EP 202: Death Doulas and Green Burials with Bodhi Be

In this episode, Kimberly and Bodhi discuss his work as a death doula at Doorway Into Light, Hawaii’s only nonprofit green funeral home and educational resource center, The Death Store. They discuss what green burials and ocean burials are and how they are more generous and sustainable to the planet than modern burial practices. They also discuss how dominant culture fears death, responds to death, and death traditions across cultures. In light of all of the ways that people, and even babies, die, Bodhi asks us to deeply reflect on the question, “What is a full life?” P.S. His nonprofit is still taking donations for those displaced by the Maui fires; find the link below to donate!

 

Bio

Bodhi is an ordained interfaith minister and teacher in the Sufi lineage of Sufi Sam and Hazrat Inayat Khan. He is the founder and executive director of Doorway Into Light, a nonprofit organization on Maui, which provides conscious and compassionate care for the dying, their families and the grieving, and has been offering community presentations and trainings since 2006 in the fields of awakened living and dying and the care of the dying. Bodhi is a bereavement counselor and educator; a hospice volunteer; a home funeral guide; a teacher and trainer of death doulas; a speaker and workshop leader and a ceremonial guide. He hosts a weekly streaming radio show, ‘Death Tracks’, on a Maui station. Bodhi guides memorials and funerals and leads grief rituals. He facilitates grief support groups for teenagers. He has trained hundreds of doctors, nurses, hospice staff, social workers, ministers, chaplains, therapists, artists and lay people in the spiritual, psychological, emotional and logistical care of the dying and the care of the dead, and for 4 years has taken dozens through a certification program to be death doulas. Bodhi has written a column called “Ask the Death Professor” for a local Maui magazine. He is a notary public, a coffin maker and a Reiki practitioner. Bodhi and his wife Leilah lead spiritual retreats in Hawaii and around the world.For many years Bodhi collaborated with Ram Dass, a neighbor and friend, who served on Doorway Into Light’s Board of Directors. Bodhi is continuing the work Ram Dass helped birth, in the fields of conscious dying in America.

 

What He Shares:

–Death doula work

–Green burials and ocean burials

–Running a nonprofit funeral home and resource center

–What you do (literally) when someone dies

–Legalities of keeping a body with you

–Generational stories of death

What You’ll Hear:

–How he was led to death work and spiritual counseling

–Working with Ram Das

–Starting the death doula movement and a ministry of death

–Running a non-profit funeral home

–Culture pushing away death

–Green burials

–Hazards of embalming

–Biodegradable graves

–Death and burial as another practice removed from traditions

–Cultural differences around death and burial

–Ocean body burial

–Being with bodies after death

–Generational stories after death

–Lingering with the body to witness death

–Healthy life includes its death

–Mothers of stillborns fighting for baby body

–Giving families time and space with death beyond laws

–Outlaw moves

–Medical rules around bodies and placentas

–Navigating baby and child death

–What is a full life?

–Entitlement around death

–Death doula trainings

–Facing Death, Nourishing Life course

–Showing up for life and death

 

Resources

Website: https://www.doorwayintolight.org/

IG: @thedeathstoremaui