'Death and Resurrection' - A Seven-Day Residential Workshop Presented by The Fool's Dance Gestalt Company

Why should I (or anyone) do a Workshop on Death?

Because living our lives in the full awareness of our inevitable death (which is not the same as being morbidly obsessed with death) offers us a more realistic and enriching perspective on life itself, on the decisions that we make and on how we choose to live. Up until the late 19th century death was always very close at hand and very, very visible - in the 1700s, for instance, one child in three died before their fifth birthday. In modern times improvements in living standards and advances in medicine have prolonged life very significantly. Everyone still dies, of course, but most do it in
old age and - considerately - in private, in hospital rather than in the bedroom upstairs, the house next door or in the street. This prolongation of life and the increased privacy of death, however, comes with a psychological price-tag. It is now much, much easier for us to banish death, and especially our own death, to some vaguely-imagined and - of course - distant future. For the most part we manage not to think too much about our death and we almost never talk about it. Outwardly (and, often, inwardly) we manage to live our lives as if we were immortal. Psychologically this avoidance of reality is quite unhelpful, given the inevitability, the unpredictability and the overwhelming significance of death. Following the success of his first two ground-breaking workshops - 'The Hero's Journey' and 'The Lover's Journey' - Paul Rebillot next turned his attention to this issue and the result was a new therapeutic structure, 'Death and Resurrection'.

The 'Death and Resurrection' workshop offers participants an opportunity to:

• Confront their own death, that ultimate taboo of today's culture.
• Explore ways to move creatively through life's transitions, letting go of what binds them negativelyto the past while courageously welcoming the future.
• Use a combination of ritual and Gestalt process to prepare for their death by reviewing their life, completing unfinished business, writing their will and planning their own funeral.
• Examine their life process with the focus on its ending, thus discovering what is - and what is not -genuinely important to them and illuminating the true meaning of their existence.
• Gradually let go of their attachments to persons, things, and self-images until, at last, they are ableto die and then be reborn to create a new life the way that they wish.
• Discover how they might complete their life beyond the workshop so that they can go on to their eventual death, not as an interruption, but as a fulfilment of all that went before.

Before 1988 Paul offered his 'Death and Resurrection' process relatively infrequently because of the seriousness of the subject matter. In that year his partner, Stanford Eugene Cates, died and Paul's experience of Stanford's dying convinced him that 'Death and Resurrection' was actually one of the most important of all his workshops. He saw, with renewed clarity, that to acknowledge and honour the fact that we are always in the process of our own dying and to look at our life as if we were shortly to leave it is, paradoxically, the key to living a richer and a fuller life.

PAUL REBILLOT was born in 1931 in Detroit, Michigan. Following a successful academic and professional career in the performing arts as musician, writer, actor, director and teacher he changed direction and trained as a Gestalt psychotherapist with Dick Price (an influential early pupil of Fritz Perls) at the Esalen Institute where he also met mythologist Joseph Campbell. From these two influences - together with his own uniquely creative insights - Paul
developed the 'Hero's Journey', the first of a unique series of therapeutic structures which drew on both his training in Gestalt and his background in the world of music, art and theatre. From 1991 to 2008 Paul presented a series of very successful annual workshops in Ireland, including 'The Hero's Journey', 'The Lover's Journey', 'Owning the Shadow' and the present workshop, 'Death and Resurrection'. In March of 2008 Paul retired from work in Europe and he died at his home in San Francisco on February 11th, 2010, aged 78.

The Fool's Dance Gestalt Company - the Paul Rebillot School In Ireland is a group of people in Ireland who have worked with Paul Rebillot for many years, graduated from his Advanced Training and are licenced by him to present his workshops. We came together with the aim of continuing Paul's transformative work in this country by offering opportunities for participation in his unique therapeutic structures.

FURTHER INFORMATION: This workshop is suitable for anyone with an interest in self-exploration or personal development. Although based on the Gestalt approach to psychotherapy no previous experience of Gestalt is required or assumed. To request a more detailed printed brochure with booking form or for other queries telephone Fergus Lalor 021-4505711 (answering machine) or e-mail to [email protected]