What's The Point Anyway?
It seems like much of the Western world is lost. The interesting trend over the last few years is that more and more people are working that out.
More people have worked out that endless materialism and chasing things that never actually satisfy us aint it.
So what’s the point of it all, anyway?
What's The Point Anyway?
What's The Point Anyway - What Dying Can Teach Us About Living With Sarah Kerr
My background is broad, but around 5 years ago with no prior experience I did something which might seem very unusual and became involved in the death industry when I co-founded a funeral business. It's been one of the most rewarding businesses that I've been involved in and one of the great lessons has been that death can teach us so much about life.
I wanted to bring a guest on the show who is an expert in this space and could share their experiences, so I reached out to one of the world leading death doulas Sarah Kerr who was all too willing to share her insights. Sarah is the Founder of the Centre for Sacred Deathcare and an expert on dying.
We spoke about the role of rituals and her views on the supernatural elements of what happens when a person dies.
You can find more of Sarah's content at her website.
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What I'll do, up to you, I record video and it's mainly a podcast. So put it on all the podcast platforms, but as of about the last two weeks, I've been adding the video to YouTube. And then I just use little snippets from the video for social. So your background's pretty good. Are you happy with video? Yeah, awesome. So I'll just do a quick intro, ask you the first question. What's the point anyway? So first of all, we need a little more context. Who are your people? who are really mixed. I'm basically the premise of the show is asking people with all different worldviews. What's the point anyway? What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? I'm Christian. I've been Christian three and a half years. So audience are Christian, but I speak to all sorts of people. I've spoken to Satanists. I've spoken to new age believers. I've spoken into what else? Stoics, the whole lot. So, so my, my audience is broad in that it's people sort of seeking to understand the answer to this question. It's definitely not an echo chamber. So, you know, I think in my audience, you'll get people that come from all of those different worldviews. as I mentioned to you on this initial email, I'm a part owner of a funeral business. so I've been in that space for four and a bit years now. no background in whatsoever beforehand, but coming into it has been fascinating. I love the space. I'm sure Canada is similar. mean, in Australia, tell people you work in the death industry and they're like, you know, what do mean that, you know, that they have a morbid view of it, but it's a, I think I've learned more about life from looking at death than any other thing. And there's something beautiful about it. There's something so real about it. So I was When I started this podcast, I was really interested in getting someone that can talk a little bit about death. then I think the company I'm a shareholder in follows you and shares a bunch of your stuff. So I thought you'd have a great insight. So we'll talk about life, but I think we'll use death as a bit of a method for getting there. And I have to say, what's the point is not gonna, I don't know, I'm need a little more something to get me going. Once I get going, I'm fine, I can go, but what's the point is too big. I need some, I need some. I'll get you into what the point of the first question is really just a quick snapshot of your broad first what comes to mind understanding and then. of, sorry, I tell you, I have to say I'm grumpy from a whole other thing. So if I feel short, it's because I'm short. I'm having a grumpy thing out there. So you're getting a bit of my grump. I apologize for that. So what's the point? my, can talk about a thousand different things. I get interviewed on a whole bunch of different topics, life, death. Like there's a whole bunch of stuff in there. Like I just need a little more interview pathway in. Yeah. What about I don't ask that first question? I'll just, I'll just say we're going to answer it and then I'll just, I'll start asking about what you do and then we'll get into it. Yeah, it has to make a little field for me. It arrives, but I, I'm just, I'm just coming from something else that I need a little more gentle on ramp, please. Easy. Well, welcome back to What's the Point? Anyway, my guest today is Sarah Kerr, who is a death doler and founder of the Center for Sacred Death Care from British Columbia, Canada. Thanks for joining me. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. So what I was saying is my background, I've been in the funeral industry for four and a half years, no background in that whatsoever beforehand. People have all sorts of different views around death and they might think of it as a morbid topic. I've learned so much about life from this space. I'd love you to talk about what you do. What is a death doula and what is the Centre for Sacred Death Care? Death doulas are lay people who are involved in supporting dying people and their families, but the sort of magic thing that death doulas do that fills a need that's not met in other ways is that death doulas start with someone when death enters the space, when it becomes clear that that's where the conveyor belt is going, and they stay with the person with the family and support all the way through. The person dies, then past the death and often into the funeral. So it's one continuous support, whereas the medical system goes to the death and then the funeral industry comes after that. But there's often a gap in the middle and it's a very tender time and a very really fraught time. There's so much going on in that in-between moment. It's a hard time to have a transition in who's supporting you. So having a death doula walks all the way through. And I am a death doula, I'm also a sacred death care guide and I run something called the Center for Sacred Death Care, which is working on, we sort of do a, we're like specialized death doulas who works particularly with the spiritual in a very broad nature-based spiritual but not religious way. Other death doulas have different focuses and different ways they do the work, but this is what I do. Yeah. How did you get into it Sarah? You know, lot of different ways I've always been interested in spirituality, soul, the bigger questions in life. I have also always been very sensitive to the other worlds and to energy in general. And so this time when body and soul separate, learning to attend to the energetics is part of what we do as death doulas and sacred death care guides. So I've always been very attuned to energetics. And my dad had a big stroke and he didn't die. I mean, he died seven years later, but that was a huge kind of social death to begin with, first really one in my family. And then I did my doctorate in transformative learning with a focus on ritual, traditional archetypal ritual principles and how we can use those principles to navigate big transitions. So it was a whole bunch of different things. yeah. Had you thought about, you you mentioned you're always into spirituality and sort of bigger questions. Had you thought about death a lot before your father had that incident or did that sort of thrust it upon you to start really considering this topic? You know, I was always and always have been At least in the last 20 years, maybe not as a child, I didn't have that. Some people really have it as a child, but as an adult, as a full grown adult, 20, 30 years, have had a very palpable, real relationship with the energetic dimensions. Dream space, meditation space, intuition. I just, that other world is very accessible to me and is some ways as real or more real than this world. And that world also includes the world of the dead. So it's all been sort of of a sort that I've been interested in. I'm an artist, I'm interested in symbolism and myth and archetype. So that whole basket. And then when my dad had his stroke, it took me a while to really, probably six months to kind of come to terms with my own grief around the loss of who he was. Yeah. And then after six months, I thought, my goodness, he needs help. He needs help in a kind of soul way. There's nothing that can be done to help his body. His mind was still relatively intact. He needs help in a soul way and who else is going to do it? I'm the only one really who can do it. And so that took me into that work and working with him and exploring what death, I mean, he didn't die for several years after the stroke, but suddenly death was in the space and he needed to talk about it and he needed help preparing. Yeah. So when you say, you have an interest in spirituality and this moment where the body, the body dies and the soul continues, but you say it's not religious. What is your broader spiritual worldview? What do you, what do you believe in? how would you identify it? You know, if I probably had to put a name on it, I might say I'm an animist. I see a world that's more complex and interrelated than the Western five senses and a materialist approach. And what really, if I had to name us the most sacred, it's relationship. It's relationship. with ourselves, with each other, with the land, with the ancestors, with the future beings, that all of us that were a web of interrelated beings and health comes from the health of that larger web of relationship, the ecosystem in this dimension and all others. so ritual is really a... Ritual is how relationship is embodied in the energetic way. When we... When we do rituals, we're making and tending relationship in all sorts of ways. So that's the biggest sense of it. guess the other sort of dominant vision in there is soul, is that there's some aspect of ourselves, which is not our bodies. And it's, it's, you know, my, my six-year-old niece, when she was little, she asked me what soul was and I thought, how do I define that to a six-year-old? Yeah. And what I said was, well, when you love someone, you don't love them because they have brown hair or five fingers. You love them because it's their soul. That's so it's that part. And when someone's dying, their body is deteriorating, but their soul is fine. And so how do we care for the soul and the soul's journey, whatever that might be. In addition to the work that mainstream medicine does to care for their bodies, we need to soul care. So the soul is really thrives on relationship, on meaning. Yeah, and beauty and truth. That's what the soul wants, are those things. Bodies need something else. Yeah. What do you think? I most, I mean, there's so many different religious worldviews and a lot of them, core question is what happens next? You know, when a person takes their last breath, what do you think's happening in that very moment? I that in medicine, in the not too recent past, decided that we had a moment of death that could be marked on the watch and written down. But that's a kind of recent invention. That death is a moment, a switch to the flicks. We're dead or alive. It's like birth. Well, like when are you born? Birth is a process. Dying is a process. If it's expected through illness or aging, or if it's sudden through accident or something else, the process can go faster or slower. But it's a slow unhooking. Body and soul are together and they unhook either slowly or quickly, but they come apart because body is finite. It can only hold us for so long. Eventually it just gets old, gets sick, gets broken, can't work. Soul is infinite. It's not damaged by body. So it's a kind of unhooking, disengaging, unwinding. And it doesn't happen like that. It's slow and in the moments before death and the moments after death and the hours and even the days before and after. And certainly if it was sudden, the days after, but even if it was sudden, sometimes the days before can be quite significant too. That there's something happening, the veil lifts, there's a spaciousness and there's a transition. Yeah. So that's what I think is happening. That's, what I've got lots to say about that, but that's one version of what's happening. Yeah. Where do think the soul is going? What's in there? What's the, what happens in the afterwards? I think there are many ways to answer that question. I think we have DNA. as humans, we share DNA. And I would say there's probably, as living beings, have a certain, we have some physical commonalities that we have. So it doesn't matter who we are, let's just take humans. We have basically the same kind of DNA. Our bodies basically do the same kind of thing as they die. My understanding of it is that At a soul level, we also have a kind of soul DNA that we all go through more or less the same kind of journey, which is being here in bodies. The image I use is on this side of the river in the village of the ancestors. And then we cross some kind of dividing space. And then we end up somewhere else. say it's the village of the village of the living on this side, the village of the ancestors. So that. here, in between, and there, I think is a little bit like DNA. I think that's just kind of what humans do. We're here, then we're there. And what we do is different cultures and different spiritual traditions layer on different stories about what that is. But most of them that I've come across have a kind of, we're here, and then something needs to happen, and we get there. And there is where everybody else is. Sometimes there's different options once you get there, but That's just the idea. I think we, my framing for it, which is just an image to understand that journey is that we end up in the village of the ancestors, but it's also, it's not a place. Place is three-dimensional. It's here, right? So we're not a place, but that's the only language you can use to describe it. I would say it's more we're a frequency. Mm-hmm. We're in a dimension which is a kind of frequency that it's all here. It's just what are we attuning to? That's how a medium can attune to someone because they're still here. They're just on a different channel. And do you have different views? Do you have similar views around? I mean, so many people ask the question, what happens when you die? The question, what happens before you become a human being? Do you think that process is sort of similar, but in reverse? think it's a big circle. think the image I have is that this is the line and this is out of a body and this is in a body. So at some point we're non-physical, we come into a body, we live a life and then we leave and then we come back around again. And that it's, you know, my ancestors are Celtic and the tradition there is that the stork brings the baby from across the river. So for me, that image works, right? We think about lots of traditions have a crossing the river picture. So that the ancestors and the future beings are in the same place as it were. And that there's a cycle of reincarnation where we come in to learn something new each time. And when we learn, we sort of evolve as we make our trips around that cycle. Yeah. Do you think there's memory throughout? So, yeah. their memory. think... Memory is the way we describe memory is has a very specific, like I remember what I had for breakfast. But there are, I think there are threads of. hints of energies that can pull through. And yeah, or just like, that, this is a pattern that feels familiar or things like that. I don't think it's as clear as what I had for breakfast, but I think there, because we're doing this evolutionary journey, it's, we're building on what we did before. So with this sort of worldview and understanding of things and then obviously your work now with the Center for Sacred Death Care, can you talk through maybe some of your more profound experiences with that? Because death is such a, it's such a monumentous event and you're so close to people at this personal period of time and everyone. I was gonna say everyone dies once, but perhaps you say that we die multiple times, but certainly in our lifetime, it's essentially the culmination of all things. What are some of your experiences and things that you've seen that have made you go, wow? That's, you know, when I put that fish hook on the water, nothing comes up to answer that. That's too big of one. what I will say is that, you know, in terms of kind of... sparkly things. What I will say is that The work I do is about helping people meet death well and have the support to be present to what's happening. And what's happening is most often and mostly a really deep combination of love and grief. And those two are in equal measure. And it's an enormous amount of energy moving through the system, an enormous amount of energy we're being asked to be present to. And it's really hard, especially if we haven't had a lifetime of being taught how to do this. It's something that just happens suddenly. When my dad had a stroke, suddenly I was in the process. I didn't have any idea. And that wasn't death, that was just really serious injury or illness. this moving the love and the grief. And what's really, I think, the most amazing for me and the work I do with people is How ritual? And when I say ritual, mean just the most gentle, it can be sitting around a coffee table, passing a talking object. I mean, they're not bells and whistles and any of that. It's just focused, structured space where people have an opportunity to make symbolic gestures. And that symbolic gesture might be putting a rose in the coffin and then closing. Mm-hmm. But it's, it's embodying that. And so when people are supported and guided to follow a ritual path through that journey, particularly, let's say from the moment of death to the funeral, like that's a really intense period in there. If people are supported, yes. Yeah. But it's, it's short and it's super concentrated and a lot happens. And so there's lots of possibility there. The most amazing thing is how beautiful it is and how when people are given support to really be present to the feelings, to feel the grief, you titrate it a little bit so they can feel the grief in stages. How transformative that is and what an enormous impact it makes on people's grief going forward if they're ritually supported. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've seen it with our business that a funeral done well is such an important, it's such an important part of the death and the grief process. Have you, sorry, go on. Well, I would say that funerals, when I work with families, we do a series of rituals leading up to the funeral. That when someone dies, the families, if they're at the deathbed or however they find out, even if you knew it was coming, they're shocked. And it takes coming to terms with it and integrating. And so I'll do rituals at the deathbed, sometimes three or four hours of ritual there, just helping people. the terms with and then we might care for the body for another two or three days in ritual and then we might have a family storytelling ritual and then depending on what's happening with the body there might be a cremation ritual or some other kind of ceremony going from the intimacy of the deathbed including more people each time so you know it's just the most intimate of the deathbed and then maybe by the family storytelling ritual you have 12 or 15 people and then maybe something else and then the funeral is the everybody. If you ask a family to make a leap from the deathbed to the funeral without a pathway of ritual in between, it can be incredibly overwhelming. And so a good funeral to me is actually premised on a whole series of preparatory rituals that allow the family to show up at the funeral and receive what the funeral has to offer, which is it's not a grief ritual for the family. They need grief rituals before the funeral so that they can be open and receive. It's quite a lot of pressure and attention for the funeral. So a good funeral is critical and beautiful, but I think it needs a lot before. Yeah. What do you think makes a great funeral and what's your view on the funeral industry in general? I'm guessing Canada is fairly similar to here in Australia. it is. Well, I think what makes a good funeral is what leads up to it. That's a huge part of it, that people are prepared because so many people show up at the funeral, walk out and there's a hundred or five hundred of the people who, you know, from your entire life and they just kind of get a little shell shocked and they kind of zip themselves up, put all their emotions down and smile and shake hands through the whole thing and it's It's not really very healing. It's not really often very much fun. It's just, it's too much. So a good funeral is people are prepared emotionally so that they're ready. Like, okay, I've done my grieving in private and with my small group. Now I can see all these people. And also it's, it's a well-held container. So it's, You know, in the, language of ritual, a container is, is a, is a literal palpable energetic field around the space. And it has to do with having an officiant who anchors and owns that. Like they take responsibility for it. I find it's, it's rarely successful to have a family member officiate because then they're being asked to be in two processes. Too much work. I'm sure you've seen that. So having a really well-held officiant. and having a really clear pathway of what is the ritual arc of the funeral. A ritual serves a purpose. Every ritual has a purpose and every ritual has a kind of the pinnacle gesture. At a wedding, it's when the ring goes on the finger and they say, I now pronounce you. It builds up to that and it comes down from that. At a funeral, I was just at a funeral the other day and it sort of started here and it just went along. A bunch of people talked to me, watched some videos and then it went along then we went home. There was no, we weren't invited into anything. So for me, when I officiate funerals, the core pinnacle gesture of the funeral is when, in my language, we put our hands on the stern of the canoe and we push it out into the water and we let it go. That's the moment. And we have to build people and actually have people stand up and in their minds or in their bodies do that. We're sending the canoe across to the ancestors. Mm-hmm. We have to do something in order for it to feel like the energy has been. catalyzed so it can move to the next stage. A funeral should be a stepping stone that you go in as one person, you come out as another person, but it has to have a strong enough container. You can get changed and it has to have an energetic art that walks you through that. Yeah. So in Australia, I find that the average person, we have such an aversion and, fear of death. And then when you actually lose someone, you know, unfortunate, unfortunate circumstances, there's a little bit of a period of time where you can prepare for it, but a lot of the time there isn't. What do you wish people considered death earlier and thought about it and thought about the implications of it? You know, I can't remember who said it, but there's some wonderful quote that the meaning of life is that it ends. End. It is in a way loss. We will all lose everyone and everything we love. That's just how it works. And that is, if we can be present to that and hold that in our awareness, everything becomes more precious because in a way it's temporary. death, talking about death not only prepares us for death, it also helps us build an incredible life. So We have a particular aversion in modern culture to death. there are lots of reasons for that and lots of cultural conditioning, but what we've done is we've made it taboo and we just don't talk about it. We don't talk about it. don't share with each other when it's happening. And so people don't learn how to do it because it's kept so hidden in the family situations. We should be learning how Like when my dad had a stroke, I had never been around someone whose parent had a stroke or I hadn't known it anyway. I hadn't been able to see and observe and have that exposure so that when it my turn, I'd know. And same thing, when someone gets a diagnosis and they start walking towards their death, ideally they've been on the periphery and had participated in lots of other people's deaths and dying so that when it's their turn, they feel like they have a map. Someone's been there before them, they can follow that. Yeah. What is it? I mean, you almost sort of touched on it then I mentioned before we hit record that, we would just sort of talk a bit about what you do before I asked my sort of fundamental question. What's the point anyway? And in some ways you answered it there that, know, death teaches us what was the quote? It was that, the meaning of life is that it ends. Yeah. What has, what has, it's almost a juxtaposition, but What are some of the things that death has taught you about life? Because I think we can learn so much from it. I think it's more that dying has taught me about living, which is kind of the same, but it's a little bit different. That's how I would answer it. that it's short, that it ends, that the time to do your work is now, not at the end, that we die the way we lived and it's hard to have a beautiful conscious death if you haven't been doing the work along the way to be conscious and intentional about how you live your life. That what matters is relationships. What matters is who you touched and who touched you and... how we felt because of that, not the numbers in a bank account or the model of our iPhone. It's very grounding and simplifying in a way. Because when I walk into a room with a family, either with a dying person or after the person has died, It is, it is the absolute antithesis of small talk. Nobody cares about all of that stuff. What matters is this love and this grief and these connections and how can we weave these connections more. And we don't need to be dying to do that. Dying sharpens the edge of it a little bit, but it's a finer point on it. Yeah, yeah, it's from my experience, it brings, it just brings a sharp sword to the things that matter and everything else just disappears. What do you think some of the biggest, what have you from your experience, sound like the biggest regrets that people have? You know, that's not really, I don't know that I have much of an answer for that. It's not a kind of a conversation I have with people. One of the conversations I have with people fairly regularly, because I'm, I mean, I call myself clergy for the unchurched. So if someone is dying or supporting a dying person and they hold these bigger nature-based spiritual views, They understand there's a something, they believe there's a somewhere, but they don't know what it means or how to be with it. So I answer a lot of those kinds of questions. We have those kinds of conversations. So often there'll be questions like... dying but I was married twice and I love both my husbands and they're both there. I'm really worried I'm to meet them both and how will I choose? No? Or I don't think my father would be proud of me for how I've lived my life and I'm afraid to see him. Or my abuser is over there. So those are more the questions. I I guess we talk about regrets if that was what came up but it's more that and then also Like how do we do this here and now? So like ideally people come to me when they're four or five, six months. I mean, if you can predict, but that's, that would be great. What can they do to get ready so that when the pot really starts to boil, when it's really moving quickly, they're where they want to be. And sometimes that is. resolving regrets with ritual. from my experience, from what I've seen, it's always, I mean, you touched on it and that's a common answer of people around what's the point anyway. It always comes back to relationships. So the, there's any regrets I've seen or things that really come to the fold of death is that, you know, the relationships that you've had and maybe the relationships that you haven't mended, you've reached the point where it is too late on that. What are some of the advice if, know, people come to you and they've got six months to live and you can really start to work through their final six months in life. What do you try to do with these clients of yours? What do you get them to focus on? sometimes my clients are the dying people and sometimes my clients are the family members. So someone will say, my dad's dying. He can't really talk about it, but I want to give him a good death. And I'm sad that he's dying and I want the grandchildren to have a good death. So it'll be a whole variety of people. So I ask, let's say I'm working with a family with a dying person as part of the conversation. What I ask them is what do they want their death to do? And that's really it's... That's a line from Stephen Jenkinson, who's a great writer and teacher about this. What is the point? Like that death is and dying is another stage of living. Like it's our nature, Thich Nhat Hanh says, it's our nature to be ill. It's our nature to get ill. It's our nature to get old. It's our nature to die. So dying is living. And in this phase of living, we had different phases of living. In this phase of living, what do you want your dying to do? What do you want it to bring into the world? Or what's your intention or even your prayer for your death? And that takes a long time sometimes to work out with people but finding it and that the wrestling with it is the gift in there. So people have said well I want there to be more love in my family. I want us to feel and let the love flow. Okay then you kind of have a set of marching orders or it's like a Like a company has a mission statement and you, you bounce all your potential projects off that mission statement. So if you want there to be more love in the world, you know, I had a client say, I don't know what I want. just know I want this to be sacred. Okay. Or, you know, I want my kids and my grandchildren to come out of this feeling more resourced and resilient to be able to meet future deaths in their lives. Okay. So you want this to be a learning process for them. So then when people find that. We sometimes can put dying people in the category of Victims isn't the right word, but they no longer have agency. They just are the recipients of treatment and they lie in bed and people do things to them and for them. And they're kind of no longer meaningful or useful in the world. And that is so not true. But we have to remind people that their death, they're still living as they die and they can make choices about how they live that will impact their life and impact the world. So when people find something and it'll usually just be a little phrase and the way they phrase it and it'll ring their bell and the whole family can get around it. And then every time there's a decision to be made, should we go to the hospital? Well, I want there to be more love in the system. I might spend three weeks in the hospital and not with you. Okay, maybe I'd rather stay home. So they bounce their ideas off this. And it gives a really reliable soul through line that they can follow. And then once we have the attention then it's a combination of... Just death education. What do you need to have in place and how do you do these things in a way that values the soul's experience? It's not just because it's efficient. Souls aren't really into efficiency. That's not where the soul gets fed. So how do we, you know, I had a client a long ago, she was dying, her son, she lived on the West Coast, her son coming from the East Coast to visit her. We were talking and And it was clear that he was coming to say goodbye. He wasn't going to come back again until the funeral. He wanted to come now. And so I said to her, how are you going to say goodbye? And she hadn't really thought about that. And so I gave her some tools and just a simple four step practice so that they could be intentional about it. Otherwise you don't really know how to do it. And it doesn't really happen. And Give each other a hug and then that's it. So how do you make every single moment meaningful and fit that intention? Yeah. How have you found Sarah, um, working in this space impacting you personally? you, because it is such a ex there's so many extreme emotions and it's so targeted. it weigh, does it weigh down on you at times or I mean, you clearly love the space that you were in. How do you deal with working in such a high emotion environment all the time? I was an outward bound instructor for years. And you know, when the kayak tipped or someone fell off a cliff and broke their leg or whatever, the lightning struck, I got a really plumb line. Like I'm the person you want to be standing beside when that happens. There's something in me that just comes to life when the stakes are high in some way. I'm the same personality. So maybe it's something, maybe there's something in us that leads us to this spot. Yeah, so it's something about being in, it's not physical stress, it's emotional. All the emotions are all over the place and it just makes me get grounded. And I love being with what's real. Like small talk doesn't interest me, I want big talk. And when someone's dying, they want big talk. And sometimes... It's hard to have that without some support. So I'm helping people. I'm always in these spaces of enormous, meaningful, deep conversation. It's not, it's not the weather. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the business I'm in, started in 2020. and then I just found, you know, obviously, I mean, Canada had, I think you guys have the heaps of lockdowns. We were like the most locked down city in the world. And through that, everything went virtual, you know, all the conversations were on zoom, no one was connecting. And then we were doing funerals and there was something so beautiful about it. It was like the only real thing in the world that was happening. Yeah, yeah. And so hard because people couldn't be close. But yeah, yeah, but so important. Yeah. Perfect. what are you, how many, how many people have you got working with you at Center for Sacred Death Care? So in terms of being a death doula, I have done that since 2012 and I'm doing it still in small ways, but not very much. Mostly what I'm doing is teaching. So I have the whole online thing going on, teaching and social media and backend and customer support and all that. So I have five or six people, all different kinds of part-time making that happen. So there's quite a team behind it, but I'm the only one doing the actual death work. The rest are doing the support of the process. Yeah, it can make sense. it is, you you're obviously so great at what you do, but it's, it's so much, so time consuming on an individual level that being able to scale yourself, you can only look after so many people at so many times. How? Yeah. just launched a 13 week certification training program to train people, particularly in the soul's journey approach. There's lots of other death doula trainings that have a little more pragmatic set of nuts and bolts. That's useful, but this is a little different. Have you noticed sentiment changing around perspectives with death in it? I mean, you've been in the space for 13, 14 years now. there's more. It's just more in the space. There's more talk about it. There are more people doing it. There are more practitioners. There's more conversation. You know, the, I feel like I'm kind of the first generation of internet death doulas. They're certainly there. mean, ancestrally, people have always done this, but that line got broken a bit. And then maybe there's another generation ahead of behind me who were doing this, mostly women doing this in their communities. And then the next sort of wave, I was part of that next wave and who I've served and who's been really part of that. both as clients and practitioners are often people who had children with midwives. And they're part of the boomer generation and they did things differently coming in and they're now aging and dying and they want to redefine how it happens going out. So I think there's a whole bunch of stuff happening that that boomer generation is shifting things. And I really think the psychedelic revolution is doing an enormous amount to open people's eyes and consciousnesses to that larger dimension and to see what can be learned and known and healed by plugging into something bigger. What's, I'd love you to talk about that. Cause I've seen it on your website. What's, what, what is the psychedelic revolution? What are you and what's your experience with it? So as a practitioner, I don't work with psychedelics at all. So I see it culturally and what it's doing. know, Michael Pollan's work has had a big impact on that. There's a big uprising of people interested in doing personal healing work by plant medicines, other kinds of substances that open your consciousness to something new. And so I... I feel like in a way what I do is a kind of parallel to that. Ritual is an altered state of consciousness. If you go into deep ritual, you actually come out feeling a bit different. There's a bit, it's a, when you're really in it, it's a different space inside there. And so the stronger the ritual container, the more we can access that, those altered states of consciousness, which allow us to feel more in touch and more connected with the whole. the same way psychedelics allow us to feel more in touch and connect with the whole. The work I do and a particular set of practices I do, I do a workshop called the Across the Veil Constellations, which are day long or weekend long events where we do embodied practices for bringing resolution to unresolved deaths in people's lives and for bringing clarity around either upcoming or past deaths. It's an incredibly strong container and incredibly beautiful things happen. And the healing that comes, I think can be parallel to the psychedelic work. difference being psychedelic work, the bar is high. You have to take a substance and there's legalities and sitters and price. And it's also individual. You do the journey alone. This ritual work we do in community. So people come and a whole family could be there exploring the same question and have a shared experience. Yeah. So that access to the larger dimensions is I think where the real healing is gonna come. Yeah. So you think, you know, I've spoken to people that haven't actually, no, I haven't really done it myself, but the DMT and mushrooms and different sort of substances to, you know, access this, what people call higher level of consciousness or whatever different words they want to use to describe it. One thing that is clear from it is there, there seems to be a huge amount of uniformity and commonality around what the experiences are. And different people with different worldviews have different opinions, whether what they're experiencing is good or whether it's bad. But what do you think, what do you think, what do think they're experiencing when they take these psychedelics compared to what you're talking about earlier about, you know, crossing the river and these unseen realms? Do you think it's, do you think it's accessing the same places? The same category of places, I think. It's a little bit what I spoke about earlier about I've always been interested in the subtle realms, in dreaming, intuition, all those capacities for touching into something that's not immediately visible or palpable here. So I think there's this physical world. had a teacher, I worked with a... teaching in maledoma sommet and he had this beautiful line he said that this is the we are in the infinitesimally small sliver of reality in which energy becomes matter and everything else is not that so we're here and this is the small part of it and so when we dream when we meditate when we do psychedelics when we enter trance states, when we read tarot cards, when we have an intuitive hit, all those different practices, we're sticking our little psychic tentacles out into that larger field, into the more. So there are probably different places out there. We go from different ways, but it's all the more. And we're here. And the other thing he said is that there are souls lined up a mile deep to get into this sliver of reality. because there are things you can learn here and things you can heal here that you can't learn and heal anywhere else. There's something about the combination of mortality, change, physicality. This combination creates an opportunity for soul growth that just doesn't happen in other dimensions. Yeah. So do you think what we do here in our mortal bodies impacts our eternal soul? Not in a punitive way, but I think that there is, we're doing, if this image that feels so right to me and it flows from the teachers I've had, if this image of us coming into bodies and leaving bodies and coming into bodies and going out of bodies, we're in a cycle. There's continuity that happens there. And we learn, we grow. I think there's definitely some continuity. Yeah, interesting. Well, Sarah, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your experiences and talking about death as a way for us to understand life a lot better and what the point of life is. Where can people find you and what's the best way to sort of understand more about what you're doing? It's been really fun. Yeah. So I, the website is the Center for Sacred Death Care. It's sacreddeathcare.com and I'm at sacred death care on all the social channels. I've got lots of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, all that stuff. And a newsletter that comes out once a week, you can find easily on my site. I send a little quick two or three minute video with a bit of some writing every weekend and people enjoy that. And then they're all courses I have on my site and different free resources people can download. So. Follow the internet breadcrumbs and you'll find me. Perfect. And I'll put links to all that in the show notes. So thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon in Canada and really appreciate you coming on and it's been great to chat. Great. Thanks very much. It's been fun, Luke. Thanks, Sarah.