The Ecstasy of Impermanence is a live, online exploration held on Tuesday evenings (in the US) for three consecutive weeks. Each session is conducted via Zoom and includes guided practices, prompts for personal reflection, group sharing, and deep inquiry into embodied presence. You will likely be surprised how deeply we can go in an online container. Recordings will be available for those who cannot attend live, though participation is most powerful in real-time.

You’ll have access to the recordings for one year. These recordings capture the energy of the group field and remain potent even when revisited later. The recordings will not include the break-out room discussions.

This is an experiential journey, so the outcomes will unfold uniquely for each participant. These are my intended outcomes for participants. Feel free to find your own wording for these experiences: 

• Feel more connected to your body, intuition, and gratitude. 
• Enhance your capacity to be more fully inhabited.
• Develop tools to experiment, play, and explore your aliveness.
• Unwind, very gently, barriers that keep you from trusting yourself, your life, and your death. 
• Transform your fear of death into an intimate inquiry with death.

Lee Warren is a death educator, end-of-life preparation guide, writer, mystic, and community builder. 

She was fortunate to learn about dying within the context of a village. Lee spent 30 years as a co-creator and resident of a rural ecovillage in Southern Appalachia, where in addition to learning about sustainable and reverential ways to engage with life, she participated in collective approaches to death-care.

Over the course of two years, from 2016 to 2018, the close-knit village of 125 people experienced the decline and death of six members ranging in ages from 2 to 98. These deaths, and the generous people who experienced them, offered an incredible opportunity to reweave a more holistic approach to end-of-life than the one generally offered to us.  The outcome of stewarding those deaths, together as a community,  including after-death care, home funerals, and home burials, was life changing and heart opening for all involved. 

As a result, Lee helps folks who are engaged in a death and dying process, for themselves or a loved one, who are confused about end-of-life options and isolated in their decision making, to overcome their fear of death by being both internally and externally prepared. She is a huge advocate for a more death literate, death informed, death accepting, and death positive worldview which ultimately leads to a profound trust of the life/death/life mysteries.

Her forthcoming book, Village-Based Death and Dying, provides a rare glimpse into the once-ubiquitous practice of communal approaches to decline, death, and post-death ceremonies, embedded in the communal web of care that nourishes these processes. Lee invites readers into a bold reimagining of life’s most profound transition, offering tools, stories, insights, and suggestions for creating community-centered approaches to death. While inspired by her experiences in an intentional village, the principles in this book are universally relevant—whether practiced within families, among friends, or in existing communities of all shapes and sizes. 

Ultimately Lee is committed to regenerating the wisdom that allows for us ALL to “return to the village.” The village is a metaphor for the collaborative and inclusive systems that move us towards more supportive, coherent, and integrated ways to live and to die. This course is an opportunity to tap into that village and tune into what we can create together.