Stop Pedestaling ‘Certifications’ for Death Doulas.
Every once in a while, there is a conversation circulating about the many death doula training programs that are emerging and the validity of ‘certification’ in this field. Even as I write this article, I learn about an organization that was recently created that uses the title “Certified Death Midwives.”
This is not a new conversation for me; ‘certification’ in death work training programs, ‘death doula proficiency exams’, and organizations and trainers who lean heavily into credentialing. I’ve been around the block with this topic dozens of times. So much so, that I rarely enter the conversation anymore.
This article isn’t about whether I think death doula ‘certifications’ are a ‘good or bad’ issue. This is an article about the overculture’s incessant need to box vast things that are bordering on infinite potentialities into certification programs.
“Wow! This is so helpful for my community, I think I’ll certify it.” was never uttered by an ancient elder, a mystic, or a midwife from the bygones.
Our collective neural pathways are so deeply tracked with one way of going about things when it comes to learning and training, that we, so help us god, tremble in our boots at the thought of hopping tracks and leaving ‘the way it’s always been done.’
We have fear that if we rip up the idea of certifications our work is no longer valid.
Several years ago a Navajo woman in my yoga community contacted me and asked me this. “Narinder, my grandmother has been helping people who are dying, and their families, in our community for almost 40 years. Does she need to go through a training program to call herself a death midwife?”
The fact that this question even needs to be asked is devastating to me. It angers me that this person who has been serving death care in her community for generations wouldn’t be listed on a website for “certified death midwives” because she didn’t pay her dues at a desk under the tutelage of someone who wouldn’t fight like hell for this woman’s right to call herself a death midwife. It’s preposterous to me that people, the majority of them white americans, do not see the problem here.
Here's what else rips my paper up; the ‘death doula training programs’ that the overculture buys into are deciding amongst themselves, what death work is valid and what death work is not. Keep your self-appointed authority off of my death work!
This same-ole-same-ole capitalistic approach to naming the value of our gifts can hide extremely valuable work that is done by death and grief workers under the rug. All eyes are on then on the ‘credentialed’ and/or ‘valued’ death work.
Times they are a changing. Get with the program.
We have seen (so obviously) that death care wisdom belongs to all of us, and that grief illiteracy is a crisis in the collective. We are literally living during climate collapse, multiple genocides, pandemics, violence, and capitalist systems collapse.
We are in CRISIS which all originated with the ‘industry.’ Industry born from overloading logic. “I think therefore I am.” has gotten us into a big mess.
In my corner of the world, logic isn’t the only tool that’s going to build the structures that save our collective sanity in these times. We have to stop only giving value to ‘logical solutions’ when we are in a spiritual crisis. We need to stop boxing every spiritual care offering into certification programs. We need the artists and the mystics, the healers, plant talkers, and Indigenous teachers UP FRONT and center. We need these people to navigate death and grief care too. Honestly, we’re fucked if we don’t follow their lead.
So, SIT DOWN, capitalist learning systems in the ‘death trade’ arena. Your days of being the ‘big shot who calls the shots’ are OVER. We do need more death doulas on hand, yes. We need grief workers like the earth needs the sun. What we don’t need is more training programs that pedestal certifications and a “governing body” over the people who do this work.
Have your certifications but stop the narrative that a death doula certification is what makes death work valid. That story has ended.
We are standing at the edge of an abyss! We are in a spiritual crisis! We need truly-spiritual learning systems that follow matriarchal flow. We need these death workers to be supported, held, lifted, fed, clothed, and housed; NOT slipping off into nothingness because someone else thinks their ‘uncertified’ work isn’t valid.
Bless all death workers and grief workers to understand the impact that their work has on the collective as we all feel, experience, and know the falling of the empires, climate collapse, mass violence, and extreme Uncertainty. Bless these death workers who already know this and behave as such.
