remind you that, as Elizabeth Gilbert says, “There is no such thing as one-way liberation.” The path to the life you want to create is through the threshold. The path to a different way of being and receiving in the world is through the threshold. The path to new creation is through the threshold. More information on Thresholds is below. If you have any questions not answered there, please let me know. Love, Booth |