Éascaitheoir Báis: End of Life Doula Training

Éascaitheoir Báis: Community Death School is a winter-long journey into death, dying and grief, grounded in Irish ritual, trauma-informed practice and hands-on death care.

At its heart is a belief that became resoundingly clear through our first cohort: this is knowledge we should have been taught at school.

We all have a right to know how to be with someone who is dying. How to meet grief when it arrives. How to tend our dead. How to talk about death, make ceremony, sit in the unknown and show up when there is nothing to fix.

Community Death School is a space to reclaim some of this knowledge that is being lost, whether it’s for yourself, for the people you love, for your community and, if you feel called, as the foundation of a practice as an End-of-Life Doula or Community Death Educator.

A winter journey from Samhain to Imbolc

Rooted in Celtic seasonal wisdom, Éascaitheoir Báis follows the darker months from Samhain to Imbolc,  a time associated with ancestors, death, darkness, rest and eventual emergence.

Across two residential retreats, online sharing circles, and a winter programme of learning and practice, we explore death beyond something that happens at the end of life, as something that can teach us how to live, care and belong more fully.

We blend somatic awareness, storytelling, grief literacy, ritual, therapeutic tools and practical death-care skills, while making space for your own relationship with mortality, ancestry and grief.

You might come because you feel called to work with the dying, because you want to bring this knowledge into work you already do, or simply because you want to feel more able to meet death when it enters your own life.

You do not need to know where this journey will take you before you begin.

Those who wish to carry the work into professional practice can find insurance, sign up with professional bodies, and receive mentorship by the end.

How the Winter Unfolds

Grandmother Calling — Opening Retreat | 23–25 October
We begin at Samhain with an immersive weekend of ancestral and hands-on death care, exploring grief, trauma, ritual, keening, washing, waking and shrouding the dead.

Winter Death School | October–January
Through monthly in-person workshops and online cohort check-ins, we explore practical and embodied approaches to grief, death and dying. Full-course participants have access to all workshops as part of their training.

Echoing the Future — Closing Retreat | 12–14 February
We gather again around Imbolc to turn towards our own mortality, end-of-life planning and life-story work, while exploring how this learning might be carried into our communities, existing work or professional practice.

This course includes both non-residential retreats, access to workshops, online holding space, training manual and materials, access to slowly growing online videos, and 1to1 mentorship with Patricia.