Earth Earth Awakening – Death Awareness Space

I was delighted to be invited to complete the Death Awareness team held by Celia Libera and Mike Grenville at the Green Earth Awakening (GEA) festival which is an Autumn event, from Wednesday 12th to Sunday 16th  September 2018, this event is affiliated with the Buddhafield Festival. A description of the GEA is as follows: ‘The Green Earth awakening is an intimate, late summer gathering to explore engaged Buddhism, community living, land skills and creative responses to forging social resilience. To bring together Buddhists, activists and anyone drawn to exploring the skills required to reach our collective potential. An Off-grid, drug and alcohol-free, temporary community where creativity can weave and connections can deepen. Expect the opportunity to network and collaborate through discourse, movement, music, play and fireside story and song.’

‘The Buddhafield theme for 2018 is Dance of Life and Death, (which followed through to the GEA): Death can bring deep sorrow and grief. As the Buddha showed, all human lives are touched by loss. The paradox of the dance of life is that it is also the dance of death. Life is so precious because we have such limited time on this earth. How do we honour our grief and sorrow, whilst allowing it to permeate our lives in a positive way, encouraging us to transform ourselves? Buddhafield and  GEA celebrated relationships, coming into a community, turning towards death and celebrating the joy of life, together, supported by our beautiful earth’.

I arrived Thursday evening arriving just in time to co-hold the Death cafe with Celia in our beautiful tipi tent, this was a full tent and one of the main themes that arose was suicide, and someone dealing with a terminal prognosis. It was powerful to share, and bear witness to peoples experiences and thoughts.

Friday morning Celia and I  held a session Exploring Mortality and making plans to make choices around our death. And in the late morning, I offered a Gentle touch session, which became a lovely pampering session with emphasis on touch and consent as a giver and receiver and being clear about our own boundaries.

In the afternoon, I attended a grief tending ritual which was beautifully held by Sophy and her team, this was my second experience of this, my first one being at Buddahfield this year. These teachings come from Sobonfu Somé, who has brought to the West teachings from the ancient wisdom, ritual and practices of her Dagara ancestors. Largely offering community grief,  so often we grieve alone or not at all, however, when we grieve together, not only does it help the individual to heal, it also helps strengthen the entire community fabric. Which I what I felt again. This yet again was a powerful ritual of feeling supported and supporting people in our temporary village namely this festival. I recommend attending such a ritual if you get the opportunity The song that was sung by us during this ritual and the same as the previous grief tending has now stayed with me.

Saturday morning Mike offered a workshop called when someone dies – exploring practical and spiritual options at and after death and Celia led 5 discussions to have with the dying who are living.

In the afternoon we all offered Blessing the body – ritual of washing, blessing and anointing as we say goodbye to our loved one. Celia made a splendid corpse model as we offer a demonstration.  Late evening we held a companion voices session- whereby we learnt a simple song (lullabies in essence)and each takes it, in turn, to lie down and be sung too. It feels like a beautiful healing sound/voice bath.

Sunday we completed with Dying to talk session and a Sound Bath, the sound Bath was popular and unfortunately, we had to turn people away as the tipi was full. I totally enjoyed the festival, a small 500 people capacity and out in nature, the weather was good for this time of year. We offered varied workshops around death and dying and it was lovely to be offering this space at this festival and working alongside an awesome team.