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Embracing Death & Celebrating Life Seminars

For current seminar and retreat dates, times and locations, check the calendar.

Exploring and embracing your own upcoming death brings you fully into life, into celebrating each moment with tenderness and reverence. It is the deepest spiritual practice we can engage in, because it stretches us to expand beyond our limited form and into the vastness and immortal core of our true nature.
During the weekend we focus on the inner essence qualities that we long to dive more deeply into. We open our hearts in practices of choiceless compassion, love beyond form, deepened presence in the moment, radiating our brilliant inner light into the world and the energy of gratitude.

Today may be your last day.
Are you ready to die?
Can you die in peace?
Knowing that your deepest longing has been expressed
and that you have loved fully?
What is going to die?
What is not going to die?

We explore questions like these during the weekend seminar, which is for anyone who would like to explore their own death, for those who are terminally ill, and for those who have lost a loved one or work with people who are dying.
The weekend consists of profound meditations created by Helena, inquiries, powerful processes, The Work and sacred life/death ceremonies.

Seminar times: Saturday & Sunday, 10-5, with an evening session Saturday night.
Seminar fee: $190
(Times and price vary locally.)

During times of loss and grief we are truly in need of going within and it is also the richest and most potent time to listen within.

Our normal masks and comfortable persona are stripped from us, leaving us open and more soft and able to access the deeper layers of the heart and our inner soul.

During this class Helena gives compassionate, clear guidance on how to use different meditation practices to access the deeper place of peace within, the eye of the hurricane, that is available in the middle of our crises and grief.

You will learn how to:

• open to more compassion and tenderness within
• use the breath as a centering and calming tool
• transform emptiness and missing into fulfillment
• release painful thoughts that add more stress
• open to your inner knowing
• allow grief to open you instead of contracting you
• see your loss or transition from a higher spiritual perspective

The tools you learn are simple, yet profound, and require no previous experience of meditation. You will receive meditation CDs for your home practice in between classes.

A radical, tender, celebratory training for those who are ready to do some real inner work and long to transform their life.

The training consists of four weekends, one in each season, with study/sharing groups, assignments and CDs for your own spiritual practice in between weekends.
The training includes meditation, dance and movement, deep sharing, transforming practices, beautiful ceremonies, real life assignments such as visiting that old aunt, doing one thing a day that scares you or singing a healing opera on a street corner, or whatever you are longing to express before you die, but have been putting off. You commit to a deepened spiritual practice on a daily basis, endeavoring to cultivate a heart that cannot be disturbed even by death, as the Buddhist teacher Stephen Levine said.

1st weekend:
We will contemplate questions like: What would I do if I had one year left? What needs to die in order for me to live fully? What is incomplete or unexpressed in my life? What am I procrastinating? Am I living my deepest longing? What inner qualities, such as compassion, kindness, unconditional love, clarity, would I like to develop more?
We will design an individual spiritual practice for each participant for the coming year. You will start or complete creative projects and assignments that you always longed to do, getting out of the way so that your divine purpose can be expressed through you.

2nd weekend:
Silent meditation retreat with an individual vision quest in nature, by the Yuba River, focusing on the spiritual preparations and inner practices that will help you face death. We will practice dying, exploring the seeming solidity of your body and breathing through all emotions around death. Connecting with that which is immortal. We explore questions like:
What will die?
What will not die?
How can I keep opening to the impermanence in life?
How can I let each moment, each breath, be a death and a rebirth?

3rd weekend:
Focuses on the relationships in your life. In which relationships are you still holding back your truth and love? Who do you have unfinished business with? Where am I lying, faking or making nice?
Learn to use “The Work” to heal relationships that are painful or incomplete. Practices to extend unconditional love and compassion to all living beings. Can you die in peace, knowing that you have loved fully?

4th weekend:
Holding your last speech, dancing your last dance here on Earth. Going through “The 5 Wishes” from the hospice movement, arranging your will and other practical things. Planning your funeral. Investigating your fears and stories around death, dying and the afterlife. Learn to use “The Work” to dissolve stressful thoughts around death.
We complete the training with an abundant, wild, sacred, beautiful, over-the-top life celebration where friends and family are invited.

Next training starts in the spring of 2007 in Nevada City, California.

Price for one-year training: $1750, includes the 4 weekends (Fri. eve - Sun. eve), 4 evening meetings with Helena, Meditation CDs, ongoing support via e-mail and phone from Helena. Participants meet in weekly or twice weekly support/sharing/meditation groups.


A Note from Helena:
In the Buddhist and Zen traditions preparing for one’s own death and contemplating impermanence is considered one of the most important spiritual practices one can engage in. In many cultures it is considered an act of wisdom and maturity to prepare for death throughout life. During my travels in Egypt and the Sinai desert the presence of death was a natural part of life. After a dinner invitation for the following evening, my friends would say upon parting: “If we are not dead by then, if Allah let’s us live, we will see you for dinner tomorrow night.”

Most of us in the West hold a negative image of death and live to avoid it as much as possible. Because of our ignorance and denial we procrastinate important things, not allowing the fullest expression of our unique being and maybe leave our loved ones with painful decisions.

As a teenager I worked with elderly and dying people for four years, both in home-care and in nursing homes. I had no education or clue about what I was doing, the social services were simply understaffed and I was sent into all kinds of challenging situation that catapulted me into accessing a deeper knowing and maturity. It was a deep learning process and one of the biggest teachings were to witness the difference in attitude in my patients.

Some laid on their deathbed with love shining trough their eyes, having a good time reminiscing about what they had experienced in life. They had an attitude of gratitude. Others were bitter, grumpy and full of regret and blame. They saw themselves as victims. Yet, those patients who shared love and joy with me had not had less hardship in their life than the bitter one’s. Sometimes the contrary were true. I vowed that I was not going to be one of the bitter, angry ones; I was going to live life as fully as I could.

Being forced to embrace death, for real, when my son died I was amazed at how alive I felt, how intensely vibrant each moment became. I awoke from a long sleep, seeing life with fresh and wondrous eyes, astonished at the radiant light that pumped through my chest. I had thought death was only heavy, tragic, dark, something you were forced to endure when you lost a loved one or at the very least an annoying inconvenience you had to deal with.

Now, I live with death close by at all times I realize it is an extraordinary gift to contemplate the impermanent nature of life. My son Jon said to me, a year before his death: “Mom, life is sweeter because of death, not the other way around.” He was right, as always.

When I bring my fear and anguish around death into the light of my loving awareness and allow them to dissolve, knowing death brings a celebratory quality to each moment. And when I deeply explore the form of my body in meditation I see it is not as solid as I thought and I can instead connect with the vibrant flow of consciousness that inhabits it. It is a luxury to have the time and opportunity to prepare for death. As my friend and artist Ursula Freymuth said: “Die now, before it is too late.”


Benefits from the Embracing Death & Celebrating Life Seminars:

• Increased presence in the moment.
• A peace of mind that only comes with completing unfinished things and exploring your darkest fears and strongest attachments.
• Vibrant gratitude for life and every experience that life offers.
• Awakening to the immortal vastness of our true nature.
• Deep resting in the love and peace of our true nature.
• Extending unconditional love to everyone I meet since I know that this might be my last day to share love.
• Focusing on what is truly important in life.
• Brings sacredness into your relationships and lovemaking. Imagine making love as if every time were your last.
• Taking radical steps to express your true gifts and accomplishing your visions. What is the worst that can happen if you step out fully and share yourself? That you will die? Ha ha, guess what….