Healing is possible, even if curing isn’t.

You’re facing mortality (your own, or someone else’s) and it’s difficult.

You know that illness, death and loss are an important part of your spiritual journey.

You need help finding a healing path through these transformative experiences.

Take heart, you’ve come to the right place.

PERSONAL SESSIONS

I offer compassionate guidance around death and transformative loss.

  • Preparing for your own death
  • Preparing for a death in the family
  • Pet death (especially for children)
  • Complex family dynamics around a death or loss
  • Unresolved deaths from the past
  • Pregnancy loss (abortion, miscarriage, etc.)
  • Life losses that feel like a death, even if nobody has died
  • Integrating non-ordinary or mystical experiences
  • Any other deathly situation where the healing energy is stuck

The issue may be current, or something that happened years ago. I’m not daunted by the unusual or complicated.

Learn more about support for specific situations:

Sometimes a single session can give you what you need. In other situations, we might work together for a few weeks. We follow what feels right in your body.

90 minute sessions: $250 CAD / ~ $183 USD

FAQ’s

Call me whenever death or loss –or the possibility of a death or loss– starts to occupy a big place in your thoughts.

Call me when you need help coming to peace with a death from the past.

Maybe someone is aging and the end of their life is in sight. Maybe someone has had a significant diagnosis and suddenly their death feels more possible than it did before. Even if they recover, a brush with death is still a huge soul-process for everyone to go through.

If people are thinking about death, but not talking about it –to each other, or to the person who’s ill or dying– that’s the time to call me. Those feelings need space, and keeping them locked in is rarely helpful.

Death happens in its own time. Talking about it doesn’t bring it on, and not talking about it certainly doesn’t prevent it.

If a death is coming, every moment counts, and the more beauty, love, and connection you can bring into those moments, the better. If the death doesn’t come soon, then the beauty and love are never wasted.

There is nothing to be lost by starting too early, but I’ve seen regrets in people who wished they’d started earlier than they did.

If you’re facing a serious illness, you’re probably putting all your energy into getting better. Hopefully you’ll recover, and live for many more years.

Illness often brings mortality into the room, and there are many ways rituals can help sustain you emotionally and spiritually when this happens. Healing is about integrating what’s happening, so you can grow into the person the illness is asking you to become. Rituals help your soul catch up with the changes that illness brings.

More than anything, rituals are about creating more love in the world, and love is always a powerful force for healing.

My clients understand that illness, death and loss are part of their spiritual journey, but sometimes they don’t have a spiritual tradition to guide them through the process.

The mysteries of living and dying are too big to face alone, and we need the support of something bigger than ourselves. If you have a sense of the Sacred, but don’t have a way to connect with it, I can help you find words and practices that feel right for you.

People say that the ceremonies I lead feel “spiritually safe” because all traditions are respected, and nobody is asked to do anything outside their comfort zone.

If you have a religious tradition that sustains you, we can design a ritual that honours your particular spiritual values. In this case, the ceremonial practices I offer can help you and your loved ones connect more deeply to each other, in the context of your own spirituality.

FAMILY AND COMMUNITY RITUALS

Rituals are group processes that help people connect with each other, and with a deeper source of meaning and grace.

The rituals I lead are outwardly very simple. They may look like a conversation in the living room, or a group of friends gathered in a park, but they create a space for deep healing and connection.

Examples of community rituals:

When there’s been a difficult loss, rituals can help you heal together

  • A sharing circle to help you, and your family, integrate the shock of a big diagnosis
  • A storytelling ceremony in the family home before an aging parent moves into long term care
  • A goodbye ritual for a woman’s breast before she undergoes a mastectomy
  • A celebration ritual to welcome the new, one-breasted woman home again
  • A healing circle before beginning chemo or radiation, or when it finishes

Rituals create a channel through which love can flow

  • A pet euthanizing ceremony for adults and children
  • A letting go ceremony when capacities like the ability to drive, to see, or to live alone are lost
  • A celebration after positive test results, or when a capacity is regained
  • A series of rituals and healing circles as death is approaching, helping everyone to say goodbye
  • A funeral or memorial that makes space for both laughter and tears
  • Whatever ritual you, your family, or your community needs to navigate a death or loss

Generally, we’ll have 1-2 sessions before the ritual to get clear on the intention and plan, and then hold the ceremony itself.

Most of the ritual facilitation I do is now online and technology allows for amazing things to happen at a distance. I can also help you design a ritual that a local person can facilitate for you.

FAQ’s

Illness and loss bring up lots of powerful emotions: love, relief, anger, grief, fear, and more. These emotions can get intermingled, and feel overwhelming.The safe container of a facilitated ritual makes space for all the feelings, so they can move through us, instead of getting stuck inside.

When someone we love is ill or dying, it’s important to say what really matters. “I want you to know how much you really mean to me,” “My heart is breaking,” “I love you,” and sometimes “Goodbye.”

It can be hard to find a way to have those conversations, but ritual can provide a structure where it’s easier to share what you really feel.

When someone we love is ill or dying, we want to help. But if the physical issues can’t be resolved, it’s hard to know what to do.

Illness and death remind us that we are more than our bodies, and rituals give us a way to offer support that is more than physical. Rituals create a channel through which love can flow.


Find support during hard times

When you, or someone close to you, is experiencing the initiatory power of serious illness or death, the journey can be a roller coaster of emotional and interpersonal challenges.

There are tools and practices that can help. Contact me to learn how they can work for you.

With love,
Sarah

Sarah works with the group in a way that deepens the experience, and takes everybody to a place of great healing and insight.

~Robert M.

Sarah’s knowledge and support allowed us to normalize dying for our children. Yes, it was sad, but they weren’t afraid. They understood what was happening and that we were going to be okay, together.

~Rachel P.