Emberlight: Center for Conscious Living & Dying

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Emberlight: Center for Conscious Living & Dying

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Emberlight is a nonprofit center for conscious living and dying. Community-centered end-of-life care, death doula education, and grief support. Asheville, NC

Donor-supported residential care is provided at no cost to those in their final weeks of life. The Founder of CCLD, , is featured in the new documentary film . CCLD has a vision for death, dying, and grief that involves greater community involvement and connection to the mystery of this season of life. Death is a mirror in which our own lives are reflected. VISION:
To nurture a community that celebrates the sacredness and creativity of the human spirit, honors diversity in its many forms, and dignifies the final stages of life. MISSION:
To facilitate the collective shift towards an integrated approach to death, dying and grief through education, community support and contemplation.

10/06/2026

An Evening with Stephen Jenkinson
Author of Trembling, Still: The Awful Clarity of a Mind in Eclipse

Wednesday, Oct 7th
Kittredge Theatre, Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa
Doors 6:30 pm • Conversation 7:00- 9:00 pm • Book Signing until 9:30 pm

The threshold of death is not the enemy of living but its teacher, and the way we meet our mortality shapes how we meet everything else. Written in real time through his first year with Parkinson's, Jenkinson writes in Trembling, Still about what it means to tremble and still stay present, to be broken and still be whole.

Kimberly Ann Johnson, who sat beside him through much of that year writes:

"Trembling, Still is a profound and intimate invitation into the heart of what it means to be human in the face of the unknown. Stephen's honesty, his tenderness, and his fierce commitment to truth are a gift to us all. This is not a book to read quickly; it is a book to sit with, to let rearrange you."

This Wednesday, Stephen and Kimberly help us slow down and share heart to heart. Hosted by Aditi Sethi, hospice physician and Emberlight's founder, with a book signing to follow.

Pay What You Can. All proceeds support Emberlight: Center for Conscious Living & Dying.

Tickets almost sold out, gets yours here:
https://www.emberlightway.org/events-1/trembling-still-the-awful-clarity-of-a-mind-in-eclipse

09/29/2026

For decades, Stephen Jenkinson taught people how to die wise.

Then, in January 2024, the diagnosis was his. Join us on October 7th to hear what this journey was like, from the inside.

Stephen spent his life at the bedsides of dying people and their families. He directed palliative care at a Toronto hospital. He wrote Die Wise. He became, for many of us, the voice we turned to when death came close.

Then came Parkinson's. And the man so many had leaned on had to discover whether any of it would hold when it was his own mind, his own hands, his own days.

Trembling, Still is what he wrote in that first year, in real time, with no idea how the story would end. Much of it was written in the home of his friend Kimberly Ann Johnson.

On Wednesday, October 7, the two of them sit down together and look back at that year from where they stand now. What held. What fell away. What cannot be taught from a distance.

Most of us will one day stand where Stephen stood, or beside someone we love who does. This is a rare chance to hear, plainly and in person, what that is actually like.

Hosted by Aditi Sethi, hospice physician and Emberlight's founder, with a book signing to follow.

Wednesday, October 7
Kittredge Theatre, Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa
Doors 6:30 pm.
Conversation 7:00 to 9:00 pm.
Book signing until 9:30 pm.

Pay What You Can. All proceeds support Emberlight: Center for Conscious Living & Dying

09/24/2026

Ethan Sisser asked us a question we couldn't put down: Does dying have to be a solitary experience? What if what we call dying can be a communal experience?

That question became Emberlight.

If you've watched The Last Ecstatic Days, walked our campus on a tour, or simply kept reading our newsletter month after month, you've already been part of this story. We're grateful for that.

This fall, we're opening membership to everyone who has stayed close, however that closeness has looked. It's a way to say, formally, that this matters to you, and that you want to be counted among those who hold it.

Become a Member and join the circle. https://www.emberlightway.org/member

09/19/2026

Does dying have to be a solitary experience?

That question started Emberlight. We've spent years building an answer, in a home in Swannanoa where people are cared for through their last breath, free of charge.

This fall, we're inviting you to become part of that answer, as a member. https://www.emberlightway.org/member

Walk with us on this path of love and service?

08/30/2026

There are challenges in a life that no amount of wanting will change.

And in the same hour, there is sun or there is rain. There is your own body, doing its quiet work. There is something growing outside the window.

Gratitude does not ask that the hard thing resolve first. It asks that we notice what else is here.

Kathryn Brewer, who wrote this reflection for us, calls that the door to the love that awaits.

How has Emberlight gifted you with moments of awe or gratitude?

Awe and Gratitude lives within Respect for All Beings, one of our four guiding values. Read more here https://www.emberlightway.org/post/emberlight-2026-2027-values-series-awe-gratitude

Photo Credit: IG

08/23/2026

Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that "the beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe."

Think of a time you felt it. What happened in your body, in your heart?

Awe is not only something we feel. It is a way of perceiving, one that returns dignity to whatever it touches.

Awe and Gratitude lives within Respect for All Beings, one of our four guiding values. Read the full reflection at https://www.emberlightway.org/post/emberlight-2026-2027-values-series-awe-gratitude

08/21/2026

"One last glorious burst of living."

That is how one of our residents described her final weeks.

Not a decline. Not a waiting room. A burst.

She was on hospice the whole time. Her nurses came, her pain was managed, her medical care never stopped. What her hospice team could not bring was the rest of it: the volunteers who stayed through the night because they wanted to be there, the games, the music, the bodywork, the mountains outside the window, her people close by.

Dying did not ask her to withdraw from the life of a community. It let her stay in it.

The whole range of human emotions is welcome here at Emberlight. Grief and delight sit down together, often in the same hour.

Learn more about how it all coexists together in "What Is Hospice and How Is Emberlight Different?" on our blog.

https://www.emberlightway.org/post/the-embers-that-light-our-way-in-june -kqi2j7664

08/18/2026

Compassion is not reserved only for the person in the bed.

It is equally needed for the people gathered around the bed.

Each week, our direct care volunteers gather in Care Circle. Not because anyone has the answers. They gather to celebrate, to grieve, to question, to listen, and sometimes to repair.

Michael Sigmann, three years a volunteer here, writes that the threshold transforms everyone who gathers around it. It reveals tenderness and courage. It also reveals impatience, uncertainty, and the places within us still asking to be healed.

None of this is meant to be carried alone.

His full reflection is on our blog at https://www.emberlightway.org/post/when-love-community-and-service-meet

08/16/2026

Obon ends with fire.

After several days of welcome, families in Japan light farewell fires and float lanterns onto the water, seeing their dead off across whatever it is that divides them from us. Then the following summer, they do it again.

What holds our attention here is the repetition. Obon does not assume grief finishes. It builds a return into the calendar, a season set aside each year for the dead to be named and fed and danced for.

Most of us were not raised that way. We were raised to grieve once, quietly, and then resume.

Obon is observed across most of Japan, closing today. And this year we are noticing what it knows, the wisdom of this practice.

What would you keep a season for?

Photo Credit: Nipino

Address

83 Sanctuary Road
Swannanoa, NC
28778

Telephone

+18282730528

Website

https://linktr.ee/emberlightway

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