HEATHER MARTEL
Guidance & Support in Dying, Death, and Grief
I offer support around all aspects of dying and death.
Shaped by countless teachers – primarily Eastern Ontario’s seasonal changes, Fundy tidal rhythms, and the movement of breath – my approach is informed by nature-based and transpersonal perspectives.
Typical offerings include counsel, guided meditation, and simple ritual healing support. I am neither a registered psychotherapist nor psychologist.
Grounded in playful curiosity and compassion for our human predicament, my work is motivated by these core ideas:
Exploring 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.
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 can increase our capacity to remain present with the fundamental nature of change, uncertainty, and suffering.
Get in Touch
Still in stages of re(dis)covery from my own brush with death, I’m not publicly offering direct services at this time. However, I am connected to a network of trusted practitioners and can provide resources.
Please reach out if you are looking for support and don’t know where to begin.
“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.”
Roshi Joan Halifax
Background
After early life initiations in loss and grief, Stephen Levine’s “A Year to Live” experiment found me in 2009, sparking an engagement with death as part of a daily rhythm. After a period of self-directed learning from pioneers in the field of conscious dying and family-led deathcare, I studied under Donna Belk through her Beyond Hospice End-of-Life & Home Funeral Guide program from 2015 to 2016.
Time as a Personal Support Worker deepened my understanding of the physical realities of caregiving, while training with Sarah Kerr through The Centre for Sacred Deathcare focused on subtle energy and ritual 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”.
Studying transpersonal therapy and engaging consistently in various types of journey work has allowed me to explore states of consciousness that encourage acceptance, presence, and a sense of connection beyond individual identity. I’ve encountered insights about impermanence, fear, and the continuity of meaning, which have softened anxiety related to the ending of life in this body. These approaches haven’t made me invincible or entirely fearless, but they have helped to cultivate emotional resilience, deepen my spiritual understanding, and develop a more compassionate, grounded relationship with my own mortality.
My work draws on this education and experience along with skills honed through careers in customer service, event coordination, and university academic counselling, as well as personal experience in family caregiving and supporting my partner through a career in funeral transfer services. Since 2019, I’ve been actively involved with Community Deathcare Ottawa, providing administrative and event support, building relationships with local practitioners, and engaging in educational dialogues around death preparation and family-led deathcare.
I believe one of the most compassionate acts we can offer ourselves and one another is to intentionally make space for death.
“My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
Space for Death 