Something led you to this page.
Maybe a quiet restlessness you can't quite name. A life that looks beautiful from the outside and still, somehow, feels empty. There’s a whisper you can't quite silence… is this really it?
Or maybe life cracked you open — a loss, a heartbreak, an ending — and you're standing in a place you never asked to be, wondering who you are now. Where do I go from here?
Hi, I'm Emily.
To sit with the discomfort of not knowing.
To enter the rooms inside you that you've kept dark.
To face what society fears most…
Death.
I know, because death taught me everything I know about living.
However you arrived, I want you to know…that ache you're feeling? The one you've likely been trying to avoid? It’s actually an invitation.
Let me tell you the story...
It started on a golden San Diego beach in June 2017. My toddler wobbling across the shore, face covered in sand, my husband Ian smiling ear to ear — when one phone call changed everything.
Uveal melanoma. At 30, Ian was diagnosed with terminal cancer...
THE PHONE CALL
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It started on a golden San Diego beach in June 2017. My toddler wobbling across the shore, face covered in sand, my husband Ian smiling ear to ear — when one phone call changed everything.
Uveal melanoma. At 30, Ian was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
THE PHONE CALL
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Ian's death was devastating. It was also a doorway.
Within a few years, I'd built a grief coaching practice, hosted sold-out retreats, written a book, landed TV appearances, even launched a clothing line! I had everything I'd dreamed of. But inside? I felt numb...
THE POPSICLE
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MY STORY
It started on a golden San Diego beach in June 2017. My toddler wobbling across the shore, face covered in sand, my husband Ian smiling ear to ear — when one phone call changed everything.
Uveal melanoma. At 30, Ian was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
THE PHONE CALL
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How could a dying man be more alive than me?
That question became the foundation of everything I do now. I stopped avoiding death and started engaging with it daily — as a practice, an anchor, a mirror. I wrote my own obituary...
THE MEDICINE
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Suddenly the future we imagined — growing old together, walking our daughter down the aisle, meeting our unborn son — was uncertain. Would he have ten years? Five? One?
So instead of waiting for answers we couldn't control, we started fully living right away. We quit our jobs, moved closer to family, booked the bucket-list trip, and savored sunrises, cuddles, popsicles, and the magic in the mundane. We made memories imprinted on my bones, so that when he passed away fifteen months later, he could go in peace, with no regrets.
At 32, I became a widow and solo mom to two toddlers.
Ian's death was tragic.
In those early years, I was angry, anxious, and at times completely numb. Workouts became my lifeline — the one place I could move the grief through my body. But I still felt utterly alone, navigating the life we'd built together… without him.
I found reprieve in writing. I'd pour my heart out onto the keyboard late at night, and eventually I started sharing it online.
Much to my surprise, it reached hundreds of thousands of people — grievers who wrote back saying how seen and inspired they felt by my story. My grief had become a bridge to others. And slowly, my loss stopped being only a tragedy and started becoming a source of purpose.
Ian's death was devastating. It was also a doorway.
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Glued to my phone, chasing relevance, missing my own kids — running on the fear of not being enough. What had once been driven by the depths of my heart had turned into an endless quest for more.
Then, on an ordinary morning walk, a flashback stopped me in my tracks…
Ian on our back deck, one month before he died. Body frail, features sunken — but his spirit radiant. Eyes closed, rocking in his chair, popsicle in hand, savoring every last drop. Dripping with life.
That's when it hit me.
There was Ian, content, satiated, full of life …and dying.
And then me, on my walk, miserable, stressed out …and alive.
How could a dying man be more alive than me?
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I contemplated living with a terminal diagnosis. I journeyed to the end of my life in a deathbed visualization. And very quickly, I started noticing the shifts.
I slowed down and savored more. I was more present with my kids. I still pursued my ambitions and fulfilling work — but not at the cost of my aliveness.
I realized that facing death was the fastest way to start fully living.
Then I wondered if others could achieve this transformation without going through the same tragedy I did. Do you need a loss to learn how to live?
So I took my tools, practices, and frameworks to develop what I call “Death Medicine” and started sharing them with my community. And after every wake-up call, death ceremony, and visualization, clients would leave with clarity on what mattered, motivation to act, and gratitude for the gift of simply being alive.
That's when I knew:
Death isn't something to fear, or a conversation to save for the end of life. It's the greatest clarifier, motivator, and amplifier of magic and aliveness — available to everyone, right now.
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"Let us prepare our minds as if we'd come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing."
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Death Medicine is the practice of using your mortality now to access the clarity, courage, and reverence for life that changes how you think, what you believe, how you act and how you decide to spend your finite time here.
It's also the practice of dying while you're alive — shedding the identities, beliefs, and chapters you've outgrown, and alchemizing what's heavy or ended into gold.
The archetypal nature of death is releasing and letting go — stripping away until you remember what you always knew and forgot: life is finite, you're already whole, love and essence were underneath the patterns all along
WHAT IS DEATH MEDICINE?
Why it works when nothing else has:
Ernest Becker argued in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death that beneath all human striving is one primal fear — death — and that our worldviews, belief systems, and systems of self-worth are simply the psyche's way of keeping that terror at bay. Every limiting belief, every fear of failure, rejection, or not being enough all trace back to that single root.
Which means the mindset work, the productivity systems, the manifestation courses — they all work on the branches. Death works at the root. Face the root fear, and the smaller ones lose their grip all at once.
Death Medicine is built on a framework I call the Triangle of Aliveness: three sides, activated by death awareness at the center.
My Signature Framework
The Triangle of Aliveness:
This sits at the center because it activates everything else. Facing your mortality deepens appreciation for life, clarifies what truly matters, and turns impermanence into motivation. It also unlocks the archetypal wisdom of death: that endings aren't a full stop, but the seeds of transformation.
DEATH AWARENESS
Accepting that your time is finite and fragile deepens gratitude for simply being alive. It awakens awe and wonder and cultivates inner abundance, so you can stop chasing it outside yourself and feel full from the sunrise, your breath, the people you love.
Appreciation for Life
Knowing who you are and moving from that place. Living from love over lack, essence over ego, soul over society, while bringing honest awareness to the beliefs, fears, and patterns holding you back.
Aligned Action
Taking what's heavy or dark (endings, heartbreak, disappointment) and transmuting it for growth. Because dying is a practice: the shedding, releasing, and letting go that's key to our evolution. There's always a lesson, a redirect, or a breakthrough on the other side.
Alchemy
From that center, three sides:
I apply this framework across everything I offer — a continuous cycle of death and rebirth, individually and collectively.
The medicine comes alive through practice. Like any muscle, your capacity to live with the end in mind has to be strengthened, because the denial of death runs deep, and it's easy to slip back into autopilot living. That's why nothing I offer is a one-and-done fix. My work gives you a space to return to; to remember, again and again.
It's also why so much of it happens in community circles. Death is a jarring topic — most of us can't bring it up at the dinner table without feeling like the black sheep. So I create spaces safe enough to soften your defenses, honest enough to go deep, and warm enough that you're held through the shedding. When you watch others face their fears and go for their dreams, the courage becomes contagious.
Inside these containers, I use exercises, visualizations, and frameworks that bring your mortality close enough to see your life clearly — and invite you to sit with the questions most of us spend a lifetime avoiding:
THE PRACTICE
What is the meaning of life?
What is the point?
Am I actually living MY life … or someone else’s?
Then I hold the space for the transformation to unfold — through ceremony, retreats, and year-long journeys like The Bucket LIFE.
And here's the most promising part: there's nothing to attain.
Most work asks you to get somewhere — manifest it, achieve it, become the upgraded you. This asks the opposite. What you're looking for is already here, underneath everything you built on top of it.
You just have to stop looking past it.
"You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I didn’t choose this work. It came for me on a beach in San Diego, fifteen months in and out of hospitals, lying beside my husband's lifeless body, learning to navigate the life we built together… alone — and everything death taught me on the other side.
Lived experience gave me the visceral wisdom to facilitate this depth of transformation. But I've also spent years training in the traditions and modalities that let me deliver this medicine with skill:
→ Certified Grief Educator — trained under David Kessler, one of the world's foremost grief experts
→ Certified Dharma & Spiritual Life Coach — through the Highest Self Institute, helping people uncover who they are and what they came here to do
→ Certified Temple Guide — through 13 Moon Mystery School, trained in holding sacred space, ceremony, ritual, and rites of passage
→ Priestess Mentorship — 1:1 with Elayne Kalila Doughty, ordained priestess and founder of Priestess Presence Mystery School + Temple
My work lives at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern psychology. I weave the medicine wheel (an indigenous framework blending the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical realms) together with evidence-based approaches like Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing and Visualization (neuro-plastic reprogramming). So whether you speak the language of ceremony or the language of science – there's a bridge here for you.
I'm not here for quick fixes, mindset hacks, or cute frameworks. I've trained deeply to facilitate honest inquiry and hold space for transformation at the core. And the work is never done — including mine. I'm constantly investing in my own growth, sharpening my ability to guide others through the very territory I've lived.
My Approach
WHO I WORK WITH
People seeking deeper meaning who have outgrown the script — or watched life burn it up for them.
⟫ You achieved it all and still feel empty. Is this really it?
⟫ You're watching time speed up and wondering if this life is actually yours. Whose script have I been following?
⟫ You're standing in the ashes of a life that ended. Who am I now?
Different doorways. Same room. And the same way through.
Reverence for life. After watching someone lose the privilege of simply being here, I can't unsee the gift in every ordinary day. This work is rooted in treating life — yours, mine, all of it — as sacred.
Your truth, not a script. There is no one way to live, no single moral code, no dogma here. We all have a divine design, just like everything in the natural world — and my job is to help you find yours, not hand you mine.
Everyone belongs. All backgrounds, all beliefs, all worldviews. You don't need to be spiritual, religious, or anything in particular to do this work. If you have a beating heart and the willingness to look, there's space for you here.
The full range. We live in a universe of duality — dark and light, grief and gratitude, death and life. I don't do spiritual bypassing. The lows get honored here just like the highs, because aliveness lives in holding it all.
Love over lack. When you act from love, you look out for others and serve something bigger than yourself. This work always points toward essence over ego, soul over society, cooperation over hierarchy.
What I Stand For
Author of Love & Grief — on finding healing, purpose, and meaning after loss
Credentials & Press
Host of the Death & Disco podcast
Featured on Good Morning America
300,000+ followers and writing that's reached millions
Founder of moveTHRU Grief coaching practice that has served hundreds of clients
Ready for your own wake-up call?
You've read my story. Now it's time to look at yours — from the end.
The Wake-Up Call is a private, live-guided journey to the end of your life and back. You'll walk away with deathbed clarity on what matters, what needs to shift, and what you want to do with the time you have left.
You don't need a loss to learn how to live. You just need the willingness to look.