Death Midwifery Training
Caring for our dead is a practice as old as humankind.
November 12-14, 2026
9:30 – 5:30 each day
Asheville, NC
Caring for the body of our beloved dead can be a powerful experience, especially in community. In this deathcare training, we’ll dive into the physical, emotional, legal, practical, and spiritual aspects of caring for the dying and dead, as well as their families. Please join us if you wish to reclaim a more meaningful, hands-on experience at end-of-life and gain the skills and knowledge of midwifing death with grace and confidence.
Co-hosted by the Center for End of Life Transitions (CEOLT).
NikiAnne has exemplified the most compassionate approach to death, dying, and home funeral care while being honest and realistic. Likewise, her work in the field of grief support was a timely and effective presence in my life. It is most reassuring to have her clarity and willingness to engage in this most sacred realm of life.
Who is this training for?
It’s for those who want to learn how to skillfully and respectfully care for the dying, the dead, and their families at and around the time of death. This class is for you as a caring citizen of your community, an interested member of your family, a deathworker, a physician, a funeral director, or a hospice nurse. If you wish to offer home funeral guidance professionally, you’ll need to invest more than this three-day training can hold, through additional research, mentorship, and experience.
We expect and will respect the diversity in our backgrounds, experiences, and belief systems. There are infinite ways to tend the dead.
Topics Covered
History, Background, and the Law
- History of death and dying and the funeral industry in the US
- Caring for your dead: The law and your rights
- How to navigate local bureaucracies after a death
- Green burials — in cemeteries and on private property
Inner and Outer Preparations and Planning
- Embodied apprenticeship: Envision your own death, integrate its certainty, work what you’re learning into your life
- Death planning and advance directives — for yourself and those you support
- How to organize your sacred paperwork: checklists, forms, instructions, and more
Care of the Body
- What happens when we die? How do our bodies respond to death?
- Preparing the body for a wake, funeral, celebration, and/or final disposition through burial, cremation, etc.
Sacred Space & Ceremony
- Honoring our beloved dead through home funerals, ceremonies, and sacred vigils
- Co-creating and co-holding sacred spaces for and with the living, the dead, and the dying
Sacred Space and Ceremony
- Self-care as community care
- Grief tending and bereavement support
- Understanding the intersection of families and helpers
- Cultivating community engagement and forming circles of support
Tentative Schedule
9:30 am – 5:30 pm (with lunch break)
BYO lunch (lunch is not provided)
Expect to spend an hour each evening, after class, deepening into the curriculum through contemplative practice and additional reading.
Prerequisite
Filling out your Advance Health Care and After-Death Care Directives prior to this training. Notary services are available in class to make them legal.
Logistics
Instructors
NikiAnne Feinberg
Instructor
Throughout the last two decades, NikiAnne has dedicated much of her life energy to facilitating transformative learning journeys, particularly in community settings, and with folks in transition — between vocations; stages of life, including death; and those working to live into new, more life-giving stories of the world and themselves. In all her work, NikiAnne partners with the ancestors, the natural world, the power of ritual, and others to best serve the whole.
Sara Carter
Instructor
Sara (she/her) has called Earthaven home for nearly twenty years. She strives to live life in a way that feels authentic and fulfilling, showing up in her community and the wider world with vulnerability and intention. She serves those in her life with presence, fine listening skills, insight and the capacity to hold depth, grief, discomfort and the myriad complications of this life. For the past decade, tending to the dead and the grieving has been one of Sara’s clearest, most passionate avenues of soul work.
Caroline Yongue
Instructor
After a long spiritual search, Caroline committed to a Buddhist mindfulness practice in 1990 and has since become ordained as Lay Buddhist Minister, Teacher, and Monastic in the Soto Zen tradition. In 1995, she began working towards a greater understanding of the death and dying process when she discovered her fears around the transition and journey that each of us will take. She feels blessed to participate in the life transitions of families and individuals.
Caroline is one of the mentors for Earthaven's death team and serves as Director of Center for End of Life Transitions and Carolina Memorial Sanctuary.
Financial Co-responsibility and Scholarships
Because some people have more financial means than others, we have created a sliding-scale fee system to accommodate a range of economic realities. We offer several price tiers and leave it to you to select the most appropriate tier. The price range aims to take into consideration economic disparities, historical injustices, and personal circumstances. The system is designed for those with more resources to support those with less.
At Earthaven and through the School of Integrated Living (SOIL), we strive to practice a culture of financial transparency, authenticity, and generosity. Trusting each other to assess their needs, what is within their ability, and when to ask for help. We are excited to include you in our experiment with financial co-responsibility.
We are now offering self-selected scholarships for many of our programs. No proof of need, no questions asked. Just the clear intention of trust that registrants can assess whether the cost of a program is truly a barrier to attendance and the growth of self and community our programs seek to foster.
In addition, we offer partial scholarships (50% of the middle of the sliding scale) to black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) with financial needs who otherwise would not be able to afford to attend, even with the self-selected scholarships. We understand that BIPOC may experience more financial and institutional barriers to participation, and this is one way we are able to create more access. If you identify as BIPOC with financial needs and would like to receive a deeper scholarship, please contact us.
SOIL endeavors to support the healthy flow of all resources; whether that be monetary or the skills and information that seed cultural change; and widen the doors of accessibility to what we offer.
Cost
Tuition: $700 – 1,000
General scholarship: $550
BIPOC rate: $500
Tuition includes instruction, materials, and notary services.
Meals and accommodations are not available for this training.
Registration
Complete the registration form once per participant. It takes 5-10 minutes, and you will complete your enrollment with a credit card authorization.
After your enrollment is processed, you will receive several confirmations…
- An automatic confirmation of receiving your registration form
- A payment confirmation from our card processor
- Confirmation that your registration has been processed
Please contact us before registering if any of these apply:
- You have a service animal.