Workshops for Celebrants: Continuing Professional Development

10:00 – 13:30
at Natural Endings, Todmorden
£60 (to book tickets click here)

Want to know how to maximise your vocal potential, reach hearts AND minds and make a ceremony truely memorable? Come to this workshop specifically created for funeral celebrants who would like to further develop their voice and non-verbal delivery skills and confidence.

Course content:

• Warm up activities for Mind, Body, Voice
•  The Breath – supporting the voice
•  The vocal warmup
•  Deeper connection to both language and silence and awareness of their impact

At the end of the course attendees will be able to:

• Project their voice to suit a variety of ceremonies and buildings, indoors and outside
• Use their own body language to greater effect
• Deliver poetry and readings with more feeling

Beth Allen is daughter of teacher and Minister and now trainee Shaman…with a degree in singing, a postgraduate in music therapy and an MA in spoken voice this really is Beth’s area of special interest. Working creatively as a Vocal Practitioner she has worked for extensively for Manchester Business School and Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, and has been working with large scale community voice for Manchester International Fest every other year since 2013. She now specialises in outdoor voice.

Beth is also available for for one-to-one voice coach sessions. Working with her expertise to try things out and get specific feedback on personal areas to develop. Appointments made with her directly through her website.

To book tickets click here

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One day workshop led by Alexandra Derwen
Participatory co-creation of death and funeral ritual

Monday 14th of September 2026
09:30 – 16:30
at Natural Endings, Todmorden
£95 (to book tickets click here)

Alexandra will talk about the why and the how of ceremony within the context of death and dying. Speaking about the conventional form of a modern funeral from a celebrant’s perspective before that limited formulaic approach is then unpacked.
The re-wilding of ceremony is about a return to circles within communities with the ceremonialist facilitating rather than reading a script from a pulpit.

This day is for existing celebrants wishing to deepen and refresh their work, prospective celebrants wishing to learn and to anyone who feels called to a ceremonial life filled with meaning. This day will support anyone who wishes to be a “servant of ceremony” whether that is publicly or for their own personal growth.

Alexandra Derwen is the founder and director of a social enterprise dedicated to community education and development in the field of death, dying and grief, Sacred Circle CIC which offer the Journey with Death doula preparation courses. Author of the Lost Rites trilogy of books (Ceremony and Ritual for Death and Dying, Community of Grief and Ancestral Landscape) Alexandra travels far and wide teaching and speaking on the importance of good death rites and collective mourning practices. Poet and intuative speaker Alexandra weaves story, imagery and life experience together in deep service, of the living and the dead. A lamenter and keener, Alexandra works with the soundscape of Grief as a force for community cohesion, repair and peace. They are based in Eryri (Snowdonia) in North Wales but work all over the world.

To book tickets click here