Kenneth J Breniman

Author, Grief Guide & Unapologetic Apeologist

Kenneth J. ("Ken") Breniman is an award-winning queer author, licensed clinical social worker, certified yoga therapist, thanatologist, and New York Times–featured death doula. For more than two decades, he has helped people navigate grief, change, and the complicated privilege of being alive. His work brings clinical experience, humane curiosity, and well-timed humor to a serious question: How do we care for ourselves, each other, and a world that rarely follows the treatment plan?

A self-described “elder in training,” Ken has been actively expanding his work beyond the therapy room through writing, film, sound, teaching, and conservation. His LGBTQ+ advocacy in Japan in the early 1990s helped shape his enduring commitment to belonging. He is proud to have been part of those pioneering efforts, helping lay the groundwork for the movement toward marriage equality. Today, he draws on applied primatology, Celtic wisdom, yoga therapy, and psychedelic integration, approaching healing as both a personal practice and a shared responsibility. He brings experience to the conversation – and plenty left to learn. Ken currently teaches Psychedelics in Thanatology as an adjunct professor at Marian University in Wisconsin, USA. His studies with ICEERS in Spain and End-of-Life Psychedelic Care in the United States inform his approach to psychedelic education, grief, and compassionate care.

Ken is also a veteran naked yoga teacher of more than 20 years, Ken invites humanity to recover some sanity around the human body. His teaching challenges inherited shame, puritanical attitudes, and rigid either-or thinking, making room for self-acceptance, play, and connection. He also asks what might come after Homo sapiens. His imaginative vision is Homo animus: a heart-and-soul-centered APE(x) species whose greatness lies in its capacity to care. For this unapologetic apeologist, opposable thumbs are an excellent start; wisdom still takes practice.

These questions animate the Keniverse, his growing collection of books, films, and creative collaborations. His work includes Subversive Acts of Humanity, with an expanded second edition underway, and the multiple-award-winning queer science-fiction novel a three body solution, whose completed screenplay awaits a visionary filmmaker. He is also developing suicide-prevention and self-help writing for the reluctant mortal, alongside the See-Soul illustrated death-education series, helping children and their grown-ups find words for loss, love, and living.

His award-winning stop-motion short, Primates, Privilege & Possibility, carries that spirit onto the film-festival circuit, with a companion live-action documentary in development. He is returning to Borneo for a three-month working sabbatical to support frontline orangutan care and learn alongside the people protecting our endangered Ape-Kin. Kinship, in his view, is best practiced with sleeves rolled up. Introducing singing bowls to Chimp Haven in the USA and Matang Wildlife Centre in Malaysia, Ken explores sound as auditory enrichment for apes living in sanctuaries and zoos: a meeting of contemplative practice, animal care, and the art of listening across species.

Within his Celtic and animist spiritual practice, Ken honors Dr. Jane Goodall as one of his ancestral guides – a beloved teacher who gifted the world a legacy of HOPE grounded in care, curiosity, and action. He seeks to carry that legacy forward through what he calls NEO-HOPE: facing the realities of our time and turning our best intentions into purposeful action. It begins with humility, grows through community, and takes shape in the daily choices through which we care for one another and the living world.

Through Mindfully Mortal and the Keniverse, Ken uses edutainment – education with imagination, humor, and heart – to help people dream more, dread less, and turn empathy into action. His signature KENergy makes room for grief and delight, conviction and curiosity, with an invitation at its center: “Neo Hope: evolution gave us the upper hand. Now how can we use our hands to lift one another?”