END OF LIFE PSYCHEDELIC CARE PRESENTS
Death Sangha
Deepening presence, connection, and our capacity to live with greater intention and care
About This Event
In April 2026, End of Life Psychedelic Care convened a conversation with Rev. Norma Burton, Rabbi Dan Goldblatt, and Amy Slonaker, PhD, to explore a central question:
are psychedelics changing our understanding of death and consciousness?
What emerged was not a set of conclusions, but a shared recognition. Across disciplines and lived experience, the conversation returned to a common thread: relationship. Relationship to death, to consciousness, to one another, and to something larger that many described simply as love.
Rev. Norma Burton shared a near-death experience that revealed a profound sense of continuity beyond the body. Rabbi Dan Goldblatt reflected on death as a reconfiguration of relationship rather than an ending. Amy Slonaker spoke to how psilocybin transformed her relationship with death, helping her live with greater clarity and presence.
These insights aren't limited to psychedelics. Meditation, ceremony, and other altered states offer similar openings — ways of encountering death not as abstraction, but as lived experience. Again and again, what becomes possible is a softening of fear and a deepening of presence.
The Death Sangha brings this inquiry into an ongoing, shared practice.
Developed by EOLPC in collaboration with Rev. Norma Burton, Rabbi Dan Goldblatt, Dr. Rohini Kanniganti, and Dr. David Dansky, Death Sangha a contemplative community devoted to exploring death, consciousness and expanded states of awareness.
Grounded in relationship, reverence, respect, presence, love, and curiosity, the Death Sangha is not about arriving at answers. It is about learning how to be in relationship with death, with life, and with each other.
Who It's For
The Death Sangha is for anyone drawn to sit with these questions honestly — no particular belief, credential, or prior experience required.
Those facing mortality — people living with serious illness, aging, or grief, and those who love and care for them.
Contemplatives & caregivers — hospice and end-of-life workers, chaplains, doulas, and clinicians who sit with death professionally.
The curious & the practicing — anyone exploring meditation, ceremony, or expanded states of consciousness as a way of understanding death.
Weekly Format
The semi-structured format for the weekly online sessions:
A guided meditation or contemplative practice.
A dharma talk — a short teaching or reflection offered to illuminate a theme, pointing toward truth, wisdom, or the nature of reality.
Small group discussions to explore personal experience.
Large group reflections to weave insight and connection.
A Note on This Work
The Death Sangha is a contemplative community. We'll be talking openly about death, dying, and consciousness, and diving into some of the deeper questions of the soul. This kind of reflection can be profound, but it can also bring to the surface material that feels difficult or uncomfortable. Come with self-compassion, go at your own pace, and lean on your own support system alongside this practice as needed.
Facilitators
Facilitators rotate through the schedule below.
Rev. Norma Burton, M.Div in Psychology of Religions and Hospice Chaplaincy. Norma served as pastoral counselor and hospice chaplain for over 30 years. The psychological study of mystical states has been Norma’s field of research, not only with indigenous elders, but also in the realms of academia for her entire career. Steeped in Buddhism, she lived in Japan, and is a pioneer of American Buddhist psychology.
In the early 1990’s Norma created her own Bodhi-shamanic healing program, the Journey to Completion, now practiced all over the world. In 2020 she co-authored the first international training program for facilitators of psychedelic therapy. In 2021 Norma was chosen to serve on the Oregon State Rules Advisory Committee to guide the rollout of psychedelic assisted therapy in that state. Norma has co-authored two books with her daughter, Nisha Burton: Lucid Dreaming, Lucid Living and Psycho-navigating Lucid States of Consciousness.
Rabbi Dan Goldblatt has served as rabbi of Beth Chaim Congregation in Danville, CA since 1993. He has a passion for facilitating the sacred and continues to explore ways to enhance the richness of rituals that bring meaning to all of life’s transitions. Rabbi Dan completed rabbinical studies and was ordained by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, z”tl, ALEPH, and has been a leader of both ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal and OHALAH: Rabbis and Cantors for the Renewal of Judaism.
He co-founded the AriYael Jewish Healing Center with Marc Mazer and Susan Talon Mazer who had lost their beloved son, Ari, earlier that year. Working through his grief over the loss of his wife allowed him to greatly deepen his ability to help others do end of life work, grief work, and expand his lived experience of healing. Rabbi Dan is a trained Spiritual Director and Mikveh Guide and serves on the Board of Wilderness Torah which works to renew earth-based Judaism. Email: [email protected].
Dr. Rohini Kanniganti is a Board-Certified Family Physician who has dedicated over a decade to the sacred terrain of Hospice and Palliative Care. Naturally attuned to a disposition of deep relational warmth, creative playfulness, and an overflow of love, she maps the end-of-life journey not through a clinical lens of subtraction and deficit, but as a masterpiece of absolute Fullness.
As a contemplative teacher bridging the thresholds of end-of-life care and psychedelic-assisted therapies, Dr. Kanniganti offers a radical, relational, and embodied spirituality. Grounded in Vedic, Tantric, and indigenous earth living wisdoms, she illuminates the profound, shared thread running through deep dying, psychedelic states, and near-death experiences: that love is the continuous tissue of reality, we are an unbroken stream unfolding, and death is entirely different from what we have been conditioned to fear.
Crucially, rather than viewing the human transition as a tragedy of depletion, she asks:
“Is death a medical failure, and is a dying person emptying out? Or is their life-force simply gathering back into the threshold of saturation, preparing for the fullness of another magnificent emanation? We may be guaranteed a luminous death no matter what, but can the dying process itself be lived as a beautiful, lifelong journey of waking down into the flesh?”
Her approach is deeply devotional and subversively playful. Guided by the conviction that helping a single being reclaim their intrinsic worth and sovereign meaning can heal and liberate their entire familial system, she reframes the deathbed as a place where the mind, body, and spirit can finally rest into its divinity.
Dr. Kanniganti has been featured on multiple podcasts and serves as the co-facilitator of two vibrant online communities: Cultivating Presence and The Death Sangha. Through her work, she invites clinicians, seekers, and the dying to stop trying to climb out of the human mess, and instead trust the soft animal of the heart-body as it masterfully participates in the dance.
Dr. David Dansky studied Tibetan Buddhist practices for years, graduating in Religious Studies at UC Berkeley before finding his spiritual path in the practice of medicine.
Board-certified in internal and emergency medicine, he trained at UCSF and Northwestern University and served as Assistant Clinical Professor at UCSF for several years before moving to the Monterey Bay Area. He is a physician with more than 35 years of experience using ketamine in both emergency medicine and therapeutic contexts.
Dr. Dansky is the founder of Monterey Integrated Therapies, where he provides ketamine-assisted therapy for chronic pain, mental health, palliative care and end-of-life care. He has given talks on his decades of experience with dying patients in the ER, and their felt experience as they transition. He has lectured nationally on ketamine’s medical and therapeutic uses, co-directed training programs on the use of ketamine with EMDR, and has published in clinical medicine. His teaching integrates decades of bedside experience with practical guidance on protocols, safety, and patient care.
Christine Caldwell is the Founder and Executive Director of End of Life Psychedelic Care (EOLPC), a nonprofit advancing safe, ethical, and spiritually grounded psychedelic care for people facing serious or life-limiting illness. Through professional education, community dialogue, research initiatives including the Psychedelic Deathworker Project, and innovative programs such as the Home-Based Ketamine and Spiritual Care Pilot, EOLPC supports clinicians, doulas, chaplains, and guides working at the intersection of psychedelics and end-of-life care.
Christine completed Psychedelics Today's Vital Therapies and Integration Program and Dr. Rosalind Watts' ACER Integration Program. Earlier in her career, she owned and operated a 250-client home health agency, where witnessing the gaps in care for those aging and dying shaped her commitment to advancing compassionate, meaningful, and dignified end-of-life support.
Schedule
Weekly online gatherings, alternating between Tuesday evenings and Sunday mornings Pacific Time, across four rotations of facilitators.
You are welcome to join at any point during the series and attendance at every session is not required.
Rotation One • Aug 11 – Sep 8
Aug 11 Tue
5:00 – 6:00pm All Facilitators
Aug 16 Sun
10:00 – 11:00am David & Dan
Aug 25 Tue
5:00 – 6:00pm Norma
Aug 30 Sun
10:00 – 11:00am Christine
Sep 8 Tue
5:00 – 6:00pm Rohini
Rotation Two • Sep 13 – Oct 11
Sep 13 Sun
10:00 – 11:00am Norma
Sep 22 Tue
5:00 – 6:00pm David
Sep 27 Sun
10:00 – 11:00am Rohini
Oct 6 Tue
5:00 – 6:00pm Dan
Oct 11 Sun
10:00 – 11:00am Christine
Rotation Three • Oct 20 – Nov 17
Oct 20 Tue
5:00 – 6:00pm David
Oct 25 Sun
10:00 – 11:00am Norma
Nov 3 Tue
5:00 – 6:00pm Dan
Nov 8 Sun
10:00 – 11:00am Rohini
Nov 17 Tue
5:00 – 6:00pm Christine
Rotation Four • Nov 22 – Dec 20
Nov 22 Sun
10:00 – 11:00am Rohini
Dec 1 Tue
5:00 – 6:00pm David
Dec 6 Sun
10:00 – 11:00am Dan
Dec 15 Tue
5:00 – 6:00pm Norma
Dec 20 Sun
10:00 – 11:00am Christine
FAQ
Is there a cost to join?
The Death Sangha is free to join and open to the community.
Do I need any experience with meditation or psychedelics?
No! The sangha welcomes anyone drawn to this inquiry, whether form a contemplative background, a clinical one, a personal loss, or simple curiousity.
Where do sessions take place?
All weekly sessions are held online via Zoom. A link will be sent after registration.
Do I need to attend every week?
Not at all. Join whichever sessions call to you.
Will sessions be recorded?
There will be NO be recordings to respect privacy and the sacredness of the container.
Are there in-person gatherings too?
Yes – We will also host periodic in-person gatherings to explore our relationship to death and dying through expanded states of consciousness. More details coming soon.
Dates
Aug 11 – Dec 20, 2026
Time
Tue 5–6pm & Sun 10–11am PT
Location
Online via Zoom
Price
Free
End of LIfe Psychedelic Care • Death Sangha
eolpc.org