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 extraordinary 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 are exploring how to widen the circle of care around people who are dying and the families who love them by bringing local practitioners and artists whose work offers comfort, presence, expression, and connection alongside existing hospice and palliative care.
This might include palliative acupuncture, music, contemplative care, and expressive and ritual arts—offered in ways that are responsive to the person, the family, and the moment.
In the community
We are beginning to 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.
Some of this work is still emerging. Intentionally.
Rather than arriving with all of the answers, we want to listen, gather, experiment, and build in response to what our community actually needs.
Because perhaps a wider circle of care begins long before the bedside. It begins with learning how to show up for one another.
The Collective Taking Shape
The Threshold Collective is being built in collaboration with practitioners, artists, healthcare partners, and community members across the North Bay. Our emerging network brings together people working across palliative acupuncture, bedside song, expressive and ritual arts, contemplative practice, grief support, hospice and community care.
Courtney Reiman
Founding Director, DACM · LAc · CPHPCA
Courtney has spent her clinical career at two thresholds that ask everything of us: the moment life arrives, and the moment it leaves.
A former professional ballet dancer and Boren Scholar in Japanese, she has spent her life moving between disciplines—dance, language, culture, medicine—each shaping how she understands the ways humans navigate profound change.
As a Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine and trained full-spectrum doula, Courtney spent a decade specializing in fertility, pregnancy, and birth and later co-founded Akin, a women’s integrative health network, where she grew a multidisciplinary team of 40 practitioners across California.
Her experiences with loss and end-of-life care eventually drew her toward 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 alongside a thriving community of practitioners, artists, community leaders, and others working at the end of life.
She writes The Deeper Fluency on nonlinear lives and embodied ways of knowing.