The Threshold Between Worlds: On Stewardship, Legacy, and the Sacred Work of Space Holding
The Threshold Between Worlds: On Stewardship, Legacy, and the Sacred Work of Space Holding
Somewhere above the Pacific, suspended between sky and sea, I found myself reflecting—not just on the distance I’ve traveled in miles, but in lifetimes.
After six weeks of movement—not only physical, but soul-deep—I’m returning to Hawaii. And with me, I carry a truth that’s been slowly revealing itself:
We don’t just pass through transitions—we hold them.
For years, my life has moved in cycles of arrival and departure. A dance of hellos and goodbyes. I've lived from suitcases, crossed continents, and created pop-up sanctuaries in every corner of the globe. As a retreat leader, I’ve built a business around travel, around transformation, around designing containers that help others cross their thresholds.
But lately, travel has felt different. Heavier. More sacred.
It’s asked more of me. Invited more stillness. Required more reverence.
The Quiet Questions
High above the clouds, I found myself asking the kinds of questions that don’t have easy answers:
What am I being asked to release?
What’s ready to emerge?
Am I willing to meet it with the reverence it deserves?
If you’re a space holder—a retreat guide, a coach, a healer—I imagine you’ve lived these questions too. Because we’re not just designers of experiences. We become the experience.
We are the stewards of sacred in-betweens.
And recently, I crossed one of my own.
A Retreat, a Rite of Passage
In early April, I returned to Costa Rica—my former home—to co-lead the first Sacred Stewardship Retreat, a small and deeply immersive experience for women leaders ready to deepen their relationship to leadership, embodiment, and service.
It was the most intimate retreat I’ve ever led. And perhaps the most potent.
For seven days, we didn’t just talk about leadership. We lived it.
Presence. Embodiment. Attunement. Radical responsibility.
It felt like a rite of passage—not just for the women in the circle, but for me and my co-facilitator, too. A profound “leveling up” into a new model of leadership—one that the world is aching for: relational, reverent, and rooted.
This is the initiation of the sacred steward. And it changed everything.
(You can join the waitlist for the next one here.)
Closing Chapters, Opening Doors
After the retreat, I stayed in Costa Rica to tend to personal endings. I sold my car. Packed up the remnants of the three years I’d lived there. And said goodbye to a place and a phase of my life that had shaped me deeply.
It was a conscious closing. A ceremonial completion.
Then I flew to the Midwest to be with family—and to open a storage unit I hadn’t touched in six years. Inside were the boxes of my pre-pandemic self. The woman I used to be. The identity I’d once carried.
It felt like its own kind of portal.
I sorted. I released. I remembered.
And I stepped into something entirely new.
An Anchor to Lineage, Not Location
Here’s something I haven’t shared publicly—until now.
A week before New Year’s last year, I bought a house.
Not just any house.
My grandfather’s house.
Built in 1952, with creaky stairs, a pink bathroom, and blue shag carpet upstairs.
The house of childhood summers, where I watched Hee-Haw with my grandma detangling my hair.
I didn’t buy it to live in it.
I bought it to keep it.
To preserve a place that remembers me.
To root a legacy.
To reclaim something sacred.
As someone who never imagined owning a home—let alone a family home—this was more than a financial milestone.
This was an act of anchoring. Not to a location, but to a lineage.
To wealth on my terms.
To stewardship.
To remembering who I am.
Becoming the Container
These past weeks, I’ve been knee-deep in paint chips and renovations. Breathing new life into this home. Curating it with intention and care—the same way we curate retreat spaces.
And what I’ve come to realize is this:
Stewardship doesn’t only happen in the circle. It happens in the spaces we claim and tend for ourselves.
It’s how we close what needs closing.
It’s how we say yes to what wants to emerge.
It’s how we root in a world that never stops moving.
As retreat leaders, we don’t just hold containers.
We are the container.
And how we navigate our own transitions—how we say goodbye, how we say yes, how we walk through the fire without flinching—matters.
If You’re in a Threshold Season…
If you’re rearranging, releasing, or reimagining…
If you’re navigating a goodbye of your own, or standing at the edge of an unknown beginning…
If you’re craving a deeper relationship with your work, your path, or your own sacred leadership…
I see you.
You’re not just holding space.
You are the space.
You’re becoming the steward you were always meant to be.
And that work?
It’s holy.
With you in every in-between,
Brockell
