About Us

Be Ceremonial is what we wished we’d had access to during times of transition and loss. We want to empower people with a ceremonial framework that inspires creativity when it comes to ritual design. 

Who We Are​

Our Story

We are a husband and wife team who stumbled into ceremony after years of recurrent miscarriages and the death of a parent. We didn’t know how to grieve the seemingly invisible moments that surrounded our experience, especially since we don’t prescribe to a set religion or spiritual philosophy. 

We decided to craft our own rituals to acknowledge our grief in ways that felt meaningful to us. We told our story through ceremony, and then decided to make these tools available and accessible to anyone seeking ceremony.

Our Vision

Our vision is to help people reimagine the role of ritual and ceremony in their lives by offering them lots of rituals to choose from so they are empowered to create their own ceremonies to acknowledge a milestone or moment of transition they are facing.

Megan Sheldon, Co-Founder & CEO​

Megan Sheldon, Co-Founder & CEO

Megan Sheldon is the co-founder of Be Ceremonial, the world’s first guided ritual and ceremony app. Megan is a cultural mythologist, humanist celebrant, and end-of-life doula living and working in North Vancouver, BC. She has created ceremonies for people around the world, focusing on what she calls the ‘seemingly invisible moments of change’, such as pregnancy loss, organ transplantation, menopause, and marking death anniversaries.
 
She is passionate about shifting the narratives that surround death, dying and grief and recently hosted The Death Talk with 3 other deathcare professionals. Megan offers online workshops, virtual courses, and seasonal retreats on Bowen Island, BC. When she’s not crafting ceremonies, you can find her swimming in the sea or meandering in the rainforest with her husband Johan, two daughters, and their aging dog Kona.

Johan Hoglund, Co-Founder & CTO

Johan Hoglund (he/his) is an entrepreneur and software engineer, originally from Sweden. After working for over a decade in the corporate world, he was drawn to the innovation and creativity of the startup world. He’s a problem solver and is passionate about creating systems to better understand and address how we interact with technology.

After losing his father, he realized how important it is to mark both the big moments in life as well as the smaller, less visible ones. It’s the small moments that define the life we lead, and it’s how we share those experiences that define our legacy. He’s passionate about #slowtechnology and believes that technology is an instrument that can help us create the life we want.

Johan Hoglund, Co-Founder & CTO​

Our Team

Kate Love, Director of Learning​

Kate Love, Director of Learning

Kate is a Registered Psychotherapist and a former Life & Loss Coach who supports people in grief. With a background in social work, she has a passion for deep conversations around how we care for ourselves so that we can take care of others. As our Director of Learning, Kate helps develop our courses, weaving in her therapeutic knowledge surrounding mental health and emotional regulation. 

Ali Heibert, Ceremony Consultant​

Ali Heibert, Ceremony Consultant

Ali is an embodiment coach and transplant advocate living in Northern Alberta, Canada. Born with a rare, genetic illness, Ali has spent her entire life navigating the medical system. She is helping Be Ceremonial develop rituals and ceremonies surrounding health and wellness, with a focus on transplantation.

Samantha Tsui, Content Creator​

Samantha Tsui, Content Creator

Samantha is a communications and marketing professional based out of Vancouver, BC. Sam believes that all milestones in life deserve to be honoured. Passionate about wellness and storytelling, her goal is to empower individuals with the tools to create authentic and meaningful rituals and ceremonies as we navigate this interesting journey called life together.
Nathan Brigham, Video Production​

Nathan Brigham, Video Production

Nathan is a filmmaker, designer and distance runner living in North Vancouver, BC. He specializes in creating short-form video, and has skills across the production spectrum. He helps us create our video walkthroughs and is helping us develop our interactive Learning Environment coming in 2024!

Our Circle of Advisors

We’re fortunate to have an amazing circle of advisors surrounding our vision. These are only a few of the phenomenal people who helped make Be Ceremonial what it is today:

Emily is a Funeral Director and End of Life Educator with DeathcareBC. She is an advocate for community-led deathcare and has set out to transform the way we approach death, dying, and grief in our society.

Nicole leads Graceful Fusion and is both a birth and death doula, and a Labor & Delivery and Hospice Nurse. She facilitates birth doula workshops and trains nursing students for Johns Hopkins University’s Birth Companions Program.

The End of Life Doula Association of Canada has been a source of connection and support for us as we aim to shift society narratives surrounding death, dying, and grief. Thank you to the Board and all the members who have continued to support us in our efforts to make end of life rituals more accessible to those in need. 

The International Death Doula Network has been a champion of our work in the end of life space, amplifying our voice and sharing our rituals with their community. We are humbled to be part of such a diverse and intentional community of death doulas and end of. life educators. 

“We are all able to craft our own rituals. Humankind has always crafted ritual to mark special events, moments, and places. With the advent of urbanization, we became removed from this creative process as institutions took over.”