Gary Horvitz facilitates a small, intimate Conscious Illness Support Group online for those seeking to utilize illness to open their hearts and create a more loving approach to living and dying. It typically includes meditation and group discussion.

There’s no expectation that you attend every session. Teachings, stories, and practices will be shared. This online support group will provide an opportunity to gain perspective and engage with illness in new ways.

We meet via Zoom typically on the 2nd and 4th Sunday of each month at 10:00 AM Pacific / 1:00 PM Eastern. If a meeting is not listed on the calendar, it means the group is taking a break on that date. You may drop in any date the group meets.

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“The Illness Support Group is an offering of the Living/Dying Project where we witness wholeness, healing, and humanity in the most generous, tender, and uplifting ways. I received the benefits of this group for more than two years after I contracted a rare life-threatening blood disorder. My own illness, and hearing the stories of others, has brought an abundance of gifts: humility, patience, and learning how to live with uncertainty, with gratitude, humor, compassion and love. Let us meet and grow these gifts together.

Spiritual practice has been central to my life for many years. It has fueled my learning, my practice and considerable writing about transformation, wholeness, and the issues that accompany mortality as it moves to the center of our attention. In 2023-24, I cofacilitated A Year to Live, a course created by Steven Levine, one of the founders of the Conscious Dying movement.  

I will bring the writing of living and dying to this group in the form of poetry, passages and writing exercises that will offer you a chance to explore your own process and to be inspired by others’. The content of each meeting will include meditations, topics for discussion, personal check-ins, and questions for contemplation in a spacious environment of listening and sharing..

All are welcome to come, go, and to stay as you please. Bring yourself, your heart, your truth, and your writing instrument.“
– Gary Horvitz

Bio: Gary Horvitz is a retired medical professional and somatic therapist, a poet and writer, with particular interest in spirituality, crisis and transformation. He is a longtime Buddhist practitioner, a nomad traversing the geographies of culture, spirituality, politics and awakening, a traveler in resonance in this time of extremes. Since contracting a life-threatening illness in 2019, he narrowed his focus to exploring the rewards that come with the proximity of death, doing his best to dance and grieve at the ever-whirling edge of creation and destruction. He has facilitated the year-long course A Year to Live, and swims comfortably  in ancient wisdom and emerging guidance. As Rilke said, ‘Let what batters us become our strength. If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.’ He is the author of Just Passing Through: Reflections on Non-Duality, Impermanence, and Mortality (2023)and the forthcoming, Just This! Reweaving a World in Crisis. He can be found at Spontaneous Presence.