Explore your relationship with death as a way of deepening your relationship with life
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Dear community,
My yearly online course offering Align – Contemplative Care for Living with Death Awareness is back for the third time and I’d like to invite you to join.
This teaching matures from the last two times I offered it and was built from countless conversations I’ve had revealing the practical and poetic power of establishing a living deathcare practice and perspective – now – and that starts with turning towards death.
Easier said than done, right? Learning how to traverse this path is something we can only do for ourselves in our own time, but it’s emotional, spiritual, and communal knowledge that we build together. That’s why it’s so valuable to experience death and grief education in supportive settings, where death becomes teacher, not only enemy to fight or inevitability to whisper about. Having a deathcare practice does not mean we need to be positive about death either, but at least aligned in some way with its truth. Since death is part of life, neglecting it also means neglecting life.
In The Diary of a Zen Nun (1987), Nan Shin writes, “by not quite accepting things that are so – because they don’t please me – we spend our entire lives making meaningless gestures somewhere next to reality.”
I think death avoidance is that somewhere else than here. If we are not here, how are we supposed to make meaningful gestures with honest recognition of the reality that we are mortal? When we are here with awareness, more options become available to us about how we respond to life. It’s not about doing so perfectly, but about being empowered by what is within our control, enlivened by our intention and purpose, and humbled through trust in the process.
As poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir writes in Animal Joy (2022), “The goal is less to line up the external chips, to get things right, than it is to be alive while living, alive when you die.”
Systemically and collectively, such alchemy and shifted attention is part of the dimension of the Great Turning, coined by the late eco-activist, Buddhist and living systems theory scholar Joanna Macy.
This honest effort (I’m thinking of how psychiatrist Carl Jung said, “the brighter the light, the darker the shadow”) gives us the strength and courage to resist total numbness and the false comfort of avoidance. I consider it a compass for life-affirming practices and fuel for resistance to oppressions and violence of all kinds.
Building a personal and intentional relationship with death also helps prepare you for whatever life brings. I think that death is at the core of all other fears and anxieties, and by giving space to the realities of fear, pain, and grief, one can begin to transform these experiences toward more compassion and connection, more nurturance and respect for the sacredness of all life.
With the amount of death, destruction, and negligence we’re witnessing, there is a lot going on which needs our attention. If you are feeling the pull to give more intention to your death awareness, this course will help you be in touch with yourself while you’re in touch with the world. It’s intended as a short but intimate and careful study outside of the paces of media at this time: a pause, rebalance, and call to action, from the perspectives of death and grief care.
I’m really looking forward to this course with those who resonate with the effort and commitment, however challenging, that death and grief care asks of us.
If you know someone personally who would benefit from this course, please kindly forward this email to them.
With love and in solidarity,
Staci
Kaja Meyer, smaller than a hand faster than a minute, June 2026, ink, coal and coloured pencil on paper, 6 x 8 cm