an honest approach to death care
an enchanted approach to life
established 2016
My name is Narinder Elizabeth Bazen. (she/her)
Being a Death Midwifery teacher and an Enchanted Life Guide in troubled times is an interesting lifestyle. This part I’m playing inspires me to live what it means to be truly alive in this beautiful and devastating world.
As an artist, advocate and animist, I live in creative mode with the universal spirits that guide my work and play for the greater good of this tiny and blessed corner of the world where I dwell.
My death midwifery grew out of an ask from my community in a gritty southern city. My presence has been requested by families and individuals to conversations about terminal diagnosis, death anxiety, Home Funerals, spiritual death care, burials, death education, murder and suicide, as well as collective and personal grief care. My death work has been experienced by vastly different demographics.
My death midwifery training program grew on its own. It originated as an ask from a friend. Word spread, and now six years later, I’m wholeheartedly in love with supporting death workers like me!
My Enchanted Life Guidance sessions were also created from the asks of my community. Beautiful people sought my council, asked me to remind them what it’s like to be in imaginative headspaces, and requested my help in their returning to what it means to play with the gods of whimsy, the spirits of serendipity, and the beauty available to us every day.
My work is my joy. It is my art. It is my partner. It is my guide. When I am not working, I am enjoying much time outdoors on the beautiful land that belongs to Wabanaki People (Maine), or listening to old sleepy jazz, or Vivaldi at loud volumes, going on aimless adventures, writing something, drawing with watercolors and pencils (all illustrations on this website were drawn by me! ), cuddling up with my dog Oak, or romanticizing a new world where we all get to thrive, be nourished, seen, and safe. I daydream a lot.
Current Offerings
Here are some of the ways to work with me at the moment!
What is Culture Midwifery?
As a death midwife, I believe that new death work redefines our collective death values and manifests them in our choices about how we wish to experience the end-of-life and also how we wish for all people to get to have death with dignity. It also invites us to live in death awareness, understanding the preciousness of life. Through death work, we return love to its fullest expression by lifting grief to its rightful place. In these mindsets, we imagine new paths to healing for ourselves and the planet and all people on it. Living in this death awareness, the grief void within us is no longer filled with over-consumption, individualistic living, and harm to others, but rather living in this death awareness we come back to what it means to be a human being. Living in death awareness is a big ole invitation to simplify, be present, and create.
Exploring and acting upon these values and choices, we remember death midwifery.
Remembering death midwifery, we give life to the world we long to see.
“Narinder has a gift. She is at once kind, compassionate and wise, at the same time thoughtful, practical and task-oriented. In every conversation, she exudes calm and instills confidence. She listens carefully and responds gently, always keeping an upbeat tone with the goal of bringing comfort to both the dying and their families. Her intuition is uncanny and her goal is for everyone to find serenity, wherever that might come from. For that she is very accepting of people—she wants to know what they want. She is a great guide and meets people where they are--and wants only that the transition is peaceful. I am very grateful for her help and her presence in our lives.”
“It was beautiful.” - read more
Listen to Narinder’s Nine Keys Podcast
Explore the art of death midwifery, the calling of this work as it comes through these mystic's soul-eyes!