THE

Thresholds Trilogy

A 3-Course Collection

with

Stephen Jenkinson &
Kimberly Ann Johnson

Birth & Death Among Us

GET INSTANT ACCESS

LIMITED TIME OFFER
Monday, September 15 - Wednesday, September 24th at midnight PT

THE

Thresholds Trilogy

A 3-Course Collection

with

Stephen Jenkinson &
Kimberly Ann Johnson

Birth & Death Among Us

GET INSTANT ACCESS

LIMITED TIME OFFER
Monday, September 15 - Wednesday, September 24th at midnight PT

Emergent conversations at the thresholds of birth, death, place, matrimony, and belonging.

Three Courses. Two Teachers.
One Invitation.

Three courses. Two teachers: an aged man and an aging woman, both students of the mystery ways, both steeped in oral tradition, rigor, and study. One invitation: to reckon with these crossroads of human life and village life.

The Thresholds Trilogy is a living record of Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson reckoning aloud – raw, unflinching, unforgettable.

Who is this for?

  • Readers of Matrimony, Reckoning, Die Wise, Come of Age, A Generation’s Worth, Money & the Soul’s Desires, The Fourth Trimester, or Call of the Wild who want to go deeper with what it means to be human in these times

     

  • Those who’ve attended a live event with Stephen & Kimberly and were left wanting more- or those who will come to a live event and want the material to begin working in them now

     

  • Those who have wanted to come to a live event but live far away or are holding down farms or families and can’t make it live.

     

  • People hungry for elderhood and oral tradition that they can return to again and again

     

  • Students of myth, storytelling, and ancestral memory

     

  • Somatic practitioners, therapists, and educators who know that healing isn’t just personal or psychological

     

  • Those suspicious of self-help promises and endless fixing and improving, looking instead for cultural repair

     

  • Anyone who has felt the absence of ritual, village, and elders in modern life 
  •  

About The Thresholds Trilogy

Each course in the trilogy can stand alone, but together they trace the arc of culture work at the thresholds. 

The series were recorded in distinct forms:

  • Birth & Death Among Us (three-part series) features raw and alive conversations between Stephen and Kimberly, with witnesses gathered over Zoom.
  • Forgotten Pillars (five-part series) was professionally filmed before living-room witnesses while simultaneously livestreamed worldwide. 
  • Never Land / Sever Land (five-part series) is audio-only, recorded with a live audience- an old-school radio encounter.

This is a chance to be in the presence of eldering, and to let these principles and reckonings work through and in your life. 

Each series explores a particular threshold, but taken together, they form a kind of cultural immersion into the ways birth, death, matrimony, ritual, village life, ancestors, kinship and the Other World relate to each other.

Expect to be provoked, surprised, turned inside-out– some call it getting “jenked”. 

Whatever your response, it will be a lasting encounter with oral tradition in its most urgent form: real exchange, heartbreak, and honest reckoning.

This collection offers a rare opportunity to be with the radical, time-tempered wisdom of an elder culture worker and master storyteller (Stephen Jenkinson), and with a somatic guide, mother and spiritual teacher in her own right (Kimberly Ann Johnson), as they reckon aloud.

You might think of it as a kind of mystery school – not one in search of the mythical elsewhere, but responsible to the here and now – where wondering, wrestling, and reckoning are the methods, and the thresholds of human life, the curriculum.

“There are two choices when exposed to the reversing power of a real story about another world: you refuse and stay just the way you are… Or you let yourself be dragged across the threshold of this world. And you drink.”

–Stephen Jenkinson

Why now?

The culture is at a tipping point.

  • What used to be incremental change has become exponential: AI as therapist, personal trainer, travel consultant, even lover. People are losing faith in the human body and in human solutions.

     

  • We are disenfranchised by fake news and disoriented by propaganda; many are throwing up their hands and disengaging altogether.

     

  • The pandemic briefly incited caution about travel’s impact- but now it seems to be ‘open season’ again: go anywhere, anytime. The ethos is: If you can do it, then you should.

     

  • Education is fragmented: privatized schools, unschooling, homeschooling, free schooling. Birth today is fragmenting too: forget hospitals, forget midwives, forget insurance. None of the systems seem to work.

     

  • Culturally, we may be more grief literate, but we’re still determined to outwit death– to delay it or make it on-demand, more convenient, more sanitized.

     

  • Today politics are breaking families and communities apart- what was once unlikely but possible (friendship across political divides) now feels unthinkable.

     

  • We are caught in the illusion that new and more is always better, forgetting what is already made, time-tested, and essential.

     

  • Unexamined fundamental and contemporary worldviews are at the root of relationship and structural breakdown. There is little sense of commons (or common sense), diplomacy, or shared values and standards for how to raise children or how to live as neighbors.

“Threshold moments are when all of the rules seem to change, and we have to relearn what it means to be human each time- and what it means to understand our place in the order of things.”

–Kimberly Ann Johnson

What you'll get

THE

Thresholds Trilogy

Listen

Instant access to all three courses (20+ hours of recordings)

Community

Private Facebook community discussion groups 

Book Preview

Matrimony excerpt + new manuscript pages

Explore

Rare bonus material, including Forgotten Pillars’ bonus session:
The Aftermath 

CROSS THE THRESHOLD

Inside the Collection

3 Course Bundle- Course 3 is Birth and Death Among Us with Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson.

Birth & Death Among Us

Stephen and Kimberly meet and content with the gods of birth and death – the architecture that binds them, what we owe them, and what they might yet teach us.

“Being born and dying are storms. They are bigger than us, and they are bigger than what we believe, they are deities of a kind.” –Stephen Jenkinson

3 Course Bundle- Course 1 is Forgotten Pillars with Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson.

Forgotten Pillars: Patrimony, Matrimony, Kinship, Ancestors & Ceremony

In five professionally filmed sessions, Stephen and Kimbelry explore the pillars that once held village life together. For those seeking depth beyond modern wedding clichés, for celebrants, culture-makers, rites-of-passage guides, and anyone longing to restore ceremony to the center of communal life. Includes “The Aftermath,” a candid behind-the-scenes reflection.

3 Course Bundle- Course 2 is Never Land - Sever Land with Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson.

Never Land / Sever Land — Dirt, Place, Ancestry & the Making of Culture from the New World


A five-part audio series recorded live, rooted in Stephen’s work on belonging and place. For environmentalists, storytellers, decolonization workers, and anyone reckoning with where and to whom they belong. Includes manuscript pages from Stephen’s work that originated during his residency at the Pari Center in Tuscany in Spring 2023 – Never Land: Agriculture, Culture & the Striving for Belonging.

For a Limited Time

Get a discounted 3-course bundle of the
the most popular collaborations from

 

Stephen Jenkinson &

Kimberly Ann Johnson

THE

Thresholds Trilogy

kimberly-stephen-3

Forgotten Pillars
+
Never Land / Sever Land
+
Birth & Death Among Us

$975

$450

JOIN THE INQUIRY

This deal has expired. Questions? Contact us here.

Get a discounted 3-course bundle of the the most popular collaborations from

Stephen Jenkinson &

Kimberly Ann Johnson

NLSL_Photo_Kimberly-Stephen-Ireland2

THE

Thresholds Trilogy

$975

$450

JOIN THE INQUIRY

Available for a limited time ONLY through Wednesday, september 24th!

Courses Included

3 Course Bundle- Course 1 is Forgotten Pillars with Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson.

Forgotten Pillars

“Matrimony is an act of cultural memory.” ~SJ


✓ Instant access to 5 x 120 minute professionally filmed sessions with Stephen & Kimberly

✓ Access to the never-before seen bonus session – “The Aftermath” – a behind the scenes recap

✓ Instant access to Chapters 1 & 2 of Stephen’s latest book MATRIMONY: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work (August 12, 2025, Sounds True)

✓ Access to Forgotten Pillars private Facebook discussion group

 

LEARN MORE HERE

3 Course Bundle- Course 2 is Never Land - Sever Land with Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson.

Never Land/
Sever Land

“The sad imperative of homeless people is to never land.” -SJ


✓ 5-part audio series orginally recorded with a live studioo audience

✓ Join a private Facebook group to discuss & connect with others who have listened to the Never Land / Sever Land series

✓  Pages from the work-in-progress manuscript of Never Land: Agriculture, Culture & the Striving for Belonging

✓ Suggested resources and readings to deepen your understanding

 

LEARN MORE HERE

3 Course Bundle- Course 3 is Birth and Death Among Us with Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson.

Birth & Death
Among Us

“People have confessed to us in hushed tones that they cannot say what they really think or feel about topics like euthanasia, non-gendered birth language, big Pharma, free birthing, social media’s impact, the proliferation of birth imagery, and the booming birth and death industries. This is just the beginning of what is contended with inside of Birth & Death Among Us.”

✓ 3 recorded conversations (90 – 120 minutes each)

✓ Downloadable recordings

✓ Access available instantly upon purchase

 

LEARN MORE HERE

“Ritual is where the Gods are audible, where we answer their question, where the present gets made.”

–Stephen Jenkinson,
Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work

Stephen Jenkinson

Stephen is a worker, author, storyteller, culture activist, and co-founder of the Orphan Wisdom School with his wife Nathalie Roy. The school is a teaching house for skills of deep living and making human culture that are mandatory in endangered, endangering times. He makes books, tends farm and mends broken handles and fences, succumbs to interviews, teaches and performs internationally.

He has Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work). 

Apprenticed to a master storyteller when a young man, he has worked extensively with dying people and their families, is former program director in a major Canadian hospital, former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school.

Stephen Jenkinson is the author of: Reckoning (2022), co-authored with Kimberly Ann Johnson, A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching, 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life – (live teaching, 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002).

He is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Griefwalker, a portrait of his work with dying people, and Lost Nation Road, a shorter documentary on the crafting of the Nights of Grief and Mystery tours.

Kimberly Ann Johnson

Kimberly Johnson is an author, postpartum care activist, trauma educator, structural bodyworker and single mother. She graduated Valedictorian from Northwestern University with a BS in Social Policy (‘97).

She studied yoga directly with the three main lineage holders of the Krishnamacharya tradition- Desikachar, BKS Iyengar, and Pattabhi Jois and taught yoga full time for 15 years, while running a Structural Integration practice.

When radically rearranged by childbirth, Kimberly’s life changed shape to attend to the cultural chasm of postpartum care, and as a result she trained in Somatic Experiencing and Sexological Bodywork to be able to help women heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries and sexual boundary violations.

She is the author of the feminist trauma book Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power and Use it for Good (HarperWave, 2021) as well as the early mothering classic, The Fourth Trimester: A Postpartum Guide to Healing Your Body, Balancing Your Emotions and Restoring Your Vitality (Shambhala, 2017) – translated into 8 languages. She is the host of the Sex Birth Trauma podcast with over 1M unique downloads.

With no active rites of passage, we arrive at the altars of birth, death, sex, and matrimony with a pile-up.

The unspoken grievances and resentments stack up at the thresholds.

As dire world and planetary circumstances intensify and the way people treat one another is increasingly lacking in grace or etiquette or respect of any kind, the hunger for ritual, culture work, and anything sacred is palpable.

The Thresholds Trilogy invigorates those who engage with it through encounters that are raw, unexpected, and redemptive, and that uphold village mindedness in a time of cultural estrangement and impoverishment.

STEP INTO THE CONVERSATIONS
NLSL_Photo_Kimberly-Stephen-Ireland2

What others are saying...

“I love the exchange between you two- raw and open and alive in the moment. It brings me to back hanging with my grandparents and their friends years ago. Hearing truth.”

“I would listen to them speak all night.” -Eli Himovitz 

“Punk rock for the somatic conversations people are afraid to have.” – Reckoning Attendee, PA

“These conversations have brought to the fore my hunger for such interactions and sent me out into the world determined to make them or find them, at the very least, notice and welcome them when they show up.” –  Judith  

“I had never been to anything like this event with two energies dancing with each other between two people in a space of conversation. I felt both a part of it and witness. The difference and the oneness.” – J, North Carolina 

I feel so lucky to be on the receiving end of literally anything Stephen says, as I find him to be incredibly wise and prophetic, and I find your perspectives incredibly relieving and validating.” – Anya Kaats

Questions?

Audio recording are available to listen to at any time via the Course Portal. You’ll receive login instructions after purchase.

“Lifetime” access- meaning til I die or stop teaching online.

Please direct all course related questions to admin@kimberlyannjohnson.com

This is a non-refundable purchase.

Have another question?

Should you have any additional questions, our support team are ready to assist.
Click here to send an email.

Should you have any additional questions, our support team are ready to assist.
Click here to send an email.

You could call Stephen a bard, a soothsayer, a prophet, an oracle. He is severe, unflinching and unwilling to sugar-coat.

And Kimberly meets him there- with questions, with lingering silence, and with honest and piercing reflections.

BEGIN RECKONING