Death is our teacher, one which teaches us how to live and love

We honour the Dying, Dead and Bereaved

We have compassion for self and others

We follow a consensual decision-making process

We are committed to a lifelong process of deepening self awareness, self responsibility and self care in a community context

We centre and ground all gatherings, connections and Work in a sense of the sacredness of Land, Place and Space

We strive for honesty, accountability and humility in every communication and interaction

We do what we say we will do; we honour agreements and contracts and communicate with maturity if we find we cannot.

We strive for healthy boundaries through deepening self knowledge and embrace learning from mistakes without shame

We ask for help if we need it

No one is an authority in this community; those that hold roles are in service and we love and respect them for it but no one is better than anyone else

We give ourselves and others the benefit of the doubt, we hold confidences and speak of each other only in positive regard.

Where we see this community agreement fraying or broken we call the issue lovingly into the circle of our peers in the spirit of learning, healing and holding with Love

We behave professionally but we are not “professionals”; we remain human, accessible, loving; to our clients and to each other

We see your personal data as being your story. What you share with us we hold completely confidential whether that be your life story or your email address.

We only collect the data we need to communicate with you regarding the courses and the community activities; when you join you are added to a mailing list of students and community members which receives our newsletter; you can unsubscribe any time.

We store your data in password secured and save places for the eyes only of the administration team.

You can ask us at any time what data we hold for you and you can also ask us at any time to delete it and we will do so within 3 working days of your request without question.

If you opt into our community whatsapp groups please be aware that other members of the group can directly message you privately from the group and we are not able to prevent that from happening; we have it as an agreement between users of the whatsapp groups that you seek consent first before private messaging someone and / or storing their number in your phone.

We review the data we hold on an annual basis and we will remove any data that is out of date.

This policy was last updated April 2023 and due for review March 2024; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

We at Sacred Circle Training Co CIC are often in the presence of the vulnerability of humans and we understand and hold in deep reverence and compassion the vulnerability of all we meet in grief, death and trauma.

In doing so we equally champion the sovereignty and personal power of all the consenting adults who join our courses and community to take responsibility for themselves and their own wellbeing, asking for their own needs to be met and remaining responsible for their holistic health.

This may seem like a paradox but we stand by it as a complexity of our humanity; we will witness and empathise with you in your vulnerability but we will not take responsibility for you and thus take your power from you.

This only extends to those who have the power to consent.

People who are classed as legally vulnerable and unable to consent include children and young people and adults without capacity to make decisions for themselves.

Occasionally children and young people have joined our doula trainings with the full consent and 100% presence alongside them of their parents; the children and young people have also been given every opportunity to consent or opt out. They have proven to be extraordinary contributors to our circles.

It is not, however, a policy of ours to open our courses to children and young people and we would only consider applications on a case by case basis with full consent of both the parents and the youth.

When children and young people do attend our courses they remain the full responsibility of their supervising parent or guardian.

What we may commonly come across are stories shared which may either consciously or unintentionally disclose abuse of children, young people or vulnerable adults.

Sacred Circle CIC is not classed as a statutory body so if / when we do hear disclosures of abuse we will take the following actions:

1. We will stop the person sharing with us and gently inform them that they are detailing abuse and if they continue they need to know that we are legally obliged to act to safeguard the vulnerable

2. We will write down what was said

3. We will pass the information about the disclosure of abuse to the most relevant authority eg the school of a child, the GP of an elder or social services. If what is disclosed to us is a criminal act then we will notify the police.

4. We will stand by and support any affected members of our community whatever the outcome

The directors of Sacred Circle CIC will also be notified that we have had to take such an action. We absolutely understand that human relationships are messy and we will not stand in judgment of the human beings involved; we do, however, absolutely take the community responsibility for the wellbeing of our vulnerable seriously.

This policy was last updated April 2023 and due for review March 2024; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

In 2021 a much loved member of our community had a hand in their own death. This event not only devastated us as humans, friends and beloveds of this individual but it also gave rise to a significant review of our safeguarding policy to see if there was anything we could do, as a community and as a company, to prevent this happening again.

We took time and went deep in conversation to ask the questions we really didn’t want to including “if we open space to talk openly about death, will we attract the suicidal?” “did our course contribute to this person’s mental and emotional distress?” or “do we, in our openness and willingness to embrace death as a teacher, in some way, encourage self killing?”

The outcome of these conversations led us to believe that the work that we do towards breaking down the taboos around death and dying is done with the intention of creating a better world where the promise of life outweighs the promise of death. Spaces where suicidality can be discussed without fixing or shaming seem to be better than not talking about it at all.

In the review of the factors that contributed to our friend taking their life we concluded that we couldn’t have foreseen it or prevented it; the person in question did not disclose their suicidality to us and they had been in communication with us up to the 2 weeks prior and did not give us reason to have concern for their welfare. We grieved sorely and we learned and this is what we learned:

1. Some people will take their own lives and we are powerless to stop them
2. For some people the promise of death outweighs their desire to live and we cannot fix them
3. They are not broken or failing as human beings for having these thoughts
4. It is our world that is broken and our systems that are failing and therefore we hold the spaces we do to share the pain of such failures

If any member of our community discloses to us that they are suicidal we will support them to find help, we will ask them what their plans are and signpost where we can to get the best support possible. We would also extend to them the opportunity to share their stories with us in circle and we will grieve with them their sorrows, in the hope this removes some of the impulse to die.

But at the end of the day, we work with sovereign adults and our student agreement does include a statement of self-responsibility; as an organisation we are not taking responsibility for anyone’s health and welfare.

This policy was last updated April 2023 and due for review March 2024 but will be reviewed earlier in the event (sincerely hopefully not) of another self killing within our community; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

As End of Life or Death Doulas we are often asked to comment on what we think about the “Assisted Dying Bill” that is currently in debate both in the UK and Irish parliaments.

The number one thing that is essential for all doulas to understand is that we are pro choice.

Tempting as it might be to weigh in with personal opinions based on difficult experiences from the past we are not a liberty to discuss any of situations of the clients we have supported through death and grief; we cannot use their stories as weight in arguments pro and con.

We have numerous examples of where clients of ours in the past have asked us to be with them if they ended their own lives when in terminal pain and suffering. In each case we would decline; regardless of how much we might wish to honour the human being and their wish to die.

The reason we would decline is because it would be illegal to do as wished and would bring the “profession” of death doulas into disrepute and controversy. Furthermore, bearing witness to a self killing is not the same thing as an assisted death in the legal and medical context and should not be confused.

We have death doulas in our community (we are a global community) who live in countries where Assisted Dying is legal. In fact, in some of those countries our doulas have accompanied people through the Assisted Dying process in a personal capacity as spouses and children of the deceased.

The Sacred Circle policy on Assisted Dying is that we will always abide by the law of the country in which we work. No doula will ever actively assist someone to die; we may bear witness and act as a companion where the law of the land permits it.

In terms of the debate pro and con; we champion every individual’s right to decide for themselves; we are in favour of informed choice and hold our personal opinions as secondary to the needs of our clients.

This policy was last updated April 2023 and due for review March 2024; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

The Teacher that is Death asks us to reconsider the colonial construct of “inclusion” and asks all of us to rethink what we mean when we say we champion a “good death” because a good death for one person should be a good death for all people.

The more we sit with Death as our teacher the deeper we are drawn into social justice and the fight for equality. End of Life doulas are not just for palliative and hospice care situations.

Inadequate as our systems of care are and failing as our institutions are; even so to reach an old age or to die in relative comfort with your boots off is a privilege denied to many.

Sacred Circle end of life doulas are available post-death in cases of sudden and violent death and self killing, we are grief doulas and we can hold space for the tragedy of untimely death.

We recognise that death comes younger and more violently disproportionately amongst Black communities and other communities of colour, in communities experiencing poverty and high levels of ancestral trauma, to the LGBTQIA+ communities and to people with disabilities. We see and mourn discrepancies in youth deaths along the lines of the gender binary; young men being extremely vulnerable as are transwomen. We recognise and mourn too the discrepancies in outcomes for Black families at birth and in the post partum period.

All this being said what does this mean in terms of our Equality and Inclusion policy?

Firstly it means that we do not teach that death in hospice is the only death we can be of service at. Our courses speak to the inequalities in deaths in our society and promote social justice and activism.

Secondly, we welcome applications from folks who come from underrepresented communities and we will provide additional support both in terms of learning needs and where possible financial support to encourage diversity to flourish in our community.

Thirdly, we recognise that an organisation is as diverse as it is inclusive; so we do not chase diversity as a performative and empty gesture; we work to create safety and accountability in our spaces in the faith that this will lead to ever greater diversity.

Fourthly, we celebrate with great joy the differences in our stories between cultures, heritages, ancestry, land, place and space; we seek to learn from each others stories without appropriating other cultures.

Fifthly and most importantly, the work we do at Sacred Circle CIC is a de-colonising act; to reclaim and remember Death in our communities leads us to uncover the “paths of return” in all cultures but often in white Europe and where the descendants of white Europe have settled; to meet within, once again, the lost indigenous traditions of Europe. In addressing the soul sickness at the heart of whiteness which is both cause and effect of the cultural fear of death, the loss of our rites of passage and traditions around death and grief, we are healing the very forces that led to colonialism and capitalism.

This policy was last updated April 2023 and due for review March 2024; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

Sacred Circle CIC is a social enterprise with 4 directors and we have a team of facilitators, a community co-ordinator and administrative and financial support. Our remit is to provide education and community development around death, dying and grief. We train end of life doulas and celebrants and these participants in the courses join a global community of kindred spirits. We are secular but spiritual in our approach; we advocate no doctrine and promote no religion or particular faith; all our participants are free to believe in whatever they do and we train doulas to support their clients according to their clients worldview.

We recognise that where we have “community” meeting “spirituality” and in particular in the field of death and dying; there is potential for unconsciously creating cult-like conditions. The following are the characteristics of a cult and below are the measures we take to prevent falling into such a trap:

• The group has a charismatic leader to whom member display zealous unquestioning commitment
• The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members
• The group is preoccupied with making money
• Questioning, doubt and dissent are discouraged and punished
• Members are encouraged to cut ties with family and friends and give up personal goals
• Members are expected to devote all their time to the group
• Members are often required to live together
• The group often takes the money of the membership
• The group is virtually impossible to leave and walk away from

When our co-founders parted leaving Alexandra alone with the Sacred Circle work it was Alexandra’s primary concern at the time that they did not remain the sole head of a spiritual and community organisation for the very reason it could easily become cult-like. Alexandra created the Community Interest Company to share the leadership among the directors and has been working ever since to train up a large and diverse body of new facilitators in order to create the conditions for Alexandra to step back and cease to be the lead.

As of 2022 the process is well underway to de-centre Alexandra and pave the way for a non-hierarchical sociocratic culture within the community where leadership can emerge through anyone but will not reside with an individual.

The Sacred Circle training is built on a culture of Consent and questioning and dissent is very much welcomed and embraced as opportunity for growth and improvement.

The courses we offer are products; they are costed to be accessible to as many people as possible and the cost and the offer are boundaried. Membership of the “community” is entirely voluntary and is run as a subscription, again at as low a cost as possible, to make it accessible.

The Community Interest Company is “not for profit” and any financial surplus within the business must by law be used to purchase assets for social and community gain.

Within our long term vision for Sacred Circle would be the purchase of land and assets to create Earth Hospices; there may be the opportunity for some members of the community to live in these places but rather than being encouraged it would be done on a strictly selective and discerning basis to ensure the people who live on the property best serve the Earth Hospice.

Anyone can leave the community at any time with our blessing.

This policy was last updated April 2023 and due for review March 2024; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

We at Sacred Circle CIC recognise and mourn the devastating collapse of our eco-systems and feel that the work we do is most needed at this time of systemic and institutional collapse. The work that we do promotes grassroots community and local mutual aide.

We have in recent years developed the courses online recognising that technological solutions have their own carbon footprint alongside physical travel. Our policy historically was for our facilitators to travel to localities where a circle of local death doulas would meet and form bonds; the travelling of the facilitator was aimed at reducing the need for all the participants to travel to a central location.

We recognise that when our facilitators travel we are having an impact on the planet. We strive to minimise our carbon footprint by minimising unnecessary travel and using sustainable solutions where possible.

We believe that the work that we are doing now to sow seeds at the grassroots level of community grieving, sustainable funeral practices and bringing death back into community and out of institutions, are of utmost importance. These seeds will bloom particularly in a future when our current unsustainable practices have come to their peak and fail.

This policy was last updated April 2023 and due for review March 2024; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

In 2020 and 2021 we occasionally met when legally possible with small, socially distanced groups; observing hand washing, mask wearing in close contact points, taking temperatures and requesting lateral flow tests before meeting. We had no reported examples of Covid 19 transmission in any of our groups.

From 2022 onwards the laws have changed but we remain respectful of the impact that Covid 19 has on the vulnerable in our society and many of our community do care for vulnerable people. So we strive to maintain the balance of the risk of infection versus the risk of human disconnection. We will meet whenever possible in order to foster the human connection we all so sorely need AND…

We ask that if anyone has Covid 19 symptoms in the week prior to our gathering that they only come if they test negative on lateral flow test on 2 consecutive days prior to arrival

We ask all guests to volunteer for a lateral flow test at their own expense on the morning of our gatherings (this cannot be enforced)

The facilitation team will follow the same protocols

We will encourage hand washing and distancing of 2 metres, keeping the rooms we work in ventilated and taking regular breaks for fresh air

If anyone becomes unwell during our courses with Covid 19 symptoms we will care for them in isolation from the group and make arrangements for their transport home

This policy was last updated April 2022 and due for review March 2023; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

We are often asked about whether our courses are formally accredited and the answer is No. This is a policy decision and a choice we have made because we could relatively easily make them accredited.

The reasons for this decision are thus:

1. Accreditation requires a lot more academic writing and essays requiring more of our facilitation team, driving up costs and also putting people with different learning styles at a disadvantage
2. This is an unregulated industry so accreditation would be a farce; you do not need to be accredited to call yourself a death doula or end of life doula or a celebrant; you can do so now if you wish
3. What we offer we call “preparation” and it is an inner preparation for you to engage with to the extent you wish to. Accompanying the dying is an inherently human act and you don’t need us to tell you whether you are “good enough” or not; the state of readiness for this work arises from within you
4. In all the years our team have been working as death doulas we have never actually been asked to prove ourselves; we partner with an insurance company that are willing to insure death doulas (but a doula’s work is so low risk you technically do not need insurance)
5. Our work is intended to decolonise death and dying; and to reclaim it from the hands of institutions and professionals. We do behave “professionally” but we are not professionals in the sense of power over another; we are human beings meeting other human beings. In an ideal society we wouldn’t need doulas and we should work to build such a world; rather than fostering dependency on ourselves.

This policy was last updated April 2023 and due for review March 2024; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

End of Life Doula Course

1 Doula Course Price

2 Course content 12 – 18 months incl face to face residential retreat

3 What we cover in the face to face aspect of the course

4 About our Bursary Fund

5 Some history of course development and pricing

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.

The cost is £3500 / 3500 Euro

Monthly payment plan over 12 months is £295 per month.

Please see the section below around financial accessibility and bursary fund if you consider the cost prohibitive.

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 Patricia and other facilitators 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.

Is the course accredited?

In short, no. And for good reason. This is an unregulated industry with no set of professional benchmarks or standards; so it would disingenuous to offer accreditation for a role for which you need no qualification to practice. You can call yourself a “doula” now and practice without training and you do not need us to tell you whether you are “good enough” or not.

This preparation course is about providing you with the deep holding so you can courageously undertake the inner work to ready yourself for death; we hold a space open to all learning styles and needs; you do not need to write a single essay.

If we were to enter an accreditation process we would have to change the whole way we work; it would undermine our post-institutional stance against a colonising form of education that is based on hierarchy and privilege. Our teacher is Death and we are all students; we have no hierarchy only careful and conscientious holding of the space by our experienced facilitators; upon whom you need not project “authority”; we are all peers (some of us with roles).

If we had to mark essays and spend extra time with you bringing you up to our educational standard – then we would have to charge a lot more for what we offer.

Financial Accessibility and Bursary Fund

We took a long time to settle on the price of £3500 which sees a marked increase from our old course price. One of the main reasons for this was a desire to ensure that we remain financially accessible to those on low income and we do not create an elite of middle class doulas that do not represent the diversity of the communities we would wish to serve.

Yet, when we costed up the amount of time that, along with care, skill, experience and love, has been invested in the development of the new course, the costs of a residential retreat and paying our amazing staff a fair salary; this is what it costs.

So we have a plan. For 2022 and 2023 courses there will be 2 bursary places available on each cohort. In addition to this we will “tithe” 10% of our gross income into the social enterprise into a Bursary Fund which can be drawn on by application in future. We also are in the process of developing an online shop whereby our community can sell their death related creative work and a % of sales will also supplement our bursary fund.

Applications for the bursary places are to be made to the Directors of Sacred Circle at email address [email protected] in which we would ask for some details about why you are applying for the bursary and about your circumstances; we will weigh up the applications on their individual merits, of course, but will also be keen to prioritise applications from representatives of sections of our communities that are underrepresented in the death doula and grief work; including but not limited to:

• Disabled people
• Black bodied folk and other bodies of culture / colour (of cultural heritage that experiences oppression and persecution)
• Single parents
• People originating from and still living in areas of high social and economic deprivation
• LGBTQIA+ community

We recognise that even with a financial bursary for some folk on this list there may be other barriers to participation than just money and we will work with you as best we can, learning from you what you need and how we can yield and meet you in your needs; we consider “inclusivity” to be a colonial construct so we would love to learn as much from you, and what your needs teach us, about our privileges and gaps in consciousness as possible. That said, of course, we would really love to give our bursaries to people who are committed, passionate, willing to meet us and work with us and who actively want to serve the dying and the bereaved in some form.

Please understand before you apply that we are likely to have more applications for bursaries than we have places to offer and so we will have to make a difficult decision. We hope that as our courses grow and flourish so will our bursary fund and more places will come available in the future; so if we have to come back to you with a “no” it is not a rejection of you but a “not yet”.

Some history around course development and pricing

It is important to us at Sacred Circle that we are transparent about our prices and how we came to set them; we are a “not for profit” organisation and as such we are not seeking to capitalise on death, dying and grief, on the one hand, while also esteeming the value of the work and its inherent value to our participants on the other. So we seek to strike the appropriate balance. We also seek to remain inclusive to those on low income.

Prior to 2020 the courses were delivered by Alexandra alone on a shoestring; the company made no surplus at all and developed no financial reserves. When 2020 happened this created a crisis for the company which, blessedly, resulted in innovation and pivoting online; and the hiatus of the pandemic gave us the chance to reassess and redesign the courses.

So you may have seen the courses previously advertised for £575 and that is our old price.

The old course involved 4 or 5 days non-residential face to face + 12 months self directed study using a workbook + access to Zoom calls and social media groups + online community gatherings; additional costs included 12 months of mentoring (£300) and accommodation for the face to face.

Feedback regarding that pricing was that it was incredibly good value for money (some people really thought it was not enough); Alexandra was “soft” with offering long payment plans and sometimes people did not honour them. In the end Alexandra trained nearly 200 doulas and was spread thin in their ability to respond to all the messages and emails.

The beauty of the self directed inquiry was that it required little supervision; the Zoom calls were open every week for people who needed access to Alexandra and the conclusion of the 12 months was heralded by the production of a final project. However, some people fedback that they lacked the internal motivation to complete the course in a self directed manner and when they drifted there was often a loss of their end of the financial contract.

In order to support the community that felt they needed to be held more closely into the workbook study a trial project ran in 2021 called “Pilgrim” which saw a group of doulas in preparation contract together into a cohort which followed the workbook through together over 12 months held by a facilitation team. This turned out to be such a profound and rich experience we decided that the future offering of the Doula course should include a 12 month Pilgrim journey.

Alexandra was joined by Patricia who took the original workbook written by Alexandra in 2016 and developed it; Patricia extricated two workbooks from it: 1. The Journey with Death which is a self directed inquiry into your own mortality (which we will now offer as a stand alone online course for people who aren’t yet called to be doulas but want to work on their relationship with death) and 2. The Pilgrim coursebook which may look like Journey with Death but it is not the same. In Pilgrim you are guided deeper to understand how your relationship with death then translates into your ability to serve as a doula.