Curriculum
Natural Burial
Sustainable disposition of remains:
• Natural (“Green”) Burial
• Transition from conventional cemeteries to sustainable burial sites.
• Urban Burial and other composting options e.g. mushroom decompiculture
• Solar cremation
• Promession
• Full body burial at sea, reef balls
• Other innovations
Soul & Spirit
• The Tao of Aging: Old Age as Path of Spiritual Warrior, Conscious Dying as a spiritual practice.
• Sustaining practices and enhancing activities such as yoga, movement as a form of prayer, healing music.
• Death as a community experience.
• Transmigration of soul, role of psychopomp, assisting soul advancement at death.
• A Bardo By Any Other Name–Life on the Otherside.
• Cross-cultural perspectives on the Life-Death passage.
• Death in non-human realms (animals).
Hospice
• Hospice and Palliative Care (optimal setting, tools and practices to assist the dying and sustain caregivers and practitioners).
• Peri-mortal Nutrition and trans-modality support (e.g. Chinese Medicine, Reiki, Qigong, flower essences and essential oils, sphagyrics).
• Natural Death as a fundamental human right; fasting and meditation as a viable strategy for self-determined transition timing.
• Roles of Thanadoula (Death Doula) and Death Midwife.
• “Dying Well” and “Good Grief”
Legacy
• Death as a natural part of life; living with dying.
• Legals and Legacy-Estate Planning, Health Care Directive and POLST, Spiritual Wills.
• Narrative Medicine.
• Creating Personal, Social, Cultural and Soul Legacy.