Natural Burial Talk

Earth-loving options for your body’s final act
a talk with Julia Hartsell
Noon-1pm
in the Earth Care Tent

We are so excited to offer programming this year that honors our three event pillars: Mental Wellness, Earth Care & Community Connection. We hope you will review the program (coming soon) and enjoy some of the talented speakers, workshops & sessions we’ve planned for you, including the Natural Burial Talk!

Natural and green burials offer options to express our care for the earth, even in death. Additionally, they open doorways to community-driven care with a personal, intimate, non-dogmatic, pragmatic and spiritual approach to returning to the earth and the mystery. 

In this hour talk, Julia Hartsell, co-Founder of Heartward Sanctuary, will discuss natural and green burial options as alternatives to conventional burial and cremation that allow us to return the death and dying process to communal care. Topics include: the burial process, state laws, harms of conventional burial and embalming, home funerals and customizing end-of-life rituals.  

Please bring your heart and curiosity. There will be time for Q&A. 

Meet the Facilitator: Julia Hartsell

Julia co-founded Heartward Sanctuary, an arts-based temple grounds and natural burial site, where she facilitates community rituals like the weekly Temple Dancewave. She supports individuals through various life transitions as a trained Ancestral Lineage Healing Practitioner, Death Doula, and Home Funeral Guide.

With a wish to return to the earth naturally with rituals that feel aligned and meaningful for her, Julia set out to establish a natural burial site and to learn how to tend the bodies of her loved ones between death and burial at home. These intentions guided her and her partner to the land where they tend grave gardens atop the remains of beloved human and canine friends. 

Julia currently resides at Heartward Sanctuary in Silk Hope, traditional lands of the Shakori, Sissipihaw and Catawba tribes, with her human and animal family, including a wake of black vultures.