What would it look like if no one had to face death or grief alone?

The bad news is that we live in a culture where death is medicalized, isolated, and outsourced, leaving many people disconnected from the most universal experience of being human. The good news is that the village is all around us.

Drawing from her forthcoming book, Dying Together: The Art of Community Death Care, and from decades of intentional community living, Lee Warren shares real-life stories of community-based death care at Earthaven Ecovillage, a rural ecovillage in Southern Appalachia, near Asheville, NC.

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Lee Warren is a death educator and author of Dying Together: The Art of Community Death Care. A cultural pioneer and leading voice in reimagining intimacy with death as a pathway to ecstatic aliveness, she draws on 30+ years of ecovillage living and community-based death care experience. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.                                                                           

The Pavamana Mantra, sometimes called simply by its first line (OM Asatoma Sadgamaya), comes to us from the Upanishads and is chanted to help purify the mind, create inner peace, and promote well-being for oneself and for all beings.

For this practice, we will chant this sacred mantra 108 times to lift our collective vibration and invite deeper insight into our true, immortal nature. We'll practice the pronunciation together first, and handouts will be provided so you may follow along. Bring your favorite mala beads if you wish to keep count.

Meadow DeFosche, eRYT-500, is certified in Restorative Yoga, Yoga for Post-Traumatic Stress through Yoga Warriors International, Integral Yoga for Stress Management through Satchidananda Ashram, and Yoga Nidra through Arhanta Ashram. She is also a certified Accessible Yoga teacher and Thai Bodywork practitioner. She approaches her practice as a lifelong learner and continues to seek new knowledge about yoga and yogic philosophy to deepen her connection to the world around her.

Using call and response, this presentation explores the values of community, kinship, kindness, and compassionate care surrounding the dying process and death itself. Are we willing to do the hard work of clear-eyed connection and deep respect—even to dance with joy—in remembering that death need not be hidden or denied?

Rev. Pat Jobe is a 33-year veteran of pastoral ministry, primarily in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. He has been a public radio commentator, newspaper columnist, and contributor to a number of books. His bestselling title is 365 Ways to Criticize the Preacher. His mother was once stopped on the street by a friend who said, "I like your son's newspaper columns." Mrs. Jobe replied, "Me too—when I can understand them."

Grief can be profoundly disorienting and traumatic. Yet it can also open our hearts, strengthening our empathy, affection and compassion for other people. It may even open us up to new forms of joy. In his book, The Gift of a Broken Heart, Bryan Welch shares his own journey through deep grief at the loss of his 25-year-old son to addiction. 

All love ends in grief. Through grief we form profound bonds with other human beings. This, as much as sadness, is part of his son’s legacy and he explores practical, psychological and spiritual ways of honoring that legacy and sustaining a more compassionate, less egotistical view of the world. 

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Bryan Welch is the author of the book, The Gift of a Broken Heart: How Our Grief Can Connect Us, which was published this year and his award-winning book, Beautiful & Abundant: Building the World We Want, appeared in 2011. He is a longtime CEO of purpose-driven companies including Mother Earth News, the Utne Reader, Mindful Communications and Silk Grass Farms. He and his wife, Carolyn, raise organic, grass-fed cattle, sheep and goats on their farm near Lawrence, Kansas, with the help of their grandsons.

The natural world doesn't make things that aren't useful. Even painful things - fires and floods and every kind of death - support abundance. What if the world needs our grief like it needs every other naturally occurring thing? What if keeping grief inside robs the ecosystem of something vital and nourishing? What if letting our grief out is generous? 

We will practice letting out the things that so often we are told to hide, made to make nice, expected to forget and let our stories be witnessed and held in community. We will practice this together with kindness and gentleness.

Sascha Demerjian, PhD, MSW (she/they) is a community weaver, Grief House and Death Care Collective tender, mother, daughter, sister, partner and friend. She is also co-founder and Executive Director of The Grief House (www.griefhouse.org)

Kelly Sklare, CNM, FNP (she/her) is a midwife, meditator, teenage girl-mom, grief-tender, adventurer and avid practitioner of joyful silliness & frivolity. She is also an End of Life Doula, Certified Grief Educator and Death Care Steward with the Atlanta Death Care Collective. 

A direct encounter with the Sacred, whether it arrives at the end of life or in the middle of it, has a way of taking the fear out of dying and handing back the day in front of you. I will share what that looks like, and what it asks of us afterward.

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Matt Zemon, DMin, MSc, is Executive Director of the Council on Spiritual Practices, an organization that for over three decades has been dedicated to making experiences of the Sacred more available to more people. The author of six books on psychedelics, religion, and healing, Matt serves an entheogenic faith community and views direct spiritual experience as rooted in religious tradition.

This ritual, An Offering of Grief: Conscious Grieving as a Path to Transformation, will invite us to tap into our grief which holds beautiful memories of who and what was lost and the self that we became through that connection. If we can create rituals that allow us to fully embrace love, joy, pain, and loss, we can create a pathway to new beginnings that are grounded in our lost connection with new roots and branches. Join us in the circle as we name and claim our losses, reflect on the gifts from the connections that still reverberate in us and imagine a future where pain and possibility are at peace. 

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Vanessa Jackson is a High Priestess, healer and activist. She is the owner of Dudley’s Apothecary, an aromatherapy healing practice based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Cherie Lyon, Sage High Priestess, is a magical being who prefers to be invisible, but she shines way too big of a light to be missed. She holds the center at the Spiritual Salon in Atlanta, Georgi