Meet Ash
Ash Embla is a grief worker, ritualist, and end of life doula devoted to helping people navigate the sacred thresholds of loss, death, and transformation. Her work weaves together animist practice, ancestral remembering, and earth based ritual to create spaces where grief can be honored rather than hidden.
Ash has worked as an end of life doula for over a decade and holds certification in End of Life Care from Douglas College, along with facilitator training in Traumatic Loss Support and Somatic therapy.
Her path to this work grew from a lifelong fascination with the ways humans make meaning from death and the unknown. In her twenties she studied Archaeology, earning a degree focused on the ancient Near East and participating in excavations in Macedonia and Cyprus. Those years studying ancient cultures and burial traditions shaped her understanding of how deeply our ancestors wove ritual, myth, and reverence for the dead into the fabric of daily life.
Her work honors grief not as something to overcome, but as a profound doorway into love, belonging, and transformation.
Drawing from my experience as an End of Life Doula and Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapist, I offer support that recognizes grief as both an emotional and embodied experience. Our work may include compassionate conversation, nervous system regulation, somatic practices, meaning-making, ritual, legacy work, and practical tools to help you move through the many layers of loss.
Grief can arise from many experiences, including:
• The death of a loved one
• Anticipatory grief
• Life limiting illness
• Caregiving
• Miscarriage or infertility
• Divorce or relationship endings
• Loss of identity or purpose
• Major life transitions
• Trauma and complicated grief
• The loss of beloved animal companions
Every journey is unique. There is no right way to grieve.
What a Session Can Offer
Each session is tailored to your individual needs and may provide:
• A safe, non-judgmental space to be witnessed
• Emotional support and compassionate listening
• Somatic practices for nervous system regulation
• Guidance through difficult emotions and uncertainty
• Support before, during, or after the death of a loved one
• Legacy and remembrance practices
• Practical resources for navigating grief
• Gentle encouragement to reconnect with yourself while honouring your loss
My role is not to fix your grief.
It is to walk beside you as you learn to carry it with greater compassion, resilience, and connection.
Session Details
Sessions are offered online via Zoom, allowing you to receive support from wherever you are. If you are local to the Kootenays, limited in person sessions may also be available.
If finances are a barrier, please reach out. I believe support should be accessible, especially during times of profound loss.
You Don't Have to Carry This Alone
If you are at a crossroads…
Endings are not just losses. They are thresholds. Whether it is a relationship, identity, dream, or season of life, I walk beside you as you honor what has been and make space for what is next. Through conversation, ritual, and reflection, we allow the ending to do its sacred work instead of rushing past it.
If something in your life is ending
The in between place is uncomfortable, but it is also fertile. If you feel untethered, unsure, or like the old maps no longer apply, our sessions help you find orientation again. Not by forcing answers, but by helping you build a relationship with your own inner knowing, your body, and the deeper currents moving through your life.
If you feel lost or in between
Growth often feels like shedding. Old patterns, roles, and protections fall away, and it can feel vulnerable. This work supports you as you step into a more honest and embodied version of yourself. Together we name what is ready to be released and strengthen your capacity to live from who you are now, not who you had to be before.
If you are being called into a new version of yourself
Thresholds: A Grief Companion for the In-between
In Thresholds, grief guide and end-of-life doula Ash Embla offers a deeply compassionate and grounded companion for those navigating profound loss. Drawing on over a decade of experience in hospice, ritual facilitation, and trauma-informed care, Ash invites us into the raw, transformative territory of grief, not as a problem to solve, but as a sacred process that reshapes the soul.
Through a weaving of personal story, somatic insight, mythic perspective, and earth-based ritual, Thresholds offers the reader not a map, but a lantern, something to carry into the dark.
This is not a guide for “moving on.”
It is a guide for staying present.
For finding meaning in the aftermath.
For letting grief remake you, gently, fiercely, and with deep integrity.
Whether you are grieving someone you love, something you lost, or the version of yourself that no longer exists, Thresholds will meet you where you are. And it will walk with you, step by step, until you begin to remember that you are still here and still becoming.
Download the e-book here.
Bone Art & Ritual Carvings
Reclaiming the forgotten, remembering the wild
🜁 Each piece is one-of-a-kind
🜂 Custom ritual carvings available by request
🜃 Informed by Norse tradition, animism, and ancestral memory
🜄 Available for purchase through the site or by direct inquiry
