Heather Martel
Support through dying, death, and life transitions
Shaped by countless teachers – primarily Eastern Ontario’s seasonal changes, Fundy tidal rhythms, and the movement of breath – my approach to this work is informed by nature-based and transpersonal perspectives.
Offerings include counsel and guided practices to explore the various aspects of dying and death preparation. As much as these explorations can be therapeutic, I am neither a psychologist nor psychotherapist.
Grounded in creativity, playful curiosity, and compassion for our human predicament, my work is inspired by these ideas:
Contemplating dying and post-mortem processes helps us understand the timelines and decisions involved. This offers an opportunity to align actions with core values and move at a pace more in tune with subtle needs.
Much like a birth plan, we can consider what is important, have key conversations, and make arrangements to help support certain outcomes. This process can also illuminate areas of our life in need of greater tending.
Intentionally engaging with cycles of dying, death, and rebirth exercises our muscles of surrender. This increases our capacity to stay present with the fundamental nature of change, uncertainty, and suffering.
Get in Touch
Still emerging from the liminal space after my own brush with death, I’m not currently offering direct client services. However, I am connected to a network of trusted practitioners in Ottawa, Ontario and can provide appropriate resources.
Please reach out if you are looking for support and don’t know where to begin. You’re also most likely to find me at one of these events.
Thank you!
“This (being with dying) is the work of a village, the work everyone should know how to do. We need to develop the skills of non-dual caregiving, we need to develop skills of healing as non-professional healers.”
Joan Halifax
Course of Life
After early encounters with loss and grief, Stephen Levine’s “A Year to Live” experiment found me in 2009, sparking death contemplation as a daily rhythm. Following a period of self-directed learning from pioneers in the field of conscious dying and family-led deathcare, I was certified by Donna Belk through her Beyond Hospice End-of-Life & Home Funeral Guide program in 2016 and have been offering informal death doula services ever since.
Working as a health care aid in long-term care and hospice deepened my understanding of the physical realities of caregiving, while training through The Centre for Sacred Deathcare expanded my awareness of subtle energy practices for grief and healing. The Living/Dying Project’s Conscious Living, Conscious Dying program brought things full circle by strengthening my initial draw to “caregiving as non-dual practice”.
Since 2019, I’ve been actively involved with Community Deathcare Ottawa where I provide administrative, communications, and event support, build relationships with local practitioners, and engage in educational discussions around death preparation and family-led deathcare.
My work as a death doula draws on all this along with skills honed through careers in customer service, event coordination, and university academic counselling, as well as lived experience with parental caregiving and supporting my partner through a career in funeral transfer services. Nearly two decades of meditation and transpersonal exploration form a strong foundation that I continue to build on as a source of insight and support.
There are many ways to draw from the well in times of grief, joy, and everything in between. Healing modalities that have shaped my path of remembering are thoughtfully woven into my offerings, where appropriate and welcomed.
At the heart of this work is the belief that one of the most compassionate acts we can offer ourselves and each other is to face our mortality and – right in the midst of everyday life – make space for death.
“There is probably nothing more direct that you and I can do to bring our planet and our society back into balance than deal with our fundamental, unexamined, collective fear of death.”
Dale Borglum