Ritual and the Threshold: Why Marking the Crossing Changes Everything

Working with transitions is always something that I have been drawn to. These are moments in our lives when we have an opportunity to really step into a deeper knowledge and power. It's always been interesting to me that these transitions are often marked by cultural tropes that belittle us, disempower us and make us believe that we are hopelessly inept at these points, and how women often abdicate responsibility for our care to others without a second thought.

Some know this, some sense that something is off or missing, some don't sense anything at all, often disconnected from their deeper selves, and even their body.

Over the last 20 years I've noticed this manifesting in different ways. It seems as if there is a schism growing between those who know this or sense it and those who don't at all. The worst thing about this is that women are picking on women. Social media feeds off clickbait energy and to do this women are denigrating other women's choices in ways that I haven't seen before. I've seen humiliation through humour or subjugation by creating fear and doubt.

Missing rituals in life

We live in a culture that has kept the decorative versions of ritual, but stripped the deeper meaning out. The baby shower with its pastel balloons and gift lists (and too many baby grows). The retirement party with its card signed by everyone in the office and a collection often begrudgingly donated to. The birthday that marks another year without marking what that year actually meant. These are the shells of something that once had a different function entirely, and somewhere along the way we emptied them out and kept only the surface.

The result is that women move through some of the most significant transitions of their lives without consciously arriving on the other side. Birth happens, but the transition into motherhood doesn't fully land and women may get a sense that they missed out on something important. Perimenopause happens, but the threshold into the second half of life goes unmarked, unintentional, and therefore unintegrated.

Major life changes, the end of a relationship, the loss of a role that defined you, the closing of a chapter you didn't choose to close, these happen too, and without any intentional marking they tend to leave a residue. The sense of something unresolved is like loose threads, or a contribution to clutter that cannot be neatly filed away. Sometimes it can be a subtle feeling of being between parts of yourself, without knowing how to complete the crossing.

This blog may go some way to helping you understand more clearly how this impacts us psychologically.

What ritual actually does

When something significant happens without being consciously marked, the brain struggles to encode it as a genuine transition. The old self and the new self exist in an uncomfortable overlap. You have moved through the experience but you haven't fully arrived on the other side, because nothing told the brain that arrival had happened.

Ritual does something specific and functional. It creates a boundary. A before and an after. An intentional moment that says to the deeper parts of the mind: this is different now. What came before and what comes after are not the same. The intention is what matters, not the elaborateness of the ceremony. A candle lit with awareness does more psychological work than an expensive party attended without it.

This is why women so often describe feeling not quite themselves after birth. Not just because of the physical recovery or the sleep deprivation, though both of those are real. But because something profound happened to the self in those hours and nobody helped them mark the return. The crossing was enormous. The arrival went unacknowledged, and no amount of baby grows or presents will fill that sense of something missing. I've often heard the words "I just don't know who I am anymore."

It is why perimenopause can feel like being permanently between. The self that is ending and the self that is becoming are not yet the same person, and without any intentional marking of the transition, the gap between them can feel like a permanent state rather than a crossing in progress.

Major life changes, even the ones we choose, can leave people feeling subtly adrift, because the external change happens but the internal didn't. Imagine it as leaving, but not wholly arriving.

What other cultures have always understood

Every culture that has existed has marked its major transitions with ritual. This is not coincidence. It is evidence that human beings have always understood, even without the language of psychology to describe it, that intentional marking changes how a transition is experienced and integrated.

The Yoruba people in Nigeria gather elders to whisper a newborn's name into their ear at birth, an acknowledgement that the baby is a being arriving from somewhere, being welcomed into something. In Ghana the Outdooring ceremony takes place on the eighth day, when the baby's feet are dipped in water and in something bitter, because life contains both and the community says so from the very beginning. In China the full moon celebration at one month marks the end of the mother's postpartum confinement, her re-emergence into the world witnessed and celebrated by the people around her. Among the Navajo the First Laugh Ceremony gathers family around the moment a baby first laughs, the person who provokes that laughter hosting a feast, because laughter is understood as the child's first declaration of belonging.

At the other end of the reproductive years, the Maasai Emorata ceremony gathers women who have reached menopause to dance, sing and share stories, celebrating the crossing into elder status rather than quietly enduring it. The Batlokwa tradition marks the transition by giving a woman a new name, leina la bokgekelo, because the woman who has crossed is genuinely not the same woman who began the journey and deserves to be called something that reflects that. Many indigenous and pagan traditions hold a Croning ceremony, a witnessed gathering that marks the woman's arrival into the third phase of her life, drawing on the ancient understanding that the elder woman holds the deepest wisdom, the kind that only comes from having been through the fire.

Jung described the midlife transition as the most psychologically powerful of all.

The thread running through all of these is the same. A woman does not cross alone. Around her, the community she is a part of bears witness to her departure and her arrival. They form a circle around her and hold her as she moves through to the other side of her transition.

Practices that represent this didn't stop working, but we stopped valuing them. They take time, intention, organisation. They are not shortcuts and they ask something of the community.

This loss is significant, because it is greater than the individual. It signifies a loss to our wider community, the connections we make and the knowledge that has been earned through powerful experiences.

Adolescence is a powerful threshold too, but for now I'm going to focus on birth and menopause.

Birth — before the crossing comes the welcoming ceremony

In the third trimester of pregnancy there is a tradition in many cultures of gathering around the mother as she prepares to cross. Not to give her things, though generosity has its place, but to hold her and her baby. This ritual acknowledges that she is about to become someone she hasn't been before and that this deserves to be witnessed. It also welcomes the baby into the community as a person in their own right, the beginning of the journey from the womb into the world.

This is what the baby shower was once supposed to be, and what it still can be when approached with intention. A gathering of the women who will form the circle of support leads to a conversation about what the mother is moving toward. An offering can be made of something meaningful, a word, a wish, an object that carries significance, rather than a set of matching towels. Sometimes a single ball of red thread is passed around and wrapped around wrists, connecting the group, who then cut and tie the thread, wearing it around their wrist until the baby is born. When the mother looks at her wrist during labour she is reminded of the energy of the women surrounding her.

Creating your own version of this is simple. Invite the women who matter. Light candles. Choose music that means something. Sing. Ask each person to offer one thing, perhaps a representation of a resource they know the mother can draw on during birth and those early days of motherhood. Bring food for her and honour her journey.

The same principle applies at the threshold of perimenopause. A gathering, however small, of women who have already crossed and who carry that knowing in their bodies. An acknowledgement that something significant is beginning. A moment of intention before the forest gets dark.

During and after birth — the importance of closing

When you give birth, something extraordinary happens to the boundaries of the self.

The intensity of labour, the altered state you are in, the complete absorption it demands, means that parts of you extend well beyond your physical body. Sometimes it may feel as if you are outside of yourself, and even after birth you are unable to remember everything.

You are holding so much in those hours as you carry your baby into the world. There is the enormity of the crossing, a dismantling of ordinary time and wild energy that you may not have experienced before. When it is over, those parts of you may not automatically reassemble.

Women describe this consistently. A feeling of not quite being back. Of something being scattered, unlocated, slightly out of reach. It is one of the most common things I hear and one of the least addressed things in postnatal care.

In Latin American tradition there is a practice for exactly this. After birth the mother is held, sung to, her abdomen gently massaged and then wrapped tightly in shawls, one by one, until she is cocooned. The intention is deliberate and specific. It is to call the scattered parts of herself back into her body. To close what the birth opened and to mark the return as clearly as the crossing was marked. Women who experience it consistently describe a profound sense of coming home to themselves in a way they hadn't known they needed.

This principle carries into the postnatal weeks and beyond. Birth reflection and birth debrief work serves a similar function. Sitting with the story, making sense of the timeline, finding the thread of yourself through the experience, these are not indulgent. They are part of the actual journey. The integration is as important as the crossing.

Perimenopause — the crossing without definition

More women are having children later in life, which means that menopause and motherhood often overlap. In my work I see even more importance in marking these transitions so that they are independent of each other. It creates a sense of linear order that matters psychologically.

Perimenopause is also different in that it has no clear end and no clear beginning. You don't have a map in the same way as you do with pregnancy and motherhood. It can be 3 years, 5 years, even 10 years. Most people don't know they are deep into the forest until it's so dark they can't see their way forward. This is a unique challenge.

During and after menopause - calling yourself back

Perimenopause produces its own version of fragmentation. The self that is ending and the self that is becoming are not yet the same person, and the gap between them can feel enormous, particularly when the culture offers no framework for understanding it and no ceremony for marking it.

The Croning ceremony, in its various forms, acknowledges your arrival. The woman who arrives on the other side of menopause is not the woman who went in, and when we witness that we name that. Some traditions give her a new name. Some wrap her, as in the Latin American birth practice, because the body understands being held even when the mind is still finding its footing. Some simply gather women who have already crossed, and let their presence be the testimony that the forest ends and what waits on the other side is worth the crossing.

The 14th Moon ceremony marks the moment a woman has completed thirteen full moons without menstruating. It is a precise, intentional marking of arrival at the end of the transition, and a celebration of having crossed.

A simple ritual for any threshold

You do not need a community or a ceremony or a facilitator to mark a threshold. Though all of those things have their value, the core of ritual is simpler than that.

• Find ten minutes
• Light a candle
• Choose a piece of music that carries meaning for you, something that moves you, something that feels like a part of yourself you want to bring into what comes next
• Reflect on it while you sit quietly and allow yourself to think about where you actually are - not where you should be, but where you are
• What are you leaving behind?
• What are you hoping to carry forward, and what is the crossing ahead asking of you?
• When the music ends, write one intention. Think of the quality you want to bring to the crossing, the way you want to move through what's coming. One sentence is enough.

When can you do this?

This works before birth at thirty-two weeks, as a way of welcoming your baby into your life and gathering your inner resources for what lies ahead. It works monthly through perimenopause as a way of tracking the journey and staying connected to the self that is emerging. It works at any significant crossing, the end of something, the beginning of something, the moment when life has shifted and you want to meet that shift consciously rather than let it pass unacknowledged.

Repetition is what turns an action into a ritual. Anchoring it to a time of day, or something else you do regularly like a yoga or gym session, can help.

Why this matters now

Something is shifting in the cultural conversation around women's transitions. Women are reclaiming these practices not out of nostalgia but out of genuine need. There is a sense that something is seriously wrong with the structures that hold our journey through life.

The hunger for depth, for meaning, for practices that acknowledge what is actually happening rather than managing or minimising it, is real and it is growing.

Birth and menopause deserve a space within the conversation that goes beyond the medical framework and explores the psychological expression of physical change. The countless smaller crossings that make up a life, the losses and the beginnings and the moments when one version of yourself ends and another begins, these deserve it too.

The rituals were always there. In every culture, in every era, women found ways to mark what mattered. We can find our way back to that. Not by borrowing wholesale from traditions that aren't ours, but by understanding the principle underneath them and creating something that belongs to each person within each community.

The first thing you can do is simply start to notice. To connect with the changes that are happening in your life, to witness them in yourself, and then when you are ready, to explore what it might mean to have others witness that in you. That is where it begins. One candle. One piece of music. One honest intention written down.

Ready to cross with intention and support?

If this has resonated and you'd like support at your own threshold, there are several ways to work with me.

For birth: My Mindful Hypnobirthing online course provides complete psychological and practical birth preparation, including audio tracks to use throughout pregnancy and labour.

For new mothers finding their way back to themselves in the early weeks, my breastfeeding support audio tracks are a gentle hypnosis-based resource covering anxiety around feeding, support for let-down, help through the intensity of cluster feeding, and tools for the moments when it all feels overwhelming.

For menopause: My Mindful Menopause online course and audio tracks offer practical hypnosis and mindfulness-based tools for the crossing ahead, including for hot flushes, sleep and anxiety.

For one to one work with me directly, whether that's birth preparation, birth debrief, closing of the bones, or menopause support, you can find out more and get in touch here.

For practitioners: The Mindful Hypnobirthing Teacher Training is now open for July with an early bird rate of £800 until 19th June.

About Sophie Fletcher

Sophie Fletcher is a clinical hypnotherapist, bestselling author and specialist in women's threshold experiences with over twenty years of clinical practice. She works with women preparing for birth and navigating menopause, offering online courses, audio tracks and one to one hypnotherapy that address the psychological and embodied dimensions of life's most significant crossings.

Frequently asked questions

What is the closing of the bones ceremony? The closing of the bones is a postnatal ceremony with roots in Latin American tradition. After birth the mother is held, sung to, her abdomen gently massaged and then wrapped tightly in shawls, one by one, until she is cocooned. The intention is to call the scattered parts of herself back into her body after the intensity of birth, to close what the birth opened and to mark the return as consciously as the crossing was marked. Women who experience it consistently describe a profound sense of coming home to themselves. It can be offered by a postnatal doula, a practitioner trained in the ceremony, or adapted more simply by anyone willing to hold that intention with care.

What is a third trimester welcoming ceremony? A third trimester welcoming ceremony is a gathering of the women who will form the circle of support around a mother as she prepares to cross the threshold of birth. Unlike a traditional baby shower which focuses primarily on the baby, a welcoming ceremony centres the mother, acknowledging that she is about to become someone she hasn't been before and that this deserves to be witnessed. It can be as simple as a gathering with candles, music and an offering of words or wishes from each person present. Different cultures have their own versions, from the Yoruba naming traditions to the Navajo First Laugh Ceremony, all of them rooted in the same understanding that women should not cross alone.

Why does marking a threshold matter psychologically? When a significant transition happens without being consciously marked, the brain can struggle to encode it as a genuine crossing. The old self and the new self exist in an uncomfortable overlap. Intentional marking, whether through ceremony, ritual or a simple personal practice, creates a psychological boundary. A before and an after. It tells the deeper mind that something has genuinely changed and that arrival on the other side has happened. This is why women so often feel not quite themselves after birth or during perimenopause. The crossing occurred but the arrival was never acknowledged.

Are there rituals for menopause transition? Yes, and they are found across many cultures. The Croning ceremony marks a woman's arrival into the elder phase of life, drawing on the ancient understanding that the post-menopausal woman holds the deepest wisdom. The 14th Moon ceremony celebrates the completion of thirteen full moons without menstruation, a precise marking of arrival. The Batlokwa tradition gives a woman a new name to acknowledge that the woman who crossed is genuinely not the same woman who began the journey. A simpler modern version involves a candle, a meaningful piece of music, a ten minute reflection and a written intention, something that can be done monthly through perimenopause or as a single marking of the crossing once it is complete.

What did Jung say about midlife transition and why does it matter? Jung believed the midlife transition was the most psychologically significant crossing of all. In the first half of life, he said, we are largely occupied with construction, building identity, relationships, a place in the world. The second half is where the deeper work begins. Not building but excavating. Stripping back what was performed or borrowed, and finding what is actually true underneath. Perimenopause is the threshold into that second half, and Jung's insight is that the discomfort of it, the sense of identity fragmenting and reorganising, is not pathology. It is individuation. The self becoming more fully itself. He also described this as the most creative period of a woman's psychological life, something our culture has almost entirely failed to reflect back to women going through it.

How can I create my own ritual for a life transition? You do not need a community or a facilitator. Light a candle. Choose a piece of music that carries meaning for you. Let it play while you sit quietly and allow yourself to think honestly about where you are, what you are leaving behind and what you want to carry forward. When the music ends, write one intention. Not a goal but a quality, the way you want to move through what's coming. That is your ritual. Done regularly, at the same point each month or year, it becomes something the brain recognises as meaningful. A threshold marker. A way of saying to yourself, I am paying attention to my own life.