The Cosmic Crash
On the holy tantrum that comes right before the threshold — and how to tell initiation from regression.
Have you ever noticed that right before life is about to get really good, everything seems to fall almost catastrophically apart?
Not one thing. Multiple areas of our lives. And each individually might not undo us, but together, they create this unique recipe of rupture that can feel almost cruel, like life itself is out to torture us or has put us in a time-out corner.
Which is strange, because we really thought we were doing it “right.”
We thought we were doing a pretty good job with the inner work and healing.
We thought on some level maybe we would rewarded for the time and energy and devotion invested.
It can feel so profoundly unfair. I’ve watched this happen in my own life a couple of times now, and in the lives of enough women, that I can recognize where we are in the threshold map.
There is a massive tantrum right before we cross a potent threshold that has the power to shift the trajectory of our lives, to buy us back time in living what our soul considers an extraordinary life. I have seen this in myself, in every one of the women I have worked with closely or alongside in our healing journeys, and it is especially clear in retreat portals, where we are intentionally crossing an identity threshold that has been incubating for years. So, this part of us emerges in a contained environment designed for her to express herself before the crossing.
And watching the journey of so many women, I have noticed how often a cosmic crash precedes massive expansion. And is merciful, even though it feels anything but.
Life seems to have a way of adding fire to— and sometimes encouraging — this inevitable tantrum. It seems almost designed to place us directly in the center of the patterns that have been quietly death-choking the life out of us for years, that are the crux of what is holding us back.
I call this the Cosmic Crash. It is rarely one thing. It is often a combination of ruptures that converge at once, creating the precise conditions required to undo every layer of the mask, every coping mechanism of the false self. Not because we are being punished. Because we are ready. Because our system can finally handle it.
Not because we are being punished. Because we are ready. Because our system can finally handle what emerges from the basement.
But when it is happening, it can feel almost synchronistic in its cruelty. As if life itself or the divine has turned against us, dropped us, given us the silent treatment. As if every vulnerable place inside us has suddenly become exposed. As if the universe has gathered a committee and decided to kick us while we’re down. And yet when I look back on my own Cosmic Crashes, I see something else. I see life shaking me awake. I see life placing me directly in front of the threshold I had been circling for years. I see invitations disguised as catastrophes. I see my own humiliation as a form of mercy.
I see invitations disguised as catastrophes.
In my own life it has looked like heartbreak. Feeling ousted from spaces I believed were my safe havens and relationships. The implosion of dreams I had been carefully building toward for years. Relationships shifting in ways that felt wildly out of my control while simultaneously bringing every early attachment wound to the surface. Health scares. Illness and diagnosis for myself and people I love. Deaths of people I deeply love or admire. Betrayals. Ruptures that create a distinct before and after in the landscape of a life. Near catastrophic car accidents that somehow leave only a scratch. Moments where I have genuinely wondered if I was losing my grip. Moments where it all felt like too much and all I could do was crawl into the fetal position on the floor.
What strikes me now is how precise these periods are. Not just one loss, but multiple losses. Not just one challenge, but a convergence. The devastation and the beauty arriving together. The synchronicity of it. The almost miraculous specificity with which life cuts directly to the heart of what is no longer sustainable.
The Threshold Tantrum
And what follows is what I have come to think of as the Threshold Tantrum.
Because every birth has one.
Every initiation has one.
Every threshold has one.
There comes a moment when parts of us realize they cannot come (in the form they are in) where we are going. And they do not go quietly.
They are fighting for their existence, and ego death is not graceful.
It is humbling on every level.
They are railing against what they believe is the dying of the light because they do not yet know that something better exists.
The part of us still trying to earn safety through productivity.
The part of us still measuring our worth through money, status, admiration, or achievement.
The part of us that still mistakes being chosen for being loved.
The part of us that puts other people on pedestals and then feels devastated when they fall or when we knock them off.
The part of us that is still bargaining, still avoiding, still trying to outrun grief, shame, rage, longing, uncertainty.
The part of us that is still desperately trying to find a way around the threshold rather than through it.
That is the tantrum. And the closer we get to the crossing, the louder it becomes.
Life begins asking us to release what is no longer us, and every instinct in the old self screams: No. Not this. Not now. Not like this.
It’s almost as if life is saying:
You have a choice. You can suffer and loop and resist. Or you can release what is no longer you and cross.
This is where I see so many women get stuck for years. Not because they lack awareness. Not because they haven’t done enough healing. But because they don’t understand what is happening. They interpret the labor pain of initiation as evidence that something has gone terribly wrong. They start obsessing over the unique predicaments and circumstances of their lives, rather than the over-arching protective pattern itself that is in a death and rebirth process.
Should I stay or should I go?
What is the exact right decision in this situation?
Is this person worthy of me or not?
Why is this so hard for me?
They replay every detail, analyze every conversation, try harder, seek validation for every wound, look for certainty, create parallel dramas to avoid the invitation directly in front of them.
They pour their energy into understanding the physics of exactly how the Cosmic Crash happened, rather than surrendering to the labor it has already initiated and the task at hand.
Dissolution
There is a reason this stage feels like death. It is one. And the oldest maps all say the same thing: nothing new arrives without it.
The ancient alchemists called it nigredo — the blackening. Before the gold, the putrefaction. The old form has to rot down past recognition before the new one can be drawn out. The blackening is not a sign the work has failed. It is the work beginning.
The caterpillar knows this in her body.
She does not grow into a butterfly — at first, the immune system of the caterpillar attacks the imaginal cells of the butterfly swimming in her system, and she digests herself, dissolves nearly everything she was, until what hangs from the branch is not a creature but a kind of soup. Only then do the imaginal cells, dormant and waiting, organize the new body out of the ruin of the old. There is a moment in there where she is neither. Where she is liquid. That is the Threshold Tantrum at the cellular level.
And the snake goes blind before she sheds. The new skin forms beneath the old, a milky veil rises over her eyes, and for a time she cannot see where she is going. She becomes irritable. She hides. She becomes what we would call depressed. We mistake the blindness for something going wrong — when it is the surest sign the new is already underway, waiting for the old to be released in one whole piece.
The dissolving is not the detour. It is the path.
The blackening, the soup, the blindness — these are what happens right before the new.
Transition
And this is where I think childbirth and laboring out of life both offer one of the most powerful maps we have. I’ll speak to child birth as that is connected to my first hand experience.
Because there is a moment in labor called transition. Anyone who has labored during delivery, or given birth vaginally or experienced impending transition without an epidural having kicked in fully yet, likely knows exactly what I am talking about.
It is the moment right before the channel fully opens. Where the body is still contracting against who is asking to be born. The moment where many women suddenly become convinced they cannot do it. The moment where our body throws the tantrum of all tantrums. Especially when it is the first time, our body has never known what is about to happen (perhaps in theory, but never in practice).
Our ego is simultaneously also in a process of dissolution.
I remember swearing and purging. Wailing to the sky. Crying. Screaming. Snotting. Feeling sensations that were so new to my body that there was nothing to do but surrender. All self-consciousness releases. My thinking mind was off-line and completely useless. There was no “me.” There was no strategy, no figuring it out, no insight, no self-development. I was in an altered state of consciousness from anything I had known before.
Only the waves. Only the body. Only the experience itself.
And I remember feeling something else too — the veil becoming thin, a sacred hush falling over the room, the unmistakable feeling that I was not simply birthing. I was being birthed. Something was happening through me. There was no going back. And every ounce of resistance amplified the pain.
What feels important about that memory is not the birth itself. It is what it reveals.
Our bodies know how to cross thresholds. Our bodies know how to be born. Our bodies know how to die.
What we struggle with is what our dying ego does in the labor leading up to the crossing. The closer we get, the more the old self braces. The louder the mind becomes. The more desperate we are to understand, fix, control, analyze, heal, solve. The more we grasp for the identity that is already dying. The old way we organized who we are and what truth is and how to predict what’s next.
And while healing has a very important place, and is absolutely necessary to prepare for this moment, initiation asks something different of us. There comes a point where unconditional love and mirroring and a loving womb are no longer the medicine of the moment. In fact, trying to stay there and relating to that place as home after labor has started will feel like we are dying a slow and painful death.
There comes a point where understanding and preparing for the “someday” threshold is no longer the same thing as crossing it. No amount of preparation can birth the new reality. Eventually the labor itself has to happen. Eventually the old self must dissolve. Eventually we must allow ourselves to be forged. Eventually we must push for our life and all that is holy and sacred to us.
Which is why I think the final tantrum often sounds something like this:
This is too hard. I don’t want to do this anymore. This isn’t fair. Why is this happening? I hate them. I hate myself. I hate life. I hate God. I’m a failure. Fuck this.
Beneath the collapse and resignation, something else is quietly occurring. The new self is reaching critical mass. The life that is trying to emerge has become stronger than the life that is ending. The crossing has already begun.
The Medicine
If you are in that place right now, what I most want you to know is this:
You are not regressing. You are not failing. You are not being punished. You are being initiated.
And while I know how impossible that can be to feel from the inside of the Cosmic Crash, recognizing it changes everything. Because the moment you understand that you are in threshold work rather than healing work, different medicine becomes available.
You stop trying to understand yourself and your patterns.
✓ You begin practicing embodied surrender in real time, even as the basement door opens.
✓ You prepare yourself with architecture and guidance that supports the tantrums before the crossing and the new self emerging after.
✓ You seek out circles, rituals, practitioners, guides and spaces that understand death and birth as two sides of the same mystery, that do not flinch in this portal when it gets messy, wild and raw. Threshold guides, birth and death doulas. Midwives.
✓ You focus less on healing your nervous system and more on building capacity to stay with the intensity of sensation and emotion that accompany death and rebirth.
✓ You prepare by unpacking the suitcase of your life on your bed; and bless and release, donate and gift, choose what goes and what stays with reverence for what fit you for a time. You pack lighter than you think you even need.
✓ You stop arguing with the contractions and start embracing them as evidence that something magical and wild and raw and devastating and stunning is happening.
✓ You intentionally release what is already trying to leave without begging it to stay.
✓ You begin to intentionally create space for and tend grief, not as a problem, but as reverence and love and part of the gardening process.
This is not a one-time event.
This is the rhythm of a living life.
The invitation will come again and again.
New thresholds. New deaths. New births. Until the death of your physical body.
And you will realize that you have in a way also been practicing and preparing for that threshold, too.
Extraordinary new versions and potentials for your life are waiting on the other side.
If you can learn to recognize what is happening, you buy yourself years if not decades back— years that would otherwise be spent looping, resisting, suffering because you mistook initiation for regression.
It begins with something deceptively simple:
I am not regressing and failing. I am being initiated into the highest expression of who I am already becoming.
And from there, the process can become an awakening rather than a punishment. It can become both rupturous and rapturous.
If You’re In It
If you are reading this from inside your own Cosmic Crash — if something in you recognized itself here — you don’t have to cross alone.
Threshold work is an important and distinct spine of the work I do with women.
I accompany women through all of it — the call she first heals to a life of deeper expression and fulfillment, the healing and preparation, the awakening of deeper authenticity and desire, the unraveling of the costumes and masks, the crossing itself, and the building of a life from the new ground of who we are becoming.
And when it comes to the cosmic crash and tantrum right before the threshold crossing…
There is no fixing, not optimizing, not talking you out of the dissolving.
But I will walk with you through thresholds: the heartbreaks, the unravelings, the initiations disguised as catastrophe. I’ve spent years in this terrain — my own crossings and the crossings of the many women I’ve walked beside — learning the difference between the labor that wants to be tended and the suffering that comes from bracing against it.
A threshold guide is someone who has been into the dark woods enough times to stay calm and see the forest through the trees while yours are closing in.
The place to begin is a Wild Daughter Mapping Session.
It’s where we go deeper into more precisely locating where you actually are — what’s dissolving, and what’s already forming underneath, the wisdom of the protectors most rising as you get closer to making your desires a reality, the most important steps at this unique threshold, so you can move through it with far less looping and far more trust.
If something in you is leaning forward, this will be very powerful for you.
Book your Wild Daughter Mapping Session →
Use the code WILDJUNE to get $333 off when you book for my birthday month, June (very limited slots available).