End of Life Care

Knowing and being clear that the “knowable” bucket is quite small are both big parts of being able to truly show up for others (and even for ourselves) at the end of life. Our EOL courses are designed to help you know what can be known, and get comfortable with the unknown

Not sure where to start?

We've created an End of Life Care starter pack. This bundle of three online classes lets you dip your toe into the skills and information you need to get ready to provide end of life care.

When you enroll in this bundle, you'll receive a coupon that can be applied to Opening to the Mystery or A Year to Live.

Ready to go deeper?

Once a year Cal Cates offers two courses that participants regularly describe as “life-changing.”

Opening to the Mystery

Opening to the Mystery is a six-day online retreat, designed to invite you to deeply consider and even to befriend your own mortality. Cal Cates will combine a variety of experiential, interpersonal, and individual exercises that support deep inquiry and consideration of emotions and ideas about living and dying. This course provides guideposts that will lead you to embrace an honest relationship with life that will allow you to be more fully present not only with people who are dying, but also with all of the people in your life.

This course will be beneficial for any person who wants to have more access to their own wisdom and to cultivate deeper, more authentic relationships professionally and personally. Certainly, if you spend time at the bedside of people who are dying, you’ll find you have more comfort there, but this course is not just for people who feel drawn to or already work in hospice care.

Past students have said that their experience in this course enlivened their practice, shifted stuck relationships, and helped them to see and to love their family members/spouses in a different, more open way.

Opening to the Mystery is a live, 6-day online retreat.

We will meet (via Zoom) Monday, January 22rd - Saturday, January 27th, 2024, 5:00PM - 8:30PM (Eastern) each day.

The course includes individual and small group exercises, reading and journaling, discussion and lecture. It is a highly-interactive exploration of authenticity, presence, and mortality that will include much more joy than you will expect!

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" I think every single person could benefit from this course. I would recommend it to any adult human. I took away a real re-centering of my own practice, back to embodied presence - the training also gave me a few more tools for examining myself in the moment, both for greater clarity and more sustainable, kind practice."

A Year to Live

Make a commitment today to join Cal Cates in a year-long exploration of life, authenticity, deep, spiritual decluttering and clarity inspired by Stephen Levine’s introspective book, A Year to Live.

Spend a year deeply connecting with what’s most important in your life. Loosen your attachment to things that don’t serve you. Forgive yourself and others and get down to the truth that none of us are guaranteed a single additional moment in this life. Meditate, soften your resistance, create, and wonder.

Join your fellow humans for two meetings each month (one large group on the first Tuesday of the month and one small to be scheduled at participants' discretion), weekly writing prompts, inspired readings and the guidance and community to support you in living life as though each day is truly your last.

You will be held by Cal and your classmates as you enter as fully as you’re able into a 12-month journey of discovery and greater freedom from the things that hold you back. Some of us may not even have a year to live. Now is the time. 

A Year to Live will be offered this year April 2024 - May 2025

Registration includes a year of membership in Healwell's Online Interdisciplinary Community, where the class has its own private space for real-time and asynchronous learning and sharing.

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