The Threshold
Quiz
What Soul Threshold are you Navigating Now?
Across the world's wisdom traditions, profound life transitions have been understood as potent initiations, rather than crises to be managed
or problems to be solved.
None of us are immune to navigating these soul thresholds—they are part of our universal soul curriculum. However, we do have the power to decide how we will meet them and the support we will gather around us, which can greatly affect the quality of our passage.
These sacred threshold passages separate us from our former selves, carry us through an ordeal of dissolution and transformation, and deliver us into a new state of awareness, identity, and purpose.
As Dagara Elder Malidoma Somé says: "The purpose of initiation is not to make you stronger, but to reveal to you what you already are." We become more of ourselves in this process.
After a lifetime of studying stories and ceremonies across cultures, mythologist Joseph Campbell found the same pattern at the heart of every one of them: a call to cross a threshold, a descent into the unknown, an ordeal that dissolves the old self, and a return bearing something genuinely new. He called it the monomyth, because it is the singular story the human soul has always lived out.
Studying rites of passage across hundreds of cultures, anthropologist Arnold van Gennep described three thresholds we cross in any genuine initiation: separation from the old, a liminal crossing through the between, and incorporation into something genuinely new.
Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner called the middle phase betwixt and between, where identity is temporarily suspended and we become soft clay ready to be reshaped. Some call it the goo phase, as the caterpillar dissolves before becoming a butterfly. I call this the Void phase in The Threshold Quiz.
Carl Jung saw this death and rebirth process as the journey of individuation, the painful and necessary peeling away of false selves to reveal what is most essentially true. Bill Plotkin maps it as the descent to soul: the journey beneath personality and persona into the depths where our genuine gifts and purpose are discovered and claimed.
Somé taught that these passages are the soul's most essential curriculum. Without proper witnessing and support, the initiation goes incomplete, leaving us stranded between what was and what could be.
Orienting to your current threshold
As a psychospiritual depth guide, somatic practitioner, shamanic astrologer, and initiated shamanic priestess, quiz creator Jaime Fleres has spent decades studying these wisdom traditions, undergoing her own initiatory cycles, and accompanying others through theirs.
This quiz emerged from that lived and studied terrain. It is meant to orient you and support your crossing of the particular threshold on which you may find yourself.
Though not often comfortable or convenient, every threshold passage is sacred. The only question is how consciously and how well-accompanied you choose to meet the one you are in so that it may best support your soul’s adventures in this lifetime.
Note: We are not always undergoing an initiatory process; though in this time of acceleration on the planet, many of us are. It’s okay if you can’t locate yourself in this terrain right now. But if this quiz found you, it’s likely you’ll find this assessment extremely affirming, orienting and supportive.
Rumble
Something is stirring deep under the surface that hasn’t fully come to the light of conscious awareness yet. You are being readied…
Five Thresholds We Cross in a Transformational Arc
Shed
Release and dissolution is underway, you are doing the difficult work of hospicing something in your life through its natural completion.
Void
This is the betwixt and between place, where what Has Been is complete, but the New has not yet emerged. You are in the not-knowing.
Dawn
Something new is beginning to show, but it’s small and subtle. You are learning to trust and follow the thread.
Discover which threshold you are currently crossing and gather ways to orient and resource yourself in this process
Emergence
Genuinely new territory has been discovered, you are learning to inhabit it and new aspects of your emergent Self.
FOR A NEW BEGINNING
BY John O'Donohue
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life's desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
