A few months ago, I started asking people close to me if I could listen to their story about crossing a threshold. I had no real goal at the time, I just sensed that I needed to get outside of my experience in The Sacred Dark—the disorienting passage through the unknown that follows a threshold crossing—and to feel into other people’s experiences.

The first few stories I listened to included my uncle who is 20+ years sober, an old friend who shepherded her mom through the process of assisted dying, and a former colleague who was on the precipice of a professional leap.

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.