Guides at the Threshold
Our doulas accompany individuals, couples, organizations, and communities through profound transitions with grounded presence and ritual design.
Co-Founder · Threshold Midwife and Catalyst
Cari holds a lantern in the dark. She is a catalyst, attuned to what is ready to die and what is longing to be born. For over twenty-five years, she has accompanied individuals, couples, organizations, and communities through profound transitions.
Guided by the wisdom that endings cannot be bypassed and beginnings cannot be forced, she specializes in supporting people at relational thresholds. Cari brings a grounded, clear-sighted presence paired with a willingness to vision boldly, and people often say they feel a sense of safety almost immediately in her presence. She stands for death and birth being reintegrated into our culture—for the sake of restoring right relationship with self, others, and the Earth.
Cari is a somatic and executive coach, family and organizational systems constellation facilitator, and ritual designer. Formerly a co-founder and director of an international leadership consultancy and a social innovation organization, she has worked extensively with individuals, couples, teams, and organizations navigating conflict, breakdown, communication, feedback, and repair. Her work emphasizes integrating new ways of relating through somatic practices—helping insight move from the mind into the body, where durable change becomes possible. Cari has designed and led numerous ritual experiences, including death, rebirth, and erotic hero's journey rituals.
Her work is grounded in lived experience: ending intimate relationships both consciously and unconsciously, navigating divorce as a mother of two, practicing open relating while single parenting, and deliberately "killing" a long-term partnership multiple times—choosing truth over preservation at each threshold. Alongside her own experience of childbirth, she brings years of work in leadership, culture, and policy in maternal health and midwifery, including producing childbirth education resources for new parents. She is currently working on a book, Collective Birth, exploring lessons from physiologic childbirth for how we birth healthy human systems.
Somatic Grief-Eros Guide
Victor is a somatic spelunker into the depths of Grief and Eros, inviting individuals, couples, and communities into aliveness, death, continuation, and rebirth.
With intention, curiosity, trembling, fear and pleasure he guides and witnesses people through the smooth and rugged cave walls of transition and into courageous transformation and permission to release, let go into darkness or ascend back into light.
Victor is a somatic sexuality and erotic re-wilder, a relationship and sexuality coach, an intimacy doula, a somatic decolonizer and a grief-eros guide. He weaves a tapestried background of somatic coaching, somatic psychology, intimacy surrogacy, anthropology, movement, improvisational play, art, antiracism and liberation work and ritual/ceremonial guidance. He has been witness, guide and support to people traversing conscious uncoupling and to people transitioning into new relationship forms including non-monogamy, cooperative coparenting, companionate co-habitation and the myriad, undefinable ways that people can relate. He has also been witness and support to people moving through literal, bodily birth and death in the role of birth doula, death doula for family and friends, working with people living and dying with HIV/AIDS and erotic companioning for people in the dying process.
Victor's current interests, practices and writing are focused on the foundational role of Eros & Grief as the nutritive substrate of community repair and intact community.
Somatic Psychotherapist · Couples, Grief, Ritual
Maya is a Somatic Psychotherapist and relational guide who specializes in supporting couples and individuals through life's profound transitions. She creates compassionate spaces for navigating change, loss, and transformation.
Originally from Israel and now based in Boulder, Maya is bilingual (English/Hebrew) and bicultural (American/Israeli), bringing over 20 years of experience in the mental health field. Her background spans working with high-risk populations, trauma therapy, and facilitating grief rituals and couples workshops. Maya's approach integrates somatic and relational modalities, including training in Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), Gottman Method, Internal Family Systems, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning, alongside her extensive background in movement practices, theater, and the expressive arts.
Maya facilitates couples workshops and works individually with partners to deepen connection, navigate relational struggles, and support one another through difficult passages. She leads grief rituals that honor the sacred nature of endings and transitions. Whether supporting couples through relationship transitions, loss, or life-altering changes, Maya brings grounding presence, cultural sensitivity, and a gift for helping people find meaning in their most challenging moments.
Her work weaves together artistic expression, somatic awareness, and therapeutic skill to support individuals and couples walking paths of transformation.
Co-Founder · Writer and Ritualist
Yana weaves the words that bind and unbind. They bring the ancient technology of ritual into modern heartbreak, giving language to the unspoken and structure to the chaos.
Yana Rumi is the author of Simple Magick, a ceremonialist, and a community builder with nearly two decades of experience facilitating transformational work for individuals, couples, and large groups. They have participated in thousands of hours of deep ritual and ceremony within the Red Road tradition of the Oglala Sioux Lakota, the Indigenous Andean and Amazonian lineages of South America, and the esoteric practices of the Trans-Himalayan tradition.
Their name, Yana Rumi, means "black stone" in Runasimi (Quechua)—a medicine known for activating and amplifying the medicines around it. This principle forms the foundation of their work and their writings: to awaken, strengthen, and amplify your inherent medicine in service of the good of all.
Simple Magick
Listener, Excavator, Fool
A.J.'s knowledge of loss and rebirth comes from the inside out. His lifelong practice is deep listening, unearthing what is really true under the surface and leaving room for the absurd, the ridiculous, the "what if…."
Growing up in a large restaurant family and professionally trained in the theater from childhood, he is a student of what is felt but unspoken and what is invented but has the force of reality. Professionally A.J. has worked as a leadership facilitator, relationship mediator, addiction peer counselor, and improv performer. What is common across all his work is the practice of being present, of inviting truth, and interrogating what we consider real, possible or impossible. He has practiced as a somatic and embodiment coach and mentored others in somatics since 1999.
As a relationship death doula, A.J. brings his own experiences of love, ecstatic collaboration, breakdown, grieving and repair. Working with his own relationship ruptures has shown that just as the Buddhists say "In life, there is suffering," so in important long-term relationships there is hurt. We hurt and we get hurt, if we are on a heartfelt path with someone for long enough. These hurts can feel brutal in the moment, but with attention and gentle persistence they can become keys to unlocking deeper self-knowing, a more wide-awake practice, and the integration of our own orphaned parts. He considers the work of relationship care and hospicing to be an honor and a privilege.
Somatics Coach · Bodywork and Collectives
Erika Lyla is a somatics coach, bodyworker, trainer, therapist, facilitator, activist, mother, and lover, among many others. She loves working with individuals and couples to reveal their power, potential, and purpose, guiding with love and laughter towards life grounded in authenticity and shaped by dreams.
She practices on unceded Ohlone land known as Oakland, CA and leads collectives of people through healing journeys for the sake of more embodiment in what we truly care about.
Erika has been facilitating collective and personal transformative processes for over 20 years and holds a Master's Degree in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley. She specializes in working with people facing psychiatric crises, survivors of sexual violence, and individuals healing from complex trauma. Prior to expanding her private practice, Erika supported individuals in navigating the medical industrial complex as a social worker, worked as a youth organizer, and with school-age children as an after-school teacher and program director.
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