Bring “Griefwalking” to your community
Griefwalker DVD and How It All Could Be companion book available, contact@orphanwisdom.com
This spring and fall, Stephen Jenkinson, one of Canada’s leading palliative care educators and activists, brought his Orphan Wisdom:Griefwalking Tour across Canada and the response to his teachings were so outstanding that his fall tour schedule will include all of Canada`s western provinces.
This teaching tour distils a dozen years of Stephen’s clinical counselling, writing, programme development and community education research and teaching. Part critique, part affirmation of core principles, part plea for a community based, culturally informed response to what dying asks of us all, the teachings on this tour have been designed for professional caregivers in and outside of the medical context, volunteers and administrators, and especially for dying people and their families.
The tour also includes a public screening of Tim Wilson’s film Griefwalker, a production from the National Film Board of Canada. This new documentary film shows him at work with dying people, and it reveals the cultural and spiritual roots that continue to shape his ideas and his teaching.
Contact us to be included in the next THE GRIEFWALKING TOUR across Canada (September to November)
Please consider using Stephen’s teachings to encourage and even deepen the work done by your hospice and palliative care programme.
To include your community in the Griefwalking Tour please contact us for registration or for more information
Make Meaning of the End of Life
A Master Class in Knowing Dying Well
May 8 (9am-4pm): register with Castelgar Hospice Society, BC – ph:(250) 304 1266
Contact us to be included in the THE GRIEFWALKING TOUR across Canada
Most of us working in the helping professions have psychological training, or use a strong psychological orientation in our work, and some fewer use religious or spiritual paradigms and language.
None derive from or are particular to dying, and these are what we offer dying people. Imagine that dying because it is so singular cannot be best understood or approached using the language and counseling precepts of medicine, psychology or religion. Could it be that dying asks that we learn what only dying can teach?
Rather than trying to see the dying person, we could go the more difficult route of trying to see what they see. We in the death trade might be better served and serve better by seeing the dying that the dying person sees, or doesn’t know how to see, or is too terrified to see. When our teacher is a death phobic culture, when our culture makes individuals instead of communities, our dying is mainly a solitary, inner one. Making meaning of dying is a village making act, a courageous and redemptive act. It is not acceptance but making meaning of the ending of life that might be the real measure of good dying in our culture.
This Master Class will use your experience of dying, personal and professional, reconsidered as the trustworthy foundation of good palliative care, and from it forge a new understanding of this noble, subversive project of helping people die. This is a programme for people with substantial experience in hospice palliative care, or for people who have substantial questions about this work.
The tour also includes a public screening of Griefwalker, the National Film Board of Canada’s new documentary film of Stephen’s work. Griefwalker shows him at work with dying people, and it reveals the cultural and spiritual roots that continue to shape his ideas and his teaching. Stephen offers this screening at no charge to the sponsoring agency, who often use the event as a fundraising or profile raising opportunity.
What we can do works very well for small groups and small budgets. This tour is our way of making the teachings available and affordable.
The Tangled Garden of Wisdom and Grief
Learning the Orphan Heart of Our Care of the Dying
TESTIMONIAL: “Stephen is a gifted teacher and I think his approach in bringing out our own assumptions, then exposing the fallacy behind them is brilliant! I loved getting to that ‘uncomfortable’ place Stephen wanted us to get to.” …that is what participants had to say. They were excited to talk about what they learned and the ‘Tangled Garden of Wisdom & Grief’ workshop which has sparked deep conversations and a new-found realization that we can journey with the dying in ways we have not previously imagined… in ways not previously taught. I hear, “Thank you for bringing Stephen to Kitimat!” and “When can he come back?” Stephen has opened a new door and those who have walked through it have been profoundly changed and challenged, and are hungry for more.
Contact us to be included in the THE GRIEFWALKING TOUR across Canada
“The Skill of Dying is the same skill as deep living. I’m trying to teach dying people something of how to love their dying life” Stephen Jenkinson
A good death is everyone’s right, but a good death makes no sense to someone who doesn’t believe in dying at all: this is the dilemma our death phobic culture makes for palliative patients, their families and for those working in the death trade.
After several decades of pain and symptom management and patient centered care, the time is upon us to imagine again what dying asks of us all, and what a dying person deserves from us.
There is at least one secret path in the garden of grief that gives us a way toward the mysteries of suffering and dying and death, and we walk it by wondering: Who are the dying to us? When do we begin to die?
This workshop for counsellors, physicians, nurses and volunteers in palliative care will be a long, shared meditation on what the care of our dying people might better have as its root and its flower.
The tour also includes a public screening of Griefwalker, the National Film Board of Canada’s new documentary film of Stephen’s work. Griefwalker shows him at work with dying people, and it reveals the cultural and spiritual roots that continue to shape his ideas and his teaching. Stephen offers this screening at no charge to the sponsoring agency, who often use the event as a fundraising or profile raising opportunity.
What we can do works very well for small groups and small budgets. This tour is our way of making the teachings available and affordable. Contact us to register or for more information.
Previous Articles
Welcome to Orphan Wisdom
In an information-drunk culture like our own, knowledge must be the life-tested skill of gathering what is needed to make life live, without killing life by pursuing comfort. Wisdom is the place where knowledge is fired, forged and annealed to become something of great beauty, useful to the world..
