*please note, this will be a mixed-identity space where BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and folks impacted by state, police, and gun violence will be centered.
Knowledge Share Description
What is your relationship to death? Death has always accompanied life, as a twin, as a beloved, as final rest, as decomposition. It has also been a tool and result of violence, of war, of nonconsensual rupture, of erasure. As many of us continue along our ancestral pathways and forward into the continuing ecocide and genocide of this time on earth, the veils continue to thin. Many of us are encountering and continuing to encounter death in both new and old ways, daily, but often without community and cultural spaces within which to contextualize, hold, explore, or ritualize these thresholds.
In this 3 hour workshop we will explore our feelings, fears, curiosities, mysteries and griefs around death and dying. Death Walker & Spirit Usher Medium Ash Canty (they/he), will guide us in threshold and ritual to be able to step into a non-linear time and space to have these conversations. We are all walking towards our death, but how do we integrate this relationship? How do we connect with death? We know that while we are alive, we will die and so will everyone we love. How do we rest in that paradox?
We can ground into this truth by learning practices, rituals, and calling upon our ancestors to support us as we explore and hold these conversations in our everyday life. Led by spirit, ancestors, and guided by Ash, we will begin to unpack these conversations in a sacred, trauma-informed and co-created container, while being offered many moments throughout to somatically re-ground into our bodies so that we may be able to be present when intense feelings arise. Once we have begun to explore this relationship with ourselves through conversation, ritual, and practice, we can then use these as practices for each other, our families and communities.
Knowledge Share Includes
Setting a trauma-informed, consensual container
Taking our time getting into these practices together
Using rituals from our lineages (practices, visualizations, tapping in, somatic practices)
Going into ritual, crossing threshold, ceremony and non-linear space
Creating a container with us and our ancestors surrounding us in the container
Opening up conversation together, using our voices and offering radical witness
Exploring the dignity and reverence of resting in the paradox of life and death
Exploration of being able to hold unconsensual/violent death as a community
Ceremony around a body that is not present
Space for Emergence
Exchange
$35
$70 reparations (If you have financial abundance, this is our our pay-it-forward option to fund our scholarships and work redistributing resources to Black and Indigenous Land Projects)
For scholarships please email herbancura@gmail.com with subject Sacred Death & Dying
Access
*ASR Captioning provided
*Spanish interpretation available (Si requiere interpretacion por favor mande un email a herbancura@gmail.com)
Virtual Gathering
Zoom link will be sent out via email 1-2 days before knowledge share
5-8pm EST
**This class will NOT be recorded**
Facilitator
This Knowledge Share will be facilitated by Ash Canty (They/He) of Sovereign Spirit Death Care.
My ancestors are from Africa (Mali, Nigeria, Congo) UK, Italy, Germany, France and Indigenous New Mexico. I am a black, queer, gender non-conforming activist for black pleasure and liberation and rooted in allyship for and with LGTBQIA+Transgender lives. This work of walking with grief and death found me after being diagnosed and hospitalized with a severe case of a chronic illness called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome.
It was in my most challenging days and scariest moments where death was close that I realized what I had to offer to this world. Seeing death everywhere had always been apart of my life, I just hadn't realized why. It was at a death of a good friend of mines mother that I experienced what the process of death and dying could be like. I learned death/dying could be full of grief, pain, pleasure, joy, mystery, soul searching, laughing, meaning, longing, creativity and slow quiet presence. I wanted to hold space where all of these experiences could be held.
It was when I began to face my own death that I began to trust my intuitive gifts as a spirit medium and embrace the messages coming through from spirits and my loved ones on the other side. I had no idea what to do with all of these gifts that were unfolding in the middle of a global pandemic and the fight for racial justice and Black Lives! But I knew I wanted to support this time we are in and the people in it. That's when I decided death doula with Alua Arthur and took her amazing course "Going With Grace". I led my first grief circle and also incorporated channeled messages from spirit while creating ritual around the death and grief many were experiencing. It was profound and its a role in my community I am honored to hold.
To live in a world where death care is universal & we have ritual for death and dying. This is my living prayer.