Our Workshops and Events
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In this semi-ritual /semi-performance workshop Alan will lead participants through a process of group invocation, where all participants will simultaneously invite and invoke a deceased relative, significant other or friend, to become present to a gathering within the room. In other words the room will become doubled, populated with the living and the imagined spirits.
Stephen Jenkinson is one of the world's most powerful and poetic advocates against the death phobia of our culture. Author of Die Wise, he will be speaking via video link from Ontario, Canada on Saturday 19th November as part of the Sydney Festival of Death and Dying.
We are honoured to announce that musical thanatologist, Peter Roberts, will be joining us at the festival.
Deep listening is a term that Aboriginal elder Miriam Rose Ungunmer Bauman uses to translate “Dadirri”. She says: “To know me is to breathe with me. To breathe with me is to listen deeply. To listen deeply is to connect. It is the sound of deep calling to deep. Dadirri is the deep inner spring inside us. We call on it and it calls on us.”
This workshop will explore deep listening in relation to breath, sound and voice. Each of our bodies has an internal resonance that informs how we listen and how we live. If our lives were a song that were improvised minute by minute, how can deep listening take our final improvisation, that of our death, to a place of integrity?
Repeated opinion polls show that the vast majority of Australians want the option of a medically assisted death, should they be faced with unrelievable suffering at the end of life. Yet bills that have attempted to legalise end-of-life choices have been consistently voted down in our state parliaments.
A “Soul Kit” is where you will keep all your end of life wishes, stored in one easy to find place for one day when it will be needed. It will also have the things you are proudest about your life that you want to be known as your legacy.
This yoga class will begin with Savasana with the aim of developing a Savasana mind and taking that deep relaxation through the class. Intensity is often seen as fast and physically difficult and more exciting than slowing down and really feeling what is happening – in our mind, in our body. But intensity can be tender, it can be instinctive and intuitive, it can be spacious and slow.
In this interfaith panel we will explore how faith and the afterlife is thought about in Judaism and Buddhism.
Essential Phowa is a Buddhist practice for the moment of death. This workshop will teach you this practice and show you how we can prepare for death so that we can die with a peace of mind and even with confidence.
In Australia, 70 percent say they want to die in the comfort and intimacy of their own homes, but less than 20 percent do. What, if anything, can we learn from those who succeed? What are the factors that enable home death? And what can we do to plan well-enough for our own care when we are dying?
In this workshop Mal and Diane will share their insights on living with grief, based on their over 40 years of experience in the field of bereavement counselling.
In this workshop we are going to depart by reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s last unfinished poem: “Come you, you last one” and Maurice Blanchot’s very short novel “The Instant of my Death”, which recounts an ecstatic experience of death at the hands of the Nazis at the end of World War II. These will open the space for a discussion of four of the most influential theses on death and dying in twentieth century Western philosophy:
How may we ‘ready’ ourselves to meet the blow of diagnosis, dying and death? This workshop will provide practical details about what happens to us when we are in a dying, death and after death process.
Tom Isaacs is a sculptor and performance artist who is interested in death as a metaphor for our current condition as well as a vehicle for a potential rebirth to new life. In his festival performance installation he will bury himself (and possibly others) under the soil to explore what Bataille called "limit-experience".