The Doctor Turned Zen Nun Who’d Be at Peace Dying Tonight | Sister Dang

Hey, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier podcast, I'm your host, Dan Harris. One of the things that I both love and resent about Buddhism is that the practices, many of them are really designed to help you face some hard truths about the fact that you are going to get older and get sick and eventually die, and that is true for everybody you know and love. The idea, as far as I understand it, is that it's less stressful to face these hard truths directly than it is to kind of spend your life ducking and weaving and denying and dissociating, et cetera. And I buy that. However, I do also find that facing them head on is sometimes really sad and scary. So I was really interested when I heard that one of my favorite longtime repeat guests, Sister Dung Nghiem, a.k.a. Sister D, had written a whole book on this subject. For those of you who don't know Sister D, she's a medical doctor and a Zen Buddhist nun. She practices in Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village tradition. She's the author of five books, including her newest, which is called Live Beautifully, Die Beautifully. Sister D, welcome back to the show. Good to see you. Hello, dear friends. Congratulations on your new book. I'm just curious, why did you want to write about this? I faced loss and death since a child. My brother and I, we didn't know our father. At the age of 12, my mother disappeared, and we have never found her body since. I came to the United States at the age of 17, and soon after that, my grandmother died. So pretty much those very important people in my life passed away when I was quite young. My partner died in a drowning accident when I just finished medical school. I was 31 years old then. So in that way, my whole life, I have faced loss and death. It was excruciatingly painful. I didn't know how to embrace loss and death. So on the path of practice, I have learned that death doesn't have to be a painful thing, and that includes old age, sickness, separation from our loved ones. We can learn to live beautifully and die beautifully each day, because death doesn't take place just when we stop our respiration, but death takes place every day. So I wrote this book from my direct experience, and in Vietnamese, there's a saying, it's from ruoc gang phao phoi. It means my intestines, my liver, and my lungs, because I have lived through this. So I write this, and I hope to benefit many people, young and not so young. Your life story is, and you just told it in brief, and those who want to hear more about it can go back and listen to some of our prior conversations. I'll put some links to our prior conversations in the show notes for anybody who wants to go deeper. But your personal story is remarkable, and even more remarkable from my POV is how you've used it to help other people. You have structured the book around the five daily remembrances. Maybe can you just walk us through what are the five daily remembrances, and why did the Buddha think they were so important? These five remembrances were practiced from the time of the Buddha. The monks and nuns practiced them daily by going to the charnel ground to look at corpses. And then in our Zen tradition, we also contemplate on this daily. We even have guided meditations for this. So briefly, the five remembrances are to help us face one of those deepest human fears. The first one is that we are of the nature to grow old, and there is no way to escape. The second remembrance is that we are of the nature to be ill, and there is no way to escape it. The third remembrance is that we are of the nature to die, and there's no way to escape. The fourth remembrance is that we are of the nature to be separated from all those we love and cherish, and there is no escape from that. And the fifth remembrance is that our actions are our true continuation now and into the future. Sometimes the way that fifth remembrance is articulated is our actions are our only true possessions in a world where everything's changing all the time. The closest we can come to a true possession is the kind of jet stream of our actions. People hearing this for the first time, or even those who are like me hearing it for the 1,000th time, might have the reaction, well, this seems deeply unpleasant. As a Buddhist teacher of mine sometimes jokes, the Buddhists really know how to party. So I'm just wondering, why would anybody want to put themselves through these five daily remembrances, which as the Buddha recommended, you should go through them twice a day? What's the upside? These remembrances are deeply unpleasant to most of us because we don't want to remember that these are our true nature, that these phenomena take place every single millisecond in our daily life. So if it's something so natural, and it happens constantly like that, but we don't face it, then it's actually not facing it, it's the denial of it that causes us angst, anxiety, and displeasure. The more we run away from it, the more fear, anxiety, and displeasure we experience. It's just like people with Hansen's disease or leprosy. So the bacteria destroy their motor nerves and also their sensory nerves, so they don't feel it. And so when they hit their hands on a table or on a hard object, and it causes this open wound, they don't feel the pain, and so they don't address it, they're not aware of it. But when we feel that there is an injury, even if it's very mild, and we take care of it immediately, then it doesn't have to fester. So in that way, life is that way. When we are not aware or we deny the truth that we are growing old, that our body is becoming weaker, or being sick, or that we are dying, then it is like denying what's really there. So then we don't really take good care of it until the final stage, and then we are forced to confront a very harsh reality. So the practice helps us to familiarize these natural aspects of our life, to befriend these aspects of our lives, to embrace them, and to make the best of them. And I can say to you that being a mindfulness practitioner, although I don't have the title of a doctor, I don't have the luxury of living the high-style life, my life is very simple, and yet I feel at peace with myself, with the nature of my own body. And I'm not afraid. I can say confidently that if today I'm diagnosed with cancer, or if tonight I'm going to die, I feel at peace with it, because I live with it each day, and I make the best of it. So I don't have the kind of regrets that many of my patients faced, that I witnessed in them, that when they face a severe diagnosis or death, they get very frightened, and mostly because they have so much unfinished business. They didn't take care of their relationships, of the many things that were important to them. If things were to end abruptly, they didn't take care of that. We live as if we live forever, and then when we die, we die as if we've never lived. Let me say that back to you. We live as if we're going to live forever. That part I understand, because none of us wants to think about the fact that life is finite. And then you said the second part is we die as if we've never lived. What do you mean by that? We die as if we've never lived, because we don't face these aspects of our lives. So we live quite superficially. We may pursue the things that aren't that important to us, because we feel we have all the time in the world. So we'll waste a lot of time on the things we do daily, the relationships that are not nurturing, that are not healthy activities, that are not really meaningful to us. And that is why when we die, death comes as if it's so sudden. So it's a surprise to us, and then we regret having not lived our lives really. If you're a regular listener of this show, you know that we're always adding amazing new teachers and new guided meditations and hosting live sessions over on my app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. What you might not know is that we also now have a full library of not just guided meditations, but also short courses and challenges. We've got a meditation masterclass with Joseph Goldstein. We've got Sharon Salzberg covering the Eightfold Path. We've got Diana Winston with her Reset Challenge. And next week, we are dropping a new course from Sharon Salzberg and Andy Gonzalez. It's called Taking Care of Yourself So You Can Take Care of the World. It's an eight-part course to help you develop skills for resilience and clear seeing. And remember that you're really no good to anybody if you're not taking care of yourself and your mind. 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And I mean, I just have to say for myself, you know, I'm not a monk or a nun, but I do a decent amount of meditation practice and I try to contemplate my mortality at least twice a day as the Buddha recommended. But I think that if I got a lethal diagnosis, I would be terrified. So yeah, how do I have what you're having? It's both the contemplation and also the very concrete practices in daily life. In medicine, we learn that every cell in our body is programmed to die and it's called apoptosis. Every cell in our body. Some cells like the hair cells and the skin cells are programmed to die after a short period of time. That's why our skin cells slough off constantly. Our hair falls off. Blood cells have a lifespan of about 120 days. Heart cells, brain cells have a longer lifespan, but everything in our body is programmed to die. That's called apoptosis. Now by chance, Only one cell, it escapes that program, that program is turned off, it's mutated. And then that cell continues to proliferate, to multiply itself instead of dying on time. And that's cancer. And it brings about death. So for life to be possible, our own life and the life of humanity and all living beings on this planet Earth, life is possible because death is a part of it, it's programmed into our life. And when there is no death, there is no life either. They are like the yin and yang, they go hand in hand together. I studied medicine, I learned that. But it didn't bring home in the way that when my partner died suddenly from a drowning accident, I was devastated. Because I thought that, he said to me that he would live until I was 80 years old and he would always be there for me. When he died, suddenly to me, I realized that I had taken him for granted. Because I thought he would always be there. So when my depression kicked in, when I was going through a lot in my life, then I would turn my back on him. What I mean is that when we are not aware of the impermanence of life, we take a lot of things for granted. We take our loved ones for granted. And so the intellectual understanding of death doesn't help to transform or remove our fear. But it's the daily practice to look at my own hands, to see the age spots on my hands, and to put lotion on my hands and lovingly massage my own hands several times a day. To look at myself in the mirror and to see, you know, my eyes, these crow feet, and breathe and smile and say, I am of the nature to grow old. And I'm so grateful for all the years that I've gone through, for all the people who have helped me in this life, for all the efforts that I've made, and others have invested in me. You see, so along with the simple recognition of what is, I also give rise to gratitude. I also give rise to gladness, to be able to look at the changes in your body, the injuries that you've sustained, the sickness, the pain that you experienced, and to, at the same time, to give rise to gratitude. Thank you, hands, for having been there all these years to help me make so many things possible. So in that way, when something gives up, like when I was facing early menopause, because I got very sick with low blood pressure and with Lyme disease, instead of feeling only grief and resentment, I actually practiced to thank my uterus, to thank my ovaries, to thank my body. And I just said, thank you for having been there, for functioning so well, to give me all this good health and good skin and good mood and cardiovascular protection. I give thanks to all these positive benefits all these years. And now I know that you're going out, and I just want to let you know that I'm very grateful for you. I talk to my uterus in that way. Instead of feeling resentful and angry and grief over it, we can practice to express our deep gratitude for the companionship that we've had all these years. So in that way, there's a tenderness, there's this love, there's this peace, instead of just grief and angst. I think what you were saying is that for many of us, when some part of our body stops working as well, and this is true even for young people, you find in your mid-20s that you're not as flexible as you were in your teens, and you find in your 30s that, oh, I've got maybe a few gray hairs or a few worry lines on my face, and it just intensifies as you get older. A lot of us, when we notice that our bodies are changing, we're getting older, our health isn't as good, the key functions of the body aren't there the way we've counted on, we're terrified and maybe angry. And what you're saying, I think, is that the antidote to that is to revert to gratitude for all of the service your pancreas put in over the years. Absolutely. Gratitude. Each day, each day, we offer gratitude. Exactly. Instead of taking ourselves, our life, everything we have for granted. It seems that essentially what you're arguing is the problem is not the aging or the changing of our bodies. The problem is our resistance to the changes. That's beautiful, Dan. Absolutely. Growing old, being sick, going to die and be separated from our loved ones, they are facts of life. They're not the problems. It is our denial of it, our rejection of it, and our taking everything for granted that brings about dissatisfaction and suffering. So yeah, they are not the problems. The problems is our own denial. And by the way, denial can be an acronym for don't even know I am lying. Speaking of, you know, relating to your body as it ages and also as you bump up against the inevitable health problems that we all will have. Your teacher, the legendary Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, had this expression that I love, which is the wisdom of the non-toothache. Can you talk a little bit about that? Dan, you are definitely practicing and studying the Dharma. Makes me very happy to know that you also come to our monasteries to practice. Absolutely. That's what we've been talking about all along. Everything that we have, when they don't make noise, when there's no pain, that's the wisdom of the non-toothache. We should celebrate. And Thay also said that 80% of our feelings are neutral. Only 20% of them are painful or happy. 80%. That's the non-toothache. So those 80% of the time when things are neutral, actually, if we give rise to awareness and gratitude, that 80% of the time can be turned into happiness. Oh, I'm so glad that I can walk to the mountain today. That's what I said yesterday when I went hiking. Because 10 years ago, I could barely make it to the meditation hall, let alone hiking up the mountain on our monastery ground. So all of us have been there, that we have been sick or we have had some kind of impairment, and we suffer so much. Even a toothache, you just want to be relieved from it. But then the rest of the time, when we have a non-toothache, we are not happy. Why shouldn't we be happy? So I often give rise to that wisdom of non-toothache. And it brings me not the happiness of eating chocolate, you jump up and down, you know what I mean? It's not the high of meeting somebody. It's like this quiet, deep peace and gratitude that is long-lasting, that is very nurturing. When you know many of the things you have now were the things that you wish for, a partner or a job or a child or a living space, the kind of health that we have. Many of these things that we now take for granted, when we were younger or a few years ago, we desired that, we worked so hard for. So as we work hard each day, we should also practice stopping to recognize all the efforts that you've made, that we've made, and also to recognize what we have, the conditions of happiness available to us. Even nature, even here in California, it's only in the 90s, whereas in Arizona, where my brother is right now, it's like 112, 115, 117 degrees. So being aware of that alone, it stops me from complaining that it's so hot because I remember what the people in Arizona, in other hot places, desert places, what they are enduring. So gratitude helps us to be more content with our lives, but also help us to be more compassionate and empathetic with people who don't have as much as we do. The Chinese character for gratitude has two particles. The top part is niang, which means conditions, and the bottom part is heart or mind. Gratitude means the heart, the mind is aware of all the conditions, all the conditions that are present in our lives, all the conditions that have helped us to be where we are right now. Innumerable conditions have come together for you and I and all of us to be where we are right now. That's gratitude. It brings about an open mind and an open heart. And in Buddhism, Thay elaborated on this also. It's the teaching on interbeing. I brought a model. For those who are not watching but listening instead, she's holding up a yin yang icon. And half of it is black and half of it is white. And on the black half, there's a white dot. And on the white half, there's a black dot. And this is a very deep teaching. In the black, there's the white. In the white, there is the black. In us, there are innumerable conditions that make us. These conditions can be favorable and unfavorable, but they have come together. In us, there are innumerable other beings and non-beings. And so this gratitude also helps us to be more embracing, less discriminative of the unfavorable conditions or of the people and conditions that we don't like. But we embrace them all. I wear a lot of T-shirts because I work from home and I'm a podcaster. And so I can be as casual as I want. And it's a nice little way to rebel against several decades in the news business when I had to wear a suit all the time. And anyway, the other day I was putting on a T-shirt and I thought, man, is this one of these? It looks really good. And I was wondering, is this one of these expensive T-shirts that I got for my birthday that my wife got for me? And then I realized, no, this is a T-shirt from Quince, which did not cost me much money at all. And by the way, is much nicer and more comfortable and better looking than all of the expensive T-shirts that I recently got for the aforementioned birthday. 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We do those every week and much more. Head on over to danharris.com. You can try it for two weeks free. If you cannot afford a subscription, we'll give you one, no questions asked. Sister D and I are talking about the five daily remembrances, which, and I'm putting these in my own words, are just bringing to mind twice a day, if at the least, that this body is of the nature to grow old, this body is of the nature to get sick, this body is of the nature to die. Someday I will lose everything and everyone I hold dear, and then finally, my only true possessions in this context are my actions. For the last 30 minutes or so, we've really been dwelling in the zone of aging and ill health. Let's go to death, which is, of course, everybody's favorite subject. You say in your book, which again is called Live Beautifully, Die Beautifully, that living and dying are not separate, they're not two different things. What does that mean? I just show a yin-yang model. In death, there's life, and in life, there's death. We share about apoptosis. It's that life is made possible because of programmed cell death. In Buddhism, we don't see death as the final respiration, but death takes place every day, every moment of our life, not just in the sloughing of our skin cells or hair cells or the aging and death of our old cells, but death also takes place more constantly in our own mind. For example, a thought of despair, a thought of hopelessness, that's death right there. Since I was nine years old, I was suicidal. I often thought of jumping into the river pretty much every time I rode a bicycle over the river. In Vietnam, there were many rivers, and it became a habit. Death, suicidal ideation became a habit. As I grew to be a teenager and as an adult, whenever I had difficulties, I often resorted to death. It's like a default mechanism, even though, to be honest, a lot of those times, I didn't want to die. What I wanted really was to be free from a particular situation that was painful. Many of us, we harbor thoughts of despair, of hopelessness, of anxiety, of alienation, and that's death, because it brings about the sickness of the body. First of all, it weakens our immune system. All those years of thinking so negatively, desperately about myself, about my life, that just weakened my whole body, including my immune system, because every thought we produce, it also brings about a release of hormones, of emotion hormones into our bloodstream. The hormones that are released into our bloodstream, it has an effect on our whole body. It can speed up or slow down our thinking. It can speed up or slow down our heart rates, our respiratory rates. It can give us energy or just suck out the energy, the life from us. We just feel like extreme fatigue and no energy at all. Negative thinking, all these strong emotions weaken our mind and our body, and brings about premature aging, sickness, and death, physically, psychologically, and spiritually. That's the kind of death that I think is very important for us to be aware of and to take care of in daily life. We learn in a spiritual life, we learn to be aware first and foremost of our body, for example, mindfulness of breathing. Then you recognize what kind of breathing pattern you are experiencing at the moment. Is it peaceful, deep, slow, or is it hurried, short, labored? You know that there's an emotion, a thought that accompanies that breathing pattern. You learn to take a moment to just come back to your breath, relax your body, release that thought, relax that feeling to bring it back to equilibrium. We can do that each time we have a thought of despair, of anxiety. We can learn to breathe with it, relax it, and say, I'm here for you. Help me to take good care of you. In that way, we learn to release death in each moment, thoughts and feelings of despair, of hopelessness, of angst. We learn to embrace it, relax it, and release it each moment. That is how I see we can learn to die beautifully each moment. Dying beautifully enables us to live beautifully, and to live beautifully enables us to die beautifully. That is why I feel I'm not so afraid of death or whatever that comes, because I learn to live as beautifully and I learn to die as beautifully as I can throughout my day. It seems to me like a through line in your approach to your own mind is talking to yourself in a supportive way, which I think most of us are not in the habit of doing. I think most of us are in the habit of talking to ourselves with more cruelty than we bring to any other relationship. Yes. Interestingly, we have a built-in default mode network that keeps chewing and re-chewing whatever unpleasant things that happened in the past. It's like a cow that would regurgitate and then would just chew all that. That's what our mind does when we preoccupy ourselves with work or with entertainment or with whatever underlying current. The mind keeps regurgitating. What's the word? Chewing? Ruminating. Ruminating. It keeps ruminating whatever unpleasant thing that happened to us today, yesterday, or 10 or 20 years ago, and it brings about much negativity and angst. It does that automatically, but we also have embedded in our biology the seed of mindfulness. We can also bring up mindfulness to smile, to breathe with that kind of regurgitation and rumination, and we can say, smile, my dear, you have this moment. Now you are an adult. Now you have more control over your life. What can you do in this moment to help yourself, to help another person, so they don't have to suffer like you suffered before? Mindfulness can help us stop that rumination or regurgitation in our mind and helps us to touch life in the present moment, to see life in the present moment and not through the lens of the past or the lens of the future. I don't think you're going to want to hear this, but even as much as I find everything you're saying about death to be compelling and reassuring, I'm still pretty scared of it. It's okay to be scared of it, Dan, because I think it's one of the deepest fears of a human life. Death, I think the fear was born with us. That's natural. Even a newborn child would have fear to pain and death, would experience that reflexively. It's a part of us. Of course, it's also rehearsed through generations. It's rehearsed by everybody, so it only deepens. That's why it takes practice to see that it's an old friend. It's always been there, our ancestors, we, and then our descendants. We all will go through that experience, all of us. What can we do with this life? Because there are those who live a short life, but very meaningfully. There are those who may live a long life, but they have full of regrets and pain, and they can cause a lot of suffering to themselves and others. So it's not the quantity of life, but it's the quality of life that we can deepen in our daily life. To me, one of the ways to do that is to befriend these five remembrances so that we can remember that our life is impermanent and we should cherish, nurture the positive conditions available to us. If they are not so positive, it also gives us the courage to change, to find a better way for ourselves and for our loved ones, for many people. To me, living a meaningful life, it helps us to touch eternity. Like the Buddha, the Buddha lived a simple life. His whole life was devoted to practice and sharing the Dharma. Now, the Buddha was 2,600 years ago, but today, many of us benefit from his teachings and practices. So his life is eternal because of the choices he made. So each one of us, we can come from a very humble background, or some of us have more advantages in our lives. But if we live deeply, we do the best we can, our life becomes eternal. It becomes long-lasting through those who remember us, through the people that we help, through the things that we help change in our families and society. So a part of fear of death is because we see our body as this confines, you know, how tall we are and how much we weigh and what we look. And so when we die, we see that it ceases to exist, you see. But if we see our life, ourselves is not confined in this physical body. But not only our children, our ancestors and descendants are parts of us, but it goes into the fifth remembrance. Actions are our true continuation. The thoughts, the views, the ideology that we generate in each moment affects us and affect those around us near and far. The words that we say, whether they are loving or harsh or cruel or kind, they affect the health of our body as well as those near or far. And also the behaviors, the bodily actions that we carry out each moment, they also affect us and many others. So when we see ourselves not as just this body, but through our thoughts, our speech, our bodily actions, we see ourselves in others, then death is not so frightening, you see, because you see like an image of a Buddha with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes, you know, the eyes in one eye in each hand. So then if you lose one hand, you still have 999. other hands and 999 other eyes, you will not be afraid. But if you see yourself only this one hand and one eye, you lose it, of course you'll be frightened. So one way to shave down on our fear of death is to think about the quality of our actions as living on well beyond this one life, how we treat our children, how we treat our friends, that has ripple effects, incalculable ripple effects that live on even when this vessel that we currently occupy no longer is breathing. You are very deep, Dan. I'm stealing it from you. Yes, the rippling effects take place every moment and they will continue to take place, like the life of the Buddha, the life of Gandhi, the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, the life of my grandmother that nobody knows about. Just a simple farmer, never went to school and yet she has had the greatest impact in my life. I am who I am thanks to my grandmother. So each one of us, we need to have no complex whether we are important or not important. All we need to do is to learn to live beautifully and die beautifully in our daily life and we know we have lived a meaningful life and we don't have to fear so much. It's okay to have a little fear. One time I drank a cup of water and as I was swallowing it, I realized, was that like a little tiny piece of metal in the water? And I just sat very still because I couldn't remove it. So I thought, okay, if it's a piece of metal, it could cause internal bleeding and I could die tonight. And I just sat very still on my bed and I breathed and I reviewed my life and I felt it's okay if it happens tonight. Of course, there are things I could do better than I could do, but I've also done the best I can and I was at peace with it, and I went to bed and in the morning I woke up and I breathed and smiled and I thought to myself, thank you for another day, for another chance. So I didn't take my life for granted. And so being aware of death actually helps us to cherish our life more deeply. And again, it's the quality of our life that makes it long lasting, eternal. It's not the quantity. Time is relative. It's a mental construct. If you ever have a chance, please go to one of the places and that is the Sequoia National Park. And you see trees that are so gigantic. And one tree is like almost 3000 years old, even older than the Buddha and other trees 2000 years, a thousand something years. So when we are in nature and when we are in front of a magnificent rock tree like that, we learn to be more humble and to be more a part of nature. And in that way, we touch immortality through the magnificence of life. We're not confined or trapped in this body, in these particular views or feelings that we have rehearsed so many times in our lives that they become our identity and we don't even know that they are optional. Not long ago, my wife had an interior design dilemma. She's been researching a book for a while and in order to do the research, she's been ordering a lot of books that she is then reading. But then the question became, what do I do with all these books? 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One purchased equals one donated with over 200 million donations and counting. Head on over to Bombuzz.com slash happier and use the code happier for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash happier use the code happier at checkout. There's this line in the Christian tradition which we in the West hear all the time at funerals or in movies where you see a funeral scene ashes to ashes dust to dust and it's easy to kind of just let that roll over you let that expression roll over you but if you take it seriously oh yeah okay I'm gonna die and I'm gonna return to a system that I'm already a part of anyway it can put death in a different and more reassuring perspective. Yes and that's what we all need we all need to learn to look at death from different angles and not just one angle and that is frightening it's the the end of everything because it is not and I also want to to share a little bit about grief that grief is a process it doesn't have like a finish line when we experience a loss we were devastated and at the same time many of us feel pressured to quote unquote move on to to live a normal life it's also not only for death but grief for the loss of functions in our body but you know the loss of our youth yeah old age sickness separation from others all those aspects also bring about grief and we also need to give time and space for us to go through that grief has a strong effect on our body so when my partner died literally the next day many strands of my hair turned white and I had very long hair like down to my waist and it just turned white and so in that way can affect our health a great deal it's important to to give ourselves space and time to take care of ourselves to go through the process properly to be patient and loving when we allow ourselves the time to grieve then in that way we also allowed our loved one who passed away to live on in us as well you know to recognize them in many aspects of ourselves of our life if we don't allow ourselves to grieve we quote unquote move on quickly that unfinished grief can cause us to fear relationships to not be able to live deeply our lives and also to not be able to hold our loved one in our heart because it's too painful you see so in a way it's like you make sure your loved one die for sure yeah but like I can think very lovingly and full of gratitude for my grandmother for my mother for my partner because I've learned to grieve through this practice of the five remembrances to know my own mortality to know their mortality to remember all the things that they have that they have given me all the conditions that are still existing in my life because of them so in that way they are they they live on in me and they have a chance to go through life and to grow old with me you know in my book I share about the death of my grandmother who was not educated in any standards she learned to read from her own son but she was a spiritual person and you can live a life so successful but your death can just be for fear and anxiety but my grandmother she lived a humble life she raised us the best way we can she can and when she died she died with peace she knew the time of her death she asked to be washed to change her clothes and she put her hands together in prayer and then she breathed out peacefully and her beautiful death gave me peace because it broke my heart when I heard my grandmother die but when I found out how she died I didn't feel pain anymore her beautiful death also taught me that it was possible not to be afraid of death that you can live beautifully and die beautifully you see my grandmother has the greatest impact in my life in her life and in her death she taught me many lessons and we all can do that for ourselves and our loved ones it's an incredible story and so much of what you've said today has been extremely extremely helpful and insightful um sister d I just want to remind everybody of the name of your book before I let you go this is one of many books she's written it's her latest it's called live beautifully die beautifully and I will put links in the show notes to all of her books and to all of her appearances on this show so you can go deeper if you'd like sister d really appreciate your time and again congratulations on your new book thank you dan for doing what you're doing it's very meaningful reaches many people benefit many people bless you my dear and keep contemplating on the five remembrances okay twice a day i'm on it you're on a beautiful path my dear thank you very much for listening to the show if you care about supporting independent media and creators who are trying to make the world a little bit saner you can hook us up by liking or rating and reviewing and following this show wherever you watch or listen subscribe me for my newsletter on substack following me on social media all of these things really do help us grow it's a big deal to us and would just take about 30 seconds if you have the time and inclination thank you again for watching thanks for supporting what we do now to the credits thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show ten percent happier is produced by tara anderson barissa schneiderman dj cashmere david hart and hayden broom post-production is handled by the great folks over at greenhorn creative and nick thorburn of the great indie rock band islands wrote our theme thank you for listening you're listening to this podcast so i know you've got a curious mind here's a helpful fact you might not know yet drivers who switch and save with progressive save over nine hundred dollars on average pop over to progressive.com answer some questions 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