Before & After.Life
Loss takes us wild places
Hello, welcome.
This is a place to explore the human work of caring, dying and grieving.
With the right supports and literacy, people can continue living well, families connect more deeply, communities build capacities to thrive, and workplaces become highly productive.
It is well researched that strengthening skills in caring, deathing and grieving offers an antidote to complex grief, loneliness and isolation.
The quality of our lives depends on how well we do this work.
Find out about upcoming programs and events.
Before & After Life offers practical supports, education and facilitation for people, families, and groups.
Term courses, workshops, community meets and retreats.
Online/In-Person // Bundjalung Country, NSW
All genders, backgrounds, cultural perspectives and faith traditions are welcome.
End of Life / Death Care • Grief Tending • Home Death Care • Compassionate Community Care • Grief Ritual Leadership • Home Hospice Volunteer • Advocate.
This work is available to all, if you are a pensioner,
student, low income earner contact me for details.
Weekend Retreats
1 Day Workshops
Group Tending
1:1 sessions
Spaces
and places
to be human
We possess the profound capacity to metabolise sorrow into something medicinal for our soul, and the soul of the community. The skill of grieving well enables us to become current—to live in the present moment and be available to the electricity of life.
Francis Weller
Could grief really hold generative and life-giving possibilities?
I would love your company through the wintery months to re/imagine loss and grief through the lens of Francis Weller's Five Gates.
This is not group psychotherapy; it is the community work of belonging, kinning, tending; a mingling of the human, the mystery, poetry, journalling, story: a re/imagining of living with loss and love.
Uncle Magpie said
when we pull
one thread
everything moves.
Honest work.
Grieving
Caring
Dying
Hard things-
it’s in our
nature
CARING IS CONNECTION // Accompanying people and families through life-limiting illness, sudden death, dying and bereavement. Any age, stage, phase.
DEATH IS LIFE // Enter into a relationship
with death and dying that is informed, prepared, makes possible; moving from a place of fear and unknowing towards insight, choice and sovereignty.
GRIEF IS LOVE // Honour safely and bravely that which has passed from you. Dismantle dominant cultural norms to explore alternative narratives and experiences. Grief can be generative. heartening and life-giving.
Re/claiming vitality
through connection and loss
The vulnerability and fragility of being human is paradoxically, our strength. Our threads and bonds can be re/claimed to fortify us in
this time, and the times we are on
the precipice of living into.
What is most difficult - that which is hard, stuck and static - can be liberated.
In cultivating our will for noticing, feeling, and expressing, we can move with what is hard.
Let us not swallow, let us instead throw open our throats, unlock the locked, loosen the hard and come into right relationship with the dark.
We may discover that instead of being thrown to the beasts or into a pit, we meet with a portal from which we can travel the expanse of our wholeness.
Being
together
Emma Beattie
Hello, welcome. I offer practical supports, education and facilitation for people, families and groups - workplaces and communities.
I am part of a wave of people and movements, dedicated to social justice and change. Reimagining and co-creating a spaciousness and reframe on how we care, live, die and grieve, together.
This work is an antidote to the epidemic of loneliness and isolation.
The more challenging parts of being human are often left untended. It feels vital - necessary and life-giving -to create spaces and places for our humanity to be expressed.
Caring, dying and grieving can be isolating and lonely - it can be different.
Trained. Supervised. Mentored.
Caring. Deathing. Grieving // What is offered is not psychotherapy. It is the work of being human. Grief work need not be pathologised - grief is older than we are. Caring, deathing and grieving is the work of communities.
Please note I am well supported and supervised. I have colleagues and mentors, am under Gestalt Psychotherapy supervision and apply myself to ongoing training.
2020 Death Walking and Celebrancy
Natural DeathCare Centre: Zenith Virago
2020 Death Dying & Grief Culture
Griffith Uni, (High Distinction)
2020 Last Aid. Caring for the Dying at Home
Byron College, Amitayus Home Hospice Service
2020 - Current Hospice Volunteer
Amitayus Home Hospice Service
2022-2023 Support Worker & EOL Companion
NDIS
2023 Member of Palliative Care NSW
2023 Foundation Workshop
Preparing the Way
2024 Member of NDAN
Natural Death Advocacy Network
Advaya - Thrive Member
2023 Statement of Attainment, CHCAGE005
Dementia Australia
Provide support to people living with dementia
2023-2024 Entering the Healing Ground: Francis Weller
Grief Ritual Leadership Training
2024 Ancestral Medicine, Daniel Foor
“Slow and down are movements
of the soul.” Michael Meade
May we be forest-floored.
May we take root.
“Thank you for your love, kindness, wisdom and care in supporting me through Dad’s transition. It all really meant a lot to me that you cared so much. Thank you.” GD
This work is real, raw and transformative.
It is a truthful meeting place for all of our parts, It is a portal not a pit and a homecoming
to belonging.
EMMA BEATTIE
I pay wholehearted respects to Bundjalung Elders past, present and emerging;
I acknowledge their continuing connection to, and custodianship of - land, water, sky and Culture. In your company, I live in reciprocity with the lands on which I walk and work, swim and star wonder.
MadeYou
No part of this website may be published or used without acknowledgement and prior consent