Honoring Our Founder, Tarron Estes

The Conscious Dying Institute was founded in the vision and spirit of Tarron Estes, whose life’s work has been devoted to restoring death to its sacred place within human experience. Her teachings, presence, and devotion to conscious dying continue to guide the heart of this institute. We honor her legacy by carrying forward the values she embodies everyday—reverence for life’s thresholds, compassion for the dying and grieving, and deep trust in the wisdom that emerges when we meet mortality with courage and love. Through our education, rituals, and community, her work continues..

Death is not only an ending—it is a profound instructor.

In a culture that treats death as failure or enemy, at CDI, we choose to listen instead. Death teaches through impermanence, inviting us into humility, presence, and truth. It strips away pretense and reveals what matters. It asks us to slow down, to feel, to attend.

As a teacher, death offers no abstractions. Its lessons are embodied, relational, and immediate. Through dying—our own and those we accompany—we learn how to stay when we want to flee, how to love without grasping, how to speak honestly, and how to rest into mystery without needing answers.

For practitioners, death becomes a living classroom. Each ritual, each vigil, each breath teaches discernment and reverence. We learn when to act and when to be still. Death teaches us how to accompany without control, how to serve without fixing.

To walk with death is to be apprenticed by it.

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Earth as Witness

The Earth holds all dying.

Before there were institutions, before there were diagnoses, before there were words for grief, there was soil receiving bodies, water carrying ashes, fire releasing breath, and wind bearing prayers. The Earth has always known how to hold death.

As witness, the Earth does not rush or avert her gaze. She receives decay and transformation without judgment. She teaches us that dying is not separate from living, but part of an ongoing cycle of return and renewal. 

When we situate dying within an earth-honoring frame, death is restored to relationship. Bodies return to soil. Grief moves like weather. Memory becomes landscape. Ritual becomes a way of listening to the land and the ancestors who dwell within it.

For practitioners, the Earth offers grounding, orientation, and scale. She reminds us that we are not alone in this work, and that the weight we carry is held within something much larger.  She witnesses our care, our devotion, our fatigue and our grief.  

Executive Board

  • CHAIR: Kelly Cummings, PhD

    Kelly Cummings, PhD is a death doula, conscious dying educator and coach, experienced health professional, yoga teacher, and sacred breathwork facilitator who walks gently with others at life’s thresholds. Rooted in the principles of the Conscious Dying Institute, her work honors death as teacher, presence as medicine, and the dying journey as a sacred return to wholeness. Through compassionate guidance and embodied practice, she serves both the living and the dying with reverence, grace, and deep listening.

    Her personal philosophy flows in harmony with the principles of the Conscious Dying Institute: honoring death as sacred, cultivating presence over fear, and restoring the dying process to its rightful place within the beauty, mystery, and continuity of life. Through her teaching and service, Kelly serves both the living and the dying, helping each remember that every breath, every ending, and every threshold holds the potential for awakening. 

  • TREASURER: Jay Cook

    Jay Cook is a retired financial executive with extensive experience in retail financial roles.   

    James “Jay” Cook received his Bachelor of Science degree in Social Planning from Cornell University and his MBA at the University of Chicago with a focus on Finance and Accounting. Jay is a successful Finance executive who has worked at major US corporations, including The Quaker Oats Company, Sears, AutoZone, Lowe’s, and most recently at Belk.

    Jay is a member of the Graceland University Board of Trustees and the Chair of the Business Services Committee, and Treasurer as well as a High Priest and Bishop in the Community of Christ where he has held a number of financial and leadership roles.

  • SECRETARY: Christina L. Vair, PhD

    Christina L. Vair, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist who walks the path of healing with deep reverence for the wisdom of aging and the human spirit.  She earned her doctorate in Clinical Psychology with an emphasis in Geropsychology from the University of Colorado and has devoted her career to serving Veterans, their families and caregivers through the Department of Veteran Affairs.  Her work weaves together science and soul, blending behavioral medicine with integrative healing arts such as mindfulness, meditation, clinical hypnosis, biofeedback and yoga.  Guided by a commitment to wholeness, equity and compassionate presence, she brings a grounded, heart-centered approach to healing, education and transformation.

  • OFFICER: Mary Ann Boe

    Mary Ann Boe is an end-of-life doula, grief companion, and sacred community weaver devoted to nurturing compassionate presence at the thresholds of life, loss, and transformation. As co-founder of the Journey Guide Project, she partners with clinicians to bring story, connection, and mind-body wisdom into healthcare—tending the places modern medicine often leaves untouched. Her path of service was shaped through 14 years of caring for her son, Déva, whose medical fragility and boundless love became her greatest teacher, opening her heart to a lifelong devotion to gentle, transformative care.

  • OFFICER: Mitzy D. Flores

    Mitzy D. Flores is a nurse, end-of-life doula, educator, and contemplative practitioner who tends the sacred space where healing, meaning, and dying meet. Her work is grounded in caring science, trauma-aware practice, and a reverence for the nervous system and the subtle field of connection that holds us all. Her doctoral work focused and continues to concentrate on medical and cultural anthropology.

    As faculty with the Conscious Dying Institute, she brings decades of experience in nursing education and leadership, weaving together gentle inner practices, holistic wisdom, and embodied presence. Her teaching invites caregivers and students alike into deeper awareness, compassionate accompaniment, and a more conscious way of walking with others through life’s thresholds.

Together: A Living Practice To say

Death as Teacher.

Earth as Witness.

is to name a way of being.

It is a commitment to learning from mortality rather than resisting it, and to remembering that all dying happens within a living world that can hold it. This orientation shapes how we educate, how we accompany, and how we ritualize.

At the Conscious Dying Institute, this teaching grounds our curriculum, our ceremonies, and our community life. We form practitioners who are not only skilled, but initiated—rooted in humility, guided by reverence, and supported by the wisdom of the Earth herself.

 honoring death as a teacher

 

Thank you for your interest. Reach out to us today.

 
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