Trainer Shelby Kirillin: Highly Experienced and Always Learning
by INELDA
Trainer Shelby Kirillin: Highly Experienced and Always Learning
by Garrett Drew Ellis
Compassion, empathy, kindness, and benevolence are the necessary underlying characteristics of a good end-of-life doula. When you couple that with intellect, business savvy, education, and a commitment to not only the end-of-life field but to the empowerment and education of other doulas, you get Shelby Kirillin, who epitomizes what it means to companion the dying.
INELDA has been blessed to have had Shelby as a trainer and consultant for several years. Recently, she has been integral in the education and support of our newer trainers. Her private practice demonstrates how doulas can teach and work in both the corporate and private sectors.
Teaching and the Doula Road
After 22 years of nursing, Shelby completed the EOL doula training with INELDA in 2016 and went on to receive her certification. “While my nursing experience affords me the medical knowledge and understanding of the symptoms I see, the deeper part that I wasn’t even aware of when I started this work was how much nursing taught me about staying close and present with my clients and families yet able to maintain a healthy boundary,” says Shelby. “I have sat with so many families during their worst nightmare as a trauma nurse and have felt those intense emotions. To be resilient in this type of nursing, you have to develop skills to genuinely empathize with another yet not take on their experience as your own. I had to let go of the ‘solve it’ mentality that modern medicine teaches us.”
A year after training with INELDA, Shelby became a trainer with INELDA. Her time as an educator has allowed her to provide information, education, and encouragement to a new wave of death doulas who are providing services in their individual communities.
Her love of acquiring knowledge was a natural transition to teaching others. She remembers vividly a meeting 12 years ago with someone who wanted to change the way we “labor death.” She believed that there must be another way, one contrary to the standard practices that surround death culture and hospice in America.
Shelby’s teaching philosophy comes out of a genuine belief in the collective intelligence of the people around her. She loves being around like-minded individuals and finds energy and synergy from both sharing her knowledge with aspiring death doulas, and learning from the wealth of experience they bring to the table.
In her approach to training, Shelby brings a balance of the clinical and the philosophical. Her nursing experience grounds her in the structured and concrete, but she recognizes that there are nuances and intricacies to what it means to “show up” in more spiritual and emotional ways as a doula. She is accessible to her students and is willing to share both the knowledge she has received in her clinical, on-the-job training regarding death, as well as her understanding of the ethereal and matters in the realm of the unknown.
“I love sharing the knowledge that my experiences and education have given me to help others show up in the conscious dying movement,” says Shelby. “I love helping others see their gifts and how that can translate into supporting the dying. Many people can get stuck in the weeds and worry that they don’t have the skills to be a doula.”
She chose to show up as a teacher in partnership with INELDA because when she was looking for an initial training, INELDA’s blend of structure and spirituality-based approaches, coupled with the clinical social work background of co-founder Henry Fersko-Weiss, made it feel like the place she had been looking for. INELDA was a place where she could leverage her clinical experience while exploring the spiritual nuances of end-of-life work. Eventually, as a trainer, she would be even more equipped to teach both sides of this important work.
A Peaceful Passing
When it came to the business of being a doula, Shelby felt unprepared when she first started out. She finally dug in through her own motivation and determination. She believed that if people needed support at the end of life, they would find her one way or another. “The universe,” she says, “was very good at setting in place what needed to be set.”
She received mentoring from seasoned doulas and started to share her elevator pitch with friends and family. She added “End-of-Life Doula” to her email signature, spawning interest by way of people asking her what that was. Eventually word-of-mouth marketing became the biggest asset to her business growth.
Additionally, Shelby believes that when doulas pigeonhole themselves into what they think a doula should do, they limit their possibilities and their vision of what their potential business could look like. She encourages doulas to think outside of the box, consider specialties, and really explore what is possible. She has provided income for herself through a model that mixes traditional clients with speaking engagements and other creative services.
Today, Shelby is the founder and president of A Peaceful Passing, concentrated in the area of Richmond, Virginia, where she works in tandem with a partner and co-doula. Shelby continues to teach multiple trainings a year with INELDA, as well as supporting and mentoring newer trainers and new doulas. In her private practice, she continues to balance home and family life with supporting clients through their death experiences.
“I learn something from every client that I work with,” Shelby says. “One that sticks out is the importance of talking about expectations around death and dying. I worked with my client for months. We did legacy work, vigil planning, and life review. She labored death for longer than she expected. During a moment of lucidity, she conveyed how disappointed she was that it was taking so long. She thought that because we had ‘checked all the boxes’ that she wouldn’t linger. I realized at that moment I wouldn’t ever miss an opportunity with another client to talk about what they expect to happen, and to educate them that laboring death isn’t a science.”
Shelby’s deepest desire is that by the time she dies, her life’s work has led to a transformation in the way we culturally view and experience death. She wants to “work herself out of a job” and return death education to all peoples, as was the tradition hundreds and thousands of years ago. She wants to build a practice that death doulas behind her can pick up after she is gone, passing a torch that extends far beyond the reach of physical death. As she reminds others, “Teaching others that sitting with the dying takes the skills that we all have as humans. We are meeting a human experience with our own humanity.”