Dying as a Rite of Passage: The Practice of Living and Dying

Date:

Sep 13th, 2013 - Sep 19th, 2013

Instructors:

Meredith Little, with Georgiy Kushnir and Kateryna Babenko

Web Address:

istoki-center

Contact:

istoki-center@mail.ru

Ukraine, more details to follow

For millennia indigenous people everywhere have known "how to die." Their teacher was the natural world and, over many years and many generations, they learned their lessons well. Cycles of dying and rebirth were seen everywhere: the setting and rising of the sun, the turning of the seasons, the death of the elderly alongside the birth of a new generation. Ceremonial rites of passage emerged pan-culturally as a means of supporting, guiding and witnessing this natural process. These rites supported individuals as they let go of one stage of life—the “little deaths”—and were “reborn” into the next. And these rites supported people as they prepared for the final transition, the big Death that awaits us all.

As our modern culture has grown ever more sophisticated, we have also become ever more divorced from our natural surroundings and from ancient wisdom about living and dying. We have pushed Death away from Life, the dying away from the living—all in order to impose the illusion of control on the uncertainty of change. We have lost touch with the natural world and our place in it as mortal animals. We have forgotten “how to die.”

In 2003, Meredith Little and hospice physician Scott Eberle joined together to create “The Practice of Living and Dying”—a new kind of curriculum that draws from both the hospice movement and the rites of passage movement.

In this particular program we will explore how to move through the dying process—be it a symbolic dying or a physical dying. Our aim is both educational and therapeutic. Educationally, we will see how the growing wisdom of the modern hospice movement and the ancient, pan-cultural wisdom of indigenous ways can be interwoven: how the wisdom of one world can inform daily practice in the other. Therapeutically, time spent alone in nature each afternoon will encourage you to experience the wisdom of your own nature, and your personal truth about living and dying. In the evening we will sit in council to hear the stories of this solo time, and learn from each other.

We ask an inseparable pair of questions: How do we live, so we may fully become our dying? And how do we accept our dying, so we may fully embrace our living?