A Year of Living with the Dead 2026-2027

Fridays 12:00 to 1:00 pm Eastern

November 13th, 2026 to October 27, 2027

Working with the dead is so simple: we summon them and ask for their help. That is all we need to do to transform our lives…and the world.

Yet reaching out to those on the other side contradicts all of the indoctrinations and expectations of civilized modernity. What does it really mean to live within an economy of prayer where we entrust our desires, our necessities, our yearnings, our fears, and our problems to beings the over-culture tells us either do not exist or exist only to hurt or haunt us? To embrace such a practice, to make such a practice daily, to allow it to transform who we are in the world, takes an entirely different ecology of faith and fellowship. We need guides and friends who can help us expand our experience of reality.

This intensive exploration will help each of us develop, maintain, and embrace an ongoing intimacy with the ancestral realm. Our goal will be a direct experience of the healing power of the dead. Our goal will be to connect directly with the dead as our teachers. Each of us will bring the stuff of our lives to our weekly explorations as we summon all those beings on the other side and begin collaborating with them. Much of what happens throughout the year will be orchestrated by the dead themselves as we weave ourselves into the rhythms of the seasons and the entangled intimacies of our souls.

Our time together will include:

• Both traditional and personal rituals and mantras for summoning the dead
• Oracular work, including creating our own ancestral decks and magical earth dolls
• Historical and imaginative explorations of deep time and the long story of our souls
• Portal creation and recognition for entering the liminal realms, including dream work
• The lost arts of devotion—prayer, pilgrimage, and revelry
• The power of personal altars and communal shrines
• Incorporating the ancestors into rituals of birth, marriage, dying and death
• Soul labyrinths to access the resources of our own past lives
• Land work to re-engage the conversation with the animate everything
• Methods for sharing our experiences with family and friends

Throughout the year we will discuss ways of engaging with the difficult dead, facilitating both personal and cultural healing, creating ancestral teams for guidance, working with plants and animal kin, and developing rituals for powerful moments of transition in our lives. Most of all, we will explore our own experiences of death and rebirth and how the dead can alchemize both moments of grief and joy into communal wonder. We will work with our dreams, our reveries, our imaginations, and our creative endeavors as we bring the dead into every aspect of our lives—our bodies, our families, our work and careers, our broken world.

For those participants wishing for an even deeper relationship with the other side, a second year of this course, revisiting and cycling through these practices and experiences, will include, in addition to the regular sessions, four seasonal gatherings to process our expanding relationship to this material. Second-year participants will be encouraged to begin thinking about how they may best serve as mediators between the living and the dead and how they would like to offer this work to a wider audience.  Two full-year courses, including one of A Year of Living with the Dead, are the requirements for all participants in the teacher training program that will be offered next year for the very first time.

This course is designed for active participation but every Zoom class is recorded and sent to everyone directly following each week’s class.