I’ve been thinking a lot about thresholds - maybe because September felt like one long one. In July, before leaving for the John Muir Trail, I wrote that I didn’t see the journey as stepping away from my life, but stepping more deeply into it - as all my adventures feel but, this one was different. So much in my life was changing. I knew I wanted to create differently when I returned. But I didn’t really know what any of my ideas or inclining would become. What I didn’t anticipate was that returning would be its own kind of journey.
There is a strange space between who you have been and who you are becoming. The old shape no longer fits quite right, but the new one hasn’t fully formed. You can feel that something has shifted without yet having language for what it is. September felt like that.
I came home carrying a month of mountains in my body. A month of waking with the sun, drinking from rivers, carrying everything I needed on my back, watching landscapes change beneath my feet. And immediately, upon my return, I traded one long trail for another—this time supporting Rex and Geffen as they began their thru-hike of the Hayduke.
So here I am, fresh off a month in the Sierras, carrying everything that experience had stirred up in me, plus a freshly rolled ankle at the summit of Mt. Whitney, and now suddenly living in the middle of the desert with Basil—my little familiar—and very little structure around my days.
At first, I was incredibly frustrated. I had just spent a month moving my body from sunrise to sunset. Walking had become the rhythm around which everything else organized itself. Movement was how I processed. How I thought. How I moved energy. And suddenly, I couldn't really move and in the middle of nowhere, in a landscape that begged to be explored, and my body had to stay still.
Looking back now, I think that stillness became one of the most important parts of the transition. Not because I believe the injury had to happen, or because I particularly enjoyed it. But because it interrupted one of my most familiar patterns: when I don't know what to do, I move. I hike. I explore. I find another adventure. I give my energy somewhere.
This time, I couldn't. There was nowhere I had to be. No work schedule organizing my day. No trail dictating when to wake, when to walk, when to eat, when to stop. No real structure at all. Just the desert. Basil and me. And a lot of time.
Structure had to come from within me. I had to decide what my mornings looked like. When I worked. When I rested. What deserved my attention. What I wanted to create when nobody was asking me to create anything. And perhaps most confronting of all—how to sit still long enough for everything that had happened over the previous months to actually catch up with me. had spent weeks walking through the mountains thinking about a different way of living. Now, in a strange twist, I had been given almost nothing but time to practice it.
And I began realizing that creating a different life isn't only about changing the circumstances around you. You can remove the job. Remove the schedule. Remove the obligations. Drive yourself into the middle of the desert. And still bring every old thought pattern with you. The urgency. The guilt around resting. The feeling that a day needs to be productive to have been worthwhile. The instinct to fill empty space. The need to know what comes next.
There was no structure to rebel against. Which meant I had to confront the structures I had built inside myself.
September became less about returning to normal and more about asking whether I wanted to return to normal at all. My body was healing. My mind was rewriting old scripts. And slowly I started creating. The things I had spent months thinking about stopped living exclusively in notebooks and conversations and started becoming real. Not because I suddenly had some perfect plan. But because for once, I was stationary long enough to actually make them and allow myself to integrate.
There is something almost funny about that now.
I spent so much time dreaming about having the freedom to create this life—and as the spaces finally began appearing, I discovered that freedom requires its own kind of discipline. Not the discipline of forcing. The discipline of listening. Of choosing. Of staying. Of allowing an idea to become something before running toward the next one. And somewhere inside all of that, one question kept returning: How do we inhabit the space between what was and what is becoming?
There is a word for this territory: liminal. From the Latin limen — threshold. The place between. Not here anymore. Not there yet.
We encounter liminal spaces constantly: changing careers, ending relationships, beginning new ones, moving homes, becoming parents, grieving, healing, aging, traveling, changing our beliefs, shedding identities we once needed. Sometimes we choose the threshold. Sometimes life carries us there without asking. And culturally, I think we’re often taught to cross these spaces as quickly as possible. What’s next? What did you learn? Who are you now? We want the revelation. The new identity. The clean ending followed by the beautiful beginning. But nature rarely moves that way.
There is decomposition before new growth. Winter before spring. There is the chrysalis and the dark moon. There is the moment when the seed has cracked open underground and, from the surface, nothing appears to be happening at all. Maybe the threshold isn't an inconvenience between two meaningful places. Maybe it is one of the meaningful places.
September became an experiment in staying there. Instead of demanding that I immediately know what came next, I started building from what felt alive. And slowly, the things I had been dreaming about before the trail began taking shape. Not exactly as I imagined them. Maybe more honestly. What emerged were three different ways of gathering—each one exploring something I care deeply about, but in a different way.
COSMIC EMBODIMENT became a space for moving with the rhythms above us and within us — exploring lunar and astrological cycles through the body rather than only the mind. An adaptation of my signature Mid-Week Reset class.
I've always been fascinated by the rhythms moving above us and the ways they seem to echo the rhythms moving within us. The moon waxes and wanes. Planets move through their cycles. Seasons expand, peak, release, and retreat. Our bodies do too.
Cosmic Embodiment is where I want to explore that relationship—not by treating astrology as something that tells us what is going to happen to us, but as another language for inquiry.
A way to pause and ask: What is moving right now? What am I noticing within myself? What might my body have to say about it?
These gatherings weave astrology and lunar wisdom with yoga, meditation, breathwork, journaling, and embodied practice. Less about understanding the cosmos intellectually. More about feeling ourselves as part of it.
And October gives us a beautiful place to begin.
On October 10, we gather beneath the Libra New Moon—an invitation into balance, relationship, reciprocity, and the places within ourselves asking to come back into harmony.
Later in the month, we'll meet the Full Moon from the other side of that cycle.
These are practices for remembering that we don't exist outside of nature's rhythms. We are one of them.
THRESHOLD GATHERINGS became a place for marking the seasonal and human crossings that ask us to slow down, ritualize, release, remember, and begin again. The endings and beginnings that humans have marked for thousands of years. Solstices and equinoxes. Harvests. Deaths. Births. Rites of passage. The changing of seasons. The moments when one thing is becoming another.
Threshold Gatherings are spaces for those moments. Longer, more immersive experiences where we can slow down enough to actually mark the crossing rather than simply moving through another date on the calendar. Here we can wander through mythology, seasonal traditions, philosophy, ritual, nature, meditation, movement, breath, journaling, and embodied practice.
Not to recreate traditions that aren't ours to claim, but to explore the very human impulse to gather around transition—to acknowledge that something is ending, something is beginning, and we are standing somewhere between the two.
Our next Threshold Gathering feels particularly fitting after everything September taught me. Samhain.
The ancient Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season and beginning of the darker half of the year. A threshold associated with endings and beginnings, ancestors, death and regeneration, and the mysterious spaces between worlds.
I've already found myself wandering toward stories of horned and antlered beings, shedding and regrowth, the relationship between humans and the wild, and what happens when the living world begins pulling its energy underground. There is so much here I want to explore. And as the nights lengthen, we'll gather to explore it together.
AND THEN THERE IS MYSTIK. Some questions don't belong to a moon phase. Some explorations can't be contained within a single seasonal gathering. They keep unfolding. They lead to another book. Another myth. Another conversation. Another question. And I wanted somewhere for those threads to keep going.
THE MYSTIK GATHERING. A private gathering place for curiosity. For philosophy, mythology, consciousness, yoga, nature, embodiment, ancient wisdom, strange questions, books I can't stop thinking about, things I'm learning and unlearning, and conversations that deserve more than fifteen seconds of our attention.
A place where knowledge isn't collected simply so we can know more. But explored so that perhaps we can live differently because of what we discover.
The first Masterclass for MYSTIK born from all of this, fittingly, is LEARNING TO INHABIT THE THRESHOLD. It grew directly from September and the questions I found myself living inside after returning home.
We explore liminality not as something to escape, but as a landscape we can learn to inhabit. There is teaching and philosophy, meditation, inquiry, and embodied practice — ways of meeting uncertainty through the body rather than demanding that the mind immediately make sense of it.
And because this class feels like the bridge between what has been and what it is becoming, I want to leave the door open for everyone for a little while. For the next 30 days (exp. 10/31), Learning to Inhabit the Threshold is available to experience for free. No membership required. Just an invitation to enter.
Password: threshold
This month will become its own exploration. The air is changing. The light is changing. Things are beginning to die back. And instead of looking upward toward expansion, I can feel my curiosity turning toward the darker edges of the forest. Each of these spaces will meet this season from a slightly different place.
COSMIC EMBODIMENT will look upward—to the New and Full Moons and the celestial rhythms moving through the month.
THRESHOLD GATHERINGS will take us toward Samhain—the harvest, the descent into darkness, death and regeneration, ancestors, and the old stories surrounding this turning of the year.
And inside MYSTIK, we get to follow the threads even farther. Toward antlers and horns. The beings who wear the forest upon their heads. The strange symbolism of something that grows, hardens, is shed, and grows again. Toward the wild human. Myth and folklore. The thinning of boundaries. The relationship between death and life. And the question that seems to be waiting beneath all of it: What can the dark teach us that the light cannot?
I don’t know exactly where these questions will take me yet. Maybe that’s the point. September taught me that I don’t need to know what waits on the other side of every threshold before I step toward it. Sometimes the practice is simply learning to stay curious in the unknown—to notice what is falling away, what is quietly taking root, and what begins to reveal itself when we stop demanding an answer. So I’m entering October the same way: following what feels alive, letting the season lead, and trusting that there is wisdom in the darker places too. I hope you’ll wander there with me.
With love,
Jadan
