A Warm Welcome.

“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life… with the false assumption that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning...”

Carl Gustav Jung

There is a particular kind of moment that is hard to name.

Something quieter than an obvious crisis, or breakdown. The work still gets done, the calendar still fills, and from the outside everything holds. But something underneath has shifted, and the usual answers or methods no longer reach it. You find yourself asking questions you can't quite finish: about what you're doing, who you’ve become, what you actually want now, or what will be after this?

Or the opposite: something has cracked open, and the ground you stood on is simply gone.

We are often encouraged to find the right method, or to think our way to clarity. Though much of life doesn't work that way. We are unique: shaped by what we've lived, what we've lost, what we were praised for and what we learned to hide. At certain points, the strategies that carried us this far stop carrying us. And thinking harder doesn’t bring us closer. Something else is being asked of us.

This is what I write about here. The in-between.

Where something has ended, or is asking to, and what comes next hasn't taken shape yet. 

I write about them as the places where something true tends to begin, not as problems to solve. About what tends to open up. About awe, and the dreams that went quiet. About what the body knows before the mind catches up. About why protective patterns are intelligent rather than broken. About the beauty of imperfection. About grief, exhaustion, and the strange disorientation of becoming someone slightly different. About how inner change mostly happens: slower, less linearly, and more relationally than we're usually told. I write about the possibilities the middle yields.

What you won't find here: shortcuts, formulas, or the promise that any of this can be done quickly. What you will find is what I've learned across twenty years of walking alongside people through their own turning points, and through more than a few of my own, grounded in contemporary interdisciplinary research, lived experiences across continents, and wisdom that predates both.

I write as I work: without rush, and without arriving with the answer. My part is to offer language for what you might already be sensing, some of the science behind it, and occasionally a different angle. Sometimes I challenge. And sometimes it is movement rather than language, because the body often finds a way before the mind does.

Some of what’s here may be useful for you today. Some may sit quietly for a while and find you later.

There's no right pace for this work.

I'll keep writing about the in-between: what happens there, what it asks of us, why pain and possibility so often arrive together. And what tends to open up when we stop rushing through this time.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, or about your experiences.

With warmth,
Susanne.