Kylee Stone 1/28/26 Kylee Stone 1/28/26

The Leadership Gap No One Is Talking About — But Everyone Needs

There’s a paradox playing out in leadership.

We have more access to knowledge about what great leadership looks like than any generation before us - books, podcasts, frameworks, certifications, research, tools and insights at our fingertips.

And yet, beneath the surface of performance, strategic competence and success, something is missing.

People are disengaged while pretending not to be (note the movement of quietly quitting) and while a direct impact on the bottom line (in our business and life) feels hit and miss, a meaningful connection to our true passion, purpose and potential feels hard to sustain, or worse yet, impossible to achieve.

We are beyond tired. We’re exhausted, frustrated, burning out, desperate for a break and while experiencing an increased workload with more to do, it just never feels like we’re able to get ahead. We’re increasingly time-poor, more stretched and more reactive.

While many of us appear to be “high performing” on paper, we are quietly carrying the invisible weight of pressure, urgency and failure.

In my work with leaders, I see it constantly: the desire to make an impact is real but a genuine connection that empowers people, builds trust, sustains energy and delivers high-impact results is difficult to access.

This is not because they don’t care, it's often because they care too much.

I’ve walked this path myself, leading from what we see above the surface, navigating complex challenges and driving change to transform the workplace and our own lives, only to experience the same mundane challenges.

Why? Because we are leading from the same stress-fuelled, fear-based thinking, problem-solving reactionary mind.

With decades of experience in working with high-performing leaders, here’s what I’ve learnt:

Leaders don’t thrive when they do more of what they already know.

Leaders thrive when they let go of what they know, they get out of the waves and dive deep into the unknown, to align their actions with their true values, vision and purpose.

I’m an aboriginal indigenous woman, a descendent of the stolen generation of the Wakka Wakka and Kulluli First Nations Peoples. In our indigenous culture, we recognise this shift happens when we move from knowing to being - where presence wisdom and alignment come alive.

So, what is the greatest gap in leadership that no one is talking about?

It's not knowledge.

It’s not capability.

It's not persistence.

It’s not ambition.

It’s not even confidence.

It’s presence.

Presence is often mistaken as physical presence, that we show up physically. It’s also mistaken as a ‘soft skill’ of mindfulness. But in truth, it goes way beyond physically turning up and being visible.

Presence is what determines whether your team feels safe with you, whether they trust you and whether they hear you - not just your words, but your true (but often hidden) intent.

Presence, as defined in the oxford dictionary: A state of being present.

Being present is your most powerful instrument.

Ultimately we all know that leadership is never based on only what you do.

Leadership arises when the actions you take are aligned with your values. It’s more about how you feel and how you make other people feel - it’s about your who you are being when you are physically present.

Are you mentally present? Are your values present? Are “you” present?

Let’s be honest.

We are living in a world where everything around us is moving at lightening speed.

That’s not about to slow down. If anything, it is only going to move quicker as our need to adjust to the pace and efficiency of AI transforms the way we work.

No matter what is going on in the environment around us, our brain is in a constant state of stress. We are living in a constant state of urgency and in this state, our nervous system and our fear-based thinking thoughts become the decision-maker.

Our attention fragments. Our listening becomes transactional and our ability to connect diminishes. Not because we’re not trying, because our environment is overloaded.

This is why so many of us (leaders) feel like they’re doing all the “right” things, but no matter what we do, we still have the experience that nothing is really working (the way we want, or indeed the way we expect).

The Leader Must Comes First

The foundation of my work is simple:

When you align the leader within you, the leader externally becomes powerful.

Our internal experience of ourself as a leader, that is what we call our state which includes our thoughts, feelings, nervous system and our body, determines our external reality.

The quality of our own self-awareness. The quality of our attention (what we focus on). The clarity of our intention. The capacity we have to respond instead of react.

It all happens internally before we even begin our day.

Every thought we think generates an emotion.

Every emotion we feel sends a signal to our body.

Every cell in our body responds to the energy of what we repeatedly focus on.

Most of us are getting and taking action in life without even realising it, especially leaders who are trained to solve problems externally. But our internal world is not separate from our leadership. It is our leadership.

Here’s a line I come back to often:

“Our actions don’t follow what we know, they follow what we practice”

This is where neuroscience becomes deeply practical. Neuroplasticity shows us the brain is always adapting. It forms new connections based on attention, emotion and repetition.

The experts in epigenetics (my personal favourite, Dr Joe Dispenza) are expanding our understanding of how the environment, including our internal environment (thoughts, feelings and emotions), influences how we respond to life.

As it turns out, we are not responding to life, life is responding to us.

Now, what matters most to me isn't the science as knowledge, it's the science as lived-experience. Its not what you know that matters, its what you do with it that counts.

I didn’t become a leader by learning these things.

I became a leader by doing them and being them.

Why Knowing Isn’t Enough (Especially for Leaders)

As a leader, we are brilliant at gathering knowledge. We’re rewarded for being smart, informed and strategic. We’re educated, even conditioned, to seek the answer, solutions, the right model, the plan and the skill.

But leadership is rarely an intellectual event.

A thought can inspire you. A book can move you. A podcast can wake something up. But without a clear intention, without consistency, without alignment of your thinking and your emotions and without practice, most insight stays trapped in the mind.

It becomes something we admire, rather than something we experience.

This is why many of us (leaders) feel like we’ve “done the work” and still we find ourselves overthinking, people-pleasing, over-controlling the situation to avoid more failure, avoiding conflict, burning out, living in constant vigilance and failing to deliver on the results we truely desire.

This is because the subconscious mind, or as I prefer to call it, our “intrapersonal communication” (the conversations we have with ourselves that are hidden beneath the surface, blindly driving our life) is far more powerful than what we realise.

It’s not persuaded by information.

It’s persuaded by experience, and experience takes practice.

The conscious mind learns through understanding.
The subconscious learns through repetition and feeling.

And that’s where the shift from knowing to being takes place.

The Practice That Changed Everything

I want to share something deeply personal here, because this isn’t just an idea I teach. It’s a practice I’ve lived daily since 2017 after being diagnosed with auto-immune condition and waking up to my own patterns of over-giving.

I was juggling the busy demands of life as a working mum with three children who were 10, 8 and 7 years-of-age.

I was very good at prioritising other people’s needs and beating to the beat of other people’s drums. I cared deeply about other people and was very good at listening to their needs and feeding their needs while feeling completely depleted, unappreciated and not really getting the results I knew possible (for my capability).

My body was literally attacking itself and no amount intellect was getting me out of the fatigue, anxiety, sadness and frustration.

I had zero hours to spare. I was getting zero help around the unpaid duties (yes I was a slow boiling frog of resentment). I was not zen. I was not calm. I needed a new way.

Everything shifted when I made one small shift - a one-minute morning practice of making my bed while actively focussing on slowing down my breathe.

That was it. One minute of intentional listening. One minute of deep breathing and actively focussing on my own needs before the outer world got its hands on me.

Slowly, almost invisibly at first, that single minute began to compound.

One minute became two, two became three, three became five, five became ten. Ten became fifteen, fifteen became a habit, and a habit became a new identity.

Here I am, seven years later and the practice has expanded into an integrated ritual where I actively devote 1hour of practice each morning, together with it now imbued in how I life my life and how I interact with the world, not because I “should,” but because I’ve seen the profound impact it has on who I am and how I lead - the presence of being present in every interaction, every meeting and every moment.

I’m still human and I’m far from perfect (and what is perfection anyway), but I am clear that my experience, every little experience, matters.

No matter what life throws at me, no matter what someone says, no matter what someone does, no matter how bad things get, I trust myself to be a leader - to choose presence over distraction, calm over chaos and impact over urgency.

What I know to be true.

Small daily practices don’t just change our day.
They change our entire nervous system.
They change our identity.
They change what becomes possible in how we lead and the impact we have.

This is the compound effect of presence.

Why Mornings Matter More Than We Think

The morning is not simply the start of a day, it’s the start of our state.

The moment we wake up, our mind is more malleable. Our brain and our nervous system is more receptive. The “default patterns” of thought are ready to reassert themselves - stress, worry, doubt, replaying the past, anticipating the future.

Most of us reach for our phones and check notifications. We breath in the external world, what’s happening at work, what’s happening with our kids, what’s happening on the news before we choose ourselves.

Without realising it, we enter the day already reacting and acting unconsciously.

But what if the first moments of the morning weren’t just minutes? What if they were a blank canvas. What if each day started with a fresh set of paint and a brand new possibility: a habit you can change, a relationship you can strengthen, a feeling you can cultivate, a leader you can become.

The question becomes: What possibility will I plant today?

When we consciously choose our focus, we start rewiring our brain.

When we intentionally choose what we want to create rather than what we fear, we reshape our entire experience and our energy (and state) shifts.

When we combine thought with emotion, like gratitude, joy and love, we send a signal through our biology that a new reality is possible.

This is not motivational fluff.

This is physiology.

Listening With Presence: The Bridge Between Wisdom and Leadership

The heart of all of this is one practice:

Listening with presence.

Most of us think of listening as passive, something we do while distracted or multi-tasking. But listening with presence is different. It goes way beyond “active listening” which believe it or not, still carries a lo of blind distractions.

Listening with presence is intentional. It’s a deliberate alignment of your internal thoughts (your intrapersonal communication), your feelings and emotions with your external actions.

When you listen with presence, you don’t just hear words. You allow them to enter you. You let them resonate. You feel them. You become receptive.

Leadership stops becoming you need to understand and it becomes who you are.

It is the bridge between what you know and who you are being.

It is your access to wisdom and wisdom isn’t what you know, wisdom is what you live.

It is what other people experience when you walk in a room. It is the calm clarity in your voice during pressure. It is your ability to stay present in discomfort. It is your capacity to hold space. It is the coherence between your words and your way of being.

When you practise listening with presence, especially in the morning, you’re not just consuming ideas, you’re training your entire nervous system. You’re building a brand new identity, a leadership identity that aligns with your true passion, potential and purpose.

To the Leader Within You.

If you’ve been leading hard but feeling disconnected…
If you’ve been doing all the “right” things but still feeling like something is missing…
If you’re craving more meaning, more connection, more grounded confidence…

I want you to know: the answer is not more knowledge, the answer is presence.

Start small. Start with one minute. Choose what enters your mind before the world rushes in. Repeat it consistently. Pair it with emotion. Let your inner environment become the place where wisdom is formed.

Remember. Leadership isn’t built in big moments, it’s built in the invisible ones.

By committing to this practice consistently, you are not only opening yourself to new ideas and inspiration, you are actively creating a new version of yourself and a new life from the inside out.

Kylee Stone 1/12/26 Kylee Stone 1/12/26

Leading With Purpose: Where Stillness Leads.

Part One: Wisdom and the Practice of Presence

Everything that is happening around you, everything that has ever happened, and everything that is about to happen is a gift. Every little thing, every precious moment, matters. Everything happens for a reason.

Everything is a gift.

The rising sun over the city skyline.
The crystals on the water, sparkling like diamonds.

The thickness of a storm.
The darkness of clouds.
The cold breeze.

The turmoil of terrorism.
The deep pain, hurt, and suffering.
The guilt, shame, and humiliation.

The air you breathe.
The whispers of kindness.
The love, joy, and freedom.

Every precious moment is a gift.

And yet, we pass through it,
missing the gift of the journey
as our sight is set on a destination,
an outcome,
a result.

Buying coffee to go, in a styrofoam cup.
Rushing back to your desk for a hit of caffeine.
Missing the beauty of receiving.

The touch of a warm porcelain cup, decorated with a heart.
The beautiful smile of the waitress, serving and offering.
Bringing you water, menus, and the simple kindness of
how can I serve you.

You are receiving the gift of giving.

You are grateful.
Humbled.

The joy of seeing the smile on your colleague’s face.
Hearing laughter.
The warmth of connection.

You feel heard, seen, acknowledged.

It’s intimate.
You listen deeply.
They feel heard, seen, acknowledged.

You share stories openly, vulnerably, and authentically.
You are safe.
You are free.
You are valued, appreciated, and loved.

A moment in time.
A precious gift,
where everything matters.

I trust myself.
I trust you.
I trust the journey of life.

A CONTEXT FOR LEADERS.

In a world that rewards speed, certainty and constant movement, stillness is rarely recognised as a leadership skill. Yet it is here beneath the noise, beneath the urgency to perform and produce that an authority built on influence, intention and impact, is formed.

Stillness is where we remember who we are beyond roles, titles, and expectations.

It is where discernment replaces reaction, where wisdom softens control and leadership shifts from something we do to something we embody - to who we are, how we feel and the legacy we leave.

It is this place of deep knowing where decisions are no longer driven by fear, recognition, or conditioning, but by clarity, integrity, and care. This kind of leadership does not demand attention, it earns trust. It does not chase outcomes, it shapes cultures. It begins, always, in presence.

ReflectionS

Leadership is not found in climbing higher or pushing harder, but in learning to pause long enough to listen. To feel. To notice what is already here.

Stillness asks nothing of us, yet offers everything - clarity, compassion, and a deeper alignment with what truly matters. In returning to this deep inner knowing, we return to ourselves. From this place, leadership becomes less about control and more about care. Less about authority and more about wisdom in action.

This is Part One of a leadership series exploring wisdom as a lived, embodied practice. In the reflections that follow, I explore how presence, integrity, and love reshape the way we lead - at work, at home, and in the world.

Gitanjali Koppikar 1/1/26 Gitanjali Koppikar 1/1/26

🌊 The Path Is Opening Under My Feet

There is a moment in every woman’s life
when she stops trying to build the path
and realizes the path is building itself beneath her.

Quietly.
Precisely.
Invisibly.
And then all at once.

For years, I thought my life was a series of chapters —
art, loss, leadership, energy work, reinvention, Kenya —
distinct eras, separate identities,
one ending before another began.

But now I see it:

Every chapter was the same Self
expressing through different forms,
waiting for me to be still enough
to recognize the thread.

This last year has been a year of listening.
Of not rushing.
Of letting the old identities dissolve
so something true could emerge.

I didn’t know what I was waiting for —
only that something was rearranging itself
inside my coherence.

And then the impalas leapt.

And then Human Design revealed
a blueprint I had been living my entire life
without ever knowing it.

And then the divine opened the heavens
with a series of divine, impossible, effortless alignments
that made it undeniable:

I am no longer on the old road.

The path is opening under my feet.

It is not a metaphor.
It is not inspiration.
It is literal.

One phone call.
One message.
One conversation.
One revelation.
And suddenly, the future I couldn’t see
has become the present I’m walking toward.

I can feel the new architecture taking shape —
in my work,
in my voice,
in my leadership,
in my destiny.

Threshold is not a concept anymore.
It is not a story.
It is not a metaphor.

It is the field I belong to.

It is the work I was built for.
The work my life prepared me to deliver.
The work that brings together
ontology, energy, art, Human Design, intuition, coherence —
every realm I’ve lived, studied, practiced, and survived.

I didn’t design this era.
I didn’t strategize it.
I didn’t vision-board it.
I didn’t plan it.

It found me.

It rose beneath me like a road forming from mist —
revealing itself one step ahead,
but only as I take the step.

This is what it feels like
when your life reaches the exact moment
it has been organized around all along.

This is what it feels like
when destiny stops whispering
and starts rearranging everything in real time.

This is what it feels like
to finally be placed
where your soul can make the deepest impact.

The path is opening under my feet.

And my only job now
is to walk it.

Slowly.
Deliberately.
Devotedly.
A threshold at a time.

🌊 With you at the threshold,
Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

If this spoke to you, share it with someone standing at their own threshold.
I write about leadership, identity, and Human Design — where transformation becomes art and reinvention becomes remembrance.

Image Credit: Gitanjali Koppikar, *My Mother’s Sari*, 2025

Gitanjali Koppikar 1/1/26 Gitanjali Koppikar 1/1/26

🌊 Threshold Interlude — The Moment Everything Clicks

Before we step into the next set of essays, I want to mark this moment.
The threshold is not only crossed in the dramatic chapters of our lives — it is crossed in the quiet integrations, the days when something finally settles, aligns, and makes sense in a way it never has before.
This is the moment that opened the next era of my work.

Before a new era begins,
there is always a moment of stillness —
a brief, luminous pause
where the old world loosens
and the new world has not yet taken shape.

This is where I’ve been living.

Not in confusion.
Not in crisis.
But in a deeper coherence
I didn’t know how to name until now.

The last pieces I wrote— the Self, the Identity, the Journeys, the Notes —
were the remembering.

But this…
this is the integration.

For months, something has been forming in the background of my life.
A thread weaving together:

• the art I’ve carried since childhood
• the energy work that found me in my twenties
• the ontology that shaped how I see Being
• the leadership work that changed thousands of lives
• the Human Design blueprint that mirrors my entire timeline
• the impalas on the Mara that took me across
• the voice inside me that keeps whispering Threshold

Every chapter, every crossing, every reinvention
has been part of the same field —
I just didn’t know it until now.

What I see with absolute clarity is this:

There has always been one body of work.
One frequency.
One purpose.
One thread.

And it has finally come into form.

And soon, I’ll begin sharing a new layer of this work—one that moves even deeper into leadership, coherence, and the evolution of the Self.

It is the beginning of my true work.
The work I was trained for by life itself.
The work the impalas marked.
The work the universe has been positioning me for
every time I prayed that prayer.

Threshold Leadership.
Threshold Consciousness.
Threshold Becoming.

The era of transmission begins now.

Before we step into it,
take a breath with me in this interlude —
this luminous pause.

Because from here,
everything changes.

🌊 With you at the threshold,
Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/30/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/30/25

🌊 Threshold Journal Entry — “Put Me Where I Need to Be.”

There have been a few moments in my life
— not many, but the ones that change everything —
when I’ve looked up at the sky, or the ceiling,
or into the quiet of a morning,
and said out loud:

“Alright God… Spirit… Universe…
put me where I need to be.
Where my soul can make the biggest difference.
And I will choose it.”

Every time I’ve said those words, something rearranged.
Not gradually.
Not politely.
But with the unmistakable precision
of a higher intelligence that sees the whole map
while I’m standing in the valley.

That prayer wasn’t about surrender.
It was an agreement.
A contract with destiny.

And each time, without fail,
I was airlifted out of the life I knew
and placed — gently, exactly —
into a life I would never have chosen for myself
from the vantage point I was standing in.

Because the soul sees a path
the personality cannot imagine.

Looking back now, I can see it clearly:

There has always been something watching over me.
Something that knows my blueprint,
my mission,
the thread running through every chapter of my life
even when I couldn’t see it.

And the moment I say those words —
the moment I ask to be placed —
the universe responds with the swiftness
of something that has been waiting.

What is unfolding in my life right now
is answering that prayer again.

I don’t have all the pieces yet.
I don’t need them.

All I know is this:

I can feel the reorganization.
I can feel the alignment.
I can feel myself being placed
— not by chance,
but by design —
into the exact space my soul has been preparing for.

And this time,
I’m awake for it.

🌊 With you at the threshold,
Gitanjali

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/30/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/30/25

🌊THRESHOLD NOTES: 7 — The exact second the Self steps forward

It’s not dramatic.
It’s not fireworks.
It’s not a big announcement.

It’s a breath.
A shift.
A click.

Something in you rearranges.
Something settles.
Something true rises quietly to the surface.

And you know:

“It’s time.”

That is the moment you cross the threshold.

🌊 With you at the threshold,
Gitanjali

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Image Credit: Gitanjali Koppikar, *Sydney Harbour on a clear day - detail*, 2024

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/28/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/28/25

🌊THRESHOLD NOTES: 6 — What identity are you afraid to lay down?

You already know the answer.

The one that makes you safe.
The one that makes you needed.
The one that makes you respected.
The one that keeps the peace.
The one that proves your worth.
The one that doesn’t upset anyone.
The one that hides your longing.
The one that doesn’t belong.

The one that hides your brilliance.

That identity is exhausted.

And she’s ready to rest.

🌊 With you at the threshold,
Gitanjali

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/28/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/28/25

🌊THRESHOLD NOTES: 5 — When you know you are becoming someone you can't name yet

There is a moment when the old identity is gone
but the new one hasn’t arrived.

You’re between chapters.
Between versions.
Between truths.

This is the liminal space.
The sacred in-between.

Most women rush through this part.

But this is where your real Self begins to form.

🌊 With you at the threshold,
Gitanjali

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/27/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/27/25

🌊THRESHOLD NOTES: 4 — The quiet grief of outgrowing yourself

No one talks about this part.

The grief of leaving behind the woman who carried you this far.
The version of you who survived.
Who performed.
Who achieved.
Who held it all together.
Who belonged to an older story.

Outgrowing yourself is an ending.
A death that no one else sees.

But it’s also a beginning.

And beginnings sometimes arrive disguised as grief.

🌊 With you at the threshold,
Gitanjali

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/25/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/25/25

🌊THRESHOLD NOTES: 3 — What you're afraid will happen if you tell the truth

You’re afraid you’ll have to burn it all down.
You’re afraid people will think you’re ungrateful.
You’re afraid you’ll lose what you worked for.
You’re afraid you’ll disappoint someone.
You’re afraid you’ll disappoint yourself.

But here’s the deeper fear:
If you tell the truth…
you will have to become the woman who speaks it.

That’s the threshold.

🌊 With you at the threshold,
Gitanjali

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/23/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/23/25

🌊THRESHOLD NOTES: 2 — The moment you know the life you built no longer fits

It doesn’t fall apart.
It just… loosens.

The edges stop holding.
The routines feel hollow.
The conversations feel scripted.
Your own name sounds distant.

Nothing is wrong.
And yet—everything is shifting.

It is terrifying to admit this.
But you know.
Your body knows.

You are outgrowing the life you built.

🌊 Holding the edge with you,,
Gitanjali

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/22/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/22/25

🌊THRESHOLD NOTES: 1 — Who Am I Without the Roles?

There is a moment when the titles stop making sense.

Mother.
Wife.
Leader.
Founder.
The strong one.
The capable one.
The one who keeps it all together.

You say the words,
but they no longer land in your body.

Who are you when you’re not performing the version of you the world learned to depend on?

There is a Self beneath the roles.
She has been speaking softly for years.
She is getting louder now.

🌊 With you at the threshold,
Gitanjali

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/22/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/22/25

🌊 THRESHOLD NOTES

A 7-part transmission for the woman standing at the edge of her becoming.

It has been a week since I shared the last Threshold Journey.
Since then, something has been moving — in me, and in the women reading along.

Some of you messaged me to say:

“I’m dissolving.”
“I don’t recognize myself.”
“I know I’m meant for something more, but I can’t name it yet.”
“I’m outgrowing the life I built.”
“I feel like I’m in-between versions.”

This is the moment before the moment.
The quiet edge.
The soft unraveling before the deeper Self steps forward.

It’s the threshold.

And so, for the next seven days, I’m sharing something different:

Seven short notes.
Seven frequency transmissions.
Seven reflections for the woman who knows she’s shifting —
even if she hasn’t said it out loud yet.

These are not essays.
Not stories.
Not teachings.

These are the things we whisper to ourselves
in the dark
when no one else can hear.

These Notes are for the woman who:

feels the identity she built softening
knows she can’t go back
feels a new Self forming beneath her skin
is afraid of what the truth might mean
is longing for a life that fits
is grieving the versions of herself she’s outgrown
is ready to step into a chapter she can’t yet name

One note each day.
One transmission at a time.
One step closer to the woman your life has been preparing you to become.

We begin tomorrow.

🌊 With you at the threshold,
Gitanjali

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/20/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/20/25

🌊 The Returning

There are thresholds we cross
because life pushes us.

There are thresholds we cross
because something ends.

And then there are thresholds
we cross because God calls our name.

The Masai Mara was that moment for me.

Not a metaphor.
Not a symbol.
A living, breathing doorway.

A place where the world becomes so silent
you can hear your soul speak without interruption.
Where the land itself feels ancient enough
to remember who you were
before the world placed its hands on you.

I had crossed a thousand thresholds before that morning —
through art, through loss, through reinvention,
through the Twin Towers, through global leadership rooms,
through endings I didn’t choose
and beginnings I didn’t understand.

But nothing prepared me for the stillness of that dawn.

We had been running —
a small group of us —
guided by two Maasai warriors
whose presence felt like protection
woven directly from the earth.

The air was cool,
soft with mist,
the sky still deciding what kind of day to become.

And I stopped.

Something in me —
older than my identity,
older than my work,
older than my name —
wanted to be still.

So I stayed behind.

Alone.
Yet not alone at all.

I stood watching the sun lift through the veil of morning,
pouring gold across the Mara
like a blessing.

And I felt it —
that unmistakable hum in the chest,
that expansion in the belly,
that reverence in the bones
when the Self rises
and you cannot pretend not to hear it.

Then the impalas came.

At first one.
Then three.
Then twenty.
Then an entire river of them —
silent, powerful, breathtaking —
running directly past me
as if carrying a message.

It wasn’t fear I felt.
Or awe.
Or surprise.

It was recognition.

They were showing me something
I had lived before
but never seen so clearly:

The crossing is never the end of you.
It is the moment you remember
you were always more than the one who began.

Standing in that wild expanse,
with the herd moving like a single organism of grace,
I realized:

This is the threshold.

Not the moment you choose a path.
But the moment the path chooses you.

Not the moment you reinvent.
The moment you return.

To the Self.
To the truth beneath the identity.
To the pulse God placed in you
before your life began to shape you.

All the thresholds of my life —
my grandmother,
my father’s blessing,
New York,
9/11,
global leadership,
Sydney,
art,
energy,
Human Design —
were rivers.

But the Mara was the ocean.

The place where all the rivers meet.
The place where nothing is lost
and everything expands.

I did not disappear.

I became whole.

This was the moment I understood
what my life has been preparing me for:

Not to teach reinvention.
But to guide people
back to the edge of their own becoming.

Back to the place
where identity softens
and the Self steps through.

Back to the exact threshold
where God whispers:
“You are ready now.”

This journey is not about the Mara.
It is about the remembering.

And when you feel it —
that quiet, holy recognition inside —
you too will know:

You are standing at your ocean.You are standing at your ocean.

You are ready to cross.

With love and presence,
🌊 Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/19/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/19/25

🌊 The Threshold of the Line 6 — Returning as the Wise Woman

There is a moment in every Line 6 life
when everything changes.

You do not decide it.
You do not prepare for it.
You do not “manifest” it.

It descends.

A kind of knowing.
A kind of clarity.
A kind of spacious, grounded truth
that does not need to announce itself.

When I discovered Human Design,
I finally understood
what the last five decades of my life had been shaping in me.

The mistakes.
The thresholds.
The identities I outgrew.
The collapses.
The reinventions.
The return.

It wasn’t chaos.
It was curriculum.

And the moment I stepped into my Line 6 frequency —
truly embodied it —
everything crystallized.

The work.
The mission.
The voice.
The leadership.
The art.
The energy.
The Self.

Line 6 is often called “the role model”
but the truth is deeper:

It is the woman who carries the codes of Becoming.

Not because she is perfect,
but because she has lived enough lives
to see through every identity
and trust only what endures.

And what endures
is the Self.

This era —
this threshold —
is the expression of every era before it.

It is the wisdom years.
It is the coherence years.
It is the embodiment years.

It is the return.

And now I guide women
to their own return.

To their Self.
To being true to who they are.
To their next iteration.
To the threshold they have been resisting
and the one they are ready to cross.

This is the work of my life.

This is the Threshold.

With love and presence,
🌊 Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/17/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/17/25

🌊 The Threshold of Global Leadership — Standing in the Fire of Humanity

For over two decades, I stood in rooms
with thousands of people
who thought they could not survive their lives.

I coached over half a million human beings —
people whose stories stretched across the full spectrum of what a soul can endure.

Olympic athletes confronting the weight of a single moment.
People escaping war, torture, or nations where freedom was a fantasy.
Mothers grieving children.
Men rebuilding after everything collapsed.
Young women searching for safety in their own bodies.
Families fractured by history, memory, or silence.

I stood with all of them.

Not as a savior.
Not as a healer.
Not as an expert.

But as a witness to the part of them
that remained untouched by everything they survived.

The Self.

The same Self that had carried me
through grief, loss, art, fire.

And what I learned —
over and over again —
is that human beings do not need to be fixed.

They are here to remember.

This work was not glamorous.
It was not curated.
It was not spiritual performance.

It was the most intimate, unfiltered contact
with the human spirit that I have ever known.

And in those decades,
I crossed another threshold:

The threshold between teaching transformation
and embodying it.

Identity teaches.
Self transmits.

What people felt in my presence
was never technique.

It was coherence.

It was the steadiness you develop
only when you have walked through your own fire
and did not lose yourself inside it.

Those years prepared me for this era —
the era of mentorship, wisdom, reinvention, and legacy.

The era of guiding people not through information,
but through thresholds.

With love and presence,
🌊 Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/15/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/15/25

🌊 The Threshold of 9/11 — The Identity That Burned and the Self That Lived

On the morning of 9/11,
I should have been in the office.

All of my paintings were there —
my entire early body of work,
years of creation,
everything I had not yet sold.

But that morning, I was headed down to the lobby.
A small change, a slight shift,
a decision without consequence…
a meeting that became the difference
between life and death.

When the towers fell,
my art — all of it —
gone.

And with it, the identity I had spent a decade building:

Artist.
New Yorker.
Sculptor.
Dreamer.
Young woman with a future shaped in paint, charcoal, and clay.

Gone.

People think reinvention begins with inspiration.
It doesn’t.

It begins with loss —
the kind of loss that leaves you standing in the rubble of your own life
asking questions that have no answers.

The kind of loss
that forces you to confront what you have never questioned:

What remains when everything I’ve built disappears?
Who am I if the world I created is taken from me?
Can I trust the Self enough to walk without a map?
What do I do with this life I now have — this gift called my life?
Do I really want what I thought I wanted?
The children? The lifestyle? The security?

These are not intellectual questions.
They are questions that collapse timelines.
Questions that strip you bare.
Questions that leave you with only one thing left:

Choice.

Not the identity-based choice of “What should I do?”
but the ontological choice of:

Can I choose what is already here?
What life has placed in front of me — right now?

Because only when we choose what is so
are we returned to the clearing —

the space where nothing binds us
and everything becomes possible.

And from that clearing,
for the first time,
I could ask:

Who can I be now?

It was in that ash-filled grief
that I discovered the most important threshold of my life.

There, I made the defining choice:

To complete the identity of “artist”
and step into the work of transformation —
not as a career,
but as a promise.

A promise to make a difference
for people who believed they had no choice.
For people whose past felt too heavy to carry.
For people standing in their own rubble
needing someone to hold the light
while they remembered themselves again.

A promise to guide people
through their own Threshold.

That decision — born from devastation —
became my greatest crossing.

9/11 may have taken my art.
But it returned me to my mission.

Sometimes the Self only steps forward
when everything that is not the Self
has been burned away.

With love and presence,
🌊 Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/14/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/14/25

🌊 The Mercedes Matter Years — The Threshold of Vision

Where seeing became a form of consciousness.

There are thresholds you step into…
and thresholds that claim you.

Meeting Mercedes Matter was the latter.

She was already a legend —
a woman whose gaze carried geometry,
whose hands held the lineage of giants,
whose presence felt like standing inside an era
that had cracked open what art could be.

I was barely more than a girl —
still learning where to place myself in a room —
when she noticed something in me
I did not yet know how to name.

And she let me in.

Into her private studio.
Her sanctuary.
Her inner world.

A place where the air still held the echo of great artists,
their work watching silently from the walls,
their spirits woven through the way she spoke
and the way she saw.

She delighted in my color —
actually squealed —
when I unfolded my Indian saris.
She called it “light made visible.”

This became our secret language:

How cobalt violet breathes beside pale lemon.
How marigold radiates in the presence of deep rose.
How the weight of black anchors an entire plane.
How the space between forms
is sometimes louder than the form itself.

In her presence, I discovered something essential:

Art is not made.
Art is perceived.

And perception, at its highest frequency,
is a devotion.

Geometry was her religion.

“Everything is triangles,” she’d tell me —
with a fierce tenderness —
as she traced the invisible scaffolding
beneath faces, landscapes, questions, emotions.

Suddenly the world triangulated itself:
horizon lines, tree trunks, sorrow, longing, desire —
all revealing their inner angles,
their true structure,
their coherence.

It was the first time I understood
that seeing is not optical.

Seeing is ontological.

Seeing shapes who you become.

She told me to go to Europe.
“Study the masters. Let them teach you how to see.”

So I did.
I stood for hours before Giotto, Titian, Velázquez, Cézanne —
listening for the movement beneath stillness,
the dissonance beneath harmony,
the geometry beneath flesh.

I didn’t know it then,
but I was training for the work I do now —
learning to enter a painting
the same way I now enter a human being’s world.

Color made me an artist.
Geometry made me a seer.

And then —
as if life wanted to seal the initiation —
she made her last three drawings
in my sketchbook
on the day she died.

Her final offering.
Her final transmission.
The passing of a lineage.

Something rearranged itself in me that day.
Not broken — expanded.
Not ended — transformed.
Not silenced — deepened.

Mercedes taught me how to see.
The Threshold taught me why.

The birth of my art —
which began with my grandmother’s hands —
had now matured into something else:

The ability to perceive the Self in another.
To read coherence.
To sense truth before words form.
To feel the geometry of transformation.
To guide leadership from Presence, not performance.

This era wasn’t a chapter.
It was an initiation.
And every threshold I guide others through now —
every reinvention, every exploration, every crossing —
is infused with the exact precision
Mercedes awakened in me:

The light between colors.
The truth beneath form.
The Self beneath identity.

This was the Threshold of Vision.
And it changed everything.

With love and presence,
🌊 Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/12/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/12/25

🌊 The Threshold of Becoming an Artist — The First Birth of the Self

My grandmother was an artist.
Not the kind who sought exhibitions or applause —
the kind who painted because her soul needed somewhere to go.

She lost my grandfather soon after I was born,
and in her grief, she poured her entire heart into me.

We painted together before I could spell my name.
She showed me how color breathes,
how form whispers,
how silence becomes shape if you listen long enough.

Art was not a hobby.
Art was the first language my soul learned to speak.

By the time I went to art school,
I wasn’t “choosing a path” —
I was returning to myself.

Then came the moment that transforms every artist:

The moment when art stops being something you make…
and becomes something that makes you.

I remember sculpting clay in New York,
my hands learning the topography of the unseen,
my body learning how to translate energy
into shape, gesture, breath.

It was the first time the Self stepped forward.

Not the identity.
Not the girl who left home.
Not the daughter or the student or the “talented one.”

But the Self.

The part of me that knew how to create
from something deeper than skill,
deeper than training,
deeper than intention.

Creation became instinct.

And even now — decades later, across lifetimes of reinvention —
every threshold begins the same way:

With the memory of clay between my hands.
With the truth of what my grandmother taught me.
With the Self rising quietly, unmistakably, undeniably.

Art was my first crossing.

And everything that came after
began there.

With love and presence,
🌊 Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

Gitanjali Koppikar 12/11/25 Gitanjali Koppikar 12/11/25

🌊 The Threshold of Leaving Home — “You Belong to the World.”

A Threshold Journey

I was nineteen when my father said it.

Not tenderly.
Not dramatically.
Simply, truthfully —
as if he were naming something he had always seen
but was finally giving language to:

“You belong to the world.”

At nineteen, I didn’t understand the magnitude of those words.
I heard freedom.
I heard possibility.
I heard a kind of blessing.

But what he was giving me was a permission slip from destiny itself.

My father named me after Tagore’s Gitanjali — “Song Offerings,” the book of poems he loved most.
I think now that he believed a child should enter the world already carrying contribution in her name.

He would tell me, inspired by Tagore,
that children are like the spring at the top of a mountain —
they come from the mountain,
but they must find their way to the ocean.

That was my first teaching in the nature of Becoming.

A spring does not cling to its shape.
A spring does not mourn its stillness.
A spring does not apologize for flowing.
It simply moves —
gathering momentum,
gathering wisdom,
gathering earth —
until it meets what it was always destined for.

But what no one tells you is this:

When the stream approaches the ocean, it hesitates.

Because meeting the ocean means losing its identity.

No longer “a stream.”
No longer defined.
No longer separate.
No longer recognizable.

That is what leaving home felt like.

A part of me longing for the ocean —
for the world, the art, the unknown —
and a part of me terrified that once I left,
I would no longer know who I was.

But my soul chose parents who set me free.
My soul chose a lineage that whispered,

Go.
Be who you were born to be.
Return only when you are ready.

My soul chose a father whose truth became my compass.

My mother, in her own quiet wisdom, once told me,
“If I held on to you, you wouldn’t be free.”
She knew I had to grow beyond the limits our culture placed on women —
and she loved me enough to let me go.
Her letting go was the soft power behind every crossing that followed.

And because of that…
I stepped into my first threshold —
the threshold of becoming a woman
the world would meet long before she met herself.

And that crossing changed everything.

Author’s Note

This moment — my father’s words — was my first initiation into the truth that identity is temporary, but Becoming is eternal. Every threshold since has carried an echo of this original blessing:
You belong to the world.
Go where your Self is calling.

With love and presence,
🌊 Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.