When Death is Calling: a
Clearing/Coaching Support Program

When you, or a loved one, is facing death, there are so many details to handle and every situation is different.  Death is always easier when you’re working with a guide.  I’ve designed this program as a menu of choices to meet the unique needs of your situation. My preference is that we do the first 3 sessions in order (the Assessment/Strategy session, followed by the Space and Personal clearing sessions) because I’ve seen this produce wonderful results.  That said, I trust you to know what your situation requires and will honor your request if you feel a need to begin your program in a different order.  

Regarding my work with the dying:

• In a dying process, the dying person is always the locus of control.  Even if that person is no longer conscious, all decisions are made with his/her needs, wishes and comfort in mind.

• If your dying loved one is no longer able to be present for these sessions, great benefit is realized by doing the sessions with the primary caregiver/s.

• In an ideal situation, each dying person has a team of support, several friends or family members who can share responsibilities, so the primary caregiver is spared from burnout. 

• Sessions 2, 3, and 4 are individual sessions, either for the dying person or their primary caregiver.  All the other sessions can be recorded to share with other team members.

• Session 6, Making the Plan, is for the entire team. 

• I usually recommend weekly sessions, but sometimes we need to schedule the sessions closer together in order to get a plan in place and team members aligned.  

1. Assessment and Strategy Session

This session is an opportunity to asses where you are (or your loved one is) in the dying process, and plan a strategy forward that allows more grace and ease and support into the process.

2. Space Clearing session 

This session energetically clears and up-levels the environment, resulting in more clarity, focus, peace, and life force flowing.  A Space Clearing opens a 4-6 week window of opportunity to be your best self, to make your highest choices.

3. Personal Clearing session

This 2-hour session clears your body and energy field.  This will quiet your mind, open your heart, and help you more easily access peace and grace.

4.  Releasing Energetic Cords from the Past session

In this session, we work together to release the emotional charge, and limiting beliefs, resulting from past trauma, wounds, hurts and losses, so you can move into expansion more powerfully, with no anger or sadness dragging you back.

5.  Up-Leveling your Relationship with Death session

 We all have a relationship with death, a relationship based on past experience with death and influenced by indoctrinations from our culture.  Our culture’s relationship with death is immature, and based on fear.  Your own relationship with death may be mature or immature; it may be filled with acceptance or filled with fear.  In this session, which can include caregivers as well as the one dying, we shine the light of our attention and love on the beliefs and words (whether helpful or harmful), and the emotions (whether limiting or expansive ) which are creating the experience you are having with death.  Yes, death is an experience of loss.  But it’s also much more than that.  We’ll work together to re-frame, re-name, and re-claim death and loss and bring it into the sacred circle of your Life.

5. Honoring your Grief-Needs session

In this session, we’ll explore ways to move gracefully through the sacred process of grief, so your grief can do its work.  These grief processes include: shock, denial, anger, sadness, hurt, feeling stuck/trapped/helpless, controlling others—and/or feeling out of control.  Each of these processes is sacred work, which when integrated, will result in more compassion, passion and power.

6. Making Your Death Plan session 

Before this session, I’ll send you and your caregiver team a booklet with a list of the hundreds of choices that will need to be made, including heath care choices, legal choices, after-death care-of-the-body choices, celebration of life choices, and distribution of assets and memorabilia.  Please invite your caregiver team members (family members and trusted friends) to this session, as it’s the perfect opportunity to make a plan and have team members take responsibility for what each of them can do, according to their skill set and circumstances, to support the dying process, so all the responsibilities don’t fall on one or two team members.

7. Mapping Your Death Journey session 

In this session, we’ll activate creativity and compassion.  You’ll connect with the past, present and preferred-future versions of yourself.  You’ll set intentions, from your heart, about the way you want your death journey to unfold and the priorities you want to focus on in the time you have.  You’ll be given the direction you’ll need to create an essence map of your path forward, a path your left brain may not understand but your right brain will intuitively sense.

8. Feng Shui the Environment for Transformation session 

Your home, or the facility in which your loved one dwells, is more than a structure which provides shelter.  Within the walls is a living intelligence, with its own awareness of you and your process.  I call this intelligence “the Spirit of the Space”  In this session, you’ll learn to partner with the Spirit of the Space (and the Spirit of Your Land) in order to create sacred space for the living and the dying which is taking place within it.  We’ll work together to create an environment that sings with peace, healing, and transformation, which contains altars that activate your intentions for peace and expansion.

9. Understanding your 9 Star Ki (the Feng Shui of your Birthdate) Reading

This reading gives you a lens to view the unique gifts (and challenges) which are innately yours, and what you need from your relationships and from your environment in order to stay in balance.  You’ll learn ways to resolve conflicts and create harmony and peace, inside yourself and also with others.  If you have caregivers and/or family members who are on your death journey team, this is a great tool to create understanding and unity among team/family members.

10. Organizing Your Memorabilia session 

In this session, I’ll share my professional organizer expertise and resources to help you sort and organize your memorabilia (photos, slides, videos, journals, diaries, mementos) so that it can facilitate your life review, and be easily utilized in a celebration of life, and then passed on to friends and family.

11. Life Story, or Ethical Will, session/s 

Before this interview session (or series of sessions), I’ll send you my Life Story booklet and you’ll check off all the interview questions you’d like to discuss.  We’ll record you sharing memories, values, beliefs, the details of your life that you would like to leave to your posterity and/or community.

12. Death Yoga and Pranayama 

In this session, I’ll share some yoga poses that can be done in bed and some breath work exercises that relax the body, deepen the state of surrender and bring more ease into the physical process of dying.

13. Vision Quest: Expansion into Death session

In this dress-rehearsal session, we’ll talk through the physical, mental and emotional sensations of dying and release your attachments to this body, this life.  Then, using your intentions and beliefs, I’ll take you on a guided journey which will support you to liberate your consciousness from this physical dimension as you are ready.

14. Coaching and Clearing session 

Each death is different, but one things is certain: if there are uncomfortable family dynamics or ancestral patterns of trauma, it’s likely that they will be triggered in the process.  This is normal, and it’s coming up for healing.  This is a great time for a Coaching and Clearing session that will expand your capacity for love, compassion and personal power.

15. How to Have a Shared-Death-Experience Coaching session 

This session is for the primary caregivers you want present at your death.  In it, I’ll share the tips that may allow them to cross that liminal threshold as your consciousness leaves your body and experience some of what you experience as you enter the world of light.  This session also makes it easier for your loved ones to experience After-Death-Communication with you.  Caregivers who experience SDEs and ADCs report more grace-filled grief processes and less need for medical and pharmaceutical interventions after the death.

“JoAnn and I are deeply grateful for the way your work has helped us prepare for my death.  It’s been helpful to know what to expect, to know that we’d need to assemble a team of support, and to make a plan.  You’ve helped us bring more ease and grace and creativity into this process.  JoAnn and I have painted the box in which my body will be cremated, and I’m finishing my final book Saying YES to my Cancer.  We’ve chosen the piece of art I’ll use as my focal point during the dying process.  We feel as prepared as we could hope to be.  Thank you…”

— Colin Tipping

Author of Radical Forgiveness and founder of the Institute for Radical Forgiveness

Learn More About Transforming Loss…