Living with Dying: Creating Death Awareness

Presenter:  Ed Geraty LCSW-C

CEUs: Category 1 | 3.0 

This workshop focuses on death awareness; Many individuals on our culture are uncomfortable with this topic. The prospect of dying raises questions about the nature and meaning of life and the reasons for suffering and dying. No easy answers to these fundamental questions exist. In their pursuit of answers, seriously ill people and their families can use or turn to their own resources, religion, counselors, friends, and research. They can talk, participate in religious or family rituals, or engage in meaningful activities. The most effective antidote to despair is often feeling cherished by another person. The torrents of medical diagnoses and treatments should not be allowed to obliterate larger questions, meaningful experiences, and the importance of human relationships. Clinicians are teaching people to understand loss, grief, and mourning and to understand the differences between normal sadness and clinical depression at the end of life. They are also providing information about advance care planning and decisions. It is important for clinicians to have a solid understanding of death awareness in order to assist clients in working through this process.

Workshop Objectives:

At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. You will have a greater understanding of your personal awareness of death.
2. You will have a greater awareness of the practice of impermanence.
3. You will cultivate an awareness of death and the major beliefs about the experience of death.
4. You will have a greater understanding of basic mindfulness concepts related to death.
5. You will understand how your personal awareness of death affects those clients you work with who are in the dying process.

Agenda

• Introduction/developing personal awareness
• Acceptance of impermanence and mindful contemplation
• The moment of death/Exactly what is death
• Death concepts; the great oblivion, the great insult, the great loss, the great departure, the great interruption
• Break
• Specific concepts related to living and dying.
• Contemplative death meditation/debriefing
• Closing 

Recommended Reading

The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom Hardcover, L.S. Dugdale

The Last Dance: Encountering Death and Dying, 11th Edition, Lynne Ann DeSpelder, Albert Lee Strickland, Jeanette M. Potts, Marion Mason

Beyond Death Anxiety: Achieving Life-Affirming Death Awareness Paperback – Illustrated, Robert W. Firestone