Taught Online Via Zoom

Meets Biweekly: Thursdays, November 14 and 21, December 5 and 19, 2024, January 2 and 16, 2025
7 - 9 pm ET (New York City Time) (Final class may run over to accommodate student presentations)
$165 Paid Patreon Members / $185 General Admission

* Discount code for the instructor’s book Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life in the Morbid Anatomy webstore soon after registration (only available for US addresses). 

* See the related TEDx talk of the instructor here.

Talking about death is often deemed morbid, or even taboo. But not long ago, contemplation of death was widely used as a powerful tool for countering fear, putting the difficulties of life in perspective, and helping one live according to their higher values. Now scientists, psychologists, and spiritual leaders agree—it’s key to living a life with meaning. 

This class—based on the new book Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life—will lead you on a twelve-week program to befriend death in your own way. Filled with lessons learned across cultures and with the help of insightful prompts and questions, this class aims to help you both come to terms with what death means and to live alongside it without fear.

Over six sessions spread over twelve weeks, we will explore—via illustrated lectures, readings, class discussion, exercises, and journal prompts—some of the ways people have approached, imagined and even celebrated death in many times and places. We will work on excavating—and clarifying—our own personal understanding of death, and uncovering our own authentic values that can serve as the basis of a full, rich life with the fewest deathbed regrets.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung asserted the importance of developing our own conscious myth about death, our own set of meaningful beliefs. Over the course of this class, you will be invited to apply what we have learned in order to formulate your own myth of death. You will also be invited to create your own personal memento mori—an object, artwork or practice meant, in a useful, life-enhancing way!—to remind you of the finitude of life, as a means of encouraging you to live the life you really want before it’s too late.

Whether you're currently experiencing grief or loss, facing your own mortality, or simply seeking a deeper understanding of the profound mysteries of existence, this class will offer useful insights to help you navigate your life with courage, resilience, and meaning. And even more: by learning to live with our fear of death, we also learn to live with our fear of that which we cannot control, to sit with the mystery at the heart of life and still appreciate, with joy, the life we have been given.

Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, photographer and graphic designer. She is the founder and creative director of Morbid Anatomy. Her books include Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human AnatomyandDeath: A Graveside Companion. You can watch her Tedx Talk--Death as You've Never Seen it Before--here.