Episode Details

In this tender and wide-ranging conversation, Grief Walker Aralyn Doiron joins Marina to explore how facing death, feeling our grief and remembering our ancestors can bring us more fully alive.

Topics include:

• First encounters with death: Aralyn and Marina share childhood memories of loss, from standing at the casket of an eight-year-old neighbour to being kept away from a grandparent’s funeral.
• Why death became hidden: removing death from everyday life, and handing it to professionals, removes part of our nature. Avoiding death separates us from nature, because everything in nature dies, even mountains.
• Death contemplation as a path to aliveness: two decades of Buddhist practice taught Aralyn that accepting impermanence isn’t morbid. It makes everything more precious.
• Elders at the centre of the village: in many Indigenous cultures it’s the elders, not the children, who are at the centre, the ancestors remain a living presence, and death can be an advisor, as in Mexican tradition.
• From Deathwalker to Grief walker: grief is the doorway to full aliveness, and the undefended heart, the one that can be broken by life, may be what saves us. Why “keep calm and carry on” costs us so much.
• Emotional literacy starts with adults: children learn from our behaviour, not our words. Aralyn explains feelings as energy and information, the difference between present-moment feelings and old emotional stories, and anger as pure life force (including her local “Rage Club”).
• One minute a day: a simple practice of being 100% okay with whatever you feel, and the story of a dying mother’s words: “For my whole life I thought there was something wrong with me. What a waste.”
• Art that comes through the back door: Aralyn’s image of the guarded front door and the open kitchen, how art and grief reach the heart, and her new project, Grievolution – not yet created!!
• A Knock on the Door: inside Aralyn’s four-day immersion where participants rehearse their death, including a Last Supper shared with an ancestor and ten minutes spent with a single olive.
• Aloneness and loneliness: David Whyte’s poem Everything Is Waiting for You, and remembering that the tree you lean on is leaning back.
• Passengers or participants: guilt versus remorse, the Hawaiian practice of Ho’oponopono, stepping into Brené Brown’s “arena”, and valuing honest feedback from the people who have your back.
• Rites of passage for our times: Aralyn’s work with Tides in New Zealand, and why marking thresholds such as birth, death, the seasons and friendships helps us live more consciously

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-103-elders-at-the-centre-with-aralyn-doiron/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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