End of Life Planning & Paperwork Workshop

In collaboration with the FIC (Foundation for Intentional Community)

Reclaiming Death & Dying in Community

Join end-of-life educator Lee Warren for a 2-part exploration of end of life literacy, death positivity, and the conscious dying movement.

A 2-part Online Workshop

Monday, May 1 & Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Pacific: 9-11am
Mountain: 10am-12pm
Central: 11am-1pm
Eastern: 12-2pm

“Fear of Death is Fear of Life.” Stephen Levine

About the Event:

Part 1: Befriending Death

Contemplating death, ours and others, is a deeply empowering practice that allows us to live more fully in the present and gives us access to an immense gratitude for the miracle of our own existence. There is no other mechanism quite as powerful in bringing us face to face with profound awe. Join Lee as she shares her recipe for internal and external processes that help us befriend death. External processes include an overview of the spectrum of end of life paperwork and preparations and after death options. Internal processes include discussions on how to nourish the components of our infinite selves in order to access and enhance our sacred journey with death and come to know that we already have everything we need for a positive and conscious death experience. We’ll also discuss how to create a death literate community wherever you live.

This workshop is for folks at all stages of age and health. Intentionally preparing for death is always time well spent and increases the likelihood of having a good death. Paradoxically and unsurprisingly, these principles and practices lead to a more ecstatic life. Expect educational components, discussion, contemplation exercises, real-life examples, resources, as well as active encouragement for practical next steps.

Part 2: The Art & Practice of Community Based Death & Dying

As a member of Earthaven Ecovillage, Lee Warren has been part of a team of folks gifted with the sacred opportunity to steward the death and dying process of many beloved community members. The collective sense of reverence, connection, and harmony that arose from these experiences offered a profound deepening of relationships and the creation of community-wide systems dedicated to this end of life process. For all involved, from the closest death tenders to the funeral attendees, these experiences have been life changing and heart opening.

Discover how this group navigates the dying process, tends to the dead, designs home funerals and home burials, supports the expression of grief, and cares for the caregivers. These beautifully emergent practices have been holistically learned through their humble service and a desire to reclaim the art of caring for our own at death. Specifically, they garnered this wisdom through the grace of the dying, the synergy of many traditions, really good mentors, and their own innate evolutionary intuition. We’ll discuss death preparedness, death literacy, and a whole new attitude of death philosophies that are possible within the context of community. Discover your own doorway to profound mysticism and magic as you embrace all that community-based end of life has to offer.

Objectives/Outcomes:

Enjoy death related stories from an emerging ecovillage
Adapt end of life systems to your own life and community
Inquire into the resources already at hand in your group
Incorporate emergent death philosophies into your worldview
Understand the components of death literacy
Explore death preparedness for self and groups
Generate enthusiasm for having death based conversations
Implement small or large changes into your approach to death
Develop plans for more death positivity in your world
Experiment with new ways of thinking about death
Reflect on what traditions are at play in your community
Experience inspiration and motivation to discuss death preparedness
Choose systems that support death preparedness
Celebrate your inner wisdom, insight, and guidance

Instructor: Lee Warren

Lee is a devoted community builder. She is delighted by community of all kinds, shapes, sizes, and intentions. Her life purpose is to provide leadership in the building of community in accessible, natural, and blissful ways.

To that end, she is committed to reweaving the cosmologies as well as regenerating the cultural wisdom that allows for us ALL to “return to the village.” The village is a metaphor for the collaborative approach to life that will repair historical damage and create a sense of coherence and unity. Cultural repair looks like conscious relating to self, to land, to dying, to living, and to other. As we return to the village, we create cohesive, supportive, inclusive, and life-giving systems that tend to the whole, most especially to the “more than human world”.

In the midst of this deep reverence, we will come to see the divine in all things. All aspects of life are sacred opportunities for presence and soulful engagement. sustainable economics, conscious dying, and community of all kinds.

Learn more about Lee and her work here.

Why Death Education

“Death education is for everyone, because it relates not just to death but to our feelings about ourselves and nature and the universe we live in. A prime function of death education is to help us to think and feel deeply about the meaning of life and its many relationships–to help mature our own values…confronting death imaginatively through experience, reading, thinking, lectures, and discussions often has the paradoxical effect of enriching life.”

“As we pass beyond the fear and avoidance of death, so common in our culture, we can learn to accept death as an appropriate culmination of life. to do this we need to be able to talk freely with our loved ones about death—both our own and theirs.”

“Whether immanent or remote. death education does not avoid grief—and should not if it could—but it can help us to cope with grief in a creative way so that we may grow in the quality of our lives. It can help us also to relate meaningfully to dying persons and to meet the social and emotional needs of the survivors, including ourselves.”

~Ernest Morgan from Dealing Creatively with Death, a Manual of Death Education and Simple Burial.

Fees & Registration:

Registration is on the IC.org website. The fees for the workshop are minimal. Please consider donating at a higher level to support their work.

$20 minimum donation (covers presenter’s time)

$40 standard donation (covers presenter’s time + FIC’s costs)

$60 generous donation (covers the above + supports the intentional community movement)

Custom donation amount