The beginning of lockdown, three years ago, must be one of those times that will stand out for all of us as a moment the world changed.

Where were you and how did your life change?

I was living a quiet, solitary life in a cottage on a hillside in an area of outstanding natural beauty in Wales. For the previous few years I had been on a deep grieving journey and I’d been doing a lot of writing and holding conversations inquiring into death, dying, grief and loss. When lockdown began, I took off into the next stage of my journey and started the Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme. I also began a new relationship with the man I am now living with.

Three years later we’re entering an exciting new phase of the Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme. We now have five interconnected, piloted courses and a library of resources, and I’m pulling together the last threads with the intention of moving forward into a new round of courses in the summer and autumn.

We are also inviting you to join us in co-creating an engaged, compassionate community.

For me, the fuel and excitement for this work always comes from the inquiry and the conversations. An inquiry opens my mind and heart, and a conversation has the potential to uplift and motivate everyone involved. Our courses bring people together over 8, 10, 12 weeks and the regular commitment, combined with intentional group spaces, allows all participants to connect with self, with each other, and with a bigger inspiring energy. This creates an uplifted, expanded consciousness from which we can each step more confidently into the world.

These last few years have been very intense for all of us – the more the crises in the world ramp up, the more deaths of all kinds there are, the more urgently the transformational process unfolds. In the groups I’ve run, with the people I’m close to, and in my own life, I’ve witnessed periods of confusion, overwhelm, inability to move forward, despair and dark nights of the soul, as well as big shifts of consciousness and identity. Through it all, the practice of coming together in intentional groups to engage in deep discovery conversations has created little islands of sanity and coherence where we’ve been able to pause, connect and re-fuel before continuing on with our lives.

I’m sure you will have experienced something similar. Over these years many of us on a conscious healing and creative path have been meeting on zoom for similar conversations and inquiries. The conversations, as well as giving us a place to connect with self and with each other, also provide the opportunity to find meaning, to remember our purpose and passion, to evolve consciousness, and to take creative action. Conversation can be a transformational tool and an evolutionary driver. The energy of a group of people meeting with intention can lift us up above the chaos and beyond the stories and remind us of the bigger view and the freedom of the sky. In such moments of remembering most of us choose life. Ah yes! This is why I’m here, this is what I’m here for, this is what I love. I choose this!

And yet, just as much as sitting with death can be challenging, so can choosing life. It isn’t something we do once and then it’s done. It’s not so easy to choose life when we are moving through troubled times and we feel alone. For me anyway, it’s a daily practice. Our courses provide skills, companionship, enlightened perspectives and insights but, when the group ends and the container isn’t there any more, it can be easy to drop back into a more contracted and isolated space.

Here are some of the realisations participants in the SWDCL programme have had:

1. Sitting with Death and Choosing Life is a lifelong practice and a transformational journey.
2. Choosing life through troubled times can be challenging.
3. Grief is a natural stage of the creative process of life and it holds many gifts.
4. Grief can also be a portal to new possibilities.
5. We have the opportunity at this time of global crisis to inhabit an expanded, holistic, integrated and compassionate consciousness.
6. None of us can meet these challenges and opportunities alone because the shift in consciousness we are experiencing is from “me” to “we” and we need each other in so many ways.
7. For those of us on a conscious healing and creative path coming together in intentional groups for the practice of inquiry and deep discovery uplifts our own liveliness and ripples out into the collective consciousness. This is evolutionary.
8. The choice for expanded consciousness and co-creative community can be the greatest adventure of our lives.
9. An essential part of the SWDCL process is creative empowerment – authentic self-expression and the ability to take creative action on behalf of the whole of life.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be unpacking these themes here on the blog and we are also starting an online community where we can explore together. The community is open to anyone who has completed at least one of our courses and new, interested people can enter through one of the themed Deep Discovery Conversations.

All of this, and more, I’d love to explore with you. Click here to find out how you can participate in an Introductory Conversation to explore whether this community is right for you. 

Over the last three years, since lockdown, what has changed for you? What are the challenges and gifts for you in the practice of sitting with death and choosing life?

You don’t have to have any answers, you may think you don’t have the language to even know how to begin talking about this. That’s ok. All you need is a willingness to share your own experience – what has been difficult for you, what has inspired you? If this resonates with you and you’re curious and you want to connect and explore, please come and join us.