Serving at the Threshold
A modern mystery school for death preparation and integration, grief initiation and conscious dying & living.
Next cohort date in 2027.
You will die. Everyone and everything you love will die. Impermanence has already rendered everything so deeply
holy, significant and worthy of heart-breaking gratitude. Death has already transfigured our lives into an
altar. But we forget.
And now it’s time to remember.
Nothing brings us back into truth and presence like the awareness of death.
She is the ultimate teacher.
"Die before you die -
and discover there is no death."
The ancient Egyptians revered it. The Sufi mystic Rabia Basri wrote a poem about it. Tibetan monks and yogis of Varanasi spend lifetimes preparing for it. The Amazonian shamans face it in ceremony. The deathwise mystics of all ages built entire technologies around it. Every serious mystical tradition arrived at the same strange discovery: the death you fear is something you can meet before your body stops breathing - and doing so changes everything.
Whether it's the plant medicine ceremony that stripped you bare. The surprise diagnosis that made time collapse. The night you sat beside someone who was dying and felt something crack open in you. All of these are not separate experiences - they are the same door. We've just forgotten the key.
This is where the Sacred Death Collective begins.
Death is initiation.
By the time you've moved through this work, the thing that kept you half-alive (the low hum of unexamined mortality) will have been alchemised into the thing that makes you most alive.
Part I
3 months · 12 live classes
(All recorded and
weekly)
For anyone ready to transform their relationship with death, whether you're navigating grief, watching parents age, facing your own mortality, or simply done half-living.
Part I + Part II
6+ months · Certification
Be first in lineFor those called to hold space for others at the threshold. Advanced training that goes beyond personal transformation and into the art and ethics of death work, culminating in full certification and the option to receive the final ordination in the Amazon Jungle with indigenous elders.
You've most likely felt it: the pull toward mortality that the wellness world keeps packaging into soft euphemisms. You want the real, ancient thing - the thing that actually changes how you live.
You're watching a parent decline or you've lost someone and don't know what to do with what's left. You want tools that honour the weight of it and metabolise it, not bypass it.
You know you're meant to serve at the threshold. Therapist, coach, healer, or simply someone who is the person people turn to, and you want training with genuine depth and an actual lineage behind it.
Not for you if -
You're looking for another surface-level wellness certification, a tick-box qualification, clinical training or a polished online course that doesn't ask anything real of you. This is initiation and it will move things in you. If that's not what you're ready for right now, we'll be here when you are.
Founders of The Sacred Death Collective
Carla Rubí
Death Doula · Environmental Lawyer · Ayahuasca Facilitator · Ashtangi
Born in Barcelona, Carla is the co-founder of the Sacred Death Collective and Taozen, alongside her husband, Fred. Her work bridges ancestral wisdom, ecological justice, and deathwork.
As a certified Death Doula, Jungian psychedelic preparation and integration specialist, and ordained Priestess rooted in ancient Egyptian mysticism, Carla weaves together Western esotericism, Eastern traditions, and Indigenous spirituality to help people die consciously.
An annual pilgrim to Mysore, India, Carla is a devoted Ashtangi, practicing and teaching yoga in its original spirit: as a conscious preparation for death. She follows the Jois method of Ashtanga Yoga, a codified expression of the teachings and lineage of T. Krishnamacharya.
Drawing on her expertise as an Environmental Lawyer, and inspired by her time living in the Amazon doing initiatory ayahuasca dietas with the Indigenous Yawanawá tribe, Carla is also leading Cemetrees, an initiative transforming cemeteries into forests, where trees become our ancestors and the dead are reborn through nature.
Fred Billyard
Psychedelic Integration Specialist & Advocate · Death Educator · Historian · Musician
Fred is the co-founder of the Sacred Death Collective and Taozen, both of which he runs with his wife Carla. Naturally drawn to the edges of what is known or accepted, he has spent much of his life investigating both the inner landscape of human experience and the outer frontiers of knowledge - from Indigenous wisdom traditions and altered states, to emerging frontier technologies and unconventional ideas that make you question what it means to be human on a very fundamental level.
Over the past decade, Fred has guided hundreds of individuals through processes of preparation, integration, shadow work, and personal transformation - in both plant medicine containers, men's groups and in the larger ceremony of life. He is particularly interested in the relationship between mortality and freedom: how an honest and conscious encounter with death can strip away illusions, clarify your values, and invite us into greater responsibility for the lives we are living (or not).
His perspective has been shaped by extensive work with Indigenous communities in the Amazon, including completing the traditional one-month ayahuasca 'Samakei' (diet) with the Yawanawá tribe. These experiences reinforced a belief that initiation is an enormously important element that is desperately missing from modern life in the West. Through the Sacred Death Collective, he seeks to help restore a mature relationship with death as a source of wisdom, meaning, sovereignty, initiation, connection to nature and active participation in life's deeper mysteries.
Taita Victoriano
Taita (shaman) and traditional doctor of the Siona and Cofán tribes from the Colombian Amazon
Taita Victoriano Piaguaje Yaiguaje is a direct heir of the ancestral wisdom of the Siona and Cofán tribes, and a bearer of the knowledge passed down by his legendary father, Taita Laureano Piaguaje, as well as by other ancestors of both his maternal and paternal lineages.
With more than 30 years of experience as a Taita (shaman) and as a traditional (jungle) doctor, he has dedicated his life to the science of Yagé (aka ayahuasca), the vine of the dead, in order to provide healing and life enhancement.
As a Taita, despite always wanting to heal those that request his help, he also understands that sometimes death is what's meant to happen, and so he shall not intervene trying to avoid it. Therefore, his role as Taita also entails holding space as a death doula, helping people die and later, helping guide their spirit in the beyond.
Waxy Yawanawá
Majé (shaman) of the Yawanawá tribe from the Brazilian Amazon
For the Yawanawá pajés (shamans), spirits are as real as humans, and death is as natural as life.
The “beyond” is a realm to which pajés like Waxy travel through the consecration of Uni (aka ayahuasca), enabling them to communicate with the spirit world and receive guidance, knowledge, and healing.
Together with her sisters Putanny and Hushuahu, Waxy was one of the first three women to complete the sacred one-year Muká diet, the most important initiation on the path to becoming a pajé (shaman) in the Yawanawá lineage.
The Muká diet involves the study and ingestion of sacred plants, the learning of the Saitis (the most powerful sound healing technology we've encountered), and extended periods of complete isolation.
Yawanawá cosmology is founded upon the relationship that pajés and majés such as Waxy cultivate with the spirit world through the Muká diet, enabling them to bring healing, wisdom, and guidance to their communities.
Waxy's sacred medicines/tools include Uni (Ayahuasca), Kapum (Kambó), Sananga, Sepá and Rapé. Uni (Ayahuasca) being at the heart of the Yawanawá's spirituality.
No. Part I is for the death-curious, the grieving, and anyone who's done half-living. You do need to be 18 or older, and ready to look at your own death with other people in the room.
Both parts are fully online. Part I runs 3 months with 12 weekly live classes. Part I + II runs 6+ months. Every class is recorded, and recordings stay available for 12 months from your cohort's start date.
The only in-person piece is the optional Amazon ordination at the end of Part II.
Live classes run 60–90 minutes, and an occasional one goes up to 2 hours. Typically we share 1–2 reflection points or homework per session.
Yes. Part II builds on Part I, so the two run as one path: Part I + II. Admission to Part II can include an application or a screening conversation.
A Death Doula Certification from the Sacred Death Collective, awarded once you complete all the required parts of the online program. The Amazon ordination is optional, so you can be certified without it.
No. Plant medicine is a subject in the curriculum: one topic in Part I and one in Part II. The classes are teaching, not ceremony. Ceremony only comes into it in the Amazon, and that part is optional.
No. This work doesn't replace medical care, mental health treatment or grief counselling, and we don't diagnose or treat anything. If you're in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, contact a licensed professional or emergency services where you live. We're not equipped to be that support.
The next cohort starts in 2027, with the date still to be announced. Everyone on the newsletter list hears first, so sign up below.