🌹The Threshold: How Reinvention Found Me

(Some moments divide life into “before” and “after.” This is the story of one that changed everything.)

There are moments in life that divide everything into before and after.
Sometimes they arrive quietly, and sometimes, like lightning, they change everything.

For me, one of those moments was the morning of September 11, 2001.

At the time, I was living in New York City—making art in my 8th Street studio while managing transformational seminars at the World Trade Center. I had moved from India at twenty, a shy girl carrying sketchbooks and big dreams, studying painting and sculpture, soaking in the pulse of the city that never slept. I spent my days covered in paint or clay and my nights listening to jazz at the Blue Note.

I was sculpting form—but also shaping identity—learning who I was becoming.

I loved going to the World Trade Center. My art lived on the beautiful white walls of the long hallways and the office. I was meant to be up in the office at 8 a.m. on September 11th, but the universe had other plans for my future. Looking back, I see that morning as the moment that permanently altered the trajectory of my life.

When the towers came down, I lost ten years of my artwork—but I also lost the twenty-year-old artist’s picture of her future self, the version I thought I would grow into.
In the middle of mixed emotions—grief, disbelief, shock—a strange gratitude rose up.
I realized that if I was still here, my work on this planet wasn’t done.

That day, something ancient and new awakened in me.
The artist didn’t die—she arose, she transformed, she came into being.
She began to sculpt lives instead of clay.

For the next two decades, I traveled the world coaching hundreds of thousands of people in leadership, performance, and transformation. I worked with CEOs, change-makers, and teams across continents. The thread through it all was the same: people long to be free—free from the past, free from the noise, free to create again.

Part Two: The Second Awakening

Transformation was not new to me—but it arrived again, in an unexpected form, on a quiet afternoon when I came across something called Human Design.
At first, I dismissed it. I’d heard it described as a “profiling system,” and I wasn’t interested in being labelled or boxed in.
But life has a way of circling back with things meant for you.

Five people in one week asked if I knew my chart. So, finally, I looked.
And something extraordinary happened.

As I stared at that strange-looking map—part astrology, part circuitry—I felt like a doctor examining her own X-ray. It wasn’t information I was reading; it was recognition.
My design felt like a mirror showing me the deeper architecture of my soul.

Every major moment of my life made sense:
the art,
the leadership,
the reinvention,
the pattern of crossing thresholds into new identities.

I saw that my entire life had been preparing me to blend art, energy, and wisdom—to guide others to see who they truly are beneath the roles they play.

That day, I stopped searching for what was next for me—for my voice in this era.
I realized it had always been there, encoded in my design—waiting for me to listen.

What I love about Human Design is that it doesn’t tell you who you are; it reveals how you’re built to move through the world.
It’s not a box—it’s a blueprint.
It doesn’t define you—it frees you.

For me, it opened the doorway into the work I now do with people—the work that brings all my life’s callings together.

In my work, I see leaders who’ve achieved so much yet feel a quiet dissonance inside—a sense that they’ve outgrown an old identity but don’t yet know who they’re becoming.
That’s where Human Design becomes a compass.
It brings you back into coherence with your own frequency—your natural rhythm of vision, power, and presence.

I call this space the threshold—the sacred space between what was and what’s next.
It’s the space where reinvention begins.

If you’re standing at a threshold in your life right now—maybe you’ve reached the top of something, or something you once loved has lost its spark—know that this isn’t an ending.
It’s an initiation.

You are being sculpted again.
You don’t have to abandon who you’ve been; you only have to remember who you are.

And when you do, the next version of your leadership, your work, your life—will emerge naturally, beautifully, on purpose.

We are never finished sculptures.
We are living works of art, shaped by every choice to begin again.

Come home to yourself.
Welcome to the threshold.

With love and presence,
🌹 Gitanjali
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, Kashmir Series, 2024