Before & After | Life
Places and spaces to be human
Re/imagining re/generative ways of caring, dying and grieving. Because the quality of our lives depends on it.
The way we care, die and grieve together, impacts the quality of our lives.
Quick links
SEE WHAT’S ON
Check out current programs, workshops
and events
MORE ABOUT
EMMA BEATTIE
Read more about Emma’s background and approach.
BOOK A CONNECT
Make a time to meet re 1:1 supports, explore collaboration or discuss facilitation/speaking.
Re/claim and re/imagine, regenerative ways of being.
Practical tools, supports, education and facilitation for people, families, and groups; workplaces and communities.
• Group Facilitation:
Literacy, Tending and Ritual
• Workplace Preparedness: Strategies
• 1:1 Supports
• Home Death Care
• Community Meets
• Creative Collaborations
• End-of-Life Companioning
• Workshops, Programs, Retreats
Learning and practicing the languages of caring, dying and grieving strengthens our personal and collective response-ability.
Strengthening end of life and loss literacy is an antidote to the colossal burden on our health care system, community services and in sustaining national productivity.
With quality supports, people and places continue to live meaningfully and even thrive through difficult times.
This work mitigates mental and physical health conditions. It results in being able to continue participating in community life; connected families, vibrant places, and protected, productive workplaces.
Emma Beattie | Founder
Emma is part of a wave of people and movements, dedicated to social justice and change. She actively participates in re/imagining how people, communities and workplaces can prepare, adapt and respond to the impacts of caring, dying and grieving.
Her professional origins sit in creative strategy, storytelling and social impact. Emma has worked, studied and volunteered in deathing since 2020. She brings an animistic, creative and poetic lens too the terrain. Her work and on going training intersect a long line of personal loss.
Prioritising accountable, sustainable care; she is trained. supported and supervised.
Memberships: Palliative Care NSW, NDAN (Natural Death Advocacy Network), NALAG (National Association of Loss and Grief) and is an advocate for Compassionate Communities Australia.
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, NDAN, NALAG
2023 Foundation Workshop
Preparing the Way
2024 Member of Palliative Care NSW, NDAN, NALAG
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
Australia is getting older, faster. By 2026, more than 22 percent of Australians will be aged over 65 — up from 16 percent in 2020, which was already double the 8.3 percent at the start of the 1970s.’ The Govt spends just 1.2 percent of its GDP on aged care (Denmark spends 4.3 percent). Carers are keystone in Australia’s health system; the foundation of our aged, disability, palliative and community care systems. Australian carers provide 2.2 billion hours of informal care each year with the cost of replacing this care valued at $77.9 billion.
LISTEN
Caring
Before & After Life seeks to reclaim what it means to ‘hear’, ‘be with’, and in service to. There is a moral and national imperative to improve the way we accompany each other through life’s more difficult times.
People, families, communities and businesses experience the gravity of unsustainable caring. These times we live in, and those ahead of us require we work together. Our ability to connect, deeply presence and support each other is vital to our individual and collective wellbeing.
The reciprocal nature of caring and being cared for is a re/generative practice. We can learn the art of this from nature as we re/imagine new possibilities and re/claim some of the old ways.
• End-of-Life Wishes & Companioning
• Workshops, Programs, Retreats
• Group Facilitation: Tending and Ritual
• Workplace Strategies
• Creative Collaborations
The Lancet Report (2022) states radical changes across all death systems are needed. Communities are reclaiming death, dying and grief as social concerns as they become unbalanced. Health care is now the context in which many encounter death and as families and communities have been pushed to the margins, their familiarity and confidence in supporting death, dying, and grieving has diminished. Relationships and networks are being replaced by professionals and protocols. It is a responsibility for us all, including global bodies and governments, to take up this challenge.
Image: Jo Immig
Deathing
Deathing, like love, is a verb.
It is to be participatory in the way we accompany and honour the whole, natural cycle of love and loss, death and dying. Exploration, reflection, preparedness and practice reveals possibilities and choice.
It's challenging when life ruptures to try and build new muscle. This work is loving and wise. Life becomes evermore meaningful and vibrant when you enter and sustain a relationship with death and dying.
We offer supports, education and facilitation to better understand and be with the process of dying, after death care, ceremony and ritual. In this, new perspectives, possibilities, clarity, and ultimately, choice are revealed.
• Group Facilitation: Literacy, Tending and Ritual
• Workplace Strategies
• 1:1 Supports
• Home Death Care
• Creative Collaborations
• End-of-Life Companioning
The more challenging parts of being human are often left untended. It is vital - necessary and life-giving - to create spaces and places for our humanity to be expressed. There’s a quickening upon us - people, communities and business can be better prepared. Let’s mitigate the impacts by knowing what is possible, and re/membering how to care, live, die and grieve in ways that are resourced informed and prepared.
Caring, dying and grieving can be isolating and lonely - it can be different.
Grieving
Grief is less an emotion and more a core faculty for us to cultivate. Strengthening your personal, family, community and workplace capacities for grief literacy offers foundations and ballasts to steady when life gets wild and messy.
Strengthen your response-ability. Learn practical tools for being in and with grief. Build resources; practice and explore expressions of grief, locate and metabolise sorrows,
Grief is love. They twin. One doesn’t exist without the other. Loss is inevitable and, grief can be generative. Fortify your family, friendship group, workplace and community.
• Workplace Strategies
• Organised Retreats
• Grief Ritual
• Workshops, Programs and Events
• Group Facilitation: literacy and tending
• Creative collaborations
Re/claiming vitality
with love and loss
What feels scary or foreign - that which is hard, stuck or stagnant, can be made visible, acknowledged, witnessed and liberated.
The vulnerability and fragility of being human can paradoxically be our strength.
Re/claiming threads and bonds can often fortify us as we inhabit the more difficult sides of what it is to be human.
parts of
The harder
being human.
In increasing our will and skill for noticing, feeling, and expressing, we find our-selves moving with what is hard.
Let us not swallow the unpalatable stone on our tongue, let us instead throw open our throats; release the locked, loosen the hard and come into right relationship with the dark.
It is possible that the ground beneath us may not open up and consume us after all. We need not drown in our tears or be buried by the weight of our experiences.
It is possible that in being brought together, maybe even to our knees, we find new parts of ourselves -perhaps even identify a portal from which to travel new landscapes into a more expansive and spacious, wholeness.
VIEW PROGRAMS
Workplace
Preparedness
Caring, dying and grieving will impact your business.Creating strategies, supports, practical skills and literacy fortifies workplace culture and wellbeing, and protects productivity.
Futureproof your organisation
• Organisational Strategies
• Workshop facilitation
• Co-create strategies
• Group tending
• 1:1 leadership/team member supports
Capacity building in caring, dying and grieving fortifies your organisation. It supports decision-making, overall wellness and reduces absenteeism.
Cultivate connections and organisational resilience. Support your people, strengthen culture so your people can navigate life's transitions resourced and with a foundation of preparedness.
Your workforce will inevitably be: caring for sick or ageing family members, living with multiple griefs, living with a diagnosis, experiencing divorce/separation, pet loss, the impacts of global affairs and ecological decline ...
Burn out is rising. You may notice this as decreased engagement, reduced productivity, impaired decision making capabilities, high turnover, reduced creativity and innovation, absenteeism, low morale and strained workplace relationships.
Capacity building in caring, dying and grieving fortifies your organisation.
Let’s discuss how to prepare your people and organisation. This is personally and professionally, profoundly impactful work.
An inspiring day of knowledge sharing and hands on experiences in a supported space of community. JH
I want to thank you so much for your kindness always in the vulnerability. And for the generosity of heart and spirit I’ve been so moved to witness. RS
Thank you so much for all the detailed information, it's a great help. I appreciate your kindness, clarity... DM
Please know how thankful I am for your wisdom and teachings you offered, I am truly in awe of it all. AC
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
Programs, retreats and workshops
Upcoming events
Participate in immersive workshops, programs and events; in person or online. These programs are suited to you if you’re seeking personal inquiry or professional development.
Practical skills, sensory, hands-on creativity. Courses and workshops offer reflective, restorative, and generative experiences for those with lived experience, and working in therapeutic, clinical and end of life and death care settings.
SEE MORE
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
I extend my deep gratitude to Francis Weller whose lineage I trained under and whose work I return to again and again and again.
Uncle Magpie said
when we pull
one thread
everything moves.
Media & Musings
RCR Radio - NZ
Setting a place at the table for grief
Natalie and I talk about the value of “setting a place at the table for grief”.
In Praise of Slow & Humble
I see you Earthworms.
Michael Meade says slow and down are movements of the soul. Slow and down, are also movements of the soil.
Darn It, Loss Happens
Stitching ourselves back together when loss tears us apart
There was a time when mending things grew out of necessity. Elbows in jumpers, holes in socks, knees in jeans, moth holes and hems. Clothing demanded more than a season - they were handed down through families like bath water.
Women Holding Things
Caring is whole of community.
The majority of caring in our homes and communities lands in the boughs, and on the backs of women. According to the Workplace and Gender Equality Agency, 7/10 carers in Australia are women.
Before & After | Life
Places and spaces to be human
LET’S CONNECT
This work can be real, raw, tender and generative. It is a truthful meeting place for all of our parts, a home-coming 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.
No part of this website may be published or used without acknowledgement and prior consent. Special thanks to Laura Koens whose images have been used throughout the site.