No matter where you are in your own spiritual work, this book can show you how to harness the power of an experience we all share and often fear: change. Discover how you can learn to consciously use change as a spiritual rite of passage. Illustrated with wonderful allegorical tales from all the major spiritual traditions, compelling life stories and transformative exercises, WHERE TWO WORLDS TOUCH shows you that even the mundane details of everyday life offer rich fuel for personal evolution. No matter where you are in your own spiritual work, this book can show you how to harness the power of an experience we all share and often fear: change. Discover how you can learn to consciously use change as a spiritual rite of passage. Illustrated with wonderful allegorical tales from all the major spiritual traditions, compelling life stories and transformative exercises, WHERE TWO WORLDS TOUCH shows you that even the mundane details of everyday life offer rich fuel for personal evolution. No matter where you are in your own spiritual work, this book can show you how to harness the power of an experience we all share and often fear: change. Discover how you can learn to consciously use change as a spiritual rite of passage. Illustrated with wonderful allegorical tales from all the major spiritual traditions, compelling life stories and transformative exercises, WHERE TWO WORLDS TOUCH shows you that even the mundane details of everyday life offer rich fuel for personal evolution. Gloria D. Karpinski , a holistic counselor and teacher, is the author of  Barefoot on Holy Ground: Twelve Lessons in Spiritual Craftsmanship  and  Where Two Worlds Touch: Spiritual Rites of Passage . She received her degree from University of North Carolina and has presented lectures and workshops throughout the world. Introduction   Change challenges, relieves, frustrates, threatens, saddens, or exhilarates us. Mainly it forces us to grow. It is the mechanism through which nature ensures evolution and the way God calls us home. It scares away our illusions about ourselves and others. Angel of mercy or Saturnian disciplinarian, change is constantly tailoring us to become all that we are meant to be. It molds us as surely as winds sculpt a tree or flowing waters reshape the hardest rock. Through change we are initiated into higher and higher states of consciousness. Our consciousness is our total awareness, a synthesis of heart and mind that enables us to act.   Change invites us to stretch and risk. It offers new births in consciousness to the degree that we are willing to die to the old. When change is only stoically endured or loudly protested, nothing is learned and the inevitable is delayed. Yet when change is accepted—no, more than that, embraced—it catalyzes our lives, expands our understanding, and shifts our perspective from one of fear to one that affirms life. For life is change.   There are ways of dealing with change creatively and without fear. One of them is by understanding the dynamics of change itself. Caught in the drama of a sudden personal crisis, it is often challenging to be able to see any purpose in it. But change is always a matter of process, even when it comes suddenly. Change often seems to be chaotic and threatening, with no intelligent direction. The key word here is seems. From a larger perspective or in retrospect, in change we see the workings of personal or planetary evolution.   THE RHYTHMS OF CHANGE   There is a rhythm in the way change occurs. I gradually became aware of this rhythm through years of being privileged to share the “classrooms” of hundreds of people as they met their challenges, even though the arenas and specifics were as different as the people themselves.   As I attuned myself to the rhythm of change, I realized that many of the people who came to me for counseling for the first time were either twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-five, forty-two, forty-nine, fifty-six, or sixty-three. In time I realized that this meant that they were in the first part of a seven-year cycle.   I came to see that the major turnings in their lives that heralded profound changes—marriages, divorces, deaths, births, career moves—all clustered around the actual year of a cycle change or a few months going into it or coming out of it. In case I missed the point, I would occasionally have clients who would insist that I see their teenagers, who were, like as not, age fourteen.   At first I casually assumed that this occurrence was in sync with the biological and psychological developmental tasks of the various ages. And I do think there is some correlation there, certain broad strokes that have to do with the desire to marry, likely times for career promotions, our own aging, and the aging and deaths of our parents.   However, it stretches credibility pretty far to make all the changes I was observing fit the scientific models. And this point of view made no sense at all when a man experienced a