Change can ask a lot of us. When we meet change honestly, we can begin to imagine what might become possible beyond the moment we are in. In this personal reflection, I explore change as an initiation: a threshold that asks us to arrive where we are, listen to what is true, and meet life from a deeper place of presence. I share my own story of loss and grief, and explore how art and creative expression can help stay connected to ourselves in times of upheaval.

The threshold of change

Change is most often not a gentle invitation. Instead it sometimes arrives like a clash, a breakdown, a rupture.

A door closes. A plan dissolves. A relationship changes. A role you built your life around no longer fits. The future you imagined disappears, and suddenly you are standing in a reality you did not choose and feel completely unprepared for.

In moments like this, change can feel like loss, chaos, confusion, or even failure.

But what if change is actually an initiation?

Because change can bring us to a threshold.

It can ask us to meet ourselves more honestly than before. It can reveal what no longer belongs. It can show us where we have been living from expectation, fear, habit, or old identity. And it can invite us into a deeper relationship with our own inner wisdom.

I know this from my own life.

Before I fully stepped into my work as an artist and creative guide, I had to go through several layers of change.
I left a professional path that looked good from the outside but did not feel true on the inside. I had to admit that the life I was building was not fully mine.
I began again in a new country, in a new relationship, building a new version of myself.

And then, in 2022, change almost broke me.

I want to pause here and send out a trigger warning for pregnancy loss before you continue reading.

My initiation through loss

I lost my first baby, my son Lukas, when I was almost eight months pregnant in 2022.

There are no words for this kind of grief.
There is no way to really explain or understand what happened to me in this phase of my life. My whole identity broke apart. I had to rebuild myself from scratch.

I see it as my dark night of the soul, my walk through the darkness, my journey to the underworld.

And now, from enough distance and with the perspective of a completely new reality (that includes the gift of my daughter Lily who arrived in 2024) I see that it was my biggest initiation so far.

This most terrible experience helped shape me into the person I proudly am today.

What I can share from this experience is that from the very beginning, I decided to walk this path consciously, as best as I could. I decided to do the work of healing, to commit to it completely, and to allow it to shape me.

My husband and I promised each other that this experience would not break us but make us stronger instead. And I have lived by this mantra ever since.

We both knew that we were not going to be able to do this alone, so we reached out and found support. We took every helping hand that appeared and used every possibility to dive deeper into what this experience had to teach us.

And for me there was art - my truest companion and mirror on this path - that helped me process, reflect, witness, and eventually rebuild and reimagine myself.

I started making the first drawing in the hospital, while I was still going through the birth process.

In that moment, I could not think. I could not speak. I could not understand what was happening, or express myself and my feelings. I was in a kind of trance state when I opened my sketchbook and started drawing lines.

At first, there was only chaos on the page — the same chaos I felt inside myself. And as I looked at the drawing, I began to recognize myself in it. I was there, trapped in a web of emotions, thoughts, shock, and pain.

I entered the drawing not to escape reality, but to really see what was unfolding inside me.

After a while, I noticed a large circle emerging at the edge of the page. Something in me understood that this circle mattered. It felt like a space beyond this never-ending agonizing moment. So I extended the drawing onto the next page. I gave that circle more space. I gave form to the possibility that there was something beyond this moment.

There had to be a way forward. There had to be something beyond.
I began to draw my way there, even though I had no idea how I would ever reach it.

Creating in this way helped my mind begin to move. Slowly and gently something inside me shifted. I began to see that this was not the end of our story.

I had that drawing with me when I finally birthed my son. It gave me strength because I had already seen and knew deep within that there was something beyond. I held on to invisible threads that pulled me through the hardest parts of this experience. These threads started leading me toward a future that was still unwritten, but I knew it was there, waiting.

This drawing did not fix or resolve anything. It did not take away the grief. It did not explain why this had happened. But it helped me stay with myself. And it helped me see that there was something beyond.

The art process helped me meet that moment of change without disappearing inside it.

I stayed with my creative practice throughout the weeks and months that followed. It was the most difficult time of my life. And it also sparked a completely new understanding of the healing power of art.

drawing by Antje Howard (2022)

How to meet change as a creator

This is what I mean when I speak about change as an initiation.

An initiation is not just a transformation we choose because it sounds beautiful. Often, it is a passage we would never have chosen. It breaks open the old identity, the old story, the old certainty. It brings us to the ground of our being and ask:

Where are you now?
What is true now?
What do you see now?

For me, art became the space where I could ask those questions without needing immediate answers. It gave me a way to express what had no words. It helped me hold grief, love, guilt, anger, confusion, memory, and hope in the same image. It helped me understand that I was not only a victim of what had happened to me.

I was also still a creator.

This does not mean we control what happens. We do not.

Life changes us. Loss changes us. The world changes around us. Sometimes everything we know is rearranged.

But we still have a relationship with how we meet the change.

We can resist it.
We can collapse into it.
We can try to control it.
We can bypass it.
We can pretend we are fine.

Or we can begin by arriving exactly where we are.

This has become one of the foundations of my work: before we can move forward, we need to know where we are standing.

So much personal development focuses on where we want to go. The vision. The next step. The future self. The dream life.

But if we do not first arrive in the present moment, in the body, in the truth of what is here, then our vision has no roots.

Change asks for roots.

It asks us to feel our feet on the ground. To listen to the body. To notice the emotions. To see the thoughts and stories that are shaping our response. To create a container where everything that is present can be acknowledged.

Only then can something new begin to move.

This is why I work with embodiment practices and art.

Because change does not only happen in the mind.

It happens in the nervous system.
It happens in the heart.
It happens in the body.
It happens in the images, symbols, and inner landscapes we may not yet have words for.

When we move, feel, and create, we can meet the unknown in a different way.

We can place the chaos on paper. We can see what is moving inside us. We can create containers for what needs to be held. We can bring in breath, space, connection, and new pathways. We can begin to feel that we won't be stuck in the old pattern forever.

Change as an initiation does not ask us to be fearless.

It asks us to become present.
It asks us to stop abandoning ourselves in the moment of transition.
It asks us to listen more deeply, create more honestly, and allow the unknown to become a space of relationship instead of a space of fear.

Change is the Doorway

In the free intro session to the Art of Change journey, you will be invited to explore your patterns around change. We will meet change through the body, emotions, mind, and creative intuition. We will use Kindred meditation and Intuitive Neuro Art™ to gently ask:

How do I respond when life changes?
What part of me resists, freezes, controls, collapses, or tries to rush ahead?
And what becomes possible when I meet change as a creative threshold instead?

Change may not always arrive in the way we want.

But when we learn how to meet it differently, it can become an initiation into a more truthful, embodied, and creative life.

Join me LIVE on July 3rd
Change is the Doorway
FREE guided Intuitive Neuro Art™ with Antje Howard

>>SIGN UP HERE<<

This session is open to anyone - whether you identify as an artist or not.
No art experience or skills required. I will guide the processes step by step and create a safe space for you to simply explore, experiment, and meet your creativity in a new way.