A living wake is a chance to honour a loved one while they are still here to enjoy the party. It means they have the chance to listen to and appreciate the stories being told about them and can understand the impact they have made on their friends and family. Learn how Tash Verco organised a Living Wake for her mother.

How can we bring creativity into the planning for our death, funeral, and remains? What are the important elements to consider and why? What are the legalities and regulations governing our choices? What practical and ethical issues should we be mindful of? How can the wants and needs of the living also be taken into consideration?

While holding forms an integral part of many physical interactions, and while it can, by itself, generate intense emotions and sensations, it is rarely investigated on its own merit. Often we do not actually feel safely held, even though that is what we long for (we can only truly let go when we know that someone will be there to hold us). Once we understand what it is that makes being held a less than satisfying experience, we can be clearer about what it is that we wish to feel in an embrace and where to place our attention.

In our hyper-individualist culture, an enormous burden today is put on families and individuals to do what in the past was done by whole communities. If it is true that it takes a village to bring up a child, it also takes one to support a person who is dying or grieving. For the Saturday evening of the festival, we want to cultivate village-mindedness by curating a diverse array of offerings, experiences, testimonies and performances, which do justice to the spectrum of what it is to be mortal with others on Gadigal land in 2024.

Join us for a group ritual to heal, to open our hearts, and to free up energy so we can respond in wise and loving ways. Our bodies are instruments of energy and love. Many of us are experiencing trauma, outrage, fear, grief, despair, numbness… all of these are natural human responses to our crises. This ritual is an invitation to release what is eating at our soul.

In this workshop we will create a photographic portrait which reflects our impermanence and connection to nature. We will become curious of what makes us come alive in connection to death.

This workshop offers information and discussion on the introduction of Voluntary Assisted Dying within N.S.W. It covers who is eligible and what is involved within the process. It also gives advice about what one can do legally if one doesn’t fit into the eligibility guidelines.

Poetry possesses a unique capacity to reconcile us with death and mourning, to affirm life in the face of death's inevitability, and to offer forms of spiritual solace. Poets often write about death, and funerals (along with weddings) are one of the few public occasions on which poetry is frequently read.

Death and dying are multi-faceted and deeply ambivalent experiences. There is not one true way of thinking about and understanding them. Come learn about the diverse and often irreconcilable perspectives of philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida on death and dying.

For many people, choosing abortion is an act of self-advocacy. Honouring a pregnancy release asks that we drop into our bodies in order to listen and take action based on our inner wisdom. In this workshop, we will be exploring the complex relationship between abortion, the life-death-life cycle, grief and how it can impact our own journeys of self discovery.

Compassionate communities are a core part of public health approaches to palliative care, end of life care and bereavement. The term was coined by Allan Kellehear in the mid-2000s to describe communities which play a much stronger role in the care of people at end of life and their families and carers through illness, dying, death and bereavement.

The Death Letter Project is a three- year undertaking, during which Tina Fiveash invited fifty Australians to write a letter responding to: What is death? What happens when we die?

Western culture has forgotten our mourning songs. Where is the keening, the laments, the uncontrolled wails? Those deep, untameable tones that are the native language of grief? Like tears, they need to be released.

Can music help in the ultimate encounter with death? Peter Roberts has had the most unusual job in Australia. He is the only Australian Music Thanatologist . He plays his harp for people who are facing their last moments of life. With the spirit of the Persian poet 'Rumi' running through his veins, Peter has one last task to do before he retires.

How do we meet a cancer diagnosis in our own body? Come and spend time with Victoria Spence as she speaks to treatment, aftermath, 'recovery' and what it takes to meet the grief. She will share what she learnt and the opportunities inherent in meeting, again and anew, a sense of wholeness and self.