2022 Vermont DEATH & DYING SYMPOSIUM

Confessions of a Compost Heap

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We live in an age that refuses to acknowledge the waste and death it relies upon to function. Purity, symbolically and practically, has destroyed our ecosystems and our gut biomes while necessitating an uneven distribution of pollution and suffering. But the mess of death may be what we need to survive an age of chaos and complexity. Death is, paradoxically, a mess of aliveness. It is the moment when a homophonic song shifts into a microbial polyphony of multi-species collaboration. How can we use both myth, mycology, ecology, and our own contaminated bodies to understand death is the womb of life, gestating worlds as it digests the old? Let us look to decay and impurities in our own lives not with disgust but as a teacher on how to alchemize the toxins of systems that cannot persist. It is to the dying animals and ecosystems and disabled kin that we will learn how to best to rot collaboratively into a compost heap that sprouts new worlds.

 Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com. And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.

Sophie will join us live virtually and talk on the ecology of life and death

Pleasure Activism at the End of Life

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How can you incorporate pleasure for the client, loved ones, and most importantly, yourself at the end of life? Together we'll explore the realm of sensuality and its application to the journey of dying before, during and after.Oceana Sawyer, End of Life guide, is focused on the liminal space of dying, grieving, pleasure & liberation in an eco-somatic context. Her book, “Life, Death, Grief and the Possibility of Pleasure” arrives in August 2022.
 For more information go to www.oceanaendoflifedoula.com. 

Oceana will join us live virtually and talk with us about her new book "Life Death, Grief and the Possibility of Pleasure"

Meeting the Five Buddha Families~ Through Living and Dying

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This is a system of ancient Tibetan tantric practices for seeing and experiencing one’s self and one’s world, that works with the 5 elements through meditation.   It uses the symbolic technology of the mandala principle to engage and interact with one’s body, speech, mind, and relationships as sacred.  These teachings originate from a pre-Buddhist Himalayan worldview, and have been expressed in a format accessible to westerners by various contemporary Tibetan masters, as both a spiritual science, and a mystical psychology. Pablo will join us in person and discuss the five Buddha Families and how their impact crescendos during the dying process.Anne-Marie will join in the end-of-life portion of the discussion.

Pablo Coddou is a psychotherapist and uses principles from Gestalt, Humanistic-Existentialism, Buddhist practice in the therapeutic process and is training in psychedelics as a therapeutic modality.

A published author, Salicrow is a natural psychic medium who has been aware of her gifts since childhood. For over thirty years she has worked as a seer, using the tarot and runes as her tools. With her ability to divine the future and revisit the past, she advises her clients with compassion and a straightforward approach. www.Salicrow.com

Salicrow will hold a Spirit Gallery in person Saturday evening on the property of Casa Luna on Craftsbury Common. Tickets to the Spirit Gallery are sold separately from the symposium ticket.

Stephanie Cohen is a paper pusher by day and an herbalist, a death doula, a new mother, and a lover of palmistry, astrology, tarot, and Oprah by heart. She studied Horticulture at the University of Georgia, Herbalism at the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism and the Botanologos School of Herbal Studies, and is a Village Deathcare graduate.

Stephanie will talk with us about a story from the angle of complicated grief, our collective consciousness and lives as Americans.

Connecting spirit to earth and applying practical observation for navigating life's challenges, is an extraordinary gift that Mary Beth has had since childhood. Her sensitivity was only enhanced when studying with some of the world's most gifted Mediums at England's Surrey University. For more than 25 years she has been using tarot as a vehicle to connect with her client's guides as well as her own and to offer brilliant insight and clarity into the questions that loom and need to be brought forth. She reads at the Pyramid Book Store in Salem MA, does private parties and individual sessions.

Mary Beth will offer private, virtual tarot readings for a limited number of guests of the symposium. This is included in the cost of the weekend ticket.