Doing Death Better

I'm excited to welcome you to this death education series, called Doing Death Better. I'm thrilled to be offering it, and I really hope that it's useful for you.

I get asked by a lot by people if they can train with me to become a death doula. That's something that I'm definitely interested in doing, but I find that most of us are so lacking in basic knowledge about death to begin with. We need to learn the basic skills and get the basic information before we can learn how to apply it appropriately when we're supporting dying people and their families. That's part of what these courses are designed to do.

Doing Death Better courses offer a grounding in the kind of information every human being should know about how to meet death. They are designed for a wide spectrum of people:

Ordinary folks, who might be facing your own death, or the death of someone you love right now, or you may just want to be prepared because you know it's coming.

You may be an aspiring death doula, who wants to find your way into the field, explore if this is right for you, and develop your skills.

You may be a death doula who's currently practicing, and you might need a quick primer on a topic that's particularly relevant to a family you're working with. Maybe there's something that wasn't covered in your training. This course is designed to be kind of a reference library you can go to when you need just to go directly to what you need.

The course is also of value to other practitioners who work with dying people and their family, whether you're a nurse or in palliative care, or a social worker, a counselor, or a lawyer or a teacher. We all come into contact with people who are facing mortality, and this course is designed to help you with all of that.

In my work as a death doula, I bring a certain approach to what I do, and that's reflected in these courses. My interest, and my way of engaging with death, is to meet it as a soul process. Dying is the process of leaving our bodies, so while we need to care for those bodies, we also need to learn how to be fluent in those realms that aren't physical, the realms of the soul, of the heart, of the interrelationships in community.

When I'm teaching these courses, the angle I bring is around looking at those (sometimes unseen) forces that are at play: the energetic forces and the spiritual forces. I help you understand the principles and the dynamics behind those, so you understand why things are happening.

I find when people understand those things, something lands. It's like they have a map for the process. Then they can find their own way into it.

That's my approach, it’s soul-focused and spiritual, but spiritual from the largest sense of the word, whatever your spiritual values are, in the sense of there being more than just our us.

In terms of the structure of the series, there are two kinds of courses. There are Fast Classes, which are 20 to 30-minute videos that laser dive into one particular aspect of a topic.

Then there are longer classes, called Core Skills Courses. Those are deeper. They'll have five or so lessons in them. They're a fuller exploration.

Even in the longer courses, you can choose how deep you want to go. You could just listen to the lessons and get what you need. Or, if you want to take a more transformational approach, you can go deeper into the exercises, and the reflective prompts, and the meditations, and really look at shifting who you are and how you are around death. Again, that's up to you, and the depth you want to go at any time.

Because these lessons are available in an ongoing way for you, you can come back to them whenever you want. If a new situation arises, come back and check and see what you need to know to face that.

As I said, I'm so excited about these programs, and I really hope that they are helpful, and that they help us all grow a better culture around death.