This time of year - the cusp of autumn - has me thinking about thresholds.
We all experience threshold moments in our lives—moments that change the trajectory of our lives or forever change our relationship to life.
Usually, those thresholds are figurative. A marriage. A birth. A death. A diagnosis. A decision to leave, begin again, or step into something unknown.
But every once in a while, a threshold is also literal.
Five years ago today, after struggling for over a decade with substance use disorder, my son Jordan crossed the literal threshold of an addiction recovery center and began a journey that would completely change the trajectory of his life.
He embraced the 12 Steps. He took the work seriously. And today, Jordan is living a life that I once wasn’t sure I would ever see him live. He has built a life of purpose and connection, found meaningful work, fallen in love, and created a future of his own.
Finding yoga was a figurative threshold moment for me.
And yoga has taught me to pay attention to threshold moments.
Every practice contains thresholds: the pause between an inhale and an exhale, the moment before we move, the edge of a pose, the moment when we choose whether to stay or move.
Yoga doesn’t promise us that we will know what happens next.
Instead, it invites us to become present enough to notice what is happening now.
To breathe.
To listen.
To stay.
And then, when we’re ready, to take the next step.
This weekend, I crossed another figurative threshold of my own.
I completed Y12SR Peer Support Guide training.
Y12SR uses the somatic practices of yoga to support the cognitive behavioral work of 12-Step recovery.
Jordan’s work with the 12 Steps has shaped the way I understand yoga. Y12SR training helped me see more clearly how those worlds can come together in a way that can effect profound change.
And I have a feeling it is going to change the trajectory of my yoga teaching, too.
Over the summer, I started working with a group of women at an addiction recovery center. It has been the most gratifying work I’ve done over the 10+ years that I’ve been teaching. My goals for taking Y12SR training was to better serve these women, to make our practices more meaningful to them, and perhaps to expand my work in this realm.
I don’t know exactly what that will look like yet. That’s the interesting thing about thresholds. We rarely know, when we’re standing on one side of them, what will be waiting for us on the other.
Five years ago, Jordan crossed a threshold. This weekend, I crossed one, too. Neither of us knew exactly where the next step would lead. But we stepped through. And we keep stepping.
And that’s what life asks of us: not certainty, not guarantees, not knowing exactly how the story will unfold - just enough trust to take the next step.
We don’t have to see the whole path. We don’t have to know what comes next.
Sometimes we simply have to be willing to cross the threshold.