ABOUT EMBERLIGHT
Emberlight is a nonprofit organization rooted in the belief that dying is not a medical failure, it is a human passage, one that deserves to be met in a loving way, with presence, care, and community.
Emberlight: Center for Conscious LIving & Dying was founded to restore what modern culture has largely forgotten: that death, like birth, is meant to be held, not managed, by people in relationship with one another.
At Emberlight, individuals approaching the end of life are supported in a home-like setting at no cost, surrounded by loving care, attentive presence, and a volunteer community committed to walking alongside them. Families are welcomed, grief is honored, and no one is asked to face this threshold without love.
As interest in conscious, community-supported death care has grown, Emberlight has emerged as a living model, one rooted in love, presence, and service. Our work embraces death as a natural and sacred part of life and holds a vision that invites a deeper awakening to what it means to care for one another, especially at life’s most meaningful thresholds.
OUR NAME
Emberlight speaks to both continuity and illumination.
An ember carries warmth long after a fire has burned low. It is tended, protected, and shared. Light reveals what is already present, guiding us without force or certainty.
Together, Emberlight names the essence of our work:
the ember of love we tend together, and the light of awareness that guides us through life, death, and the mystery in between.
While our name has evolved, our mission is steadfast. Emberlight continues to offer the same loving care, grounded in the same values, relationships, and commitments that have always defined our work.
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HOW WE CARE
Emberlight offers community-centered end-of-life care that honors the whole person – body, heart,
mind, and spirit.
Our approach is grounded in:
- Loving presence, rather than fixing or prolonging
- Community support, rather than isolation
- Respect for individual choice, meaning, and belief
- Honoring grief and remembrance as essential parts of care
We believe that when death is met with honesty, tenderness, and companionship, it can become a profound teacher, revealing what matters most and deepening our capacity to love.
Vision
We imagine a world where Every One Awakens to the Power of Love and Service.
Mission
Every Day We Practice Ways to Embrace Death and Support One Another With Loving Presence.
Vision to Reality: A Community for End-of-Life Care
This video shares the voices of residents, family members, and volunteers who serve at Emberlight. Many speak with heartfelt emotion about what it means to show up for one another at the end of life. Their reflections reveal how love, presence, and service shape the deeply human experience we share here.
Values
~Respect for All Beings~
Wholehearted Acceptance
Reciprocity
Awe & Gratitude
~Curiosity~
Embracing the Unknown
Adaptability & Resourcefulness
Creativity
~Mutual Accountability~
Personal Responsibility
Transparency
Courage
~Loving Presence~
Deep Listening
Compassion
Bearing Witness
Our Team
Aditi Sethi, MD
Dr. Aditi Sethi is a hospice and palliative care physician, end-of-life doula, and musician. Featured in the forthcoming film The Last Ecstatic Days, Aditi is an emerging and important voice for shifting our culture’s understanding and approach to dying, death, and bereavement care.
Executive Director & Vision Steward
aditi@emberlightway.org
Sandra Diaz
Sandra brings over 20 years of leadership support, team management, and balancing attention to detail with big picture thinking. She believes in the importance of embodiment practices, spiritual growth, community building, and civic engagement.
Coming to us from Boone, NC, she has supported community well-being across a wide range of settings, including at the Boone UU Fellowship, Neighborhood Yoga studio, and most recently at Bounty & Soul, where she served as Volunteer Manager. Additional community roles have included organizing the High Country Movement Collective and Whispering Waters Sangha, as well as teaching physical yoga.
Sandra is particularly passionate about Emberlight's desire to transform dominant culture through attending to and honoring death, dying, and grief.
Operational Weaver
sandra@emberlightway.org
Jenna Lindbo
Jenna Lindbo brings a wealth of creativity and heart to her role as Director of Volunteer Engagement at Emberlight. A seasoned musician, facilitator, and community builder, Jenna has dedicated her career to inspiring connection through music, storytelling, and innovative retreat experiences. Her unique background—from touring musician to co-facilitator of creative retreats—enables her to engage volunteers in meaningful, transformative ways, making her an invaluable asset to our community. A colleague described her perfectly, “…Jenna connects with people with genuineness and joy. She is thoughtful, intentional, compassionate, and dare I say—a truly magical human being.”
Director of Volunteer Engagement
jenna@emberlightway.org
Chelsea Trinka
Abundance Steward & Integrative Systems Architect
chelsea@emberlightway.org
Chelsea joins Emberlight following 15 years of entrepreneurship, during which she founded and operated a technology company providing sales, marketing, and support services to hundreds of small businesses. Her deep experience in systems management and business process brings ease and flow to all areas of technology, operations, and fundraising.
Her focus as Integrative Systems Architect at Emberlight is building resilient technology systems centered on people and purpose first. She also works across development and prosperity-building to support and execute fundraising strategy and campaigns throughout the year. She is ecstatic to be contributing her energy and expertise to a heart-centered mission that creates more community and connection in the world.
In addition to her business skills, Chelsea is a yoga-dharma instructor, somatic mindfulness guide, and mermaid at heart. She can be found practicing asanas in the wild or floating in the waves when she is not at the Sanctuary.
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Hayden Lilien
Hayden Lilien is an attorney, mediator, and finance professional. She has spent 15 years running the finance, H.R., and operations departments of growing nonprofit organizations. She also has a private mediation practice where she supports individuals, couples, and groups in navigating divorce or separation. She believes that bridging understanding during conflict deepens connection and builds community.
Financial Strategist
hayden@emberlightway.org
Elder Council
Holds the heart and spirit of the community: Stewardship of values, culture, and relational harmony
Greg Lathrop
Greg is registered as RN-Retired in North Carolina. At age 15, he experienced what he thought would be the moment of his immediate death. The transpersonal, mystical state-of-being he experienced transformed his perspective of consciousness and guided his choices regarding his “work” in this life. Accordingly, his more than 40 years’ nursing experience has included serving within various healthcare realms: acute care, critical care, emergency care, air-medical transport, hospice, and integrative healthcare. Coinciding with his nursing practice, he was invited into a Traditional indigenous Medicine apprenticeship, following his Teacher Will Rockingbear for more than 13 years until Rockingbear's crossing. He is now recognized as a Medicine Elder in the Way of traditional healing. An embodiment of these teachings he received from his Teacher is..."I would prefer that you don't just take care of me. I would rather that you Love me."
Prema Sheerin
Prema Sheerin is a healer, life coach, spiritual mentor, and teacher who draws on 40 years of wisdom training with elders from cultures around the world including the Vedic and Wixarika shamanic traditions. Prema tends to those facing their own death as well as to those grieving all kinds of loss. She is an ancestral lineage healing practitioner, which includes bringing support and wellbeing to recently-departed souls as well as to those long gone. Prema brings care, curiosity and compassion to those experiencing any of death’s many facets. You can find her at premasheerin.com.
Emberlight Board/Governance Council
Stewards of the organization itself, overseeing its structure, accountability, and sustainability.
Linda Solomon - President
Linda Solomon is a Marriage and Family Therapist, Parenting Coordinator and Mediator. In her 35 years of private practice in Dallas, Texas, she specialized in working with conflict in personal and business relationships. She has had the great honor to travel to many countries in the world training others in her area of expertise. She has recently retired and still enjoys mentoring others in her field. She moved to Asheville 7 years ago and knew immediately she had found her home.
She has served on several profit and non-profit boards and is grateful for the experience of working with people with many different opinions, outlooks and problem-solving abilities.
Linda has experienced the many gifts that Emberlight offers to someone who is dying, and his family, first-hand. Her loved one, David, spent his last 13 days of life at Emberlight being surrounded by loving volunteers. She credits all of them, and Dr. Aditi Sethi, with “holding her up” during this difficult transition. That experience was life changing for her and helped her move past a fear of death and, instead, embrace it as another step in the journey.
Jackie Dobrinska - Secretary
Jackie Dobrinska is an educator, spiritual leader, and wellness professional with over 20 years of experience. Currently serving as the Director of Education & Community for Ram Dass' Love, Serve, Remember Foundation, Jackie develops and facilitates programming that brings people together internationally to explore personal growth, transformation, and spiritual truths.
Ordained as an inter-spiritual minister by Jubilee! Community, Jackie integrates a wide range of spiritual traditions into her work, including Christian Mysticism, Bhakti, Female Spirituality, and Buddhism. Her diverse expertise spans Yoga (500-E RYT), Ayurveda, Mindfulness Meditation, holistic breathwork, and Western Herbalism. Jackie has led workshops and facilitated programs at renowned institutions such as Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, Yoga International, South College, Lawrence University, The Pearl Institute, and Mission Hospital, where she combines her holistic approach with deep spiritual teachings.
Committed to guiding individuals on their personal and spiritual journeys, Jackie empowers them to live with purpose, authenticity, and a greater sense of connection to themselves and the world around them.
Mary Euler - Treasurer
Mary Euler lives in Asheville with her husband, Curt, and twin eighteen-year-old sons, Isaac and Will. Mary has practiced law for more than 30 years in North Carolina with the last 25 years in Asheville with McGuire, Wood & Bissette, P.A. She concentrates her practice in wills, trusts, powers of attorney and other fiduciary and estate matters. She has served on several nonprofit boards and currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Board of Directors for Local Cloth, Inc. Mary has a steady and calm problem-solving approach. Personally and professionally, Mary has seen the immense comfort that can come when we accept our mortality fearlessly and make plans for the end of our physical life.
Jennifer Hough
Jennifer Hough (pronounced HUFF), the author of UNSTUCK: The Physics of Getting Out of Your Own Way, a #1 international bestseller in eight countries, is a renowned speaker, CEO of The Wide Awakening, and an expert in Scientuality, bridging the gap between science and spirituality.
Jennifer’s gift of holographic vision allows her to see what’s in your way and provide efficient steps that harness the laws of physics to give permanent lasting results, enabling you to fall in love with the life you are living. Her experiential programs (Advanced Guidance) and global community (Agents of Awakening), are designed to fast-track your dreams and help you embody a Thriving Operating System so you’re living in flow. Jennifer helps visionary leaders find meaning and fulfillment in life, having spoken in Fortune 500 companies (Royal Bank, Procter & Gamble, KFC), Schools of Medicine (MD, ND, Chiropractic) and National Associations (Nursing, Speakers, Incontinence, HR), on stages in India, Thailand, Australia, Slovakia, England, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Peru, Costa Rica, Bali, Canada and the USA.
With decades of experience educating doctors (MDs, NDs and DCs), teachers, CEOs and Associations (Nurses, NDs, HR, Native American) in the physics of flow through her program, Get Out of Your Own Way™️️, Jennifer finds great joy in guiding her clients on an experiential journey using everyday physics, positively shifting their ability to flourish in business, health and abundance. Jennifer is a founding member of the Evolutionary Business Council, and ran the largest Nutrition Practice in Canada for 10 years. Visit TheWideAwakening.com for more information.
Frank Marshall
Frank Marshall lives with his wife and two daughters in Asheville, NC and is a native of the Appalachian Mountains. He attended UNC Chapel Hill and lived in various locations until coming back to the mountains in 2001. With a background in sales, marketing and public affairs he has been involved with various startups over the years, the most recent being FLS Energy, a utility scale solar developer based in Asheville. Frank comes to Emberlight with a deep respect for the hospice process, having both of his parents spending their final days at a care facility in his hometown. When learning of Emberlight he realized how much of a deeper and healing experience that process could have been for his own loved ones. He has a passion for the emerging acceptance of alternative forms of treatment for trauma and ptsd and looks forward to those treatments becoming an accepted part of end of life care.
Ron Riffel
Ronald, a retired social worker, lives in Black Mountain with his wife Carla. His career included directing two mental health centers and a psychotherapy practice. He has served on numerous nonprofit boards. His career being mainly in Colorado made settling in the mountains of NC an easy choice. He has had a long term interest in mysticism and death and dying as a portal to transformation.
Prashant Goel
Prashant works in service of healing-centered systems and culture change. He has held board and leadership roles in trauma healing and social reform organizations, including Somatic Experiencing International, Inner Science, and NARM. His background spans C-level strategy consulting and UN systems-change work. His practice is informed by advanced degrees in law, business, and regenerative economics; formal initiation in three wisdom lineages; long-term contemplative practice; and life and work experience across more than 60 countries.
Professional certifications include Somatic Experiencing Professional (SEP), NARM Level 2, Collective Trauma Facilitation, Systemic Constellations, Leadership Circle, Immunity to Change, and advanced training in Dialogue, Mindfulness, Coaching, Team Development, and Systems Thinking.
Advisory Council
Offers input around Emberlight’s long-term vision, growth, culture, and emerging possibilities, while helping us remain deeply rooted in the values at the heart of this work.
David Case
Sacred Real Estate Advisor
David brings decades of experience in site selection, valuation, zoning, and permitting to Emberlight. He played a pivotal role in helping secure and shape the property that became Emberlight’s home, approaching the process with patience, discernment, and a deep respect for the vision of this community. David now offers his expertise to Emberlight’s leadership and to other communities seeking to create places of care rooted in intimacy, hospitality, and community.
Joel Karabo Elliott
Creative Advisor & Rites of Passage Ambassador
Joel’s relationship with Emberlight began as a volunteer in 2022 and deepened through his work as Artist in Residence. A musician, sound doula, and spiritual companion, Joel brings creativity, culture, and a deep understanding of rites of passage to Emberlight’s work. Through his music, teaching, and relationships with communities around the world, he helps carry Emberlight’s vision outward while bringing new inspiration back home.
Terry Finder
Culture & Transformation Advisor
Terry’s relationship with Emberlight began through her own training as a death doula and her experience of the transformative power of loving presence. With decades of experience helping organizations discover and express their authentic voice, she played an important role in Emberlight’s evolution from CCLD to Emberlight. As an advisor, Terry helps leadership tend the culture, relationships, and values that make Emberlight’s care distinctive, while cultivating connections with people and communities beyond Emberlight who share a commitment to more loving ways of living and dying.
"My son, Ethan, was blessed to be taken care of by this community who came together to care for him 24 hours a day for 15 days. I have never witnessed so much love and caring. Food, music, massage, acupuncture and healing touch were all provided. Since I am from NY I did not have anyone here and this community became my family. Ethan said when he was transferred from an inpatient hospice to a home, that he found his community. He was so grateful for all who helped him transition. I can still see his joy coming out of the ambulance to be with a loving community at the end stage. We are eternally grateful for all who helped!"
~ Linda Rothman