For Whom Is This Programme?

From the moment we are born, we are on a journey towards death. When the journey is going to end for each one of us we don’t know, but that it will end is certain.

Once we reach 65, we sometimes remember this. It could be tomorrow, it could be over 40 years, or any time in between.

At 75, we remember this more frequently, and calculate. It could be tomorrow, it could be over 25 years, or any time in between.

From 85 and up…….the time left is less and less.

Are you scared of death?

Are you preparing for it?

Are you running away from it?

Why are you here, reading this?

Maybe you are here because you understand that the best strategy for confronting this ordeal is to prepare for it. And you understand that preparation for dying cannot start when dying begins.

Do you carry unfinished matters? Like forgiveness which has not been asked for or given, like unsaid words which should have been uttered, or aspects you neglected, in spite of them tugging at you, or unresolved situations which haunt you?

Maybe you do not fear death itself, but dying in confusion, with regrets.

Maybe you have had an experience related to death — a near-death experience, a profound meditation, a psychedelic journey, a powerful dream — which pointed you to a direction you did not take yet?

This programme is for people who are ready to face, honestly and completely, the most important threshold any human being will ever cross — and to prepare for it as the extraordinary event it is.

What This Programme Is About

This is not grief counselling, though grief will be present. It is not end-of-life therapy in the clinical sense, though therapeutic depth is always available. It is not religious preparation, though the wisdom of every major tradition is drawn upon.

It is something rarer: depth accompaniment through the most consequential threshold of a human life — a sustained, individually tailored process of preparation for death and dying.

The premise is this: death is not a medical event to be managed or a spiritual problem to be solved. It is the culmination of a life — the moment at which everything one is, everything one loves, everything one has left unfinished, and everything one knows in its very essence, meets a larger reality. How one arrives at that moment depends entirely on the quality of preparation across the whole of a life.

Work at this depth produces readiness — in the body, in the relationships, in the inner life — that allows death to be met with clarity, with love, and with the dignity that every human being deserves at the hour of their departure.

Familiar Attitudes Regarding Death

“I don’t deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.” — G.K. Chesterton

So let us turn our attention to poets first.

Here follow four poems, each one with its own approach to death and dying: dread, as expressed by Philip Larkin in “Aubade”; acceptance of death as part of life, as in Gina Puorro’s poem “A Playful Love Poem to Death”; Henry Scott Holland, an English clergyman who denies the horror and grandeur of the event already in the title of his poem “Death Is Nothing At All”; and the nostalgic “Goodbye” of Juan Ramón Jiménez in “The Definitive Journey.”

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Death asked me to join him for dinner
so I slipped into my favourite black dress
that I had been saving for a special occasion
and let him walk me to our candlelit tryst.
He ordered a ribeye, extra rare
I ordered two desserts and red wine
and then I sipped
and wondered
why he looked so familiar
and smelled like earth and memory.
He felt like a place both faraway
and deep within my body
A place that whispers to me
on the crisp autumn breeze
along the liminal edges of dusk and dawn
somewhere between dancing
and stillness.
He looked at me
with the endless night sky in his eyes
and asked
‘Did you live your life, my love?’
As I swirled my wine in its glass
I wondered if I understood the thread I wove into the greater fabric
If I loved in a way that was deep and freeing
If I let pain and grief carve me into something more grateful
If I made enough space to be in awe that flowers exist
and take the time to watch the honeybees
drink their sweet nectar
I wondered what the riddles of regret and longing
had taught me
and if I realised just how
beautiful and insignificant and monstrous and small we are
for the brief moment that we are here
before we all melt back down
into ancestors of the land.
Death watched me lick buttercream from my fingers
As he leaned in close and said
‘My darling, it’s time.’
So I slipped my hand into his
as he slowly walked me home.
I took a deep breath as he leaned in close
for the long kiss goodnight
and I felt a soft laugh leave my lips
as his mouth met mine
because I never could resist a man
with the lust for my soul in his eyes
and a kiss that makes my heart stop.

Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.
Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without the trace of a shadow on it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.
All is well.

. . . and I will leave. And the birds will stay, singing:
and my garden will stay, with its green tree,
and its white well.
Every afternoon the sky will be blue and placid,
and the bells in the belfry will chime,
as they are chiming this very afternoon.
The people who have loved me will pass away,
and the town will burst anew every year;
and in that corner of my flowery, whitewashed garden,
my spirit will wander, nostalgic . . .
And I will leave; and I will be alone, without home,
without green tree, without white well,
without blue and placid sky . . .
And the birds will stay, singing.

These four poems are a map of the interior — the actual territory that this programme travels.

Most of us move between all four of these stances across the course of a life, sometimes across the course of a single night. Larkin’s dread arrives at four in the morning when we wake in the dark and the armour is down. Holland’s consolation is what we offer each other at funerals because we cannot bear the full weight of Larkin. Puorro’s playfulness is available to those who have sat with death long enough to stop running from it. And Jiménez’s farewell — the birds still singing, the garden still there, the spirit wandering nostalgic in the corner — is perhaps the most honest of all: neither denial nor dread, but the clear-eyed sorrow of someone who has genuinely loved this world and knows they will leave it.

But there is a fifth stance. You will find it at the end of this text. It is not represented by any of these four poems. It appears in the words of a man who died saying them, in the second century CE, on the day of his death. This programme is the path toward it.

To move from where most of us are — somewhere between Larkin and Holland, with moments of Puorro and Jiménez — toward that fifth stance: this is the work. It cannot be achieved by information alone, or by belief alone, or by good intentions alone. It requires a guide.

What Are My Credentials to Have the Audacity to Offer This Course?

Death has kept me consciously busy for the last twenty years. A great teacher on this path was Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master. As I am in my autumn years, I am very thankful for these years of preparation. I lost much of my fear of it, gained much faith, walk life lighter, and I am more at peace.

Besides, I am a psychiatrist and psychotherapist with more than forty years of clinical practice and many trainings in different psychotherapeutic techniques. For this programme, most relevant is a study I undertook in comparative religions, and a sincere spiritual quest stretching over decades. What I bring to this work is not one method but what I learned from a sustained inquiry into the full range of human experience — including its final passage.

Two Philosophical Tenets Which Underpin the Programme

Every major tradition that has engaged death honestly — the Vedic and Tibetan, the Taoist, the Jewish, the Christian, the Islamic, the shamanic traditions of every inhabited continent — arrives at the same essential recognition.

And fifty years of careful clinical research into near-death experiences, from Raymond Moody to Pim van Lommel, provides what the traditions alone cannot: the empirical testimony of ordinary people of every culture and background who have been to the threshold and returned. Their accounts differ in detail. In their essentials they do not.

From four decades of studying these traditions and this research, and from my own direct experience, I have arrived at two conclusions, supported by everything mentioned above. They underpin everything in this programme.

1. Everything I studied, everything I experienced directly myself convinced me that death restricts itself only to the body. Life continues, although in another form and on another plane. The soul is immortal.

2. We do not have only one life, this one. Until we consciously fuse with our immortal soul, we are tied to the merry-go-round of the Wheel of Life and Death. In other words, reincarnation is the law until our dedication to get liberated from this Wheel bears fruits, until we exhaust all consequences of our deeds, and grace descends upon us.

About Dying

Dying is a process. Even when from the outside it looks sudden, its duration does not overlap with the time the watch shows.

The image that captures the non-physical, the spiritual process of dying is accurately reflected by the metaphor of the cave.

The Cave Metaphor

The process of dying takes you into a cave.

At the end of the cave there is a blinding Light with unfathomable power.

The Light makes also visible a captivating play of puppets projected onto the walls of the cave.

The Light makes the puppets overflow with life. You are dragged into the beauty, madness, pain, ecstasy of the play, which is not a play anymore, it is life itself, it is your life, you are one of the puppets. You are back into the world. In a new body, in a new household.

Your deepest yearning, your attachments, your unpaid debts, your unfinished matters, your unfulfilled desires will decide for you when and where you will come back to an Earthly existence.

Unless you find the courage to plunge into the Light rather than be driven back by its overwhelming power.

This is a truth known to our civilisation for at least 2500 years. It is told by Plato.

The preparation for dying is, in the end, the completion of the work of living. The clearing of existential debts, the working through attachments, forgiveness given and asked for, the progressive shedding of what is false, borrowed, imitated — this is not only a preparation for death, but also, honestly undertaken, one of the most powerful agents of genuine living available to a human being during his or her life.

What You Can Expect to Gain By Preparing for Death

Every programme is individual and no two are the same. What follows is not a promise but a description of what those who undertake this work with honesty and seriousness will consistently find.

The first and most unexpected gain is this: you begin to live differently now. The honest confrontation with death does not diminish life — it clarifies it. What seemed important loses its grip. What was genuinely important, and had been pushed aside, returns. The Stoics practised this deliberately — the daily remembrance of death as a lens that burns away the trivial and restores the real. This programme does not teach the Stoic practice as a technique. It produces the same result through deeper means.

You understand your life better. The life review — conducted not in judgment but in honest, compassionate attention — reveals the shape of a life that was too close to be seen while being lived. Patterns become visible. The thread you wove into the larger fabric, in Puorro’s words, becomes legible. What was confusion begins to make sense. What seemed like failure begins to show its necessity. This understanding is not comfort in the trivial sense. It is the more valuable thing: clarity.

You become less afraid. Not fearless — fear of death is honest and deserves its place. But the fear loses its absolute authority. It becomes one voice among others rather than the only voice. The dread that Larkin describes with such precision — the four-in-the-morning certainty of extinction — does not disappear entirely, but it no longer has the last word. Something else begins to speak alongside it. The programme does not argue with Larkin. It gradually makes available a different experience than the one he describes.

You pay the existential debts you have accumulated, and you learn not to make new ones. This is both a practical and a spiritual achievement. The relationships attended to, the words finally spoken, the acknowledgments made, the reparations offered — these change the weight one carries. A person who has addressed their existential debts moves differently through their remaining life and approaches death differently. Lighter. More free.

You finish what is unfinished. Not everything can be completed — that is one of the honest recognitions the programme offers. But more can be completed than most people imagine. And what cannot be completed can be consciously acknowledged as incomplete rather than silently carried.

You become familiar with death. Not comfortable with it in the sense of casual, but familiar in the original sense: it becomes something you know, something you have sat with, something that has lost its quality of the absolutely alien and unthinkable. Familiarity is its own form of preparation. The person who has genuinely met death in the course of this programme will not meet it entirely as a stranger at the end.

Your next life will be more auspicious. This is stated directly, as a conviction grounded in four decades of clinical work, spiritual inquiry, and direct experience: we do not have only this one life. The law of karma — of consequence extending across lives is not a metaphor. The clearing of existential debts, the dissolution of attachments, the completion of what this life brought to complete, all of this shapes what comes next. This is one of the programme’s deepest motivations, and one of its most enduring gifts.

You acquire practices that deepen over time. The tools of this programme — Focusing, imagery, expanded states, contemplative practice, the ethical will, the life review — do not end with the six months. They become instruments of an ongoing life: ways of attending, ways of knowing, ways of remaining in honest relationship with the reality of one’s own mortality and one’s own soul. They can be returned to, deepened, and refined for as long as life continues.

You become capable of accompanying others. The person who has genuinely met their own death is capable of being present with the dying in a way that no amount of good intention without this preparation makes possible. Fear of death is contagious in both directions — the person who has not met their own fear of death carries it into the room with the dying, and the dying feel it. The person who has genuinely done this work brings something different: a quality of presence, of steadiness, of unhurried attention, that is itself a profound gift to those approaching the threshold.

And finally: you feel lighter. This is perhaps the most surprising gain, and the most consistently reported. The person who has done this work does not emerge heavier, burdened by the weight of mortality. They emerge lighter - because what was being carried in the dark is heavier than what is looked at in the light. Because the anticipatory dread of something unmet is more exhausting than the genuine meeting of it. Because, as every tradition in this programme attests in its own language, the movement toward death honestly undertaken is not a movement toward diminishment. It is a movement toward the Light at the end of the cave.

The Practical Toolbox

The work moves through body, image, trance, felt meaning, intellectual pursuits, and concrete action. The tools used are individually chosen. The main tools are:

Focusing — Eugene Gendlin’s method of working with the felt sense — is the primary instrument throughout the programme. The body holds knowledge about dying that the mind resists knowing. It knows what remains unfinished. It knows what is ready to be released. It knows, in its own pre-verbal way, what the passage asks. Focusing is the practice of turning attention inward with quiet, non-judgmental curiosity — locating the unclear, whole-body sense of one’s situation, finding words that genuinely fit it, and allowing that contact to move something. For many people, first genuine contact with their own felt sense in relation to death is one of the most significant experiences of the programme. It is not thinking about dying. It is allowing the body’s own intelligence about dying to speak.

Hypnotherapy and expanded states of consciousness — drawing on extensive clinical training — open access to material that ordinary waking consciousness cannot reach: the pre-verbal fears lodged in the body long before they were ever named, the default assumptions about death inherited from family and culture without examination, and the deeper layers of the psyche where the soul’s own knowing becomes available. In the specific context of this programme, hypnotic depth is used for regression to experiences that illuminate the soul’s continuity across time, for direct encounter with the inner landscape that the Cave Metaphor describes, and for working with fear at the level where it actually lives — not the level of argument and reassurance, but the level of direct, embodied experience. Expanded states encountered through shamanic practice, meditation, and dreamwork serve the same purpose: moments in which the veil between ordinary consciousness and the Oneness/Wholeness that underlies it becomes thin, and the Voice of the Immortal Self, however briefly, is heard.

The ethical will — written over the course of the programme, in multiple drafts, with the support of the sessions and the assigned practice — is the primary written instrument of the programme. It is not completed once and set aside. It is returned to, deepened, and refined as the programme progresses and the person’s self-understanding grows.

The life review — a sustained process that runs through the entire six months. Not a single event but a deepening engagement with the question: what have I most essentially lived? What is complete? What remains? What do I most want to be remembered for? What do I most regret? What would I do differently, and what can still be changed?

Imagery work — in the tradition of Gerald Epstein and Colette Aboulker-Muscat, guided imagery is used as a direct language of the deeper psyche, bypassing analytical defences and letting inner knowing surface in embodied form. In this programme, imagery work includes the direct exploration of the passage itself: the cave, the Light, the threshold, the ancestors who have gone before. These are not visualisation exercises. They are genuine encounters with the inner landscape of dying.

Active imagination — in the tradition of C.G. Jung, a disciplined engagement with inner figures — the inner man, the inner woman, the inner child, and others that emerge. Brought into dialogue as living presences with their own histories, needs, and perspectives, they often form the most direct route to resolving inner conflicts and making more mature choices.

Sacred imagination — the capacity to engage the inner life as genuine encounter with dimensions of reality that exceed the personal — is one of the primary instruments of this work. The images that arise in inner work are not invented; they are encountered. They are felt, found, experienced, and validated by verified theories, by ancient scriptures and practices, and, most importantly, by inner and outer change. Imagination, when properly attended to, is an organ of perception as real as the eye or the ear. Through it, the whole speaks to the part.

Creative tools — drawing, painting, sculpting, and other forms of creative expression, used not as art therapy but as a language for what cannot yet be said; they activate the capacity for genuine origination instead of the reproduction of the known.

Assigned practice between sessions — tailored to each participant and each moment of the process: a particular film, a specific piece of music, poems, a museum or an exhibition, a diary, a physical practice, tending one’s home or garden, a particular diet, a journey to a specific place. These are precise interventions — because insights that stay in the session room do not transform; they need to be put into practice.

Philosophical dialogue — in the tradition of Socrates — integrating the conceptual frameworks as much as possible into the default state of mind.

Ritual — drawn from cross-cultural traditions with which this practice works — marks the significant thresholds of the programme: the completion of the ethical will, the conclusion of the life review, the reconciliation of a significant relationship, the release of a significant burden. Dying is one of the great threshold events of a human life, and thresholds deserve to be marked with ceremony.

The Arc of the Six Months

The programme advances through three movements of two months each. Each movement has its own quality, its own depth, and its own central question. The movements are not rigidly sequential — the process is organic, since life itself does not always proceed in predetermined order. But the direction is consistent: from honest seeing, through genuine working-through, toward a quality of readiness that is not resignation but completion.

Movement 1 — Honest Seeing (Months 1–2)

Before anything can be completed, it must be seen clearly. The first movement is devoted to this: an honest, unhurried inventory of the life as it actually is, not as one would wish it to be or fears it might be.

This includes the mapping of what is unfinished: the forgiveness not yet given or received, the words not yet spoken, the relationships not yet reconciled, the debts not yet acknowledged, the aspects of oneself not yet lived. It includes the honest naming of the fears — of pain, of loss of control, of the unknown, of judgment, of what will happen to those left behind. None of these fears is dismissed. Each is met directly, with the same quality of attention that the programme brings to everything.

The four poems introduced at the opening of this programme are returned to here as working material: where do you find yourself in Larkin’s dread? In Holland’s gentle consolation? In Puorro’s playful acceptance? In Jiménez’s nostalgic farewell? Most people find themselves somewhere in all four — at different hours of the day, in different seasons of feeling. The mapping of one’s actual relationship to death, without performance in either direction, is the foundational work of this first movement.

The ethical will is begun — not as a final document but as a first draft, a first honest attempt to answer: what have I most essentially lived? What do I most want to pass on? The life review is opened: not revisiting the past in order to judge it, but in order to understand it, to complete what can still be completed, and to release what cannot.

The Cave Metaphor is introduced as the programme’s orienting image: the process of dying as a movement through darkness toward an overwhelming Light — and the question of what, in oneself, would be dragged back by the puppets on the walls, and what might be capable of plunging into the Light itself.

The central question of this movement: What is actually here — in my life, in my relationships, in my inner life — that I have not yet honestly looked at?

Movement 2 — Working Through (Months 3–4)

What has been seen must now be worked. This is the heart of the programme — the place where seeing becomes doing, where inventory becomes action, where the named fears are entered and metabolised rather than merely acknowledged.

The unfinished business is addressed. Not all of it can be completed — some relationships cannot be reconciled, some debts cannot be repaid, some words arrived too late. But more can be done than most people imagine, and the willingness to attempt it — to write the letter, to make the call, to speak what was unsaid, to acknowledge what was caused — changes both the person and the situation in ways that mere intention does not.

The existential debts are examined honestly and reparation is made where possible. Forgiveness, of others and of oneself, is worked as a process: approached gradually, through the felt sense, through imagery, through the body’s own knowing of what it is ready to release and what it still needs to hold. Forgiveness that is forced is not forgiveness. Forgiveness that is worked — slowly, honestly, at the pace the body and the soul set — is one of the most profound liberations available to a human being preparing for the final passage.

The two philosophical tenets of the programme are worked here not only by the intellect but as living realities to be experienced: through expanded states, through deep imagery, through the hypnotic depth that opens access to what ordinary consciousness cannot reach. The question of the soul’s continuity — of what lies beyond the cave’s entrance — is explored not as doctrine but as direct encounter, to whatever degree each person is capable of and ready for.

The attachments that would, in the Cave Metaphor, drag the soul back toward the puppets on the walls — the unresolved desires, the unfinished loves, the unlived longings — are identified and worked with. Not with the aim of eliminating them, which is neither possible nor desirable, but of bringing them to consciousness, so that when the moment comes, they are known rather than unknown, named rather than unnamed, held lightly rather than gripping from below.

The four poems are present here too — not as readings but as mirrors. As the work of this movement deepens, the person’s relationship to each poem quietly shifts. Larkin’s dread does not disappear — it is too honest to disappear — but it loses some of its absolute authority. The four-in-the-morning certainty of extinction begins to share the room with something else: not a counter-argument, not a consolation, but a different quality of experience becoming available. Puorro’s playfulness, which may have seemed too light or too distant in the first movement, begins to feel less foreign, more possible. Holland’s consolation, which the programme neither endorses nor dismisses, reveals a different face — not as the denial it can be, but as the intuition it sometimes is. And Jiménez’s birds keep singing, as they always did, but the person listening to them has changed. Something is moving — slowly, quietly, without announcement — in the direction of the stance that waits at the close of this text. It cannot be named yet. But it can be felt.

The central question of this movement: What in me is ready to be released — and what does releasing it require?

Movement 3 — Preparing and Completing (Months 5–6)

The third movement is not the end of the work but its crystallisation. What has been seen and worked through in the first two movements now takes its final form.

The ethical will is completed — not as a perfect document, which it will never be, but as a true one. This is the written distillation of what the programme has opened: what the person has most essentially lived, what they have learned, what they want those they love to know most, what they ask for in forgiveness, what they freely give. It is not intended to be grand. It is intended to be honest.

The life review reaches its deepest level: the compassionate re-seeing of the whole arc of a life, with the same quality of attention that the being of light in every near-death account offers — not judging what was, but seeing it clearly, acknowledging it fully, and recognising, in the acknowledgment, that it was enough. That the life was lived. That love was present, even when imperfect. That something genuine was given, even where much was left undone.

For those not facing imminent death, the third movement addresses the question of how to live differently in the light of what the programme has opened. What simplifies? What deepens? What can finally be set down? The person who has genuinely prepared for death inhabits their remaining life differently — more present, less encumbered, more clearly oriented toward what actually matters. This is not a side effect of the programme. It is one of its central gifts.

For those closer to the threshold, the third movement addresses the practical and spiritual preparation for the passage itself: the quality of consciousness to cultivate in the time remaining, the practices to maintain, the support to put in place, the instructions to those who will accompany the dying. What do you want the people around you to know? What do you want them to do? What do you want them to say, or not say, as you approach the cave’s entrance?

The programme closes with a ritual — drawn from the cross-cultural tradition of marking threshold events with ceremony — that honours what has been traversed and acknowledges the threshold now visible ahead.

The central question of this movement: Am I ready — and what would make me more so?

A note on this final question: it is not asked in anxiety. It is asked in the spirit of Gina Puorro’s poem — with the glass of wine and the two desserts, the soft laugh as Death leans close, the hand slipped into his as he walks you home. Readiness is not the absence of fear. It is the presence of something larger than fear: the honest completion of a life, the genuine expression of love, the willingness to plunge — when the moment comes — toward the Light rather than back toward the puppets on the wall.

That is what this programme prepares.

Structure and Format of the Programme

• Two individual sessions per month (90 minutes each) — twelve sessions in total, conducted online.
• One written reflection per month from you, responding to a question set at the closing of the previous session — keeping the work alive between sessions and developing the capacity for self-observation.
• One written response from me — brief, attentive, pointing to what is noticed and posing one deepening inquiry.
• Between-sessions availability by voice message and email, for moments when something significant surfaces and cannot wait.
• Assigned practice between sessions, individually chosen — films, music, poetry, creative work, physical practice, acts of service.

Each programme is individually designed. There is no standard protocol — only a standard of depth, attention, and rigour.

Last: the poems quoted at the beginning are the default attitudes we take when thinking about death, at one time or another.

There is a fifth attitude, which is the benchmark for the entire programme.

Tradition holds that Rabbi Shim’on bar Yochai dictated this poem on his deathbed, in Aramaic, on the day of his death. It comes from the Zohar, the Idra Zuta:

“All the days I have been alive, I have yearned to see this day.

Now my desire is crowned with success.

This day itself is crowned.

Now I want to reveal words in the presence of the Holy One;

all those words adorn my head like a crown……

I have seen that all those sparks flash from the High Spark,

hidden of all hidden.

All are levels of enlightenment.

In the light of each and every level

there is revealed what is revealed.

All those lights are connected:

this light to that light, that light to this light,

one shining into the other,

inseparable, one from the other.”

To Enquire

This programme is offered to a small number of people at any one time. It begins with a written application and a sixty-minute discovery conversation.

To apply, write to doncavianu@gmail.com and tell me what brings you here.

Two questions will underlie the discovery conversation, for which you don’t need the ultimate answers, only the willingness to contemplate them:

1. “What have you done with your life? What have you done with your time?”

2. What do you want now from life, from yourself — what does life want from you now – what is death teaching you?

This programme represents a significant personal investment, commensurate with the depth and seriousness of the work. The fee for the full six-month programme is €10,000, confirmed at the discovery conversation.