Death Cafe

In-person | $1-$15 Sliding scale or enroll for free, use promo code FREE.

We appreciate advance registration.

Join Leslie for a Death Cafe at Integral Yoga Institute in San Francisco. At a Death Cafe people, often strangers, gather to eat cookies, drink tea and discuss death.

What is Death Cafe?
It is a group discussion about death with the topics determined by attendees, with no agenda, objectives or themes. It is a discussion group rather than a grief support or counselling session. The objective is ‘to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives’.

Death Cafes are always offered:

  • On a not for profit basis, donation based
  • In an accessible, respectful and confidential space
  • With no intention of leading people to any conclusion, product or course of action.

You can learn more about Death Cafe

Leslie has taken a deep dive into death and dying after losing a long time student to uterine cancer. She has had a 30 year obsession with Savasana which is the last pose done in a yoga class and is translated as “corpse” pose. She is very interested in the intersection of how yoga, breathwork and intentional savasana can help people become more comfortable with the inevitable end we all must face. Leslie Howard has taught folks yoga for the last 30 years and has recently completed sixty hours of End Of Life Training and is a hospice volunteer at Kaiser.


Leslie Howard is an Oakland-based yoga teacher, specializing in all things pelvic. She leads workshops and trainings nationally and has written a book about caring for the female pelvis, Pelvic Liberation. In 2022, after losing a long time student, she took a deep dive into the subject of death. She has 60 hours of Death Doula training, runs a regular Death Café (a place to come and talk about death) and is volunteering in hospice for Kaiser Oakland. Her teaching is informed by over 3500 hours of yoga study with senior Iyengar yoga teachers. She considers Ramanand Patel her most important influence and mentor. She has designed two very successful studies for UCSF on how to use yoga to alleviate incontinence and pelvic pain. To learn more about Leslie or for some online education opportunities visit:lesliehowardyoga.com

2025-03-29T00:34:06-07:00March 28th, 2025|Tags: , , , |

The Last Savasana: Yoga, Breathwork and Inquiry to Help Prepare You for the Final Exit

Online or in-person
$62 Early bird, use promo code LAST, exp. 5/10
$72 Regular

Please register in advance; a Zoom link will be emailed 1 hour before the session, or join Zoom directly via your Momence dashboard.

We appreciate advance registration.

Join Leslie and Richard for a deep dive into Savasana with a twist. Most of us spend our days trying to extend our lives, i.e. looking both ways before crossing a street, putting our seatbelt on and checking expiration dates on our food. Nonetheless, nothing we do, not even yoga, can help us escape life’s inevitable end. Yoga can help prepare us to face our fear of the inevitable, maybe even embrace it so that we come to appreciate the preciousness of each day we are alive.

• Find a renewed appreciation for the beauty of our time on the planet
• Increase personal agency around end of life decisions
• Delve deep on what really matters to you
• Realize a new perspective on a very old pose and how it can help you
be more comfortable with the inevitable

Yoga is meant to bring us more awareness and gives us tools to manage the challenges of being human. This workshop is designed to manage the anxiety we all have around dying and to be more comfortable with these types of conversations.

There will be a short lecture on the history, practice, symbolic message of this often misunderstood pose. Then we will do a series of short practices with a savasana. Each practice will begin with a thought provoking question around your own death, like what are some of your regrets in life, or what do you want your legacy to be, who am I. After each practice, you will be given time to journal about each question. We’ll conclude with a group discussion and of course a final (FOR THIS WORKSHOP) savasana.

Leslie and Richard have been talking about the power of savasana for a long time. They got the idea to do a whole book about it and to include some of the teaching of yoga around accepting death. This workshop is a result of many hours of conversation and we hope to pull it all together for a book before we die!


Leslie Howard is an Oakland-based yoga teacher, specializing in all things pelvic. She leads workshops and trainings nationally and has written a book about caring for the female pelvis, Pelvic Liberation. In 2022, after losing a long time student, she took a deep dive into the subject of death. She has 60 hours of Death Doula training, runs a regular Death Café (a place to come and talk about death) and is volunteering in hospice for Kaiser Oakland. Her teaching is informed by over 3500 hours of yoga study with senior Iyengar yoga teachers. She considers Ramanand Patel her most important influence and mentor. She has designed two very successful studies for UCSF on how to use yoga to alleviate incontinence and pelvic pain. To learn more about Leslie or for some online education opportunities visit: www.lesliehowardyoga.com

Richard Rosen, E-RYT500, began his practice of yoga in 1980 at the Yoga Room, in Berkeley, CA. Two years later he began a two-year teacher training course at the B.K.S. Iyengar Yoga Institute in San Francisco, from which he graduated in 1983. In 1987, with his good friend Rodney Yee, he opened the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, CA, which operated until 2012. Richard has written numerous articles and reviews for national yoga magazines, and is also the author of five books, four of them published by Shambhala: The Yoga of Breath (2002), Pranayama: Beyond the Fundamentals (2006), Original Yoga (2012), a book on traditional yoga practice based on the seventeenth century Gheranda Samhita (Gheranda’s Compilation), and Yoga FAQ: Almost Everything You Need to Know about Yoga–from Asanas to Yamas (2017). His fifth book for Shambhala, Yoga by the Numbers, is due out in the Spring of 2022. Richard lives in a 115-year-old bungalow in beautiful Berkeley, CA.

Death Cafe

In-person | $1-$15 | Enroll for free, use promo code FREE.

Please review our In-person Safety Guidelines.

Join Leslie for a Death Cafe at Integral Yoga Institute in San Francisco. At a Death Cafe people, often strangers, gather to eat cookies, drink tea and discuss death.

What is Death Cafe?
It is a group discussion about death with the topics determined by attendees, with no agenda, objectives or themes. It is a discussion group rather than a grief support or counseling session. The objective is ‘to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives’.

Death Cafes are always offered:

  • On a not for profit basis, donation based
  • In an accessible, respectful and confidential space
  • With no intention of leading people to any conclusion, product or course of action.

Learn more at Death Cafe.


Avi Rose, MSW has been involved with LGBT causes for decades. He managed the pioneering AIDS program at S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services in the 1980s, has served as the executive director of a national HIV information and advocacy organization, and has worked extensively to bring LGBT and HIV/AIDS issues to the attention of faith communities. He served as Executive Director of Jewish Family and Community Services East Bay for 15 years, retiring in 2021. And he has continued his dedication to Jewish spiritual practice as a spiritual director at Kehilla Community Synagogue for more than 30 years. He is currently honored to serve as an end-of-life doula.

2025-01-31T15:15:01-08:00October 30th, 2024|Tags: , , , , |
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