About the DOULA course

“Like birth, we want to bring death back where it belongs; in the hands and hearts of loved ones, in the home and community, in sacred space. We want to bring back touch, care, love, connection and to uphold the importance of death as a holy threshold and transition. We want to change the narrative around death, no more euphemisms, no more dirty words, no more taboos. We honour grief; our own, each others and that of the ancestors and the world.” Founding statement from 2017

Our End of Life Doula Preparation course is radical, deep and very much what is needed in our world at this time. We gather in circles, in community, and we learn through the sharing of stories, experience and wisdom. Our facilitators are just that, holders of space and we are all learning from the teacher that is Death. The course is 12 – 18 months in length and comprises of a 4 day face to face retreat and then a 12 month online inquiry with your cohort of fellow pilgrims on this journey. 

Sacred Circle doula preparation occupies a space between 2 worlds; the mainstream world as it is where death is primarily seen as a medical event and a different paradigm. We are calling into being a world where death and grief are woven through, and welcomed in, our communities. Where death and grief consciousness is commonplace and we return, together, to right relationship with land, place and space; a deep remembering of the ancient ways for our modern times. 

We prepare doulas to bridge between the mainstream, medicalised world of the death industry infusing every interaction with presence and care; while simultaneously strengthening the community connections and threads of story that will carry us forwards as our systems and institutions of care struggle and fail to meet our dying, dead and bereaved well. Some of our practices include sharing circles, wholesome ritual, keening and lamenting, grief ceremony, home care of a dead body, social justice and care of the bereaved following sudden and violent deaths. 

Doulas cannot work in isolation; nor can we attend to another when we have unresolved feelings around our own mortality; so this preparation course is as much about yourself and your relationship with death and then being in community as it is anything else. 

The new redesigned course is between 12 to 18 months long depending on how soon you sign up before the face to face aspect of the course. 

Please see our Pricing Policy for more information about how we came to our price, financial accessibility and the bursary fund which is available to doulas from communities traditionally under-represented in this work.

The new Course Content looks like this:

1. Upon registration you are immediately welcomed into our community and can join our weekly Zoom calls and facebook group
2. You are part of the online community forum hosted in our password protected part of our website
3. You will straight away be given access to the Journey with Death course and workbook which you can start
4. You will then come on a face to face residential retreat (5 nights / 4 days)
5. The face to face experience will be led by Alexandra with between 2 and 4 co-facilitators
6. On the retreat you will cover all the aspects of the course listed below
7. You will be provided with Course Companion notebook containing all teachings and spaces for you to write
8. You will meet your cohort of fellow pilgrims and contract together for the following 12 months
9. You will be facilitated by our incredible team through the 12 months Pilgrim together with your cohort (you are no longer obliged to take a mentor but we heartily recommend it if you can)
10. The Zoom calls with Alexandra and the wider community happen twice a week and you have lifetime access to the Zoom calls for as long as they sustain
11. The wider community holding provides you with an established global community of contacts, networks and resources; we have a shared set of ethics and standards which we mutually adhere to
12.  To be considered a Sacred Circle doula will afford you a respectable reputation grounded in strong ethics; our reputation is for providing robust radical, ethical and sustainable preparation for death and service

What is covered in the Face to Face aspect of the Course?

1. Welcome, Grounding, Contracting, Consent Process
2. Ceremony and Ritual (throughout the whole time together)
3. Mapping the Ancestral Landscape
4. The Nature of Trauma and Attachment (and its impact on a “good death”)
5. Healing Trauma (Grief is the Medicine)
6. Introduction to Keening and Lament (Song, Sound and Silence workshop)
7. The timeline of death and grief (and how a doula can serve)
8. What to expect at a death
9. Laying out the Dead (practical workshop)
10. Grief Ceremony (a rare cathartic opportunity)
11. Living Wake
12. Mapping your pathway forward and the importance of a Strong Ending

The “vibe” of the course is earthy, radical, loving, transformative, more funny and light than you might imagine but also deep, we encounter our shadows, we explore the dark places together. The whole experience is woven together with ritual and ceremony; held very consciously with the Unseen; we are working with Land, Place and Space and so every group constellation and every location will make each course completely different. The facilitators all bring their unique and diverse skills but we all share a secular but spiritual approach rooted in Earth based traditions, we embrace animism and ancestral work, although the word “shamanic” is overused and not quite culturally relevant it does go some way to describing the way that we work. We work with story; we sit and learn to listen deeply by listening to each other’s stories; much of the experience is beyond words; we explore sound and silence together including keening (which if you don’t know what this is you may wish to look it up before you come), we expect people might very well cry a lot (and we welcome it if you do) and we do not fix, we will not stem your tears. Our courses invariably include a lot of laughter and silliness as well; always, we believe, in a respectful way.

If you would like to hear some voices of those who have gone before you in this work do check out our podcast “Conversations with Death” for a diverse range of experience of the course and if you have any questions please email our team on [email protected] 

The course begins the moment you sign up. The number of places for 2024 is limited so don't hold back if you feel called! We ask you to sign up according to which face to face course you wish to attend (details and dates below) but do remember the course is 18 months long and requires a commitment to personal study, engagement in the Pilgrim and the community as well as the Retreat. Make sure you read our student agreement and if you have any questions before you commit then throughout 2024 we will be holding weekly Zoom meetings to answer questions; so email [email protected] to get on those calls or to add your question (they will be recorded). 

One last but rather important thing; please note that the residential retreats take place in centres with multiple beds in rooms. We thought long and hard about how to allocate rooms and whether we should do the "single room supplement" thing but we were given feedback which we yielded to which was that often people need a single room because of a disability so it would be exclusionary of us to make them more expensive. Instead the rooms will be allocated according to people's needs (to the best of our ability) which means if you have a disability or very high priority for a single room you can email us on [email protected] to see if there are any single rooms available before you sign up; and we will hold it for you while you join. What that means for the rest of us (the shy, the snorers and the restless... is that we need to be prepared in advance to share and bring earplugs)... It's all part of the adventure!

If you have any concerns or questions clear them up with us at [email protected] before clicking on the Sign Up button. We're here for you, every step of the way.