Whisperings
I am not journeying alone. I am surrounded by my ancestors and guides, my lover and family, my friends and colleagues, and my budding death doula community. This section is dedicated to insights, reflections and whispers that are the signposts of this journey
Holding space
Holding space for someone is being fully present in your validation of their life. It is honouring what they need to be at peace with themselves so that they may die gracefully. In our work, we are holding often times liminal space. Rooted in the Latin word “limen” which means “threshold", liminal space is transitional space. For us, it marks crossing the threshold between life and death. It is the betwixt and between.
Inspired by the wisdom of Alua Arthur, Founder, Going with Grace
Ancestors
If you could see your ancestors
All standing in a row.
Would you be proud of them or not
Or don't you really know?
Some strange discoveries are made in climbing family trees
And some of them you know Do not particularly please.
If you could see your ancestors All standing in a row.
There are some of them perhaps; You wouldn't care to know.
But there's another question
Which requires a different view,
If you could see your ancestors,
Would they be proud of you.
Author: ANON
Recited to me by my mentor, session 1, March 2021
The Seven Principles of a Soul Companion
The Soul companion works to:
1. Recognise the individual needs of the dying person and their family and creates an atmosphere where they feel dignified, loved and supported.
2. Acknowledge, respect and honour a dying person’s beliefs and practices.
3. Provide comfort, compassion, continuous support and reassurance in helping a dying person to experience the death he or she wants (within legal bounds).
4. Guide and support a dying person to facilitate, in a non-medical way, a peaceful death and final farewell.
5. Keep a loving vigil and support those also keeping vigil by creating and holding a sacred and healing energy space for the dying person.
6. Provide gentle therapeutic techniques to alleviate anxiety and tension, applying an attentive manner and calm understanding, acting as a companion to the soul, working with spirit, especially during the stage of soul transition.
7. Help the dying person and their family on this journey by allowing the natural course of life and having courage to let things simply be.
Self care
The Support You Deserve
I received an enquiry today from a potential participant on our End of Life Doula Prep course. She asked me about our requirement for self care and spiritual practice saying she had these in her life in seed form but wondered if I could say more about these requirements. Below is my response about why self-care and spiritual practice is something we look for in End of Life doulas
Dear xxx
How lovely to hear from you and what a wonderful question! In many ways what you express here is really what we want to see - and that is an awareness of what a self-care and spiritual practice might be and most importantly a willingness to strengthen and deepen into it.
You see, many people are drawn to being an end of life doula for perhaps the “wrong” reasons (which I am not judging hence the “ “ ) but so many of us, myself included in the past, are drawn into service of others as a way of being a “good person” ; it can be a form of co-dependency and helping and serving others is a drug that gives us enough vicarious stress to keep us high on the adrenaline of other people’s dramas.
We learn through asking Death to lead us and teach us that in fact the greatest gift we can give ourselves and therefore the world is a regulated nervous system.
When our nervous systems are regulated we can be Present and calm even when others are suffering and struggling.
We are not compelled to try to fix or change a person because they are suffering; we can be a loving witness to their struggle - whether at birth or death the doula knows that the person who is suffering is labouring through their own pain and we cannot take that from them.
The labour process requires acceptance not fixing.
Then, almost paradoxically, our loving presence can reduce suffering - because so much suffering is caused by resistance to pain rather than the pain itself.
So when we accompany a person through the pain they are not alone, they come into acceptance and they can release the struggle against their reality.
So a regulated nervous system and Presence are very much the same thing.
Presence cannot be faked; and certainly anyone who tries to fake it will find themselves very unsettled for trying.
So we encourage self care and spiritual practice as way to integrate the regulation of your nervous system into your mundane and every day.
It’s a very tall order for any of us to do this alone. The essence of trauma is systemic - so its a tall order indeed for an individual to regulate their nervous systems amidst chaos and drama.
This is why then the essence of our End of Life doula preparation is about community and community development (and I mean with people and with our community of all beings; the energies of land, place and space) so we are not alone.
So you do not need to be so accomplished as to have achieved this before you come!
We are on this path together and my hope is that through connecting to kindred spirits in a community of practice we can support each other to settle and soothe our nervous systems out of fight flight and into a readied state of peaceful action.
I hope this answer helps you
Much Love to you
Alexandra