The Rite of Passage
There are moments in life when something within us knows: I cannot keep living like this.
Sometimes we know exactly what needs to change.
Sometimes we only know that the life we have been living no longer fits us.
Perhaps feels tight.
Useless.
With no sense.
And suddenly,
A relationship ends.
A career loses its meaning.
The identity you built your life around begins to feel too small.
The ways you once coped no longer work.
That symptom starts becoming louder in your health.
Your body starts asking for something different.
These moments can feel confusing, destabilising, even frightening.
Uncertainty appears.
And the mind starts going around many thoughts.
Because is not longer having the control.
Where am I going?
What is going to happen to everything I built and I became?
What is people, family or partner think about me?
How can I hold something between my hands, when this feels like sand running through my fingers?
But what if some of these moments are not a breakdown… and instead they are a rite of passage?
A passage from one way of being into another
The concept of the rite of passage was first identified by French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in 1909.
He observed that across cultures, societies have created rituals to mark profound transitions in human life: birth, puberty, marriage, death, initiation, and other changes in social identity.
Although these rituals differ enormously across cultures, van Gennep identified a recurring three-part structure:
Separation.
Transition.
Incorporation.
Later, anthropologist Victor Turner expanded on the middle stage, calling it liminality — from the Latin limen, meaning threshold.
The threshold is the space between one identity and another.
You have left something behind. But you haven't fully arrived somewhere new.
And perhaps this ancient framework has something to teach us about the transitions we experience today, as individuals.
Because unfortunately, not every rite of passage happens through a ceremony (even if we should honor it through a ritual).
Some happen quietly, inside the body, or some happen suddenly after holding onto for long.
1) Separation
The first stage is Separation.
It is the moment we begin to detach from an old way of being.
This doesn't necessarily mean physically leaving.
It can mean witnessing.
Observing.
Becoming aware of the patterns, beliefs, identities, relationships or ways of coping that once protected us but no longer feel aligned with our values or our higher self.
You begin to see yourself differently.
You realise: this isn't me anymore or this used to work for me. It doesn't anymore.
There can be grief here.
Because even when something is no longer nourishing, it can still be familiar and the familiar can feel safer than the unknown.
Separation is just the beginning of loosening our attachment to what was.
It’s the principle of taking perspective of oneself.
2) The Threshold
The Threshold is the space between what was and what is becoming.
Anthropologists call this state liminality.
Victor Turner described the person within it as betwixt and between: no longer fully belonging to the old state, but not yet established in the new one.
And this is often where things get uncomfortable.
You can feel that something needs to change, but you don't yet know what comes next.
The old ways of coping stop working because your entire body begins asking for something different.
What once felt familiar no longer feels nourishing.
The identity you built your life around starts to loosen, and yet, the new version of your life hasn't fully taken shape.
There is an ambiguity here that our modern culture doesn't always know how to hold.
We are constantly encouraged to know.
To decide.
To optimise.
To move forward.
But the threshold asks something different of us: Can you stay present with what it is while you don't know?
This is why transition can feel like a breakdown.
But sometimes, what feels like a breakdown is actually the breaking open of an old structure.
It is the break-through.
Something is already losing its form.
Something else is beginning to take shape.
And this is precisely where support matters.
Historically, rites of passage were rarely something a person navigated completely alone. They needed to involve teachers, elders, guides, family, shamans, community and ritual.
There was a container for the unknown.
There was someone who had walked the path before.
There was a community around the person while they were becoming.
We have lost many of these communal structures in modern life.
Mostly because of the same resistance of opening up to be held, and so we often expect ourselves to navigate our thresholds alone.
But perhaps we were never meant to.
Sometimes what we need is a net.
A person to lean on.
A healthy daily rhythm.
A supportive community.
A mentor.
A practice or a ritual that brings us back into the body.
Something we can see on the horizon when we cannot yet see the whole path.
Because the threshold isn't a place to rush through.
It is a place to learn how to inhabit yourself differently.
3) The Return.
In van Gennep's framework, this is the stage of incorporation: the person returns to their community with a new status, identity, or way of participating in life.
The passage has been completed.
But I think there is something important here for our modern understanding of transformation.
You don't return as the person who left.
You return with a new layer of yourself, but this one is a deeper one.
A new understanding.
A new relationship with yourself.
A new capacity to listen.
A new relationship with your body.
You may become more connected to your needs.
More rooted in your rhythms.
More discerning about your boundaries.
More willing to honour what is true for you.
Not because you have finally figured yourself out.
But because you have lived your way through the experience.
And this is where embodiment becomes so important: understanding something intellectually is not necessarily the same as knowing it in your body.
You can understand your patterns.
You can know where they came from.
You can read every book.
Listen to every podcast.
Learn every nervous system regulation technique.
And still find yourself responding to life from the same place.
Because transformation is not through understanding only, it is something we embody.
We take a new form.
The wisdom of the threshold
Perhaps this is why rites of passage have existed across human cultures for thousands of years.
They recognise something that modern life often forgets: change takes time.
There is a beautiful deep process between who we were and who we become.
There is a season of uncertainty.
A period where the old identity is dissolving before the new one has fully emerged.
And that space deserves to be honoured, protected and care of.
Not pathologised.
Not rushed.
Not immediately filled with another goal.
Sometimes the most transformative thing we can do is learn how to stay present within the threshold, without trying so hard to resist, prevent or control.
To listen to what the body is communicating.
To create enough safety to let an old pattern soften.
To allow something new to take form.
And eventually, to return to life… differently.
This is the work I hold space for
This is at the heart of The Art of Embodiment, my 1:1 work.
I work with people who are often somewhere between who they have been and who they are becoming.
Together, we explore the space between intellectual understanding and lived experience.
It is about developing a deeper relationship with the body that has been carrying you through it all.
Learning to listen.
Learning to feel.
Learning to recognise what is yours and what no longer is.
And gradually, learning to move through life from a more embodied place.
The purpose of a rite of passage isn't simply to become someone new, it is to return to yourself with a new way of inhabiting who you already are.
If you feel you are somewhere between the life you have outgrown and the life you are ready to embody,
perhaps this is your threshold.
Thank you for reading.
With love,
Lina
