The Threshold Collective
Surrounding the end of life with music, art, nature, and care.
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CALIFORNIA’S NORTH BAY
WHY THIS WORK
What if dying is not a medical problem to be solved, but a human experience to be held?
Modern medicine has become extraordinarily skilled at treating the body. But dying is more than a medical event.
It is a threshold that touches the whole person—and everyone who loves them.
There is pain, certainly. There is also fear, tenderness, uncertainty, memory, beauty, grief, relationship, meaning, and the need to make sense of what is happening. Families, too, are living through a profound transition, often without enough space or support to meet it.
We believe something is missing from the way we care for people at the end of life. The arts, embodied practices, and community that help us remain human in the midst of profound change.
The Threshold Collective is being built around this possibility.
Because care at the end of life does not always mean fixing what is happening.
It can mean having more ways to be held within it.
WHAT WE’RE BUILDING
An Expansive Ecosystem of Care.
The Threshold Collective is an integrative model of end-of-life care — intentional, unhurried, responsive to the person in front of us.
For people in their final months, weeks, and days — and the families around them — we are building a network of skilled practitioners who can bring this care to the bedside, wherever that bedside is: home, hospice facility, or hospital. Each person and family chooses what resonates for them.
We work alongside hospice and palliative care teams, complementing — never replacing — the clinical care already in place. Our practices create a more expansive ecosystem of care—one that attends not only to symptoms, but to presence, connection, expression, and meaning by offering:
Palliative acupuncture
Bedside song
Meditation
Grief-informed breathwork
Expressive and ritual arts
Gentle movement (qi gong)
The Threshold Collective is in active development in California's North Bay, our first pilot region — a model designed from the beginning for replication. We are currently building relationships with hospice organizations, practitioners, and funders, and establishing the infrastructure to bring the human dimensions of care back to the bedside.
Beyond direct care, we are committed to shifting how our culture holds dying: bringing conversations about death into community spaces, creating opportunities for people to explore their own mortality and grief before crisis arrives, and weaving dying naturally into our social fabric instead of hiding it behind fear and stigma.
If this work speaks to you — as a hospice professional, practitioner, funder, family member, or community member — we would love to hear from you.
Courtney Reiman
Founding Director, DACM · LAc · CPHPCA
Courtney has spent her clinical career at the two thresholds that ask everything of us: the moment life arrives, and the moment it leaves. She is a former professional ballet dancer, a Boren Scholar in Japanese who worked as a cultural liaison, and someone with an insatiable curiosity for drawing different worlds together. Each discipline — dance, language, culture, medicine — has taught her something essential about how humans transform.
As a Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine and trained full-spectrum doula, she spent a decade specializing in fertility, pregnancy, and birth. She co-founded Akin, a women's integrative health network, where she grew a team of 40 multidisciplinary practitioners across California. As life moved her closer to the bedside of the dying, she witnessed a disparity that would reshape her work entirely: the same care and intention poured forward when life enters simply does not exist in our existing structures when life exits.
Through her own personal losses, she learned what she now practices daily — that art, the body and presence can alchemize grief, transforming sorrow into wisdom that moves us forward. Sitting with those at the threshold of death, she continually rediscovers one of the greatest gifts: that facing mortality can teach us to live more fully.
That understanding is why she founded The Threshold Collective: to build an integrative model of end-of-life care for people who are dying and the families who accompany them. At its heart, the work will reach beyond the bedside, into communities where death can have a place alongside life—strengthening families, deepening connection, and expanding our understanding of what it means to live fully.
She writes The Deeper Fluency, on non-linear lives and embodied ways of knowing.