The journey beyond: the inaugural Mortals programme
How six strangers found life after death
We just completed the first ever Mortals programme!
Can you imagine… six strangers, met online with me, and we slowly, purposefully, intentionally went on a journey into the depths of our mortality, and came out the other side, feeling more alive?
These six people were asked to think about their ideal death, situate themselves with four weeks to live, take the time to slow down and breath-by-breath, let themselves die and let go into the vastness of a place beyond themselves.
These six people took those experiences - with the curiosity, discomfort and trouble that it brought up - and used it as a unique, powerful catalyst to ask deep questions about themselves and their life, their purpose, their meaning.
They did it all, beginning as strangers, and finishing knowing some of the most important things about each other, and had collectively imprinted something very significant on each other. How did the group describe, in their own words, what Mortals was?
An interesting and comforting way to discuss death and life.
A deep, but not in a 'jumping off a cliff into the abyss of your feelings' kind of way, exploration of death - which really is about life - that's calming, reflective and pure dead fun (pun intended).
Introspective and my first experience with group therapy1 that has been really positive in outcomes
A meaningful journey where I explored what mortality means to me through activities that engaged the mind, body, and senses, sharing the experience with a group that embraced vulnerability, triggering some sort of shift in my consciousness.
Doing this work feels too good to keep to myself, so I wanted to take the time to write up some reflections on this potent experience. I do this in the spirit of learning, and building in the open. I know some of you reading this have been asking me, so I’m glad to be able to share what happened. So let’s dive in.
What did I want to learn by doing this?
The goal of the doing this was to understand whether there is any demand for a programme of activities that are expressly designed to make people aware of their mortality. Something that allows people to explore the feelings that come up when they do become aware of it. To proactively engage through specific activities to guide them to identify as a result, what is most important to them, so that they can transform the self-knowledge and insight into something positive they can use in their daily life.
Specifically, I wanted to learn which activities are most useful, what structured formats are most engaging and how effective a group setting is for people to engage with their mortality.
In other words, I wanted to see if being aware of your mortality could awaken you to life, and if a group could help you do that.
Specifically, the programme was:
Held as an online meeting for 90 minutes, every week for 6 weeks.
Made up of 6 participants plus the facilitator.
Generally structured around a single specific activity that made up the bulk of each session, which was either a single group discussion or broken into smaller 1:1s. Every session was top/tailed with reflections.
Made up of applicants that were screened for anxiety and depression, death anxiety, recent bereavement and diagnosis of a terminal or life-limiting disease. This was for participants' own health and wellbeing as much as controlling for potentially difficult facilitation experiences that might be out of my capabilities.
Designed to be safe and fully transparent. Participants had to sign a consent form acknowledging the risks, and there were opportunities after every session to discuss any issues with me. Prior to every session, a step-by-step guide was shared so everyone knew what we would be doing in detail every week.
Hunches that were validated
I am so pleased to say that I think the first Mortals programme was an astounding success. It went way beyond my expectations about what would happen and what was possible. So what went right?
Firstly, I suspected that I might have a capability to do this work, and it always felt natural to me, which is encouraging.
I have an internal matrix of people I think would benefit from Mortals, and this group was made up of the exact definitions that I suspected existed. It validated the idea that people do not have to be living with a terminal illness to feel the need to be aware of and engage with their mortality: anticipating a child or working through a childhood bereavement is sufficient.
I thought beforehand that it would be very important to challenge the monocultural aspect of death literacy and awareness. This kind of work is overwhelmingly done by middle class, white women of an older age (i.e. over 35/40) who more often than not work as healthcare professionals. So I purposefully selected people from the 26 applications for diversity of gender, age, ethnicity, religious and spiritual background and motivations for joining.
Doing it in community meant people could do something they wouldn’t do by themselves, it meant they “could go there”. The feeling that we created a ‘container’ was explicitly referred to as a positive aspect of the programme. My ability to help contribute and facilitate that container is something I’m really proud of.
Mortality Awareness activities were difficult - some participants cried at times - but not a reason to not do them. Even though they actively, purposefully, and repeatedly were invited to think about their own death, everyone came away with a fortified sense of aliveness. This is fundamental to the whole proposition of Mortals, and I’m so excited that this is how people felt.
General reflections
There were no major missteps, but a number of small elements were things I did not think went well, or as well as I expected. For example, I planned to use listening experiences more, as a way to ground the group before doing difficult tasks. This was initially due to an overabundance of caution about the mindset of the group before mortality awareness activities, but once I started getting feedback that the group really valued and wanted to prioritise the discussions, I decided to omit future listening experiences. It was a shame because I was using Wavepaths for this, and I love it. After each week, any minor issues I did my best to address in subsequent sessions. This was mostly related to managing emotions or improving the flow or structure of the session.
People talking about their own death versus the death of loved ones did not seem as painful or difficult. It may be obvious to say, but given the overall power of the programme, people’s bereavements triggered more emotions. Later discussions that placed their future death and impact, caused a ripple around how their death would affect others, in the same way a family/close death affected them.
The safety and container of the group may have been quite therapeutically beneficial for a few participants who had experienced traumatic bereavements.
I made an incursion in one conversation bringing an insight I had from my end-of-life care work, about the question of ‘who is a good death for?’ .. the person, their friends/family? On reflection, this felt like a misstep because this took things away from the personal investigation, and shifted it to other people (i.e. families) which is more complicated. I felt I wanted to stay focused on the personal engagement of mortality, which I think we did and am glad we did.
By the end of the second week, something special was beginning to happen: I felt connected to the group and their aliveness in touching their mortality. I could sense they were pulling on other life experiences to help understand how they felt about things, but if I used stories or if I used examples from my work in end-of-life care, it pulled us away from being in the moment, in the present as a group. Introducing others outside - even figuratively- of the group didn’t feel great. I also felt pulled away when we tried to intellectualise death too much.
At a few points, one or two people confessed they found it difficult to attend, to muster the energy to come. But everyone did. The only times people didn’t attend was due to illness or unforeseen circumstances. This was not an easy ask for people, but their commitment is so commendable.
In later weeks, I believe trust was achieved in the group, and the personal journeys enabled deeper feelings and experiences to come up. This sound contradictory to the earlier reflection that bringing other people into our minds would pull us away from each other. But people really opened up to their experiences - the death of parents, ex-partners, friends - and there was a lot of pain held by the group. But there was a lot of affection shown. It felt like a big shift. I’m so proud of everyone for bringing their pain, it mustn't have been easy.
When we shifted tone in weeks 5 and 6, actively using our mortality experiences to bolster Awakening activities, participants validated a key mechanism for me: that these life purpose activities are manifestly more powerful when done under this auspices of mortality. In one instance, doing a life planning exercise after the mortality awareness activities took on a much more different texture than expected.
So I have been able to take a lot of the propositions and hypotheses I had before starting this programme, and I’m quite bewildered to have checked almost all of them off. As a designer, I’m taken aback about how this process has unfolded. It felt like a really scary thing to do beforehand - I had a bit of a last minute panicky call to a psychotherapist friend to try and risk manage the programme - and took what I think are reasonable steps to mitigate potential problems. Those problems never materialised. Being able to go on this journey with adults who knew what they were signing up to, but also who knew they had no idea really what was in store, was a huge mark of trust. I’d like to add a bit about what they said themselves about the most valuable part of the programme for them:
The people and the diversity.
The focused reflection that came from committing to the time each week.
Being able to be candid to strangers (in a safe space with rules in place).
Dedicated time to explore mortality and my mortality.
Realising how mortality was all about living and honouring life.
What happens next
I am now going to dive deeply into the feedback from the programme, and investigate how to improve it, and run it again. I am really excited to iterate upon this structure and take everyone’s feedback to make changes to how we conduct the Mortality Awareness activities and the Awakening activities. I think even in its current format, this is an incredibly valuable experience for people. So I can’t wait to see how it develops.
One question on my mind is this: How can we get people to integrate what they’ve experienced, rather than just let them go off into the sunset? One way to answer this is the creation of an online community where programme participants can continue their journey together, in a way that allows them to fit it into their everyday lives. This will be open soon to them, and I can’t wait to discover ways to bring more people into it.
Interested? Join us!
If you’ve read this and are interested in joining Mortals, or you know someone who could really benefit from it, visit Mortals and sign up to the waitlist. I will announce the next programme after the new year.
Gratitude
I want to pass on my heartfelt thanks to participants who trusted me in taking them through this journey, and for their incredible dedication to literally exploring the depths of their mortality together. I also want to thank Alex Evans, Kate Pumphrey, Liz Slade, Emily Bazelgette, Casper Ter Kuile, Dave Heinemann and my wife, Roberta for the encouragement, support, advice and generosity in supporting this.
I feel its important to note that at no point did I ever describe Mortals as ‘therapy’ as I take that definition very seriously, and I am not a therapist. But for them to use that word, is a huge honour for me personally: I know all too well the positive power of group therapy.