Each of these classes are designed to offer professionals and lay people alike tools for offering spiritual care to loved ones, family, friends, neighbors, and clients. Collectively they provide a foundation of philosophy, theory, science, and practice for offering compassionate care to the dying.

The Art of Spiritual Midwifery to the Dying
This course explores ways to provide spiritual care to the dying. It is offered to professionals and lay people alike, so that compassionate care can be offered to family, loved ones, neighbors, friends, and clients. (download brochure)

Spiritual Midwifery Guild
This is an advanced class offered to students, who would like to deepen their knowledge of spiritual care. This class focuses upon the last days and hours of someone’s life. We learn how to offer vigil and provide spiritual care to someone, who can no longer communicate through words. This class meets monthly, for six months, and is designed for professionals from all backgrounds and settings. Each guild is community based, building relationships between members of the group, so that innovative and collaborative services can be offered. Please contact Connee if you are interested in starting a guild in your area. (Go to blog.)

Consultation and Advanced Training
Connee offers private classes, workshops, consultation, and supervision to individuals, community midwifery guilds, churches, agencies, and other groups seeking to deepen their understanding of spiritual care to the dying. Please contact her for further information.

Wisdom of the World:  Death, Dying, and Grief
Participants will explore the teachings about death, dying, and the afterlife from each of the major world religions with special attention to the mystical branches of each religious tradition.  We will explore the philosophy, stories, imagery, scriptures, and practices surrounding death, dying, afterlife, and grief.  From an Eastern Perspective we will explore Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism with special attention upon meditation and mantra, as death is commonly integrated into daily spiritual practice.  From a Western Perspective, we will explore Christianity, Judaism, and Sufism, with special attention to the Middle Eastern roots these traditions share.  We will explore the nature of the sacred heart and the beauty of grace.  From a Women’s Spirituality perspective, we will explore the female face of God, such as Mary or Tara, often spoken of as the Great Mother, across all the wisdom traditions, with special attention to the traditions of spiritual midwifery and healing across the ages.

Post-Traumatic Stress and the Dying Process
In this class, Connee pulls together her unique background of trauma work and care for the dying to teach about ways that trauma histories impact the dying process.  She draws on her experience, as well as the fields of psychotherapy, consciousness studies, and comparative religion to offer tools for working with individuals, facing death and traumatic material simultaneously.

Reiki
Reiki (ray-kee) is an ancient healing technique involving the placement of hands onto the body in order to channel energy. Reiki is "spiritually guided life force energy." The knowledge that an unseen energy flows through all living things and is connected directly to quality of health has been part of the wisdom of many cultures since ancient times. Connee teaches reiki to those interested in working with energy and as a tool for assisting the dying.

Dreamtime Meditation
Connee first learned dreamtime meditation from a teacher in the Lakota Sioux tradition more than twenty years ago and it has been one of her primary practices of meditation and healing since. It is a mystical practice, common to all the wisdom traditions, sometimes called direct perception, sometimes called sacred heart meditation. Christ frequently asked, within the Judaic tradition, "Do you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear?" He was asking if a potential initiate could see from the depths of the heart, where heaven and earth meet, not merely through the physical eyes or senses. In Buddhism, we learn that what we call waking reality is much like a dream. The goal is to wake up within this dream and see the truth of who we are and to look upon others with these eyes rather than the eyes of greed, fear or need. To see as god sees and unify our lives with Divine vision. This practice is a primary practice in Connee's work with the dying, especially when individuals are no longer able to communicate verbally. Traditionally, she has taught this practice privately to students. But, she is now teaching classes so that those serving the dying can deepen their skills for offering spiritual midwifery.

Sacred Ritual
In this class, Connee teaches how to bring the spiritual to the bedside of the dying through the use of ritual. This class, first developed with Lyn Tuft, a California artist, teaches how to use ordinary and natural objects to bring beauty, sacred space, and healing to the bedside of the dying. Ritual can be used for healing as well, to invoke the holy, and to help both the dying and their families through the transition of dying.

What Death Teaches About Life
In this class, Connee shares the stories and wisdom she has learned from the dying about how to live more fully. She teaches life lessons as seen through the eyes of the dying. She teaches what she's learned by sitting at the threshold of life and death. She teaches individuals how to prepare for their own deaths. And, she teaches how to see the cycles of death and rebirth in ordinary life and apply the wisdom of the dying to new situations besides the medical. She offers this class in a variety of settings. Please check her schedule for a list of upcoming classes and public talks. If you are interested in having her teach this class, in one of the various forms listed above, please contact her to make arrangements.

At this time, Connee’s classes are directed to professionals such as therapists, ministers, lay ministers, physicians, nurses, healers and others, who come into contact with individuals affected by trauma and violence, such as childhood abuse, rape, war, and domestic violence. Unfortunately, the statistics in our culture are such, that as much as 50% of clientele can be affected, some would hypothesize even more if we bring the affects of alcoholism, drug abuse, and violent child rearing practices into consideration. These classes are designed for understanding the effects of trauma and learning ways for bringing kindness and peace to the suffering that the cycles of violence may be broken.

Nature of Suffering
Facing violence and death profoundly alters our understanding of suffering and of life challenging personal and world beliefs about who we think we are, and why we’re here. In this class Connee shares personal story, case examples, and the lives of spiritual masters. She ties these stories to information about consciousness and the spiritual path in order to contemplate our beliefs and assumptions about suffering, and those who suffer. We will look at ways to allow our personal stories and histories, and those of our clients, to transform us. She offers tools for seeing the beauty, asking new questions, and inviting hope in the face of suffering.

Psychospiritual Healing from Violence and Trauma
In this class, we examine the nature of healing from a spiritual and psychological perspective. We will look at the wounds of violence and learn a psycho-spiritual model for understanding and treating the predominant symptomology patterns survivors experience. She will draw on psychological theory as well as spiritual practices from each of the world’s religious traditions and ask what healing and transformation looks like from a spiritual as well as psychological world view.

Spiritual and Religious Trauma
In this class, we will examine the nature of spiritual and religious wounds. This is a very sensitive topic because the way we talk about spirituality, religion, and violence can be easily misunderstood. In fact, much of the spiritual wounds most individuals carry come because languaging the Divine is such a difficult process, especially in times of suffering. We also live in a time, in which religion has often been associated with violent acts, whether during war time, or through the words of perpetrator to a young child. In this class, Connee will examine ways religion has been used to cause harm, the kinds of psychological and spiritual wounds incurred, and ways to restore religion, spirituality, and spiritual practice to the lives of injured individuals. Some prominent clinicians feel that without addressing the meaning of suffering, our relationship to self, to the world, and to Mystery we cannot fully heal. This workshop addresses this need, offering professionals and lay persons tools for addressing spiritual wounds.