Embracing Life’s Invitation: Learning to live fully in the presence of death, aging, and change
Live as if this were the last moment you had.
“Don’t Wait” is not about urgency or productivity. It’s about dropping the fantasy of later—later health, later energy, later permission.
Embracing Life’s Invitation is a contemplative and experiential workshop grounded in the invitation of Don’t Wait — not as urgency, productivity, or self-improvement, but as a gentle and honest practice of telling the truth about time, change, and what genuinely nourishes us now.
“Don’t wait” here does not mean do more. It means listen more closely. It means noticing where we’ve been postponing life — our vitality, our truth, our rest, our alignment — in the hope that later will feel easier, clearer, or more permissible.
This workshop is rooted in Carley’s immersive study with Frank Ostaseski through his One Year to Live course, her participation in retreats on conscious dying, and her long-standing Buddhist practice — particularly the Five Recollections, which point directly to impermanence, embodiment, and freedom.
Together, we explore what becomes possible when we release the fantasy of “later”:
● later health
● later energy
● later permission
● later alignment
When we acknowledge that everything we love will change — and that life may not unfold as we once imagined — we are invited into a deeper honesty with time, capacity, and choice.
This workshop creates spaciousness to gently recognize and grieve what has already shifted: our stamina, our imagined futures, our identities, and the versions of ourselves we once assumed would always be available.
Rather than rushing, fixing, or pathologizing this process, we meet these tender places with compassion and care — allowing grief to become a doorway to presence, not something to overcome.
Through guided reflection, somatic practices, and mindfulness, we explore how the wisdom of aging, death, and impermanence — held gently and without fear — can clarify our priorities, deepen presence, and support a more intentional way of living.
At the heart of this work is a simple, powerful inquiry we will sit with together:
Given what has already changed — and what will continue to change — how do I want to live now?
If you feel the quiet nudge of “not later”…
If something in you is ready to listen more closely…
You are warmly invited.
You will leave with:
● An embodied understanding of “Don’t Wait” as a way of living — rooted in honesty, tenderness, and presence rather than striving or urgency
● Practical contemplative and somatic practices to meet impermanence, grief, and transition with self-compassion
● A clear intention and living vision for what comes next — a felt sense of how to bring this wisdom into your days, your choices, and the life that is asking to be lived now
