Sitting with Death and Choosing Life

About Us

Rose Diamond

Project Leader, Course Creator, Author, Lead Facilitator

The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life project began six years ago when my closest friend and then my brother passed away. Writing was the way I  moved through my grief and found solace. I didn’t set out to create a programme but these materials have a life of their own and came through me bit by bit. One thing led to another and now, there is a programme, a team and a library of resources.

As I began to emerge from the first rawness of grief I shared my writing with a group of friends, all of them healing practitioners of one sort or another. I then recorded conversations with them exploring their personal experiences of loss and grief and the wisdom they had gathered from those experiences. Gradually these conversations grew into a resource of over 50 intimate conversations mapping the movement through grief to new life. The use of stimulus materials based on personal experience became a foundation for the way we work in this programme. The materials used in an intentional group setting help participants to focus on their own experience and find their own truth, wisdom and guidance. This in turn led on, in 2020, to piloting the first courses, and in 2022, with the support of a grant from The Emergence Foundation I completed the entire programme: an eco-system of five courses: The Foundation Course, The Essential Skills for Grieving Well, Deep Discovery Conversations and the Facilitator Training.

In this process, I’ve discovered untold riches within the apparent tragedy of death and loss. And more than that, I’ve learned how death, as well as being a tragedy, may also be a victory. I have come to understand how sitting with death holds a redemptive power through which we can release what is no longer life-giving and connect more fully with our wholeness, love and wisdom. By being willing to sit with and embrace our pain, rather than resisting it, we can come to know and love our complex human being-ness.

To work with Rose individually or in a small group please go here

Meet The Team:

Sundy Gilchrist

Sundy’s next courses starts on Tuesday January 23  6pm – 8pm and Wednesday February 21, 10am – 12

Janie Nolan

Janie’s courses are for people living in New Zealand and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere.

Karen Scott

Karen’s Introductory Session for the Foundation Course is on

Sara Rushworth

My next course: 
Tuesday 21st February – April 11th,  6.30 till 8.30pm

Liz Sokoski

Liz’s next Introductory Session is on

Mark Mullis

Mark’s next Introductory Session is on

Sofia Sanchez

Sofia’s next Introductory Session is on

Elizabeth Kaley

Elizabeth’s next Introductory Session is on

This is what we can offer you:

Foundation Courses, start in January 2023
To register your interest please contact Sundy Gilchrist

Deep Discovery Conversations, Awakening Community Wisdom for a New Era Our next full length course begins in March 2024

Monthly Deep Discovery Conversation Circles

The Essential Skills for Grieving Well  Begins in October 2024

The Facilitator Training,  dates TBA

Write Your Way Through Grief  The next Circle will begin in January 2025. 

To register your interest please contact Rose on the form below

Created by Mark Mullis

Our Vision:

The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life programme sows seeds for emotional health, mental and physical well-being and spiritual purpose, supporting participants to arrive at a place of greater acceptance of all aspects of humanity. This in turn leads to greater tolerance, compassion and commitment to life.

The end result we are aiming for is empowered, creative action. It begins with the desire to express and share personal experience, to contact authentic truth and wisdom, and to do justice to the emerging creative process, with all its subtle insights and not yet fully formed intuitive hunches.

As we shift in attitude – from fearing death, dying, grief, loss and intense emotion – to having the confidence to face, lean into, and move through and beyond pain and trauma, we make a fundamental shift from life denying behaviours to making choices and taking actions which affirm life. We then participate in creating a life-affirming culture.

This uplifting shift in consciousness is attractive and ripples out to everyone in each individual’s social network, transforming consciousness and culture.

We envision a culture made up of people who are self-responsible, creatively empowered, healthy and fully contributing members of society.

Our Mission:

The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme will be used in a nationwide and international outreach to bring people together in learning groups and awaken the creative potential within facing into death, dying, grief and loss. Exploratory conversations, held in local and virtual communities, will encourage a new wave of readiness to embrace the grieving process as an opportunity for self-healing and a deepening commitment to life. They will build positive relationships, empower people with skills and change attitudes and lives for the better.

Our intentions are to......

  • Embrace joy and life as fully as possible
  • Create a more conscious world
  • Build a life raft through these times of global grief and despair
  • Become an island of coherence amidst a sea of chaos and uncertainty
  • Live and die well
  • Be a healthy cell in the culture, capable of nurturing, living from, and spreading wholeness
  • Welcome uncertainty
  • Find friends on the journey and reach out a hand to those who are longing for connection

What does it take to become and to maintain such an island of coherence?

1. The dominant culture is characterised by individualism, separation, power-over, competition and anthropocentrism. We recognise none of us can survive alone and our current global crises are calling us to practice mutual support and co-creation.

2. As a cell off the new, emerging culture, we see ourselves as part of a vast and infinite system in which all parts are related and inter-dependent and in which all parts are sovereign, alive and sentient.

3. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts and, by learning to think together in a discovery process, we give space for the wisdom in the group and connect with a bigger wisdom and consciousness than any of us can access alone.

4. Each of us is an expert in our own field with our own unique gifts and we are also all beginners in this emerging collective process.

5. As we learn how to move beyond the limitations of conditioned thought we enter the liminal or soul dimension and we become a transformative imaginal cell.

6. As we lighten our burden of grief there is more space within us for inspiration and creativity.

7. We are Life, creating the conditions for Life, uniting within chaos; complementary plants within a garden abundant with possibility.

8. The way forward is for each of us to commit to showing up fully; making our full contribution and being brave enough to stand in our differences, as well as our similarities, holding nothing back.

Contact Rose Here..............

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Sundy Gilchrist

My name is Sundy and, as well as delivering on the Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme, I’m a Healing from Estrangement and Disconnection in Relationships Coach, with a specialist area of Adult Child Estrangement, supporting parents to move through the grief of being rejected by their adult children.

Working through my own experience of being estranged by my own adult children has given me a vast array of experiential understandings around grief, loss, rejection, feelings of not belonging, isolation, lack of support and loneliness.

Joining the Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme as a participant I quickly realised that it offers tools and resources that allow me to explore my own ‘grief song’, helps me to see the work I’ve already done in my own healing and gives me more insights to deepen further into healing.

I joined the team in 2020 and I now hold the Foundation Courses throughout the autumn and winter months.

I live in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, England, with Stephen, my husband and dear friend, and I love cycling in the lanes around my home.

Sundy delivers Foundation courses from October through to May. Her next courses start on Tuesday January 23, 6-8 pm  and Wednesday February 21st, 10am-12.
To enrol, or for enquiries, please email her on or message her direct by using the form below.

Karen Scott

During a life profoundly touched by loss and bereavement, I’ve come to realise that working with grief is my calling, or life’s work. In safely, tenderly held group spaces, I’ve been able to bring personal grief, and grief for our world, to the shared light of awareness. These explorations have felt like putting down a heavy burden I’d carried alone for decades.

Being in the Choosing Life team gives me a sense of belonging with others who recognise the gifts of grief, how it can open our hearts and heal us, while deepening our connections with each other and the vast web of Life.

For me, this is soulful work, diving into the depths, into a place of mystery and not-knowing.  I’m a qualified nature-based and Internal Family Systems-informed coach and facilitator, experienced in holding circles.

You can find out more about me and my work here:
www.beinginnature.net https://www.facebook.com/BeingInNature/

My  Foundation Course begins on 

To enrol, or for enquiries, please message email  Karen at  or message her direct by using the form below.

Sara Rushworth

I’m Sara. I live in Leeds in the UK on my boat with the ship’s cat Dave and an occasional mouse!

I truly love holding a space that facilitates a deeper understanding about ourselves. When we choose to work on ‘our edge’, that learning can be transformational. Engaging in the process of transformation has been a life long journey for me, and, thankfully continues to be so.

A major focus of my work has been facilitating learning about relationships, sexual health, consent and pleasure. It is here where I’ve made friends with my shame and guilt and learned to breathe and slow down.

Lost relationships, the menopause and my mum’s journey with dementia has brought me to a place of choosing to look loss and grief straight in the eye. I am leaning into this process with courage, willingness, self-compassion and community. When I glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel, the moments of joy remind me transformation is not only possible, it is beautiful and energising.

Want to share a journey of discovery? We can hold each other’s hand.

I’m a new member of the Sitting with Death and Choosing Life facilitation team.

My Foundation Course starts on Tuesday 21st February – 11th April, 6.30-8.30pm
To enrol, or for enquiries, please email me at or message me direct by using the form below

Liz Sokoski

As I embarked upon this path of grief work, I began to examine the mysteries of life.
What I’ve discovered, whilst taking part in the SWDCL courses, is that grief and endings are part of new beginnings. I’ve processed my grief honestly and transparently, while being brave and open to the new.

Over the years, my own personal struggle has been knowing when to release my attachment to the past and open myself to change. With a deep urge and longing for personal growth and healing from childhood trauma, I’ve had to challenge myself and my beliefs. I’ve explored my limitations, while bringing in a more conscious relationship to my soul through a strong spiritual practice and a deep desire to live authentically.

As a highly sensitive person and an empath, I was born with the ability to feel and sense people’s needs. I’m naturally compassionate with an understanding nature. At the same time, I have a well-developed instinct and intuition. I’m not afraid of delving into unchartered waters and transitioning into the unknown. This for me is often where the gifts lie and the magic happens.

My training has included humanistic psychology and transformational coaching. I see my work now as a facilitator for the SWDCL lends itself to holding the space and being a bridge between the old and the new, as we move through the never ending cycles of death and rebirth.

Sitting with Death and Choosing Life, has enabled me to heal deep grief and my fear of dying, finally allowing me to come to a place of peace within myself.

To enrol, or for enquiries, please email me at or message me direct by using the form below.

Mark Mullis

Mark is an Artist and community activist based in the north east of England.
He originally trained as a teacher and taught in secondary schools. Retraining in information and communication technology he became an expert in the use of new technology in the process of learning.

Seeing the importance of community and safe spaces, Mark and his wife Rose held a progressive community of spiritual travellers for a number of years in their home.

Through the traumas of being rejected from Church community and subsequent deconstruction of his Faith, and through the grief of environmental collapse, he has found that processing grief has been an essential portal to a life with a bigger sky.
Mark has been heavily involved in Men’s groups and listening circles and is working to develop the role of elders in our modern society.


This year, engaging with the transformative processes of the ‘Sitting with Death and Choosing Life’ programme, Mark has come to see the importance of this work at this moment in our human history and is keen to facilitate many more people on the journey to process their grief well.

Marks Introductory Session for the Foundation Course is on Wednesday 2 February, 7-9

Mark’s Foundation Course begins February 9, 7-9 and runs until March 30

To enrol, or for enquiries, please message him direct by using the form below.

Sofia Sanchez

So, here I find myself, in my healing path of reconnection with the sacred universe around and inside me, a new member of the Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Facilitation team.

My name is Sofia Sanchez. I live in a multicultural household in North London.
I landed here while experiencing a period of the sudden unexpected in my life.

One change was leaving behind two decades living as a volunteer tenant, supporting adults with learning disabilities to live independently. And, after fifteen years of co-facilitating the Expert Patient Programme, our organisation lost the funding to continue offering the courses.

The SWDCL Foundation Course has offered me the opportunity to explore how loss has shaped my life at different stages and how transformation is an integral and natural part of life. Amongst many other enquiries in the course. I’ve explored how I navigate the not-knowing, the aspects of me that I reject, and how I can best experience the Wholeness I yearn for (within me and in my community and the whole of the universe).

In my years of facilitating groups, I have witnessed and experienced how, when we come together and share from our authentic self in a safe space, magic happens; inner and group healing and transformation happens. In delivering the SWDCL Foundation Course, it is my intention to offer this opportunity to all of us in the group.
To enrol, or for enquiries, please email me at or message me direct by using the form below.

Elizabeth Kaley

My name is Elizabeth Kaley and I am a new facilitator with SWDCL (Sitting With Death and Choosing Life) Foundation Course.

My base is in the beautiful city of York, where I will be holding my groups.
I send an invitation out, to live life, free from the anchors, that hold us back from our full potential. 

Dealing with the detritus of Loss and Grief, to no longer live a half life, to be empowered to live your best life.

To enrol, or for enquiries, please message me direct by using the form below.