Threshold Self Design Guide Bundle (Part 1: Base Concepts + Part 2: Time)

Threshold Self-Design: The Foundations Bundle

Includes Vol. 1 (Base Concepts) & Vol. 2 (Time)
By Michelle D. Burk, Ph.D.

Transformation isn’t a single act; it’s a design process.

The Threshold Self-Design: Foundations Bundle brings together the first two volumes of Michelle D. Burk’s series on conscious transformation and creative evolution. Across these two guidebooks, you’ll explore how to architect your becoming through structure, rhythm, and awareness, learning to cross thresholds not by force, but through precision, timing, and trust.

What’s Inside

Vol. 1 - Base Concepts: The Architecture of Change

The foundational text of the series, Base Concepts, introduces the core frameworks that make threshold work possible:

• Kairos - sensing the right moment for action or stillness.
• Widerruf - practicing the generative art of withdrawal.
• Coincidentia Oppositorum - holding paradox as a site of synthesis.
• Prehension - cultivating deep perceptual and embodied awareness.

You’ll learn to design transition as a creative act, turning uncertainty into form and insight.

Vol. 2 - Time: Designing Temporal Intelligence

The second volume expands the framework into the dimension of time itself.
You’ll explore:

• Kairos - differentiating mechanical time from lived, qualitative time.
• Durée - experiencing continuity and flow instead of fragmentation.
• Derridean Trace - mapping repeating patterns and cycles of growth.
• Temporal Correlation - aligning reflection, action, and rest as one coherent rhythm.

Through reflection and practice, you’ll learn how to work with time rather than against it, developing a sense of temporal trust and creative pacing.

Why These Two Belong Together

Taken together, Base Concepts and Time establish the intellectual and experiential foundation of the entire Threshold Self-Design series.

Where Base Concepts teaches you how transformation works, Time teaches you when and through what rhythms it unfolds.

Together they form the core curriculum in self-architecture, guiding you to live with precision, poise, and imaginative control in moments of transition.

About the Series

Threshold Self-Design is a five-volume exploration of transformation as an art and a system:
Base Concepts, Time, Space, Bridges, and Spirals.

Each text builds toward a larger framework for designing change through consciousness, structure, and creative intelligence.

Base Concepts and Time are available via Gumroad, with Space and Bridges to be released in the late fall (2025).

Begin the Threshold Practice

This bundle is ideal for educators, creatives, and seekers who sense that change can be designed as consciously as anything we build in the external world.

Start your study of Threshold Self-Design with both foundational volumes.

About the Author

Michelle Burk is an award-winning writer, scholar, educator, and experience designer whose work explores the thresholds between perception, language, and the symbolic. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from Columbia University.

 With more than a decade of experience across education, tech, nonprofits, and enterprise sectors, Michelle specializes in learning strategy, UX/UI Design, and Research, and symbolic experience frameworks. In her consulting work, she partners with cultural institutions and business organizations to create innovative and immersive learning systems and frameworks that facilitate navigation of key threshold moments. 

 She is the author of the limited edition poetry collection No Crying in the Garden (2021) and The Threshold Self-Design Guidebooks (2025). She also leads Sensing Cities: Toward a Synesthetic Cartography of Urban Experience, a study of how sensory design influences empathy and moral cognition.