An 8-Week Journey into Death, Continuity, and the Sacred Art of Return

To reimagine death is to remember life.

This journey is an invitation to sit at the edge of the great mystery

to study death not as an ending, but as a mirror reflecting how we have lived, loved, and let go.

Through anthropology, ritual, and breath, we will walk the ancient pathways that reveal death as teacher, as midwife, as continuity.

We will explore how cultures across time have tended to their dead, how grief opens the doorway to grace, and how remembrance can become a form of rebirth.

Join us for two months of ancestral teachings, ritual transmissions, and embodied remembrance—rooted in Mesoamerican death cosmologies, ancestral rites, and the mythic cycles of life and return.

We weave together:

• Comparative anthropology of death and consciousness
• Mesoamerican and Eastern cosmologies of rebirth
• Rituals of grief, beauty, and ancestral continuity
• Somatic breathwork and integration practices
• Academic and spiritual frameworks of impermanence
• The symbolic and spiritual roles of the body, the earth, and the threshold between

This is a return to the intelligence of impermanence—a journey into the sacred art of dying consciously,and in doing so, learning how to live with greater truth, tenderness, and awe.

About your Guide:

Mariana Bandera is an anthropologist of curanderismo, a ceremonial educator, and the founder of Passages, an ecosystem of teachings at the intersection of death studies, Indigenous cosmology, and embodied spirituality. Her research weaves Mesoamerican cosmologies, depth psychology, mythic descent narratives, and earth-based ritual practice.

For the past five years, Mariana has guided the Reimagining Death cohort, a communal journey into death as teacher, threshold, and continuity. Her work bridges the academic and the ancestral—honoring archaeological evidence, oral traditions, and the somatic technologies of breath and prayer as ways of remembering our place in the life–death–life cycle. She walks alongside Mayan daykeepers, midwives, and wisdom keepers, and brings their teachings into a grounded, heart-centered container.

Guest Facilitator Teaser: Tata Búho

Tata Búho Cruz is a Tz’utujil Maya daykeeper, fire tender, and spiritual guide whose life work centers on the ancestral dimensions of time, the underworld, and the continuity of spirit. As a contador del tiempo y fuera del tiempo (timekeeper within and beyond time), he carries profound insight into the cosmology of Xibalba—the realm of ancestors—and how the living may engage the unseen with reverence. His presence brings clarity, humility, and depth to the conversation of death as transition rather than ending.

🌙 Guest Facilitator Teaser: Nana Lucy Culum

Nana Lucy Culum is a K’iche’ Mayan Ajq’ij, midwife, and lineage holder of ancestral healing traditions. Her teachings braid womb memory, fire wisdom, and the energetic pathways that connect the living with their ancestors. With a rare combination of gentleness and precision, she guides communities into deeper relationship with spirit, lineage, and the subtle worlds. Her transmission illuminates death not as rupture, but as return—an ongoing dialogue between generations.