The Birth of This Human
Where Together We Belong
This Human is a public series exploring what it means to be human in the moments that shape us.
It brings together two distinct but deeply connected bodies of work: the Path of the 12 Petalled Lotus and the Centre for Supportive Palliative Education.
One explores human development across the lifespan.
The other brings particular depth to grief, caregiving, serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement.
This Human is where these conversations meet.
Where This Human Began
This Human grew from my experience holding space for the transitions of birth and death—and from the conversations that arise when people find themselves close to these profound thresholds of human life.
Birth and death may appear to stand at opposite ends of life, yet both reveal something essential about being human. Each brings vulnerability, uncertainty, relationship, change, and the need for presence into unmistakable view.
Through years of accompanying people, I began to see that the questions arising near these thresholds were also questions about the whole of life.
How do our earliest experiences begin shaping us?
How do people learn to experience closeness, emotion, and relationship?
How do we adapt before we can understand what is happening?
What do we carry forward through change, grief, and loss?
What has life been asking of us?
It became increasingly difficult to speak about the end of a human life without exploring the life that came before it—and difficult to witness the beginning of life without wondering how a person would continue to be shaped by everything that followed.
This Human grew from that recognition.
How This Human Connects With CSPE
Here within the Centre for Supportive Palliative Education, you are exploring the part of This Human concerned with grief, caregiving, serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement.
CSPE offers thoughtful, non-medical education that helps individuals, families, communities, and those who accompany others better understand, prepare for, and meet these consequential experiences.
Again and again, however, questions arising near the end of life lead back into the life that came before it.
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How This Human Connects With 12PL
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This is where the Path of the 12 Petalled Lotus, or 12PL, enters the conversation.
12PL is a lifespan human-development framework. It explores how early experience, the nervous system, attachment, emotion, adaptation, relationship, identity, caregiving, grief, belonging, aging, and change participate in who a person becomes over time.
Through This Human, CSPE’s depth around grief and end of life can be understood within the wider context of an entire human life.Â
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Why These Bodies of Work Belong Together
12PL and CSPE have different areas of focus, but they are connected by the same human life.
12PL helps us understand how people develop, adapt, relate, and make meaning across a lifetime.
CSPE helps us understand and accompany the experiences that arise through grief, caregiving, serious illness, dying, and death.
The person approaching the end of life is the same person who has lived an entire human story.
The people gathered around them bring their own histories, relationships, adaptations, losses, and ways of coping.
The capacities involved in accompanying one another through dying and grief—connection, awareness, emotional understanding, steadiness, empathy, and care—develop throughout life.
This Human allows us to explore those connections.
What This Human Holds
This Human brings the lived experience of being human into open conversation.
It explores:
how experience shapes us before we understand it
how we develop through connection and relationship
how people adapt to life
how emotion, identity, and belonging unfold
how we care for one another in vulnerable moments
how grief and loss move through a human life
how we make meaning from what life asks of us
what becomes visible as life approaches its end
Some conversations will arise primarily through 12PL. Others will come through CSPE. Many will reveal why both perspectives matter.
The This Human Series
For now, This Human unfolds through three shared public spaces:
YouTube
Conversations and teaching that bring human development and lived experience into view.
<This Human Way>
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Substack
Reflective writing that brings experience into language—where stories, questions, and ideas can be explored more deeply.
<This Human Library>
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Podcast
Conversations about the quieter layers of being human—what we feel, carry, live through, and make meaning of beneath the surface.
Link Coming Soon
These shared channels offer one place to follow the public conversation while 12PL and CSPE continue offering their own distinct educational programs.
The Intention Behind This Human
This Human exists to make understanding human life more accessible, relatable, and real.
It is a place to recognize ourselves within human experience.
To understand one another differently.
To bring language to experiences that are often difficult to explain.
To deepen how we relate, accompany, and care.
And to strengthen the sense that, even within lives that unfold very differently, none of us stands entirely outside the human story.
One Human Experience
Human life does not divide neatly into separate subjects.
How we develop shapes how we relate.
How we relate shapes how we care.
What we have experienced shapes how we meet change and loss.
And the way we have lived becomes part of how we approach dying, death, and the meaning of our lives.
This Human holds these experiences as parts of one continuous human journey.
Not because there is one correct way to be human, but because understanding more about the human journey may help us meet ourselves, one another, and the moments that matter most with greater awareness and care.
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