Art of Birth
Threshold
Preconception and Prenatal Coaching
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Parenthood: The threshold that changes everything
Before you cross it, you are one kind of person. After, you are another. The work of becoming a parent—truly becoming one—does not begin in the delivery room. It begins the moment the longing stirs. It unfolds across months of inner reckoning, relational deepening, and ancestral healing. It calls you to unearth the patterns you inherited, to make conscious what was once unconscious, and to root yourselves in the kind of family you are choosing to become—before the baby arrives.
Threshold exists for couples ready to meet that call with intention.
꥟ What is Threshold ꥟
Threshold is a relationship-based, deeply personal coaching program for couples navigating the reproductive continuum—from the first whisper of preconception through pregnancy and into birth preparation. It is not a curriculum you move through. It is a living container, built around the specific needs, questions, and constellation of your family. The work draws from physiology, ancestral frameworks, nervous system literacy, herbal medicine, birth ecology, elemental wisdom, and the sacred arts of womanhood—equal parts grounded and transformational.
The couples sessions move through eight carefully designed areas of inquiry. Each builds on the last.
Each produces something real and usable for your family.
You will receive •
Every Threshold session is custom-designed to meet the living edge of your family’s journey. Beyond the sessions themselves, you receive a rich library of resources that continue to nourish the work between meetings.
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No session is generic. Each is built around what is most alive for your family in that moment—drawing from physiology, ancestral inquiry, relational practice, nervous system work, and embodied ritual.
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Powerful prerecorded content to support the journey and help you keep integrating the work between sessions
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A living document you build together mapping shared values, roles, household responsibilities, and the invisible labor that must be named and distributed consciously before the baby arrives.
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A detailed, practical map of who will hold your family—emotionally, physically, and spiritually—in the weeks after birth. Built before you need it, so you are not making these decisions from depletion.
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Not a checklist. A values-aligned framework covering physiologic birth care, intervention awareness, birth space protection, and how to advocate within medical systems—reflecting how you actually want to birth.
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A shared, pre-agreed relational protocol for navigating tension as partners. Built before the baby comes so you have a practiced map for repair when sleep deprivation and identity shifts make everything harder.
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A co-written declaration of your parenting philosophy—grounded in nervous system science, attachment principles, and the values you want to actively model for your child from the beginning.
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I support you in crafting family ritual to mark the crossing into parenthood—Creating shared experiences that prepare you body, mind and heart for what is to come and helpts anchors what you have built together.
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Anatomy of birth, holistic stages of labor and brainwave states, fetal development, postpartum physiology, herbal support, book lists, elemental frameworks—hundreds of pages of original educational content.
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Weekly homework, rituals, and embodied practices to deepen the work between sessions and carry it into daily life.
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WhatsApp access for questions, processing, and real-time support as things arise between your sessions.
• The Paths Into Threshold •
Two program tiers, designed to meet different seasons and capacities. Each is built on the same depth of care.
The First Crossing
Mini Threshold Program
$850
6 Sessions · $141 per session
Payment plans available upon request-
4 Couples Sessions · 75 min each
A grounded entry into the shared work of conscious preparation—exploring your family values, birth vision, relational architecture, and the questions that most need meeting before your baby arrives.
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1 Individual Session · 75 min
A private space to orient—body, heart, and lineage—to where you are right now and what most needs tending as you step toward conception or birth.
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1 Individual Session · 75 min
A grounded conversation for the co-parent: where you are, what you carry, and how to show up with full presence at this threshold.
The First Crossing is a powerful beginning. Many families choose to continue into the Full Arc once the container opens—at the Full Arc rate.
The Full Arc
Complete Threshold Program
$2000
16 Sessions · $125 per session
Payment plans available upon request-
8 Couples Sessions · 75 min each · $1,200
Family culture & shared foundations, birth preparation, shared vision of parenthood, emotional intimacy & conflict navigation, building your village, money & resource stewardship, parenting philosophy & nervous system care, and a closing ceremony of arrival. Tailored entirely to the needs and season of your family.
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4 Individual Sessions · 75 min each · $400
A private space to tend your body, lineage, and emerging identity—supporting the full initiation from maiden to mother with depth, sovereignty, and ancestral care.
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4 Individual Sessions · 75 min each · $400
A dedicated space for the co-parent to explore their own initiatory journey—emotional presence, protective role, personal patterns, and the profound calling of conscious fatherhood.
Couples sessions also available as a standalone package · 8 sessions · $1,200
Single Session
$150 · 75 minutes · For individuals or couples
Single sessions are a welcome starting point. We will meet you wherever you are—and gently extend the invitation to go deeper, because the most powerful transformation happens over time, in relationship.
How to Begin
Beginning is simple. The only requirement is that something in you is ready.
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A 30-minute conversation to meet each other, ask questions, and feel whether this work is the right fit for your family. No pressure, no obligation—just a genuine conversation at the threshold.
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Together we’ll identify which program tier best meets your season, your needs, and your capacity. The Full Arc, The First Crossing, or a single session to begin. Clarity first, commitment second.
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Once enrolled, you’ll receive your intake materials, session schedule, and access to the resource library. Your family WhatsApp group is created—the hub for all communication, materials, and between-session support.
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Your first session is oriented to exactly where you are. From there, the container builds—session by session—into the living relationship this work becomes over time.
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We examine the family cultures you each came from and the unconscious scripts you carry—around gender roles, emotional labor, household responsibilities, and power. Together we map your current and ideal distribution of tasks, identify invisible work, and begin building a Family Values & Culture document rooted in your actual values rather than inherited defaults.
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We cover the physical, hormonal, emotional, and spiritual shifts of pregnancy for both partners. We explore the holistic stages of labor, physiologic versus medicalized birth, how to protect the birth space, and how to advocate within medical systems. You leave with a shared birth vision and communication agreement.
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Parenting styles, discipline philosophy, education values, home rhythms, career trade-offs, and long-term dreams. We surface the friction points before they become conflicts, and design a rhythm chart for your first year postpartum together.
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The death of the old self. The grief of lost freedom and identity. The work of rebirthing as parents while staying connected as partners. We build your Conflict Compass—a shared, pre-agreed map for repair when rupture happens—and practice the skills of presence, vulnerability, and return.
Session topics could include:
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Postpartum planning: who will help, how, and when. We create your Postpartum Support Matrix across emotional, practical, and spiritual needs. We write boundary-setting scripts, map specific roles for community members, and answer the question most families never ask: who will hold the parents?
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A real look at your finances, parental leave, income shifts, and values-based budgeting. We create a family resource flow chart across money, time, and energy and establish financial check-ins as a regular practice in your family culture.
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Attachment, conscious discipline, co-regulation, and the neuroscience of infant development. We explore what it means to parent from the nervous system—to model repair, tend the emotional body of your child, and honor their spirit and autonomy from the beginning. You write your Parenting Manifesto together.
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A closing ceremony to honor what has changed in each of you, reaffirm your shared commitments, and step consciously across the threshold. You co-create a family altar or symbol, exchange written vows or blessings, and design a threshold ritual to mark the end of preparation and the beginning of parenthood.
Threshold Is For You If…
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And you want to cross that threshold with your whole self—body, lineage, relationship, and spirit tended before the seed is planted. You want to heal what you carry before you pass it on, and enter conception as consciously as possible.
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Not just information about your body, but a guide who can hold the full initiation of what is happening to you—physically, hormonally, spiritually, and relationally. You want to understand what is actually unfolding, not just survive it.
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And you want to understand physiologic birth, build a values-aligned birth vision, know how to navigate medical systems with advocacy and sovereignty, and feel genuinely held by someone who knows your family and your story.
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You understand that what you build between you before the baby comes will shape everything that follows. You want the real conversations—about labor, about money, about roles, about repair—to happen now, with guidance, while you still have the space and energy to do them well.
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Something in you knows this threshold deserves more than the default. That becoming parents is one of the most significant initiations of your lives—and that it is worth preparing for with the same care and devotion you want to bring to the raising of your child.
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You can see the threads—the ways your family of origin shaped you, the patterns that were handed down without question, the wounds that were never named. And you are ready to do something different. Not out of rejection of where you came from, but out of devotion to where you are going. This work is about becoming a conscious link in the chain—one who receives what was given with gratitude, heals what needs healing, and passes forward something more whole.
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You understand that the quality of presence, attunement, and emotional intelligence you bring to your child’s earliest years will shape who they become. That the nervous system they develop, the attachment patterns they carry, the sense of self they build—all of it begins here, in the quality of the container you create before and after they arrive. This is not about being a perfect parent. It is about being a prepared, conscious, and intentional one.
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You know that unexamined fears, unresolved grief, and untended relational dynamics don’t disappear when a baby arrives—they intensify. You want to do the inner work now, while you have the space, so that you are parenting from your values and your vision rather than from old survival patterns and unmet needs.
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That a child who arrives into safety, sovereignty, and attunement carries something different into the world. That families who do this work consciously are quietly midwifing a cultural shift—rebuilding the village, one rooted household at a time. You want to be part of that. This work is your contribution.
• What families are saying •
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Testimonial One
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Testimonial Two
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Testimonial Three
Your Guide at the Threshold
Doula · Clinical Herbalist · Natural Builder · Educator · 15+ Years in Service to Families
Ashley McDonell is a full-spectrum birth keeper and educator whose work is rooted in devotion to future generations. Born on occupied Anishinaabe and Dakota land (Minnesota), her life follows the rhythm of the seasons—gathering teachings, tending community, and sowing the seeds she has been entrusted to carry.
For more than 15 years she has served families across the reproductive continuum—preconception, conception, release, pregnancy, physiologic birth, postpartum, and beyond. Her lineage of study includes Whapio, Rachelle Segal, traditional midwives, and teachers of the Wise Woman and physiological birth traditions as well as every mother, baby and coparent she has had the privilege to tend.
Her understanding of birth is both clinical and initiatory. She teaches the holistic stages of labor—including the brainwave states that unfold as a woman moves through the continuum of early labor into the altered states of active birth and transition—drawing on the lineage of Whapio, one of the foremost teachers of physiologic birth in the world. She understands birth hormones, fetal positioning, birth ecology, hands-on support, and the cascade of interventions that can occur when the birth space is not protected. She prepares families not only for the birth they hope for, but for the full range of what birth can be—including how to advocate for themselves with clarity and sovereignty inside medical systems.
What makes Ashley's coaching distinct is her capacity to hold both registers at once: the rigorously physiological and the profoundly initiatory. She can explain the hormonal orchestra of undisturbed birth in the same breath as she names what is spiritually at stake when that process is interrupted. She knows what the mother's nervous system needs, what the baby's transition requires, and what the couple's relationship must be able to hold for all of it to unfold with integrity. This knowing comes not from certification alone but from relationship—with families, with birth itself, and with the ancestral tradition of women holding women through the threshold.
When you work with Ashley, you are not just receiving information about birth. You are receiving the transmission of someone who has sat at that threshold hundreds of times, who understands what can go wrong and how to prevent it, who knows how to prepare a couple's body, mind, relationship, and spirit for one of the most powerful experiences of their lives—and who can still provide support for your family long after the birth itself.
Why an Ally, Not Just a Session
The work of family initiation coaching is most powerful when it is built on relationship. Trust, shared intimacy, and the knowledge that someone truly knows your family—your history, your fears, your values, your specific edge—changes everything about what becomes possible in the hard moments.
A single session can offer insight. But an ally who has walked with you through preconception, who held you through the uncertainty of pregnancy, who knows your birth vision and your relational patterns—that person can stand at the thresholds that matter most with the kind of presence that only comes from real relationship.
This is why Threshold is designed as a program, not a transaction. The sessions build on each other. The container deepens over time. What you bring to session four would never have been possible in session one. The investment is not just in information—it is in building an ally for the long arc of your family’s life.
Single sessions are available for those who need to begin somewhere. And we warmly welcome them—with the honest invitation to go deeper, because the work asks for it.
The Village We Were Never Meant to Live Without
We live in an era that asks two people to do what entire communities once held.
The dual-parent model—isolated, overstretched, and untethered from lineage—is a modern invention, and it is quietly failing families everywhere. The sleepless nights, the relational ruptures, the identity crises of early parenthood are not personal failures. They are the predictable result of crossing one of the most profound initiatory thresholds of a human life without elders, without ceremony, without anyone to hold the invisible architecture of this passage.
We tend to build the skills of conscious partnership, conflict repair, and intentional family design in the middle of needing them—already sleep-deprived, already overwhelmed, already changed. The conversations about invisible labor, about whose career yields and whose expands, about how we want to navigate disagreement when we are both depleted—these are rarely had before the moment arrives. The financial reality of the first year with a baby, the specific people who will hold the family after birth, the non-negotiables around parenting philosophy and home rhythm—most of us piece this together as we go, under pressure, without a map.
This is not failure. It is simply what happens when a profound rite of passage is treated as a logistical event. The fault lines were always there. Threshold is where we find them before they widen.
This is the work Threshold was built for. Not as a curriculum to complete, but as a living container where the real conversations happen—with guidance, structure, and the steady presence of someone who has walked this terrain with hundreds of families. We work together to map your resources, name your values, repair your patterns, build your village, tend your nervous systems, and cross this threshold as consciously as possible. This is learning and remembering together—reclaiming the rites of passage that help families stand at difficult thresholds with skill, presence, and grace.
