CENTER HERE AND NOW / WORKSHOPS / November 2022 / 16.11.22 - 20.11.22

The “Die Before You Die” retreat is a path towards awareness of who we are beyond life and death and a journey into our conscious death. The understanding is that death is an organic integral part of life and it is happening each moment, and that the death of what we believe we are is necessary for recognizing our true nature, so that we can be totally alive.

The death of what we believe we are, in its different manifestations, is necessary for recognizing our true nature, so that we can be totally alive.

In this Course we are going to experience how our energy can be liberated from attachments and identifications that create suffering in our lives.

This is a process of symbolic letting go of the physical body, honouring being a human - our flesh and bones, our feelings and emotions, and the infinite energy that is constantly moving us. The possibility is then to experience a real sense of embodiment of Life, entering each moment in its fullness and with higher levels of perception where sounds, colours, forms, smells, textures, and tastes become fully vibrating and alive.

This retreat is an opportunity to contemplate and make friends with death, and to create the possibilities for life to sprout and thrive into its full potential.

„Die Before You Die“ is a ritual of departure from the past, a ritual of cleansing and letting go of all that we no longer need so that life can thrive, move forward and bless the future. In this journey we are going to experience our death consciously, understanding that death is a process of letting go and a possibility to review our lives and create space for what is really important.

“Die Before You Die” is a process that supports you to connect with a sense of wholeness and continuity – of inner and outer, breathing in and breathing out, past and future, me and you, life and death.”

We are going to create a space to complete our unfinished business and to connect with people, situations in our lives and with ourselves in completely new ways. We will open our heart, body, and mind to create space for forgiveness, cultivation of gratitude and compassion towards ourselves and others.

We will use music, dance, whirling, poetry, breath work, movements, sounds, prayer, meditations and powerful practices that comes from Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, Tantra, and Shamanism. These are mystical traditions that have been investigating and experiencing in-depth the nature of death and its pathway for being fully alive.

These practices work on our body-mind-emotional system at many levels, helping us to wake up our vital energy, and to recognize and create space around places and situations where we feel stagnated and tense, over attached and disconnected.

We will explore where we stop our energy because of fear of losing somebody or something – our fear of surrender to the unknown. With the practices and meditations, we create an ambiance of loving acceptance and around the fears and tensions and the possibility of letting go.

Together as a group, we create a safe space of love, openness and beauty from where each individual gets the resources they need for their journey. We will practice again and again to let go, to celebrate death and life in its fullness. We will see how we can free our energy from the identifications and attachments that cause suffering in our lives.

This is a call to open the heart for love and compassion. This is a time to let go, to let life fully in and to celebrate the beauty and great mystery of life and death.

The first three days of the retreat are going to be in silence. The silence is a support to stay in deep contact with ourselves and our intention while being also connected with others, energetically. While in silence we remain contemplative and open to life all around us. This is an opportunity to feel life inside and outside of us in its depth, and a way to experience each moment as the last, as the only one and as eternal.

Death is the most natural experience that every human being and every element of life will go through one day or another and is also one of the most overlooked questionings of our modern life. This creates great disconnection, lack of understanding and preparation for such fundamental rite of passage, for the ones that departure and for those that stay.

This retreat is designed for:

• People that want to refresh and reseat their connection with themselves and with life.
• People that want to have a deep experience of "being" and to enter a meditative space.
• People that would like to change their attitude towards life;
• People that have fear towards death and are interested to face it;
• People that have gone through life-threatening diseases or close to death experiences and are well enough to go to a process that requires physical and psychological work;
• People that have difficulties to let go in different areas of life (separation, losses, people that have died or are in the process of dying);
• People that are close to or accompanying people that are going through a dying process.
• People that want to have an experience of "being", of meditation, who they are beyond the physical experience.

The receivers group is not traumatized people or with long-lasting diseases. Participants need to be at a relatively good level of physical and psychological conditions (the normal that is necessary for a usual self-development and self-inquiry work).

The workshop is inspired by the teachings of Stephen Levine and his books "Who Dies", "A Year to Live", and "Healing into Life and Death". It’s a path of love and compassion; process of letting go; working with the breath; unfinished business.

We will go through a "death meditation" on the 3rd day of a workshop, and everything we do until then will be a “preparation for dying” – to our symbolic death ... We will be constantly aware that every moment is the last one, and this is time to look into what is really important. The workshop structure is designed in a way that we may move through different emotional states that can come when we face death or any experience that feels like death and involves separation and losses in any way. This is very individual but through the process there will be space to go through those different states: denial - anger - pain - acceptance - letting go.

Meanwhile, we will be working with unfinished business - with people from our life, people that have already died, with ourselves, with life, with God. And we will alternate those practices with different practices for letting go (from the body, from the mind, emotions, etc).

In this work, we will really talk very directly about death. And at the same time, while we contemplate death we also bring light and lightness to the theme, we open to the Life. So we also dance, work with sounds, be playful and welcome life in different ways. The movement towards our conscious death is an invitation to be fully alive before dying. The idea is to be ready to die by being fully alive - which means living each moment fully, as it was the last one..

Throughout the work, we connect death with a process of renewal and a natural part of life. At the same time, we acknowledge all the different and natural feelings, emotions and mental states that come when we are facing death (our own or people close to us) – like fear, anger, sadness, confusion, denial, etc.

„To die and to be born is a paradox - the understanding that death and life happens each moment.”

In this retreat, until the “death meditation” we will stay in a contemplative silence, in which we are welcomed to taste and feel life fully. After the “death meditation” a process of coming back, embodying and integrating the experience will follow.

This workshop help us to awaken our vital energy, to open up and to look and recognize themes and situations where we feel stagnated and tense. We will explore where we stop our energy because of the fear of losing someone or something – the fear of surrendering to the unknown. We will learn to create an ambiance of loving acceptance around those fears and tensions through practices and meditations.

“This is a call to open the heart for love and compassion.

This is a time to let go, to let life fully in and to celebrate the beauty

and great mystery of life and death.”

Details of the workshop