Death is our teacher, one which teaches us how to live and love

We honour the Dying, Dead and Bereaved

We have compassion for self and others

We follow a consensual decision-making process

We are committed to a lifelong process of deepening self awareness, self responsibility and self care in a community context

We centre and ground all gatherings, connections and Work in a sense of the sacredness of Land, Place and Space

We strive for honesty, accountability and humility in every communication and interaction

We do what we say we will do; we honour agreements and contracts and communicate with maturity if we find we cannot.

We strive for healthy boundaries through deepening self knowledge and embrace learning from mistakes without shame

We ask for help if we need it

No one is an authority in this community; those that hold roles are in service and we love and respect them for it but no one is better than anyone else

We give ourselves and others the benefit of the doubt, we hold confidences and speak of each other only in positive regard.

Where we see this community agreement fraying or broken we call the issue lovingly into the circle of our peers in the spirit of learning, healing and holding with Love

We behave professionally but we are not “professionals”; we remain human, accessible, loving; to our clients and to each other

We see your personal data as being your story. What you share with us we hold completely confidential whether that be your life story or your email address.

We only collect the data we need to communicate with you regarding the courses and the community activities; when you join you are added to a mailing list of students and community members which receives our newsletter; you can unsubscribe any time.

We store your data in password secured and save places for the eyes only of the administration team.

You can ask us at any time what data we hold for you and you can also ask us at any time to delete it and we will do so within 3 working days of your request without question.

If you opt into our community whatsapp groups please be aware that other members of the group can directly message you privately from the group and we are not able to prevent that from happening; we have it as an agreement between users of the whatsapp groups that you seek consent first before private messaging someone and / or storing their number in your phone.

We review the data we hold on an annual basis and we will remove any data that is out of date.

This policy was last updated Oct 2024 and due for review Oct 2025; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

We at Sacred Circle Training Co CIC are often in the presence of the vulnerability of humans and we understand and hold in deep reverence and compassion the vulnerability of all we meet in grief, death and trauma.

In doing so we equally champion the sovereignty and personal power of all the consenting adults who join our courses and community to take responsibility for themselves and their own wellbeing, asking for their own needs to be met and remaining responsible for their holistic health.

This may seem like a paradox but we stand by it as a complexity of our humanity; we will witness and empathise with you in your vulnerability but we will not take responsibility for you and thus take your power from you.

This only extends to those who have the power to consent.

People who are classed as legally vulnerable and unable to consent include children and young people and adults without capacity to make decisions for themselves.

Occasionally children and young people have joined our doula trainings with the full consent and 100% presence alongside them of their parents; the children and young people have also been given every opportunity to consent or opt out. They have proven to be extraordinary contributors to our circles.

It is not, however, a policy of ours to open our courses to children and young people and we would only consider applications on a case by case basis with full consent of both the parents and the youth.

When children and young people do attend our courses they remain the full responsibility of their supervising parent or guardian.

What we may commonly come across are stories shared which may either consciously or unintentionally disclose abuse of children, young people or vulnerable adults.

Sacred Circle CIC is not classed as a statutory body so if / when we do hear disclosures of abuse we will take the following actions:

1. We will stop the person sharing with us and gently inform them that they are detailing abuse and if they continue they need to know that we are legally obliged to act to safeguard the vulnerable

2. We will write down what was said

3. We will pass the information about the disclosure of abuse to the most relevant authority eg the school of a child, the GP of an elder or social services. If what is disclosed to us is a criminal act then we will notify the police.

4. We will stand by and support any affected members of our community whatever the outcome

The directors of Sacred Circle CIC will also be notified that we have had to take such an action. We absolutely understand that human relationships are messy and we will not stand in judgment of the human beings involved; we do, however, absolutely take the community responsibility for the wellbeing of our vulnerable seriously.

This policy was last updated Oct 2024 and due for review Oct 2025; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

In 2021 a much loved member of our community had a hand in their own death. This event not only devastated us as humans, friends and beloveds of this individual but it also gave rise to a significant review of our safeguarding policy to see if there was anything we could do, as a community and as a company, to prevent this happening again.

We took time and went deep in conversation to ask the questions we really didn’t want to including “if we open space to talk openly about death, will we attract the suicidal?” “did our course contribute to this person’s mental and emotional distress?” or “do we, in our openness and willingness to embrace death as a teacher, in some way, encourage self killing?”

The outcome of these conversations led us to believe that the work that we do towards breaking down the taboos around death and dying is done with the intention of creating a better world where the promise of life outweighs the promise of death. Spaces where suicidality can be discussed without fixing or shaming seem to be better than not talking about it at all.

In the review of the factors that contributed to our friend taking their life we concluded that we couldn’t have foreseen it or prevented it; the person in question did not disclose their suicidality to us and they had been in communication with us up to the 2 weeks prior and did not give us reason to have concern for their welfare. We grieved sorely and we learned and this is what we learned:

1. Some people will take their own lives and we are powerless to stop them
2. For some people the promise of death outweighs their desire to live and we cannot fix them
3. They are not broken or failing as human beings for having these thoughts
4. It is our world that is broken and our systems that are failing and therefore we hold the spaces we do to share the pain of such failures

If any member of our community discloses to us that they are suicidal we will support them to find help, we will ask them what their plans are and signpost where we can to get the best support possible. We would also extend to them the opportunity to share their stories with us in circle and we will grieve with them their sorrows, in the hope this removes some of the impulse to die.

But at the end of the day, we work with sovereign adults and our student agreement does include a statement of self-responsibility; as an organisation we are not taking responsibility for anyone’s health and welfare.

This policy was last updated Oct 2024 and due for review Oct 2025 but will be reviewed earlier in the event (sincerely hopefully not) of another self killing within our community; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

As End of Life or Death Doulas we are often asked to comment on what we think about the “Assisted Dying Bill” that is currently in debate both in the UK and Irish parliaments.

The number one thing that is essential for all doulas to understand is that we are pro choice.

Tempting as it might be to weigh in with personal opinions based on difficult experiences from the past we are not a liberty to discuss any of situations of the clients we have supported through death and grief; we cannot use their stories as weight in arguments pro and con.

We have numerous examples of where clients of ours in the past have asked us to be with them if they ended their own lives when in terminal pain and suffering. In each case we would decline; regardless of how much we might wish to honour the human being and their wish to die.

The reason we would decline is because it would be illegal to do as wished and would bring the “profession” of death doulas into disrepute and controversy. Furthermore, bearing witness to a self killing is not the same thing as an assisted death in the legal and medical context and should not be confused.

We have death doulas in our community (we are a global community) who live in countries where Assisted Dying is legal. In fact, in some of those countries our doulas have accompanied people through the Assisted Dying process in a personal capacity as spouses and children of the deceased.

The Sacred Circle policy on Assisted Dying is that we will always abide by the law of the country in which we work. No doula will ever actively assist someone to die; we may bear witness and act as a companion where the law of the land permits it.

In terms of the debate pro and con; we champion every individual’s right to decide for themselves; we are in favour of informed choice and hold our personal opinions as secondary to the needs of our clients.

This policy was last updated Oct 2024 and due for review Oct 2025; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

The Teacher that is Death asks us to reconsider the colonial construct of “inclusion” and asks all of us to rethink what we mean when we say we champion a “good death” because a good death for one person should be a good death for all people.

The more we sit with Death as our teacher the deeper we are drawn into social justice and the fight for equality. End of Life doulas are not just for palliative and hospice care situations.

Inadequate as our systems of care are and failing as our institutions are; even so to reach an old age or to die in relative comfort with your boots off is a privilege denied to many.

Sacred Circle end of life doulas are available post-death in cases of sudden and violent death and self killing, we are grief doulas and we can hold space for the tragedy of untimely death.

We recognise that death comes younger and more violently disproportionately amongst Black communities and other communities of colour, in communities experiencing poverty and high levels of ancestral trauma, to the LGBTQIA+ communities and to people with disabilities. We see and mourn discrepancies in youth deaths along the lines of the gender binary; young men being extremely vulnerable as are transwomen. We recognise and mourn too the discrepancies in outcomes for Black families at birth and in the post partum period.

All this being said what does this mean in terms of our Equality and Inclusion policy?

Firstly it means that we do not teach that death in hospice is the only death we can be of service at. Our courses speak to the inequalities in deaths in our society and promote social justice and activism.

Secondly, we welcome applications from folks who come from underrepresented communities and we will provide additional support both in terms of learning needs and where possible financial support to encourage diversity to flourish in our community.

Thirdly, we recognise that an organisation is as diverse as it is inclusive; so we do not chase diversity as a performative and empty gesture; we work to create safety and accountability in our spaces in the faith that this will lead to ever greater diversity.

Fourthly, we celebrate with great joy the differences in our stories between cultures, heritages, ancestry, land, place and space; we seek to learn from each others stories without appropriating other cultures.

Fifthly and most importantly, the work we do at Sacred Circle CIC is a de-colonising act; to reclaim and remember Death in our communities leads us to uncover the “paths of return” in all cultures but often in white Europe and where the descendants of white Europe have settled; to meet within, once again, the lost indigenous traditions of Europe. In addressing the soul sickness at the heart of whiteness which is both cause and effect of the cultural fear of death, the loss of our rites of passage and traditions around death and grief, we are healing the very forces that led to colonialism and capitalism.

This policy was last updated Oct 2024 and due for review Oct 2025; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

Sacred Circle CIC is a social enterprise with 4 directors and we have a team of facilitators, a community co-ordinator and administrative and financial support. Our remit is to provide education and community development around death, dying and grief. We train end of life doulas and celebrants and these participants in the courses join a global community of kindred spirits. We are secular but spiritual in our approach; we advocate no doctrine and promote no religion or particular faith; all our participants are free to believe in whatever they do and we train doulas to support their clients according to their clients worldview.

We recognise that where we have “community” meeting “spirituality” and in particular in the field of death and dying; there is potential for unconsciously creating cult-like conditions. The following are the characteristics of a cult and below are the measures we take to prevent falling into such a trap:

• The group has a charismatic leader to whom member display zealous unquestioning commitment
• The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members
• The group is preoccupied with making money
• Questioning, doubt and dissent are discouraged and punished
• Members are encouraged to cut ties with family and friends and give up personal goals
• Members are expected to devote all their time to the group
• Members are often required to live together
• The group often takes the money of the membership
• The group is virtually impossible to leave and walk away from

When our co-founders parted leaving Alexandra alone with the Sacred Circle work it was Alexandra’s primary concern at the time that they did not remain the sole head of a spiritual and community organisation for the very reason it could easily become cult-like. Alexandra created the Community Interest Company to share the leadership among the directors and has been working ever since to train up a large and diverse body of new facilitators in order to create the conditions for Alexandra to step back and cease to be the lead.

As of 2022 the process is well underway to de-centre Alexandra and pave the way for a non-hierarchical sociocratic culture within the community where leadership can emerge through anyone but will not reside with an individual.

The Sacred Circle training is built on a culture of Consent and questioning and dissent is very much welcomed and embraced as opportunity for growth and improvement.

The courses we offer are products; they are costed to be accessible to as many people as possible and the cost and the offer are boundaried. Membership of the “community” is entirely voluntary and is run as a subscription, again at as low a cost as possible, to make it accessible.

The Community Interest Company is “not for profit” and any financial surplus within the business must by law be used to purchase assets for social and community gain.

Within our long term vision for Sacred Circle would be the purchase of land and assets to create Earth Hospices; there may be the opportunity for some members of the community to live in these places but rather than being encouraged it would be done on a strictly selective and discerning basis to ensure the people who live on the property best serve the Earth Hospice.

Anyone can leave the community at any time with our blessing.

This policy was last updated Oct 2024 and due for review oct 2025; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

We at Sacred Circle CIC recognise and mourn the devastating collapse of our eco-systems and feel that the work we do is most needed at this time of systemic and institutional collapse. The work that we do promotes grassroots community and local mutual aide.

We have in recent years developed the courses online recognising that technological solutions have their own carbon footprint alongside physical travel. Our policy historically was for our facilitators to travel to localities where a circle of local death doulas would meet and form bonds; the travelling of the facilitator was aimed at reducing the need for all the participants to travel to a central location.

We recognise that when our facilitators travel we are having an impact on the planet. We strive to minimise our carbon footprint by minimising unnecessary travel and using sustainable solutions where possible.

We believe that the work that we are doing now to sow seeds at the grassroots level of community grieving, sustainable funeral practices and bringing death back into community and out of institutions, are of utmost importance. These seeds will bloom particularly in a future when our current unsustainable practices have come to their peak and fail.

This policy was last updated Oct 2024 and due for review Oct 2025; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

The current price for our Death Doula Preparation course stands at £2950 a revision on the 2023 price of £3500. The revision came about with sourcing lower priced retreat centres and passing on the savings to the participants: however, the £2950 holds a very low margin indeed for the company and really does reflect the real cost of the course. 

We have learned a lot about offering bursaries over the years; we have found that different people have very different bars internally when they say "I have no money" ; we gave people bursaries only to later see them on holiday on social media, or find out they have a hoarding problem, or they had just finished paying for another course. Some people just apply for the bursary to see if they can get money off, without first wondering for themselves HOW they might be able to find the money. 

We also found that we were enabling people to underearn and as we became more boundaried and less codependent ourselves we learned it was possibly more loving to redirect people to Underearners Anonymous or Debtors Anonymous, to encourage them to heal their relationship with money and earning so our bursary didn't become just another codependent enabler of chronic underbeing. 

Our bursary is really specifically for people who are under-represented in death doula work due to systemic oppression. White, educated, cash poor, women with a long CV of personal development courses under their belt are very highly represented in this work and while we are sympathetic to what it is to live with low cash flow; we also believe in you that you could run an event or fundraise or crowdfund something, if you wanted to. We do offer monthly payment plans and welcome you to apply for those of course. 

Black and brown bodied people and other bodies of culture, disabled, queer / LGBTQI+ folk, refugees and asylum seekers, full time carers and (in some cases but not all) single parents are welcome to apply for the bursary. 

In the case of single parents we will ask you to qualify what your available income is as being a single parent in and of itself is not always an indicator of low income. 

The full bursary is 50% of the cost of the course, which can then be spread monthly. We offer 2 bursary places for every 10 full paying sign ups we get. 

Which is another reason we would like people to stretch to see if they can make the cost, because we DO need people to pay what it is worth in order for the organisation, the social enterprise, to thrive. 

We welcome all applications and we ask you to prepare yourself that the response may not always be a straight yes, we believe in having open honest and no-shame-at-all conversations about money and we want you to know that we will handle your application and personal circumstances with respect and love, you have no need for embarrassment, shame or fear in applying, you will be well met regardless of the outcome, treated with great care. 

Email [email protected] to apply

Revised Oct 2024 due for revision Oct 2025

Feedback, Grievances and Complaints Procedure

(Oct 2024 for review and full implimentation Jan 2025)

Death is an extremely benevolent and loving teacher, but at times the learning can be Strong and confronting, the material can be challenging to some. We need to create a feedback loop that simultaneously filters and extricates what is fair and useful for the organisation to assimilate and learn from while at the same time not allowing the student of Death, our death doula in preparation, bypass and avoid their learning in what is triggered in them by the material.

Most of us will have heard the term "grist to the mill" and it can be used, certainly in our personal experience, by organisations that deflect and avoid feedback by saying "what is this mirroring in YOU?", "what are you learning right now?" rather than accepting and yielding to constructive information given about what the organisation could do better. And yet... paradoxically the greatest learnings are always in where there are ruptures, and repair. It is in the REPAIR that the expand and grow stronger.

This applies to everyone involved - the complainant and the subject of the complaint. It would be remiss of us as an organisation if we simply took unprocessed and unexamined reactive feedback and apologised; we need to have a mechanism where the learning is not lost for the student while at the same time not using that as a prop to avoid yielding and listening to what is true in what they say.

We have a draft feedback and complaints procedure which is below; you can send your thoughts and comments on this to [email protected] but please know that since Alexandra is the main responder and on holiday from 19th October to 9th November the responses will not be harvested and gathered until their return.

We will also bring in a new boundary which is that from now onwards we request that if you want to talk something through you seek consent of Alexandra, Su or any of the facilitators before you engage them in a one to one in WhatsApp - to protect you and them from becoming engaged in a trauma bonded, less than helpful exchange. And furthermore we will seek to recruit a really good supervisor from January to offer community group supervision once a month and this would also become a space for struggles, grievances and difficulties to be shared for the mutual learning of all.

DRAFT FEEDBACK, GRIEVANCES AND COMPLAINTS PROCEDURE

We welcome feedback and complaints using this structure, this structure exists to give you and us both guidance and support. We all know that Death as a Teacher can be really confronting and at times unsettling, so with Love and respect, if you are experiencing pain and struggle with the course material or with one of our facilitating team; take a moment to first place some time and distance between stimulus and response, breathe, take some perspective and ask yourself if you are upset / activated / angry because they are wrong... or because they are right?

Ask yourself whether the material and the stories used to bring these materials to life are activating in you one of the following core wounds:

I am not Loved or Loveable
I am not Good Enough
I am Wrong or Bad
I am Nothing

These 4 core wounds underlie so much of what we fear and if one of these has been activated in our sessions and material please hold yourself and your inner child or teenager with great compassion and love. These 4 core wounds are also invitations to heal.

The course we offer, Journey with Death, with Death as the Teacher, is not running scared from trauma and of triggering people but we are also not in the business of deliberately triggering people either. We simply know that the material is strong at times and it is common that people with unhealed trauma find some of it challenging.

The Journey with Death material builds on layers and layers of self-loving strategy to create resilience and fortitude within, so we can be with others in their difficulties without being unduly triggered. In theory we should all welcome being activated by the material and course so that it shows us where we are yet to heal. In theory, we say, because it doesn't feel good when it happens.

If you are having a very strong reaction to the material or to one of the sessions then we really want you to know that there is huge potential here for a breakthrough and deeper surrender; and while we receive feedback and complaints with an open mind and heart - we don't want you to miss this opportunity for learning and growth for you too.

That said, if once you have used your self care, spiritual practice and support structures to hold you, if you have identified the learning that this strong response might be a defence against and if you have honestly checked for yourself that you are not reacting in haste and you still feel that we have done, said or acted in ways that our out of our integrity and are harmful to you or to the community at large; then we want to hear it.

(The following complaints form will be created in an online form and also an editable PDF for you to work through with your supervisor / mentor or friends – for now it only exists as this draft but if you have something you need to feedback to us – do just borrow this process and send it in…)

Grievances and Complaints Form
Please fill out this form by way of opening the conversation:

1. Do you have a complaint about a particular person? Or our Organisational culture / practice? Please name if a person.

2. Was there a single moment of fracture / rupture for you where you felt unsafe? Yes / No
   
   3. If Yes please describe this moment of fracture / rupture as factually as possible.
   
   4. Is there a pattern or waveform within our culture that you identify as leaving you feeling unsafe? Yes / No
   
   5. If Yes please describe as best you can this pattern or waveform using specific examples if possible.
   
   6. If No on both accounts, please describe as best you can the reasons for your feedback in your own words.
   
   7. Can you offer us some insight into your feelings around the matter? How do you feel about the event, pattern or other reason for offering feedback?
   
   8. Have you processed this at all through the following channels:
   
   Supervision / mentoring?
   Talking in circle with members of this community?
   Through your self care / spiritual practice?
   Other - please share with us what you found helpful?
   
   9. What would you like to be seen, heard and understood by us in this matter?
   
   10. What would you like to see happen as an outcome of your feedback?

We assume you are offering this with love, care and compassion for the individuals involved and we want you to know that we will receive and process this with love, care and compassion for you.

We will respond in the following ways:

1. We will respond to confirm receipt of the form

1. Within 10 working days of receiving this form we will respond in person by your preferred method of contact to acknowledge and affirm your experience, to thank you for sharing it with us and to offer our considered response

1. Where there has been actual harm done we will acknowledge, apologise and detail how we will amend our practices so this does not happen again.

1. Where there has been a personal grievance against an individual we will detail how they are being supported in supervision to learn from your feedback and we will ask you if you want to have a supported conversation with them to make peace?

1. We will detail any learning that the organisation has gained from your feedback with thanks.

1. If the law has been broken we will self refer to the relevant authorities and encourage you to do so as well.

1. We will ask you if you are satisfied with our response and give you the opportunity to come back to us with more feedback if not.

1. We will ask your consent to share the learnings of this exchange in an anonymised form with the community in the spirit of accountability and mutual growth and learning

We are often asked about whether our courses are formally accredited and the answer is No. This is a policy decision and a choice we have made because we could relatively easily make them accredited.

The reasons for this decision are thus:

1. Accreditation requires a lot more academic writing and essays requiring more of our facilitation team, driving up costs and also putting people with different learning styles at a disadvantage
2. This is an unregulated industry so accreditation would be a farce; you do not need to be accredited to call yourself a death doula or end of life doula or a celebrant; you can do so now if you wish
3. What we offer we call “preparation” and it is an inner preparation for you to engage with to the extent you wish to. Accompanying the dying is an inherently human act and you don’t need us to tell you whether you are “good enough” or not; the state of readiness for this work arises from within you
4. In all the years our team have been working as death doulas we have never actually been asked to prove ourselves; we partner with an insurance company that are willing to insure death doulas (but a doula’s work is so low risk you technically do not need insurance)
5. Our work is intended to decolonise death and dying; and to reclaim it from the hands of institutions and professionals. We do behave “professionally” but we are not professionals in the sense of power over another; we are human beings meeting other human beings. In an ideal society we wouldn’t need doulas and we should work to build such a world; rather than fostering dependency on ourselves.

This policy was last reviewed Oct 2024 and due for review Oct 2025; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line

In 2020 and 2021 we occasionally met when legally possible with small, socially distanced groups; observing hand washing, mask wearing in close contact points, taking temperatures and requesting lateral flow tests before meeting. We had no reported examples of Covid 19 transmission in any of our groups.

From 2022 onwards the laws have changed but we remain respectful of the impact that Covid 19 has on the vulnerable in our society and many of our community do care for vulnerable people. So we strive to maintain the balance of the risk of infection versus the risk of human disconnection. We will meet whenever possible in order to foster the human connection we all so sorely need AND…

We ask that if anyone has Covid 19 symptoms in the week prior to our gathering that they only come if they test negative on lateral flow test on 2 consecutive days prior to arrival

We ask all guests to volunteer for a lateral flow test at their own expense on the morning of our gatherings (this cannot be enforced)

The facilitation team will follow the same protocols

We will encourage hand washing and distancing of 2 metres, keeping the rooms we work in ventilated and taking regular breaks for fresh air

If anyone becomes unwell during our courses with Covid 19 symptoms we will care for them in isolation from the group and make arrangements for their transport home

This policy was last reviewed Oct 24 and is due for review Oct 2025; if you feel this policy needs to be better, tighter or different we welcome your views please email your feedback to [email protected]with Policy Feedback as your subject line