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.
THE WORK
A Wider Circle of Care.
What would it mean for a community to become better at showing up for one another at the end of life?
The Threshold Collective is exploring that question here in California’s North Bay, alongside families, hospice and palliative care professionals, artists, practitioners, caregivers, and community members.
We believe care at the end of life can extend beyond the clinical—not by replacing the work of hospice and palliative care, but by widening the circle around it.
Our work is taking shape in two interconnected ways.
At the bedside
We bring local practitioners into the circle of care alongside hospice and palliative care teams, offering practices such as palliative acupuncture, music, contemplative care, breathwork, and expressive and ritual arts.
Each offers another way of tending to the embodied, emotional, relational, and meaning-making dimensions of dying.
In the community
We create spaces where dying and grief can be part of community life before a crisis arrives—through conversation, art, shared experiences, and opportunities to explore how we want to care for one another through illness, dying, loss, and remembrance.
Because a wider circle of care begins long before the bedside.
The Collective Taking Shape
The Threshold Collective is taking shape through relationships with practitioners, artists, healthcare partners, and community members across the North Bay—all exploring how we might widen the circle of care around dying, death, and grief.
Courtney Reiman
Founding Director, DACM · LAc · CPHPCA
Courtney has spent much of her clinical career at two thresholds that ask everything of us: the moment life arrives, and the moment it leaves.
As a Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine and trained full-spectrum doula, she spent a decade specializing in fertility, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care, and later co-founded Akin, a women’s integrative health network that brought multidisciplinary care to communities across California.
Her work has long been shaped by an interest in how we inhabit the body and navigate profound change—through her early career as a professional ballet dancer, years spent immersed in other languages and cultures, and later through medicine and caregiving.
Experiences with loss and end-of-life care eventually brought her to a question that now sits at the heart of her work: how might we bring the same intention, presence, and humanity to the end of life that we so readily bring to its beginning?
She founded The Threshold Collective to explore that question in community—bringing together practitioners, artists, healthcare partners, and others interested in widening the ways we care for people and one another through dying, death, and grief.
She writes The Deeper Fluency on nonlinear lives and embodied ways of knowing.
Bios of partnering artists and practitioners forthcoming.