UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH – A BEREAVEMENT COUNSELING SKILLS TRAINING WORKSHOP
The following Bereavement Counseling Training Programs are scheduled and open for registration:
A professional training offered by
New Open Center New York, NY
MARCH 29-30, 2009
SUN-MON 10 AM to 5 PM
CEU’ s available.
www.opencenter.org
Death is an inevitable dimension of life, often laden with deep and confusing human emotions. Yet by encountering the reality of death with humility, honesty and integrity, it is possible to develop a much deeper appreciation of the meaning of life itself.
Through a variety of learning modalities including lecture, discussion, videos, personal sharing, journal writing, meditation and other self-awareness exercises, we will focus on four inter-related areas:
- Personal Grief Journey
- The Psychology of Death and Bereavement
- Specific Skills in Counseling the Dying and Bereaved, and;
- Mortality, Life After Death and Questions of “Ultimate Concern”
Specific course goals will be: i) to expand each person’s comfort level and repertoire of skills in working with the dying and the bereaved; and ii) to facilitate the process of exploring individual reactions and responses to the human encounter with death.
Among topics to be explored include:
- Personal and Cultural Images of Death
- Earliest Recollections of Death/Personal Grief History
- The Psychology of the Grief Process
- Normal and Pathological Grief
- Bereavement Assessment
- Pastoral Counseling with the Dying and Their Families
- Rituals of Funeral and Burial
- Near Death Experiences, Immortality and Life After Death
Some believe they have no grief. This is another aspect of our rigid denial and self-protection.
Everyone has grief. Everyone seems to have some unbalanced tally sheet with life, some unfinished business. An incompleteness with the past and with ourselves, a fatiguing self-consciousness, the predominant theme of the unfinshed symphony of mind’s yearning.
Our grief manifests as self-judgement, as fear, as guilt, as anger, as blame. . . Our grief is our fear of loss, our fear of the unknown, our fear of death. Grief is the rope burns left behind when what we have held to most dearly is pulled out of reach, beyond our grasp.