Navigating Liminality in a Time of Initiation
Next week, I’m moving to Greece.
A new country, a new life, a new expression of work that has been quietly forming for longer than maybe I’d like to admit.
I’ve visited Greece several times over the past few years and it is a place that holds a sacred energy for me. Though I’ve had very powerful experiences in the country, I never really expected to make Elláda (Ελλάδα) my home. My transition is happening as a direct response to an inner calling—and I’m listening.
As someone who guides leaders through some of the most significant transitions in their lives, I anticipated that this move would come with a healthy dose of inner work and introspection. But didn’t expect just how much this move would surface within me. Old patterns I thought I metabolized. Beliefs I thought I had finally outgrown. Emotional signatures that I thought I was over with.
All of these are versions of myself at the threshold, asking to be finally seen before they are released.
I am, in the most honest sense of the word, grieving.
Not because I don’t want this. I know I am fully guided. My soul has been preparing me for this chapter for years. I feel it in my bones. But grief and excitement can co-exist in the in-between. The liminal space where the old identity no longer fits and the new one hasn’t fully arrived.
The ancients understood moments like these.
The Greeks have two words for time. The first is chronos, which refers to the measurable, sequential kind of time that our clocks, calendars, and deadlines are synced to. It runs most of our lives.
The second is kairos, which refers to an appointed moment or sacred opening. Kairos is the point of convergence when something that has been building finally becomes possible. Kairos is not a moment you can schedule. It’s one you either recognize…or miss.
April feels like a kairos moment. This month, we will have seven planets transiting through Aries ushering in a potent initiatory fire that many of us haven’t felt in years. In the next few weeks, there is a powerful energy pressing us toward new beginnings, toward boldness, toward our next chapters. You may be feeling it as urgency or restlessness. You may be sensing that something needs to move now.
Or you might be feeling exhausted. (By the way, those two experiences could both be happening simultaneously).
Now is the time to be honest with ourselves and to take actions that are aligned with our soul’s path. We’re moving through a threshold. A portal of our Becoming.
The ancient Greeks new that these important moments in time—kairos—were presented in our lives, but not without an inner change.
Threshold moments require transformation to happen first.
Metanoia, another Greek term, which literally means “beyond mind,” is a fundamental shift of the whole self. It is a transformation of the interior operating system so complete it reorganizes how you see, how you lead, and how you move through the world. In Greek mythology, Metanoia accompanied Kyros everywhere, representing that the opportune moments and the moment of inner transformation were not separate events, but dependent on one another.
Metanoia is often associated with the grief of missing an opportunity, but it is more precisely understood that the overall experience of metanoia is a reflective act in which a person returns to a past event to see it anew. It often instigates an emotional response (like guilt or regret), but ultimately, this emotion leads to reflection and thus, is the motivating force that leads to transformation. Rhetoric scholar Kelly Myers (2011) argues, metanoia is the affective dimension of kairos—the inner transformation without which no outer opportunity can truly be seized.
You cannot truly step through a threshold if you haven't done the interior work of releasing what you’re leaving behind.
This is where so many leaders get stuck in a season like this one.
The initiatory pressure of this Aries season is real. The kairos is real. But if you haven’t yet moved through your own metanoia—if you’re still mid-grieving an identity, still running on an operating system that was built for who you used to be—that energy has nowhere clean to land. It becomes anxiety. False starts. Decisions made from the old self trying to engineer its way into the new chapter. You end up moving fast in the wrong direction. Or you freeze entirely, sensing that something is off but unable to name it.
These moments can bring up a lot of grief. I know this because I am actively in it. While I am excited to begin my new chapter in Greece, I am actively grieving old identities. I’m holding space for what’s ending and the deep soul-level knowing of what’s beginning.
What I’ve learned, personally and in years of working with leaders in significant transition moment, is this:
Clarity doesn’t come from pushing through the in-between faster. It comes from moving through it honestly. Letting the old identity be properly honored and released. Letting the grief be real without letting it make the decisions. Letting the soul’s direction be trusted even when the mind wants a more legible map.
Only from that settled place can the kairos moment be truly met.
This is what I see in the leaders I work with.
The founder who has built something remarkable and now stands at the helm, sensing they’ve outgrown the very thing they created. The executive being asked to lead a transformation they haven’t fully undergone themselves. The entrepreneur in full reinvention who feels like they’re holding too much, not because the strategy is wrong, but because they are actively shifting and haven’t yet settled into who is doing the leading.
These aren’t performance problems. They’re metanoia moments wearing the disguise of strategy problems. They are moments where leaders are being asked to carry people across the threshold.
And they require something specific: not another planning session, but a different kind of clarity. The kind that comes from an honest reckoning with what’s ending, what’s being grieved, and who is genuinely emerging.
April is not asking you to have it all figured out. It’s asking you to be honest about where you actually are in the in-between. To stop performing the clarity you don’t yet have. To let the metanoia happen before you force the next move.
I’m moving to Greece. To the land where these concepts were born, where the threshold was understood as sacred rather than something to rush through.
And I’m opening a few conversations this month for leaders who sense they’re in their own threshold moment.
A Leadership Clarity Session is a 90-minute working session where you can bring the actual thing you’re carrying: the decision in front of you, the transition you’re navigating, the leadership challenge that hasn’t moved despite everything you’ve already tried.
We apply leadership strategy and spiritual intelligence using your personal astrology, directly to your situation. The session includes a precise read of your leadership design, the patterns shaping what you’re in right now, and the specific timing you’re moving through and what it’s asking of you. You’ll leave with a clear sense of what the right next move is, and why.
This session is particularly suited for this moment if you’re in the middle of a significant decision, a leadership transition, or a threshold that is asking more of you than your current thinking can resolve.
If this is your kairos moment, I’d love to support you.
Book a Leadership Clarity Session
We are all moving through an initiation portal. What our lives are going to look like on the other side…
Only time (kairos) will tell.