Death as Homecoming: Life is the the Answer

Co-sponsored by Boulder JCC’s Maimonides Wellness Center, Conscious Learning Community and Ruach Haaretz, the DEATH AS HOMECOMING retreat is a unique offering.  This intensive program focuses on facing our mortality and learning from it how to reprioritize and redefine the values in our lives.

People have been dying ever since the world began and yet each one of us clings to the illusion that death is something that happens to other people but not to us, says Rabbi Jack Reimer, the author of  So That Your Values Live On: Ethical Wills and How to Prepare Them.

When we recognize that life is finite we are challenged to live each moment fully and to accept the gift of our soul’s breath as our most precious commodity.  We may choose to BE rather than DO. We can freely choose to NOW focus on the meaning of our lives and make the adjustments that allow for that meaning to be expressed before we are faced with the “final curtain call.”

Using processes and tools that take us into the imaginal realm, we will visit the end of our life to explore medical and ethical choices and the psycho-spiritual obstacles to a ‘beautiful death’. We will encounter the Soul, and what our Jewish mystical tradition, as well as other traditions, teach us about the journey our soul takes—before, during and after this lifetime.

Each of us will write our own Vidui “deathbed confession,” and begin the process of writing a Spiritual-Ethical Will. We will take home with us the tools to update and expand both of these gifts as life continues to unfold.

Rabbis Gross and Rabbi Ori Har DiGennaro who will co-lead this retreat are Sage-ing Mentors. Rabbi Nadya Gross has developed a program to train End-Of-Life Doulas, and serves on the faculty of the Anamcara Project of the Sacred Art of Living, Center for Spiritual Formation in Bend, OR, where she was awarded an Honorary Anamcara. Reb Nadya and Reb Ori also serve as Mashpi’ah (Spiritual Director) with individuals and groups, and all three co-lead services at Pardes Levavot.

The program will be offered on October 21- 25, 2012 as a day retreat starting on Sunday at 4:00pm, ending on a Thursday evening, taking place in the Boulder Mountain Lodge, 91 Four Mile Canyon Drive  Boulder.  $450 ( scholarship available)

For more information and registration: e-mail ori.har@comcast.net or call 303.440.1024. www.center-for-spiritual-freindship.org