The Blindboy Podcast
Hosted by Blindboy Boatclub
Laura Coleman is a psychotherapist and death doula Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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Strangle the balcony, you dangly Anthony's. Welcome to the Blind by Podcast. I've been enjoying the wonderful November chill in the air. This morning, I went down to the river at 8:00 a.m. And the water was like glass, still glass. It was about minus four degrees. And there was a beautiful, smoky mist caroling over the surface of the water. And everything was sparkling with frost, because the sky was completely clear. Baby blue with a pure slanty golden sun.
And I took in big breaths and just admired, admired the wonder and splendor. I marvelled at the river, just after dawn, freezing cold, no one else around. And as I took in nature with every one of my senses, I reminded myself how lucky I am. How lucky I am to be, to be healthy, to be able-bodied, and to be, to be in the right frame of mind.
To get up at eight in the morning just to enjoy a river, just to enjoy the beauty of a freezing cold river. I really asked myself to be grateful, to be grateful for shit that I'd normally completely take for granted. I was grateful to simply be alive and to say to myself, this is enough. This here is enough. Getting up at eight in the morning, enjoying a river, that's enough. The reason I'm doing that is because I've had a very intense week. You know that last week my documentary came out on television, The Land of Slaves and Scholars, very well received, thank you to everybody who sent me a kind message about that documentary.
But as I said last week, because, because I made something on corporate media, a big RT one documentary, because of that, it means I get covered in the newspapers and on the radio and all that type of shit. So that means I'm, I'm an Irish celebrity for like a week or maybe two weeks, I'm an Irish celebrity. And it's particularly intense, it's very strange because of the huge amount of harassment that comes with that. So I release something in the, in the corporate media, maybe once a year, once every two years. And what that means is, you know, you release a book or something or a TV show and then
you get covered in corporate media, radio, television, newspapers. And it means you then reach an audience that don't usually think about you and that comes with harassment. People are very upset that I wear a plastic bag on my head and present serious documentaries. That seems to be the bones of it. Now, I'm quite used to that, but since the pandemic, since after the, after the pandemic, what used to be plain begrudgery has turned into, it's become politicized. So aside from reading comments and receiving messages where people are like, oh, it's that stupid prick with the bag on his head, now.
Like just today, I got accused of being a Freemason. I don't know why people think I'm a Freemason. And I got accused of being a paedophile. Why? Why would someone think that? Well, because I'm on television, you see. And people who are on television, people simply appearing on the television or making a television show, even if it's just in Ireland, an RTE. That means that some people genuinely believe that you're part of an international sex trafficking cartel and that you eat children for adrenochrome and energy. So I get called a paedophile and a Freemason because I made a documentary, because I made
a documentary and this documentary went out on RTE One Television. Middle aged men, middle aged men up and down Ireland are furious with me because I wear a plastic bag on my head. This week, this week, the mixed martial artist Conor McGregor was found guilty of rape in a civil trial, in a civil trial in Dublin. One of the Irish newspapers posted an article about my documentary, my documentary about early Irish Christianity. And then all the comments underneath this was just very, very angry men whose reality and sense of safety had become destabilised because I'm wearing a plastic bag on my head.
And it is, it's 97% men. One or two comments from women, but it's men, it's very angry men. And the same newspaper posted another separate article about, about the verdict of Conor McGregor's rape trial. And I compared the comments. There were much more men vocally upset and angry and demanding justice because I'm wearing a plastic bag on my head than there were men vocally outraged and angry and disgusted about Conor McGregor. And that was particularly depressing. That was very depressing. So the past week has been challenging.
It's been very challenging because you're talking about, I'm just trying to live my life, but because I put something out there in corporate media and it's been reported in corporate media spaces, it just means I'm getting.
Like hundreds, hundreds of comments and messages all day from men who either just just think I'm a fucking idiot for wearing a bag on my head, which is fair enough, I don't really mind that. But then the other men who are just as angry, but they're more conspiratorial, they think I'm a Freemason, they think I'm part of a larger plot and that I'm funded by Big Pharma and that I'm towed out, I'm towed out to spread globalist propaganda. I don't know what the fuck they believe, but they believe it, they believe it enough to feel entitled to threaten my safety. And then of course, like I said, lots of wonderful supportive messages from people who enjoyed watching the documentary
and that's nice too. But I went down to the river this morning because it's all bullshit. It is all bullshit. Some of the negative comments I was receiving, I was taking them on board. I was allowing them to hurt me, to impact my self-esteem. So I got up nice and early to witness a wonderful, crisp, sparkly winter morning to ground myself and to truly, to say to myself, how dare I allow myself to be emotionally impacted by the
negative opinions of strangers when I have the, the privilege of being healthy, able-bodied, mentally healthy and able to get up and enjoy a river in the morning and just bask in the absolute splendor and glory of fucking nature. Cause that's what matters. That's what actually matters. Strangers saying mean things to me, that they're just gonna forget about in five minutes. Strangers saying mean things to me, that just wounds my identity. That wounds the part of me that would like to be, that wants to be liked, who doesn't wanna be liked. I want to be liked by everyone and it's painful when people don't like me.
But my, my sense of identity, how I'd like other people to see me, these things aren't real. I have a choice. I can choose whether or not I allow a person's negative comments to hurt me. That's actually a choice that I have. I haven't hurt anybody. I haven't done anything bad. I just made a documentary, put it on TV and happened to be wearing a plastic bag on my head. This is confusing and frightening for some people, so they get angry. Because on the internet, anger is a very easy emotion to feel. It's easier, more satisfying and feels more actionable than feeling vulnerable and threatened and confused.
Which is what some of these men feel like when they see a serious documentary presented by a man with a plastic bag on his head. So I've got a choice. I can choose whether or not I allow that to hurt me. And I went down to the river to practise gratitude. The humility, the humility of realising that my health and being alive, that these things are actually a privilege. That some people don't have these things, that this, this is a privilege for me to be able to enjoy a wonderful morning. Touching the earth like that, um, it's a great way to, for me to understand that it's all bullshit. It's all fucking horseshit. Newspapers, TV, radio, whatever the fuck.
It's bullshit. It's vacuous horseshit. And so is all the harassment that goes along with it. And you know what? It'll be gone next week. Next week it'll be gone. I'll be back in the world of independent media, just making my podcast. And, and I don't have to upset people's dais. They'll go back to forgetting that I exist. But expressing gratitude.
And recognizing the privilege, the privilege of simply being alive and being healthy. I find it, it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful thing to do when you're stressed out about stuff that has to do with your sense of identity. There's problems and then there's, I'm experiencing a lot of pain because strangers on the internet are saying mean things. It's challenging, but I genuinely have a choice about whether I want to be hurt by that or not. And the beauty of nature, the beauty of a morning, reflecting on my mortality, understanding that I'm gonna die someday, appreciating that all human beings are equal.
I'm no better or worse than anybody else. Other people's opinions of me don't matter. My achievements don't make me better or worse than anybody else. That type of existential humidity, that's what sets me up for a nice day where I can say, you know what, I'm a good person and I deserve to have a nice day. Now, I know I'm in the extreme situation for like a week where because, because I'm on a public platform like TV and newspaper, I get a bizarre amount of harassment, but I don't think it matters. All of us, like, was it a beautiful morning today when you woke up? Was it a beautiful, crisp, bright November morning? Did you notice it?
And were you thankful for being able to notice it? Or were you worried about the future? Were you angry with somebody who said something to you three weeks ago and now you're redoing what you should have said in the argument in your head? Were you jealous of another person? Were you comparing yourself to another person and feeling like shit because you think someone else is better than you? Or were you feeling better than somebody else and feeling superior? Did you have a shit morning because of completely avoidable pain? Avoidable pain centered around your, your sense of identity? And if you were, chances are you didn't notice the beautiful morning and would greatly
benefit from reflecting on, reflecting on humidity and being genuinely thankful for the privilege of being alive and being healthy. So that's why I've chosen to put out this week's podcast, this week's podcast.
I speak to a wonderful, a wonderful person called Laura Coleman. She's a qualified psychotherapist, she's a humanistic psychotherapist and also a play therapist. But she's also a death doula. Laura Coleman works in hospices with people who are dying, people who are literally at the end of their lives. And she works in a professional capacity as a psychotherapist
to, to guide people through their death journey. She's a death doula. And there's no way to listen to her speak, to listen to her speak about people who are dying, without coming away from it, experiencing humility, experiencing the humility of, I should be really grateful to be alive and right now is the time to choose how I want to live. And do I really want to choose being upset by other people's opinions of me? And this might sound like there's nothing depressing about the chat that me and Laura have. It's fucking fascinating.
And she speaks about, like she might be working with three or four people a day who are dying. And she speaks about near-death experiences that people have, people who have died, actually died and come back. And the things that they say. She speaks about what all people who are dying, what they wish they would have done differently in their lives. She's a wonderful woman and a qualified, qualified psychotherapist. She's fascinating. So, without further ado, here's the chat that I had with Laura Coleman, the death doula, in, in Mayo about a month ago.
And they're becoming much more common. A death doula is somebody that helps people to die, makes it as easy for the person as possible for them to die. You all know that we don't talk about death very freely. It's not, you know, I'm not morbid, but I talk about death a lot. And when I get a wee chance to chat to a big crowd about death, I take it, delighted to be here. So a death doula will help the family, they'll help the patient, just whoever needs a bit of support. And I've done it so many times before with other people, so that just, I can help them then through things that they've never been through before. Most people only die once.
I had never heard of a death doula until I researched you for this podcast. And what struck me as quite beautiful is that I have heard of the word doula. And a doula is somebody who helps a mother to give birth and aftercare as well.
Exactly.
And I do find that there's just something beautiful about the fact that the word doula is used there. It's someone exiting the world and also entering the world. And I'm very curious about what you do, but also I don't want to think about it because it's really depressing. You know, it's that contradiction.
Yeah. And as opposed to be honest, a lot of people think that's what it's about when I go into a house that I'm going to sit down and say, so you're dying. And that's not the way it works. So a death doula, you're talking about a birth doula, and that's the bookends of life, birth doula, death doula. And I often say, if we talked about birth the way we talked about dying, there'd be uproar. So if a woman was in labour, so there's a person in the bed and they're very unwell, they're coming near the end of their life, and the family trying to not let the person in the bed think that we all know they're dying, and the person in the bed needs to talk or wants to talk about dying, but they're afraid to upset their partners. One time I was working, this lovely man, he was an elderly man, lovely man, and he
was in hospital. And I was on the way in to see him, and I met his wife on the way out, she was going for a coffee. And she said, Laura, I don't think he knows that he's dying. And I said, I think he does. He's like, he's been talking to the consultant a few times, I think he does. And I said, you head off the coffee and I'll scoot in and have a wee chat with him. So his name was Michael, lovely man. And I said, Michael.
Mara thinks that you don't know what's happening. And he said, what did the doctor say? And he said, oh, it's not good, Laura, it's not good. Time's short. And I said, Mara doesn't know that you know that. And so they're the kind of uncomfortable conversations that you can make a wee bit lighter. Thank God, I have a good sense of humour and I can bring it to people. Because they don't lose their sense of humour just because they're sick or dying. And most people kind of whisper around them and, shh, don't be talking and, you know, don't be saying that. And people, really, that I have met, doesn't matter what age they are, they need to talk to people to figure out those things that they're going to do at the end, that they need to do, that they, you know, the things they want to say to the people they're leaving behind.
And that's how I got into this job and that's why I wanted to help people. Just ask yourself this question. Am I afraid to die? Am I afraid of death? And if I am, why? What is it that I've been told down through the years? What is it that I think death is that's making me afraid? And, you know, Stoics think that, you know, there's, well, I suppose Socrates, and I'm not a very philosophical person at all, but Socrates talked about there's, the body lives and then it dies. And you've only two things to worry about. And it depends on what your beliefs are. So if you believe there's nothing, well, then there's nothing. And if I'm nothing, well, then there's nothing to fear if there's nothing.
And the other one is that death is maybe a sort of a hallway or an entrance or a journey to another, to another existence. And if you believe that, well, great, because the body mightn't be going with you, but whatever bit is on the inside will be going with you. The mind or the soul or whatever you want to call it goes through that tunnel.
You're also, you're a psychotherapist, you're a humanistic psychotherapist. And something, and I know from humanistic psychotherapy, it's about the client, we'll say. So.
How does it work with, first off, would you be working with multiple people in the same day?
Oh, I.
Yeah, so in the morning, you could be helping someone and they have a belief, they could be Christian or Muslim, and then in the evening, the person is completely atheistic and they have no belief in an afterlife or anything like that, how do you navigate that as a doula?
So, I, wherever they want to go, that's where we go. So it's not, I have my own opinions, obviously, and I was rare Catholic, I'm not particularly religious, but I was rare Catholic, and I, so I have that ingrained in me. But the first time I worked with a woman who was Buddhist, she needed to be, her funeral had to be arranged really, really quickly. She didn't have family. There was nobody, she was, she moved here from a place far away because of her, her choice in religion, and so she had to be, everything had to be done within 24 hours, whereas in Ireland, we take our time and do it. But depending on what the person I'm sitting with, so sometimes I'm having a conversation with the person about the first law of thermodynamics and
that the energy that is in the body, energy doesn't die, it just changes form. And then the next person is talking about Jesus is going to come and meet me, and, you know, I'm going to go to heaven, and I see all the people that I've loved, and I go there too. So it's the same as what I would do if I was in a session with anybody about anything else, it would be whatever they needed to work on, I meet them there. And lucky enough that I'm having with the hospice for 24 years, so I have a lot of experience. I was arranging a wedding for somebody at the end of their life. It was going to be easier for the wife afterwards, if they were married with all the property and things. And then in the afternoon, I was going in to sit with a man to do what we call dignity therapy, where I'd be finding out.
Sort of the, the, the things that had happened in his life that had given him purpose and meaning. And we put it together in a little audio track and then I go away and edit it, take out my voice and then I type it up and give them a little book format or they have it for their family for, and one thing I, that's become more common, I think anyway, in my years is motor neurone. And I had the loveliest sister-in-law, um, I loved her dearly and she died from motor neurone. And there's a new thing that we're doing and I'm at the forefront of death and dying. So I know all the, the new tricks that are coming out. We have a thing that we use now, it's a QR code on a headstone and you go to the headstone, click, it brings you to the website and there's pictures of the person or their favorite music or whatever.
And when I was speaking to, about that, about putting a QR code, we had no proper recording of our voice. And I said, that, that'll never happen on my watch again, whoever I'm working with, I will make sure that I get a recording of their voice for themselves or for their family. There's, I, trust me, if there's one thing you love after your mother or your father or your partner or somebody dies, to hear, to have their voice.
Like I, I, what I'd like to know about is you're gonna have your people who, who, who are accepting throughout the end of their life.
Yeah.
But then you're gonna have people who are not accepting or are terrified. What does denial look like to a person who's just been told they're gonna die?
Just say the wee man I mentioned that was in the hospital and his mother, his wife has gone down for the tea.
Mm-hmm.
When she came back, I said, Mara, myself and Michael, we chat there and he knows exactly what's happening. So there's a lot of conversations that need to happen here now. He had two sons and they had things that need to be sorted and, and if we don't talk about it, you definitely can't plan it. If we're all walking about pretending that we're not gonna die or, or, you know, wishing that the person that we love isn't gonna die, but we actually know they're dying, that's part of the work that I would do. I'd go in and just talk about it normal. Like, you know, like, what are your biggest fears about dying? When the person knows they're going to die, there's no, there's no like, um, there's no need. To pussyfoot around it. When a doctor or consultant has said, you're coming near the end of your life. And you know, you've got a little bit of time left.
My job then is to go in and help them. So what do you want to do with that? What do you, what mark do you want to leave? What, what do you not want to leave unfinished? What do you want to leave messages or directions or, you know, words that you want to leave for the people you love? You know, what would you tell them to do? Like the thing I mentioned there, dignity therapy. One of the questions is, can you remember something that you're really proud of? I remember working with a lovely wee woman. She was a teacher. She never got married and she was a teacher all her life. And I remember introducing the thing about dignity therapy and explained to her, there's just a wee conversation and I'll answer a few questions and you'll answer them. And we'll just see where it goes.
And the purpose of it is so that she gets a bit of purpose and meaning from looking back at her life. What, what was, what was the purpose of her life? And she said, I don't think it's going to be very interesting because I never had any family. I never got married. You know, I've been a spinster all my life and I don't, I don't think. And I said, how long have you been teaching? She'd been thirty six years a teacher. And I said, I think there's a lot of stories in them thirty six years that your nieces and the people after your nieces, you know, your, your future grand nieces and nephews, that they really appreciate knowing how you impacted people. And so I said, tell me about some of the stories, some of the tough cases that you had, some of the tough people that you'd helped.
Oh my God, it was lo-, it was lovely. I'd, I cry a lot when I'm working with people because it's very moving work. But I genuinely, genuinely think that we need to talk about it. We really do need to talk. It's very easy for me to say, well, I'm not afraid to die. And genuinely, I'm not afraid to die because I do think personally, there's something more. Maybe there's not, but I'm going with the, there's something more and it's making me feel good. If you say, I think there's nothing after it, Laura. Great, if there's nothing after, we'll go with that for you. But I think the more we talk about it, the less fear there is. But if it's always, shh, don't mention, don't say now that he's dying. Years ago, they could tell the doctor not to tell the patient, don't tell him he's dying.
Imagine how unethical it is.
Like it, it, it's, I, I try very much myself.
To be okay with, just the concept of my own mortality. If I don't understand and recognize I am going to die and it can happen at any point, then I can't enjoy the present moment.
Something that really changed my perspective is, have you ever heard of the Tibetan sky burial?
Yeah. So it's, just for the audience, it's certain Buddhists in Tibet where they don't have, they're up in the mountains, they don't have soil to dig. So their way of burying people is they will leave the body on a mountain and vultures come down and the vultures pick the body apart and they scatter the bones all over a valley. But then trainee Buddhist monks walk into the valleys of corpses and they meditate there. And they meditate alongside pieces of bodies that are decomposing specifically to confront death.
It was this, there was a sect within Catholicism known as the Poor Claires. So the Poor Claire nuns in France, there's a monastery, a Poor Claire monastery in France, and there's this little room. And they look like big concrete toilets. So it's like a throne and there's a hole in it. But what these were is when the older nuns died in this monastery, they would literally place their body on this thing and the body would decompose. And the young nuns would go there and they'd do their rosaries and they would, it's, there is death, there is a body decomposing in front of me and I can't ignore this.
If I'm to be spiritually present, I have to go, there it is, and this is life. You know what I mean? What you're doing is a bit like that, but not as yucky.
What people say to me often though is, what, why would you ever get involved and spend in most of your day talking about death? And I, I think anybody that knows me, I think there's a few people here that knows me, I have, I have fun, I enjoy life, I squeeze every bit of crack out of it, because we do not know the day or the minute. And every morning I get up, and every time I go to bed, my father used to say, you get up in the morning, you don't know who's going to be taking off your shoes at night. And that's, that's a fact, we do not know. Confronting death, and it's not like, oh, big story, it's confronting death, it's just like, looking at it and saying, okay, I know I'm definitely going to 100% die, and then living every day. The big mistake we make is, we think we've got plenty of time, and none of us know.
Yeah, I know. Is there, when you're dealing with people who are at the end of their life, is there any message that you find in common, that, something that they would wish they could say to themselves when they were younger?
One of, one of the questions in the dignity therapy is, if you went back to your 15-year-old self, or your 30-year-old self, what would you tell them? And it's a lovely piece of work, because you actually get, like, the real, the real rawness of, I should have done, why didn't I, why did I let other people? Mainly people just are sorry they didn't live the life they wanted to live themselves, that we conformed to, you know, getting up in the morning, going to work, nine to five, coming home, doing whatever you do at home, doing the home to work and work to home and home to work, and instead of squeezing whatever bit of crack you can into life.
And is, was the fear judgment from other people, or other people?
If you were being honest, we all, we'd say, oh, I don't care what anybody thinks about me, but we kind of do.
We do, like, yeah.
We kind of do, like, if you're being honest, you kind of do. Yet, like, you can, I, I saw your thing, I was, you said, I had the choice of being a psychotherapist or a mad bastard, but most of us, most of us try to kind of edge away from the madness. I, I think my children would say, I've embraced the madness. I've kind of, you know, kind of run with it a bit, it suits me.
A fair fucking play to you.
Something, I had the benefit of having much older siblings, so something that really guides me is, I'll embrace, I find that a lot of people don't do what they want to do because they're terrified of failing, this fear of failure. So what I do is I deliberately try to fail. I fail so much that failure isn't frightening anymore. And what I've found is, I don't think there is such a thing as failure. The only failure that I want to avoid is doing nothing because I was scared to try. I don't want to be older or someone who's dying, if I'm lucky enough to die when I'm old, and I don't want to look back and
go, I didn't do that because I was scared. Because often the fear is, it's bullshit, you're just scared of what other people think.
It is.
I'm wearing a bag on my head, I'm up on stage with a bag on my head. It's ridiculous, like, it's grand, I'm having crack. I'd rather do this than be in a job I don't want to do. You know what I mean?
I encourage you to do it too. Well, I'm a play therapist as well, so I work with kids.
Oh lovely.
And one of the things we do with, my husband's a play therapist too, so we do a lot of playing in our house. But they, one of the things that we do with parents or with, even when I'm working with teachers, I'd be telling them how to build somebody's self-esteem, a child's self-esteem. And one of the fastest ways to build a child's self-esteem is to say, oh, I got that wrong. Because you're encouraging, yeah, sometimes even big people get it wrong. So I'd almost go out of my way to, you know, do the wrong thing in the play with the vast majority.
Demonstrate failure?
Because we're saying, even big people get it wrong. It's one of the, it helps them to attempt things way faster. Building a child's self-esteem helps the adult, the adult that you'll meet is a different adult if that child has self-esteem. I say, I faked confidence for years, but when I eventually had good self-esteem, you don't need to fake the confidence, then it'll just be there. And the same with kids. If you can put that bit of self-esteem into them, you needn't worry about the confidence. They can be quietly confident because they're shy, or they can be outwardly confident.
And how would you define? Self-esteem versus confidence.
Self-esteem is what you think about yourself on the inside, but that's all right saying what you think about yourself on the inside. But it's what what you've fed me, what my parents or society or the teacher. Or the, you know, what people have told me about myself. They held up a mirror and go, that's who you are. And I'm like. And so if that's good, I'll have internal self-esteem. So it's on the inside self-esteem. Confidence is what what you show other people.
And and people can have shit self-esteem and be very confident.
Can appear very confident, exactly, yeah.
Just before we go for a break, I do you ever do play therapy with adults?
All the time, all the time. I have actually have a woman, she's sixty three and she comes in and she'll say playroom. She'll go and she know it because if you're an adult and you're nursing stuff that went wrong for you. And it's in here or it's holding your back or whatever it is, if if it's going on, it happened when you were younger. So it happened, it happened either when you were a child or an adolescent. So whatever your trauma was, and wouldn't it be lovely if nobody had trauma, but we. Life has trauma. And so if you if we go right back to the play bit, we can take it all the way up. And work with the bits, work with the bits. And so what you're doing, you go back to before the trauma trauma happened.
But even the muscle memory of play even.
Lovely. And I'll tell you something. So I I do a bit of teaching. I teach play therapy for a college in Limerick, would you believe? And and so when I'm it's two adults playing and you would not believe. One's the the child taking the place of the child, one's taking the place of the therapist. And you would not believe how difficult a lot of adults find it to sit down the floor and play.
Because we're worried about right and wrong.
Course, and also this one's going to think I'm an idiot. And so it's it's a it's very freeing, very freeing. Like I could have a nineteen year old that only goes into the playroom, a twelve year old that wants to have talk therapy. You know, dependent. And these could be children or parents or or, you know, people who are either sick. Or the family of the person who's sick or dying.
So I I bring play as a. Huge part of what I do. And what I mean, so, so my job as a writer, what I'm looking for consistently is the feeling of flow. Right, that feel, if I can get fucking flow, then I can write. But the hardest thing about writing, about doing anything creative, is this fear of failing. And what have you afraid of failing is, first off, it's your ideal self. The desire for me to be seen as a good writer by other people, that'll fuck me up immediately. And my, I sit down to write, I've got this blank page and I'm thinking, oh god, this better be good. Or what if this is shit?
And the only thing that will break me out of that and into flow is when I engage in play. See, the beauty of playfulness is there's no such thing as right or wrong. Like kids playing with Lego, like little kids playing, they're not like, I'm not making something, I am doing Lego. I am doing Lego for the sake of doing Lego, whereas as an adult, I'm conditioned to be right and wrong. So just that story I read out at the start there, the donkey. Like, that started off as a blank page. And it started off with maybe two days of me terrified, terrified, what am I gonna write? Oh, this is shit, I'm awful, I'm a terrible writer. Until eventually I engaged in playfulness.
And, and how I engage in play, it's, I seek out failure. And what I mean by seek out, if, if failure is the thing I'm terrified of, well, let's fucking fail. So I just said to myself, and I do this often, I'm gonna write a story about a fatass shoving a donkey into a car. And I'm gonna do this for 10,000 words. And that's beginning with failure because that's a ridiculous idea. How are you gonna write a story about a man shoving a donkey into a car? But because I'd began with failure, now I'm in a playful state. And now I begin writing and now I'm entering flow state. And now, once I'm in flow, that story, yeah, it's about a man with a donkey, pushing a donkey into a car. But really what it's about is.
It's a man whose father is, has dementia. And he kinda wants to not visit him anymore because he doesn't recognise that person. And really what I'm doing is, my dad got a brain tumour. And I was told, I was nineteen and it's like, he's gonna die in six weeks. And I did the full palliative care thing. I watched my dad go from being my fucking lovely dad to a week later being, couldn't talk, couldn't move. He was wearing a nappy in one week. And it was tough. And I was very, nineteen's quite young to be dealing with that. So that left me with a lot of trauma. And I don't like thinking about those feelings. I don't like remembering him in that state.
I couldn't cry for about ten years afterwards. You know, it really stuck with me. But the playfulness of writing like that, that allowed me to go write. So that story really, it's my dad, you know what I mean? It allowed me to go into all those feelings and the processes. But that's play, that's how I use playfulness. It gets me beyond my defence mechanisms. And then I can cry.
And it lets the creativity out as well as the tears.
I mean, creativity is just, creativity is adults playing. That's all it is. It's playfulness for adults.
And you don't get old, cause, cause you're getting old, you get old cause you stop playing.
And that's one of the things that fucking pisses me off about school is, but all of us played, all of us started off. Crayons, mala, every fucking single one of us. And when we were one or two years of age, we weren't good or bad at it. It's just a thing we do cause it's class. And then you get to school and all of a sudden, you're brilliant at painting, you are. You're not so much. But you know what I mean? And then you end up splitting and some of us become the good at art people. And then other people, it's just gone, it's gone. I think everybody should be making art for the sake of making it. And fuck this good or bad. You make art and, or even to play. Carl Jung was great at that.
Carl Jung used to, he was about seventy years of age and he used to make sure that every single day he went and played with sticks at the end of his garden. Seriously, I'm gonna go down and play with mud and sticks. Why? Cause I used to do it when I was three.
You know what I mean?
We better take a break soon.
Are you enjoying this? This isn't too heavy for you, is it?
Because it is something I was saying to you beforehand, that I am mindful of people's safety tonight. So we're making sure that we're, we're speaking about this in a way that's not, we're not going to get too heavy with it.
But you were saying there though about, you know, play isn't good or bad. And death in and of itself isn't good about it either. It is what it is, but it isn't good or bad.
I've never thought of it that way. That's an interesting way because for me, it's like, no, that is awful.
Because you were trained to think that then.
And you had an experience that left you traumatised, so that makes it awful.
Whereas if, I love some of the, some of the people that I've sat with when they're dying. And they're just so peaceful and, you know, they just drift away. It's like going to sleep. And, and they look like they're going to sleep and it's just lovely. And then more deaths can be very tough. But death itself, it's going to happen, it's neither good or bad, but it can be a tough death or it can be a good death. As in a, a death that didn't hurt so much.
Or unnecessary suffering.
And that's, that's, I think that's why I do the job I do.
If I look at pain that I've experienced in my life, the vast majority of pain I've experienced, it, it's not something that was actually happening to me. Most suffering that I experience, it's the worrying about what if or why did I do that? Ignoring the present moment, fucking ignoring the present moment and my life is, what if that happens? Wouldn't that be terrible? Oh God, this is awful. I hope that never happens. Why did I say that to that person there six years ago? What a cunt. But we, I can live my life, all of us can live our lives in that continually, what if and why did? And that is completely unnecessary suffering.
Hundred percent.
Most of my pain has been that.
And shit that's bad that actually happens, like even my dad dying, that was no crack. But at the same time, I wouldn't be who I am if it didn't happen.
True.
Like facts, like I just simply wouldn't because that, it was like the hammer of life hitting me into the side of the head and saying, you have to be an adult now.
Yeah. You said there about the future. So if your mind is in the future, that causes anxiety. And a way of avoiding anxiety is bringing yourself right back to the moment. If your mind is in the past, you're feeling low and your energy will die. So the past is about that low energy. Yeah. And the the future is anxiety takes you, what if, what if, what if? And the way to get working away with both of them, come back to the present. Be in your body. It's the only place you got. Be in your body. I remember working with a young fellow one time and he was in a, he was in foster care for years. Lovely lad. I worked with him for seven years, but he was in foster care and I, and the father in the foster care home died and he was the carer.
So he went off to, the young fellow had to go to another home for a while and he was way down in Billmullet. And he came back and he was all buff. I hadn't seen him for six months and he had been in the gym. And he's, this is true as God. He said, I said, geez, you must have been spending a lot of time working out. Do you look mighty yourself, all muscle? And he said, I realise, Laura, this is the truth, sixteen year old. I realise, Laura, this is the only place I have to live. He'd been in many as a house, but this is the only place I have to live. Doesn't matter how fancy your house is, what's going on in here and up here that goes with you everywhere?
Fair play to him. Let's have a little lockerina pause now. We'll have a slight break in the conversation. Wonderful fucking chat there with Laura Coleman. She's astounding. I'm going to play my ceramic otter and you're going to hear a noise which hopefully won't disturb any dogs. And then adverts are going to play.
Very gentle.
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That was the Ocarina Pause. You'd have heard an advert there for some bullshit. I don't know what the advert was for. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, please consider becoming a patron. This podcast is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living. It's how I rent out my office. It's how I pay all my bills. It's how I live. It's how I survive. This podcast is how I have the time and space to make the podcast. This past week of making fucking documentaries that go out in corporate media, that go out on the television.
Has really reminded me of how horrible, how horrible it is to be living in that landscape, to be putting out work in that landscape and how grateful I am to have this wonderful fucking audience here. You see, when you put something on television, you're arriving into people's living rooms, not necessarily with their consent, and that this pisses off a lot of people. You end up on people's timelines and they didn't ask to see you and this makes people angry. But with a podcast, with independent media, no one's listening to this or doesn't want to. If you're here listening to this, it's because you made a choice and because you're, you're curious and passionate and interested and you're seeking out something. And that means for me, I just have an audience of people who
are chilled out and nice and kind and calm and don't think that I'm a Freemason who works for Big Pharma, who sacrifices children in satanic rituals so that I can drink from a gland in their neck that gives me eternal life. This is what people believe. This is what people believe and this is what I'm being accused of. Now, not a lot of accusations, like a couple, but that's enough. That's enough. Most of the negativity is people calling me a stupid cunt. That's fine, but Illuminati stuff is a bit much for being on fucking RTE. It's a bit much. I'm, I'm a paid shill. I'm a paid shill for vaccine manufacturers.
So anyway, yeah, support for this podcast comes from you, you the listener via the Patreon page. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. If you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. You can listen for free. Everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. And you know what? If you are listening for free, the person who is paying, they're paying for you to listen for free. A nice, kind model there. Everyone gets the exact same, exact same experience. And I can tell advertisers to fuck off. They can't influence my content in any way. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. And if you are becoming
a new paid patron, try and do it through the desktop because if you become a patron through the Patreon app on your Apple iPhone, Apple, the greedy fuckers are going to take 30% of that. So fuck them. So. Do it through the desktop if you can, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. Upcoming gigs, I'm taking it handy for November and December, I'm not doing any gigs. No point doing fucking December gigs, just in case someone decides to bring an office party, a Christmas office party to the podcast, that ruins a podcast very quickly. So my next gig, I was in Vicker Street last week, it was unbelievable, amazing gig in Vicker Street last week.
So because of demand, there's a second Vicker Street date, and this is now in January. Monday, the 27th of January, I'm in Vicker Street, that just went on sale. Then in February, I'm in Leisure Land in Galway, on the 9th, tremendous crack there. Crescent Hall in Drogheda, 21st of February. Belfast, the Waterfront Theatre, 28th of February. Then in March, I'm in the Ainech on the 7th of March, that's in Killarney. Cork Opera House there on the, I don't know if that's even out yet, is it? I'm in Cork anyway in March. Australia and New Zealand sold out in April.
Oh, and just fucking added, just added, on Wednesday, the 23rd of April, Limerick, my home city, I'm in the fucking University Concert Hall in Limerick on the 23rd of April, 2025. That's, that goes on sale tomorrow morning, that's the biggest ever Limerick gig that I'll be doing. Actually, that gig, that gig's in the University Concert Hall, which means technically, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be gigging in Yarke's Couch, the spiritual home of this podcast, so that's, that's very nice. If anyone's thinking of visiting Limerick, that might be a good one, come to that gig on the 23rd of April, we got a new Brazilian buffet, there's a new Brazilian buffet opening up this week as well, passed away from the Hunt Museum.
And then June 25, big giant massive tour of fucking England and Scotland, nor ways this time. So June 25.
Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, Norwich, Nor- Nor- Norwich, Norwich. And then there's definitely an Edinburgh in there somewhere, just not written down here. Fan.co.uk forward slash Blind Bife for those tickets. I think I've listed out all my 2025 gigs there. Fuck it, why not? Back to my chat here with the magnificent Laura Coleman. This is where we speak about near-death experiences.
Laura was trying to convince me to move from a plastic bag to a cotton bag.
He's sweating like mad. His thumb crack, no, your, your thumb crack.
Um.
Something, something I was asking you backstage and I'd love to, for you to ask it in front of the audience is.
Do you really want to ask that?
People at the end of their life. What is like a common regret?
Biggest regret, don't even have to think about it. I work too much. Every person, doesn't matter if they're in their twenties, their fifties, their eighties. One of their biggest regrets is always I work too much. I didn't spend enough time with my family. I thought too much of what other people were thinking of me. And people aren't thinking about you at all. When you realise how little other people think about you, you get on with your life, do what you want. And that's a huge regret. I work too much. I didn't spend enough time with the people I loved. Always, and then I try and help them to spend that bit of quality time. Cause we still have time. Hopefully we have still a bit of time so we can make the most out of a week. We can make the most out of six weeks.
And the thing is, if you think of those regrets, the system of capitalism that we live under needs us to think you're not working enough. That's what it needs us to think, because if we stop thinking that way, then the system doesn't work.
The system also also really, really needs us to care about what other people think. Because a good way to solve that is to buy shit. You know what I mean? If you're very concerned about other people's opinion, if it's your physical appearance, then you can buy a bunch of shit to improve your physical appearance. Or if you want people to think you're more successful, you achieve that by buying things. So we have a system. It's just, that's really dark. It's dark that people get to the end of their lives and the things that they're regretting are the values that our system is is most upholding. Other people's opinions matter and work fucking harder or you're worthless.
Mm hmm, that's that's just the fact of life. And I think all of us can identify with that.
It's something I often think of because I get great meaning from work and I love, like I adore working and I like it. But I wonder at the end of it, will I go, Jesus Christ, you should have chilled out there and just hung around with a daisy a bit more or something.
Are you are you saying this work? Because to be fair, if you're getting paid to do this, this is great work.
I do, I do love it, yeah. Well, that's another way to think of it, yeah. I mean, I actually genuinely love it. I like, I absolutely, like, my definition of my personal definition of success for me is can I earn a living doing the thing I love doing?
And that's what I'm doing, like, you know? I mean, my my job is, I don't know, if I wanted to do a podcast next week talking about the history of this theatre, which I might do, it's completely possible. You know what I mean? And and that's what my job is, to be as as curious as possible, so.
Isn't it something else though? That you, a random thought comes through his head and boom, he's got a podcast out of it. It's brilliant.
That's all, but that's the, that's openness. That's openness. I, I, I, like I said, I'm always fighting this fear of failure. I don't allow anything come in and say that what a silly idea. If it's silly, I run with it. I'm, I try to be playful as much as possible all the time. There's great crack and play, you know yourself.
Hundred percent. And I'll tell you, it's the making of you.
Thank you very much.
You're a great lad.
I'm trying to phrase this in a way, I don't want to say spooky, like supernatural. In your work, have you encountered, because this was a huge question that people were asking. Encountered anything supernatural or anything that made you go, wow, that's odd?
Well, I'll take it, I'll take that question and I'll run with it. But I'll call it natural.
Okay.
But it is, like, for somebody who wouldn't have experienced it, they might think, jeez, that was strange. But in the work that I'm in, and for anybody that has ever worked in palliative care, we tell the family to expect the person who's coming near the end of their life to see people who have already died.
And that, it happens so regularly, we have to tell people because often the person in the bed thinks they're actually losing their mind as well. They'll say, like, I remember a 16-year-old saying to me, I see grandad behind the door. And me going, yep, he'll be there. And that's, I suppose, for us that work at the end of life, and his family would have been quite religious. It was a lovely thing because he actually could, had a sense and a visual even, that nobody else could see. Because he was so close to that veil of death, he could actually see somebody from the other side, there in the corner. For me, I think it's a lovely thing for them to see. I'm not going to lie and say, the first time that I was sitting beside somebody's bed
and they said there was somebody behind me, I got the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. I was like, oh, jeez. But I got used to it. And now it's like, yeah, that's something that, yeah. So the people that love you, who have gone before you, whether it's your father or your grandfather, or whoever it is, they'll come to meet you if, if that's. Like, if you think there's nothing and you're looking at somebody behind the door, that's going to be scary for you. If you're an atheist and you're like, no, when you're dead, you're dead. And then you see somebody in the back of the door, that's going to be frightening. But if you have some kind of an idea of that maybe, maybe there's something more.
That's what I'd like to know about there is... Is this happening to people who have a belief about an afterlife? Have you seen it happen to a person who doesn't have a belief in an afterlife?
It has, it actually has. And you see, then sometimes people say, oh, that's the drugs. Like they're on, they're on morphine or they're on whatever. And maybe it is, maybe it is. But all I know is it gives a lot of people a lot of comfort. If I was dying in the morning and if my kids and my husband were sitting there beside me and I, and I was saying, I see my mother. Wouldn't they be like, oh, that's great. No, you know, granny's there gonna be, you know, helping her along or whatever. It's a love, even if it is the drugs, it is a lovely thing, but it happens very regularly. It happens in people who are dying at home who don't have medication or who aren't being medicated. So it's, it's a thing and it's a fact that people do see.
And it's one of those things where
it's the meaning that you give to it. I mean, there's the cynical side of things which says, this is just what the human brain does. Like, I'm sure you've heard of all those theories about, what's the name of that fucking chemical that's in Iowaska? Is it D M T? D M T. So some people say that, you know, when people die, that the brain releases the natural D M T. And that's where they get the, like, have you, have you spoken to people who've seen the tunnel, have seen the light and all that crack?
I have actually had several, several people over the years. There was one man and he made it to hospital. They had announced him that he had, he was, he was gone. And then they went,
Oh, wow.
Somebody else came along. Yeah, so they came back and did the, the electroshock and he came around again. And he sat in the bed. I'd say I talked to him for about forty five minutes about an experience that he says he didn't know. Was it five days or five seconds? It was just this no space and, and there were, he described it as a light.
Was, he was very chatty about this, was he?
Oh, he was.
This was a big deal.
So I suppose for me, it was, his consciousness still had it. So his body was dead for all intents and purposes, for whatever many minutes. I can't remember many minutes, but.
Wow, that's a lot, that's so minutes we're dealing with here.
Yeah, so he was, and they cha-chinged him back. And, and he didn't know, he couldn't tell if it was.
Days or weeks or seconds, but it it just felt like space and this light. And I was like, that is so interesting. And he could talk about the space and the light. And every time anybody else came in, he was like, and the space and the light. And they were the only two big words, really, that kept coming out of it. But he, he.
Was it peaceful? If he's speaking about it a lot, that means fuck me, that was class.
That's exactly what he felt. That's exactly, he was like, this is unreal. And, you know, people talk about, you know, um, what's, what'll happen after. And you said it a minute ago, you said, it depends what you think yourself. Like, you know, I can, you can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven, depending on what you allow yourself to think.
Yeah, because I'm not in, to be honest, I'm not into the idea of heaven. I'm not into the idea of anything that doesn't end.
No matter how class heaven is, it's not class if it doesn't end. Then it becomes eventually torture.
You'd be tortured with, with good stuff, would you?
Well, if it never ends, yeah. I mean, the law of diminishing marginal returns.
The law of the limiting marginal returns.
Mars bars are class. I don't want to be forced Mars bars forever. You know what I mean? No matter how wonderful Mars bars are, there needs to be an end to the Mars bars. And it's, and it's not, it's about the loss of the Mars bar too. Like, I did a podcast once on sparkling water, right? There's, there's a specific type of sparkling water that you can only get in Spain. It's called Vichy Catalan, right? And it's, it's sparkling water that's, it comes from a fucking volcano. And it's naturally sparkling. It comes out boiling hot and sparkling and it tastes a bit like bread soda. And it's the nicest sparkling water in the world, right? It's so fucking nice, I refuse to buy it online or take it home with me from Spain.
It must live in Spain and I can only taste it when I go to Spain once every two years. Do you know what I mean?
Because I know if I get this sparkling water and I have it all the time, it loses meaning. Part of the joy, I was in Spain two weeks ago and I tasted it then. The joy is the memory of it.
Lovely.
But if I imagine a heaven of perpetual fucking Vichy Catalan sparkling water, I'm gonna be ringing off the devil. I'm here, what's the crack down there, you know what I mean?
You were saying about a Mers bar, did you ever get a deep fried Mers bar?
A deep fried, I did over in Edinburgh.
We did too, that is.
They're fantastic.
That is not fantastic.
You didn't like it?
Oh.
I quite enjoyed it.
No, we shared it between five of us, it was rotten.
So that's your idea of hell?
That was, no.
Do you know that, um, the modern, and this is a fact. So first off, if you look at the Bible, right? The Bible doesn't actually mention hell. The description of hell in the Bible is, it's a place where God's love isn't present. That's it. Which, so God's love isn't present. This business of eternal torture and fucking fire and devils. There's no mention of that in the Bible. That actually comes from Cork. I'm fucking serious. I'm, hold on.
There, in the 11th century in Cork, there was a manuscript written called The Vision of Knug Dallas, right? So it was, it was, uh, the story goes, right? So this is the 11th century, so that's what, nearly a thousand years ago. There's a story about a knight, so he was a knight in Cork. And this fella lived a terrible life, debauchery, right? Drinking, riding, whatever he wants to do. And he would go nuts on the drink. And then one weekend, he got so drunk that he had a hangover that basically killed him. So he spent an entire weekend dead. And then he woke up on the Monday and it's like, I wasn't dead at all, but let me tell you what I saw.
So this manuscript is called The Vision of Knug Dallas. And Knug Dallas basically says, because I spent my life riding and fighting and doing all these bad things. I visited a place where there are specific tortures for the things that you did in your life that were wrong. So if, he's like, I saw people who were gluttons, so that they were being force fed on a mountain. And then I saw other people in a lake of fire. So this entire vision of hell that we have, it comes from this manuscript in Cork a thousand years ago. But this manuscript, it ended up becoming.
The medieval equivalent of a bestseller. Because we've got the Irish storytelling tradition, so it was a really good story. So back then, what would happen is it would be written in a monastery, and then it would go to another monastery in Europe, and a monk would read it and go, this is a great story, I'm gonna write another one. So all the monasteries in Europe started to copy this one story about the knight in cork who visited the hell and saw demons and saw goblins and devils and fire. Got reprinted and repainted and rewritten. Until eventually, by the 15th century, there was a painter by the fellow of Hieronymus Bosch. And Hieronymus Bosch, he's the one who painted the visions of hell. He took all his inspiration from reading this book.
So hell as we know, it's cork, it's a fellow, seriously? It's about cork in the 11th century, it's bullshit, there's no mention of it in the Bible. No mention at all, and we've believed this now about devils and fire and all that crack. I went a bit off topic.
No, um.
And you take my son back from cork?
Have you spoken to anyone who had a fucking near-death experience and it wasn't fun?
No, actually, no.
Really?
Which is interesting, no, haven't. Even somebody who was a bit of a twat, and he was not a nice man, he was really hard to work with, I found him really difficult to work with. I did my best, but he was a really hard man to... Even just being his energy, he had really negative energy, the creature. And, um, and he had a near-death experience and actually was a nicer man after it. That's the truth, he could have been, no more than that, he could have been.
That's what I wanna know, how many people change? How many people, here's one. When people have these near-death experiences, is everybody, wow, that was real? Or are some people sceptical? That was chemicals in my brain as I was about to die?
This fellow, this fellow, he would, anybody else, now to be honest, I haven't, I don't know hundreds of people who died and came back. I only know a few, but they, that fellow, he actually did make changes. His voice even was softer.
Wow.
Maybe he did damage when he was in, I don't know, but he, but he definitely, he changed dramatically. Didn't still particularly like him, but he, you know.
Have you looked into, like, are there people practising your profession in countries where psychedelics are legal in therapeutic use and they're incorporating psychedelics into your profession?
I know that for a fact, that they are even in this country.
Okay, they're doing it on the sly.
Yeah, well, yeah, people are using psychedelics. I don't use it in my practice, but...
Why would they do that? What is the purpose of psychedelics in palliative care?
What do you think?
Well, I spoke to a fellow called Dr Paul Letnitski in Australia, and he was given the licence by the Australian Government to study LSD, psilocybin and MDMA, and he was using psychedelics in palliative care. I think it was huge doses of psilocybin. And what he said is, "I'm giving these people a dress rehearsal for death. So I'm giving them a psychedelic experience to let them go, maybe this is what will happen."
And, you know, my personal take on this, if you think, you know, any psychedelic would help you, well, that should be your choice. If you think it would make the last part of your life anybody easier, why wouldn't you?
And what he also said to me too, and it harks back to something you said earlier, which I found fascinating, when you were speaking about play therapy and you were speaking about trauma and how an adult can play and just the actions of that play can maybe take them back to a younger part of themselves. Well, this fellow was using, he was using psychedelics to help people address pre-verbal trauma. So people who had experienced trauma so young that they hadn't learned to form words yet.
And he said that that was the most difficult to access because... How do you verbalise trauma when words don't exist? So he was using psychedelics as a new way for people to access. I mean, they could be six months old, whatever happened. And psychedelics were helping these people with that, to get back to that world without words.
What they would have been doing there, and we do it in play, we do it in holotropic breathwork.
Even being in the womb, there can be trauma when you're in the womb. You know, if the mother was using drugs or if there was a trauma that happened, somebody died, there was a car accident. A child in the womb can experience that as trauma. The adult has some conscious awareness of it, the child has it more as a subconscious level. And so doing what you were saying, like when we spoke about holotropic breathwork earlier. And holotropic breathwork brings you to your subconscious. So you let go of that conscious mind, people are looking at me, and you move deep down into the body where the subconscious lives. And that's where you feel it.
I'd love to speak to you about that because breathwork is the closest you can get to psychedelics without taking a psychedelic. Like even myself, right? So I don't do holotropic, I'd love to get into it. I just do standard breathing meditations.
It's probably similar though.
Yeah, just like, ah, it's fucking amazing. Like when you can get handy at meditation and when you can get your breath so slow that it's like, how am I even alive right now? You know what I mean? It's so, but something really profound had happened for me and I'm not, I don't really believe in the supernatural. But I'd been, so I'd go to this river every single day and I would meditate there for 10, 15 minutes, just for anxiety. And I'd been doing this every single day for about two months, just on this riverbed. And.
I came out of the meditation and when I came out of it, I looked across the river and I saw my dad, who'd been dead 10 years. I saw him and he went into the reeds and then a voice came on me that said, "I'm okay." And then I snapped out of it. And, and then as well, and then I looked towards a nettle and the message I got from the nettle was, "Me and you are one, we're like brothers." Do you know what I mean?
And it doesn't, the thing is, I don't believe I saw my dad's ghost. I don't know what that was, but what matters is, it fucking gave me great meaning. Like, a way it was lifted off. I don't, like, I don't need that to be psychedelic, or to be supernatural. Something very meaningful happened to me. I think what it was personally, right?
Wherever I'd gone in the meditation, it's so calm. Anxiety doesn't exist, anger doesn't exist, emotion doesn't exist. That wonderful, beautiful centre of meditation where it is what it is. Whatever place I'd gone to there, it allowed me to safely access repressed grief. And it allowed me in that moment to go, "Let go. Your dad's dead. He died 10 years ago." I don't need that to be supernatural. For me, it's about, it's about the meaning. And I took a fucking hell of a lot of meaning from that, you know? Someone else might come away from it and go, "I fucking meditated there and I saw a ghost of my dad."
Right. And, and you know, it's interesting, we say supernatural.
Is that really, really natural? Is supernatural just very, very natural?
It's hard to fucking know. When you go, if you wanna go at it though, what the fuck is natural? Like, you don't know, but it's true, like, because the thing is, like, even, like, we're here in this room, right? And there's fucking speakers and all this shit. At the end of the day, it's a bunch of light and it's bouncing into our human brains and we're interpreting this as visual information. But I bring a fucking bat into this room and the bat can't see. But the bat could fly around this room and it would safely not hit you into the head, but it can't see. But the bat is using echolocation. But what's the room to that bat's mind?
Now, where are we going now?
I know, I know, I know, I know. Just talking about, I'm just talking about what is the nature of what is real.
He brought it back.
Our reality as human beings, right?
We're back, we're back.
We're human beings, so we, we're... That was a bit bad, all right. We're, well, no, it comes from Descartes, Rene Descartes. We're human beings and we interpret this world using our human being senses. So we've got scent, we've got smell, we've got hearing, we've got fucking sight, right? And our brains take all this information in. A bat doesn't have that at all. A bat is, is all echolocation. But yet, but what is reality to a bat?
And that's, that's a lovely question and...
We don't know because they can't talk.
Exactly. And everybody, everybody in this room perceives through their senses their reality. And it'd be different for you or me. We could, we're sitting here in the, almost the same position, but there's a very different experience for me. I'm all, you know, starstruck, looking at you in your plastic bag.
You're going out of it.
And you're all, you're all saying, "I thought she was younger."
Um, I'm absolutely in awe of your, your wisdom and your compassion.
Now you're telling me I'm old. When people say it's your wisdom and you're comparing, that is not. That's practically an insult.
I'm not. Um.
What, what do you, like, do you ever reflect your work into, we'll say, Irish traditions? Like, I reckon in Ireland, historically, we're, we're pretty good with death compared to other cultures.
We certainly are, yeah.
You know? Um, even, like, an old school wake, like, I mean, you'd have people drinking with the corpse.
Aye.
You know what I mean? In, in particularly rural areas. And then you had a form of singing called keening.
You know? And we had all these traditions, rituals and music around death. And death didn't seem... I, I've thought about it, I think it might come down to temperature. Because I know in countries where, in countries where it's hot, where they couldn't preserve the body, like Spain, for instance, you tend to have distance from the corpse. But in Ireland, we didn't have to have that. Decomposition didn't happen as quickly. Something I heard too was... When people died, the only place that was cold in the village was the cellar of the pub. So the body would go down there and then people are mourning going, there's a lot of drink here. And that's how we ended up with the Irish wake. That's something I heard.
But how do you feel about Irish traditional death practices?
I think you might have made that thing up about the pub.
I don't know where I fucking heard it. I'm not saying it's fact. Someone told me when I was pissed, so don't quote me on it.
Tonight is All Souls Night.
Actually, you said that to me when I asked you to speak. You said tonight was All Souls Night.
And last night was All Saints Night, so last night was about me.
And tonight is about who?
You. So, All Souls, so I'm from Donegal and we are very, very traditional people in Donegal. And I actually messaged a few of my friends and a few of my sisters and I said, do you all still do the thing on All Souls Night? And in our house was, the place had to be all tidied up, the fire, all the ashes around the fire had to be tidied up. And then there was two glasses of whiskey, there was a bit of barn brick that was probably left over from Halloween. But this is, this is actually very common. And, and there would be cigarettes. My mother and father smoked like troopers and must be everybody along the way too. And it was like, it was very, you know.
Are these for, like you're leaving it out for the dead people?
Like you would for Santi?
Like you would for Santi, except Santi doesn't get the fags. Santi doesn't get fags.
But isn't that love? So you're leaving whiskey and fags out for dead people?
Are you telling me they don't do that in Limerick?
No!
It's a, it's a real kind of a respect thing. And I remember us like tidied all up and up to bed, right? You'd be up in the bed terrified in case you'd hear anybody downstairs, you know, but it was, and the whole thing of it is and was, there's a lot of my, my sister-in-law's a lot younger than me and she still does it. She still does, puts out the cigarettes and puts out the whiskey. But it's a very traditional thing.
So before Christianity, we had Samhain. And with Samhain, it's tonight, the veil between the dead and the living is very thin so the dead can walk amongst us. And then with the process of Christianization, they brought in All Hallows' Eve or All Souls Day. Cause to basically go, look, you can still do the shit you want to do, but let's just say Christ is involved. You know, that's pretty much it. Cause people are like, I'm not getting rid of this. You can fuck off. No, just bring Christ into it, it's fine. And, cause that's what it sounds like to me, it's. I never knew about that. I never that that sounds love. So your own relatives come back.
That's, that's, that's what they told us. I remember saying, you know, Jesus, would you not be afraid, you know, like if you went down to the toilet or something, because we don't have one toilet downstairs. If you go down to the toilet in the middle of the night and you met some of them. And my mother's answer was, but sure, they're all your own people. Like they don't, it's only your own that come to you, not next door's people come to you. It's only your own people that'll come. So you, you didn't need to be afraid. And again, it's all interpretation, isn't it?
It's all and they're not going to want to freak you out. Your great grandfather's not going to come to the future and go, woo.
My father threatened to come and haunt us if he could.
Have you looked at, I can't think of the country, but there, there's certain Asian cultures.
Is it Mexico?
Is it? Oh, no, no, it's in South America.
I said, America.
Or, I think, I think.
Guatemala.
It's where they literally take out the dead body.
To take the bodies out.
And they give them fags and they give them drink as well.
And they dress them up and they dance with them and they parade them. Everybody dresses their own corpses up and leaves them outside in chairs and things and dress and then puts them back.
And this is every year. It's like, here, here's my grandad from 30 years ago. And like literally every year they change the clothes.
GM, DM Murtas, or, yeah.
It's.
The festival they call it.
It's a festival. The, the issue that the problem that's happening with it now is, so it's not widespread. It's, it's a small area. I don't, I think it's Asia. I'm not sure. Because, where is it? Litram. Because of the fucking internet, because of the internet. The internet is fucking ruining it. So you've got these people in the village and these people are digging up their grandfather and taking him out and giving him cigarettes. But now all these tourists are coming from abroad, taking photographs of it for Instagram. The people are very poor. And now they're, the, the tourists are paying for photographs with corpses. So the tradition is in danger of, the respect is being lost.
And the people, if they're incredibly poor, they're doing it under duress. You know what I mean? So it's being exploited by outside forces.
But to be honest, they were doing it anyway. Like they were doing it.
They were doing it anyway, but it's.
And now they're getting a few bob.
It seems weird if a yank is involved.
Ah, it's true. It's true.
Do you know what I mean?
The English aren't great with death. Well, that's a bit unfair, but as I understand this, it takes ages for them to have a funeral, isn't it?
Aye, or you could be three weeks waiting.
What are they asked?
I don't know. There's so many of them, there's so many. But there's people dying every day, everywhere.
But what, like, is it the Victorians, is it Protestantism?
Aye, let's go with the Protestants, we'll go with the Protestants.
Sanitizing, sanitizing death. We'll go with the Protestants.
Go, we'll blame the Protestants.
Sanitizing it, do you know what I mean? And, and making it something that's happening over there. Like, do you have any thoughts on that? And, like, you have some cultures, so Irish wake culture, I reckon that's pretty good. Death is right there. Like, even, even, sometimes I could say to, like, American people, some places in America, it's like, what do you mean? You, you, you show people the corpse.
It's hidden away. In Ireland, there is the dead person, you come and visit it, the whole neighbourhood. Like, I think that's healthy because what you're doing is, here is the person, they're dead, this is death.
And then other cultures are like, death isn't happening. Just straight into an incinerator, there's the ashes. And, and how do you feel about that? Because the meanings that are, that are being given to that, is one healthy, is one not? Or does it matter?
In my experience, and that's all I can speak to, is my experience. But in my experience, when we, children, let them see the, the person who's died, if they want to. If the child doesn't want to, well then, no, that's fine. But I remember even when my mother died, the grandchildren running out and then out, and then they were drawing little pictures. First, they were kind of a little bit cagey coming in to see my mother, and then coming out, and granny was such a big part of their life. And then they were drawing pictures and putting in pictures, and they were bringing in little things and putting things in on top of her, and this little, you know, the shroud thing, and they were tidying that up around her. You know, they, they actually, and so they have a conscious, I remember granny in the coffin, and I remember, that's, that's part of what death is. You know, that's part of what it is.
But a lot of people, I think, Irish people in particular, they actually think that they, after they go to the wake, that they can go outside and comment on how well or not well, you know, awful, bad-looking corpse.
I think people need to sort their shit out if they're thinking that way. Like, honest to God.
It's a fact.
If I can think of... That's the opposite of rest in peace. Like, if I can think of the exact opposite of rest in peace, it's commenting on a corpse's haircut.
Can you imagine? That's gonna happen to you. You'll probably be dead years from now.
I'm wearing a fucking bag in my head when I'm dead.
But I have, I have thought about, um...
When I die, right, I'm... So every single plastic bag that I wear, I never throw it away. I keep them all. So I've got thousands and thousands of plastic bags. And I was thinking, for the crack, right, when I die, instead of a headstone, I'm just gonna build like a giant kitchen sink, right? A huge fucking kitchen sink. And then I'm gonna get every bag I ever wore and put it inside a larger plastic bag and put that under the kitchen sink that is my coffin, or my fucking...
Can I ask you...
Or just hop into a... I'd love to throw my corpse into an air balloon.
You should write that down. I'll make it happen.
Do you ever help with that, with people with, um...
All the time.
Very strange requests?
Yeah. Actually, some people have some really interesting requests and I do write them down on my phone to remember for myself. You know, there was this, I'm sure you must have seen it, it went all around the internet, where the boy recorded himself knocking. "Let me out, let me out." Could you imagine? And I could see me doing that. Especially because of the job I do, you know, big ass, wouldn't it?
What about, um... What are the laws around that stuff, though? Would you get people... You can do what you want with ashes.
Can you?
I think so. You can get... Your ashes made into a tattoo and stuff and...
Oh, you can get them made into jewellery?
Into jewellery, yeah. Um, I know America is a bit more liberal. The writer Hunter S. Thompson, I think he had himself shot out of a cannon.
That was interesting, yeah.
Yeah, but like...
But somebody has to go and pick him up, don't they? Like, where'd he go?
Actually, no, it was his ashes shot out of a cannon.
Oh, that's better.
Sorry, that's a big difference. That's a huge difference.
Um, what's the role of pets, the role of pets in death? Like, when my dad was dying, it was really shit that we couldn't bring the dog along. The dog just wasn't allowed into the hospice.
And so he is now, the dogs are allowed in now.
Personal dogs?
Yeah, and horses are allowed in, yeah.
Well, that's fucking great.
Isn't it though?
We had to get a surrogate dog.
Ah.
Yeah, it like-
It'd be like getting a surrogate wife, like you have a relationship with your dog.
It's like, so my dad's dog wasn't allowed in. We held him up outside the window, but then they had like this communal hospice dog-
Oh aye.
That you had to project your own dog on top of. And it just felt a bit wrong.
Aye, it's like cuddling somebody else's wife, isn't it?
That's it. Um, have you ever seen any animals act strange or, because people would say that animals can sense things that we can't, like-
I do think they can, yeah.
Have you ever experienced that?
Not personally, no I haven't, but my own, in our own experience, my brother when he died, the dog would not leave. He lay under the coffin the whole time, would not leave. Didn't eat, didn't, didn't, didn't go outside the house, he stayed under the coffin for two days solid.
So, like the dog understood?
Must have.
The dog was mourning?
Yeah, the, oh, the dogs, animals definitely mourn, they definitely mourn.
Like, there's this wonderful little statue in Edinburgh called Greyfriars Bobby, and it's, it's a statue of a little terrier, and it's outside a graveyard called Greyfriars. And it was, it was a terrier and his owner died, and the dog just stayed there every single day for like seven years.
You know, the dog just understood. No one showed the dog that's where he's buried, they just, that was his duty and that's what he did.
No.
Um, hold on, I see, I had so many wonderful questions from the internet.
What about, how do you bring the family into it?
The family into the, the process of the...
Into the, like, I'm assuming it's not, like, when someone's dying, like, you've got the people who are gonna be buried as well, so...
Of course, hmm.
Do you ever have the entire family in the room, or everyone, all of you together, speaking about deaths?
Oh, actually, yesterday, just yesterday, I had to go to a house and there was a person who, who has an end-of-life diagnosis and everybody, her husband, her children, were all in denial, these are all adult children now, they were all in denial, and, as in, "I don't think she's that bad, I mean, she looks good", you know, "I don't think..." And two of the daughters had gone to meet the consultant, and he explained to them in very clear terms, "It's short time, could be before Christmas", now, this woman's up and walking about and, you know, not driving and doing everything, like, she's,
but her disease is still very progressed, and, and so we had to have first, and I kind of try and break it up because it can be very, you know, very hard for people if they're all in together, one'll trigger the other, so what I did was break them down into kind of groups, so I spoke to two, and now the, I'm already working with the patient, so I've been working with her for quite a while, and so she didn't need to be in in the first instance, her husband, he's like, he just, he just says, "I don't wanna have this conversation", and I said, "I know how difficult this is, it's really, really tough for you", but the reality is that this is what's happening, and her disease has gone very, they said maybe Christmas, they've told her to get her affairs in order, and she can't do that unless we have this conversation,
so that you can, so that you can support her through this. It gives the person whose, whose life is ending, gives them a bit of power, it gives them a better, "I'm in control here, I can, I can decide what I'm gonna do, what I'm not gonna do", I, I love doing a thing called a what-not-to-do list, you know, people have, "You do this and do that and do the other", what things do you not want to do? You don't wanna, you know, who do you not want to have time? But, so, spoke to him...
What is the purpose of a... A what not to do list.
It's like, it's like a kind of a feck at list. I'm not.
Do you learn more from the what not to?
Course you do. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna listen to what other people are saying. I'm not gonna do this because somebody else thinks I should do it. A what not to do list coming near the end of your life. We should have them now.
Never mind, when you're coming near the end of your life. But so for that house, the youngest child in the family, obviously finding it very difficult. It's not, it would be, it'd be unnatural for them to say, okay, that's fine. Oh, that's grand. Thanks for telling me that. Course there's tears. That's normal and healthy. Course there's resistance. Normal, healthy. And but then when we could all come in the room together and they could sit, I'm sitting in a chair a little bit further away. And they're sitting on the two sofas, side by side, holding each other's hands and, and saying, so we've got some time. We are very lucky. We know that your mother still has some time. So there are some things she'd like to do. We've discussed them. She hasn't been able to discuss them with ye yet because she didn't want to upset ye and you're trying not to upset her.
But now that it's all out in the open, she, that woman will run with these last few good weeks before she actually gets really unwell. And they'll make the most of it. Her daughter will come home from where she's working away and stay at home. It'll be lovely for them. And if we didn't have that conversation, you know, it'll run up to the end. We all know she's dying and nobody got to do or say the things they wanted to say.
And how much of what you do as well, are you consulting with, we'll say a medical professional? And what I mean by that is, like, so my own dad, right? He got six weeks to live. I'd say
there was maybe about two weeks of that where he was present. You know what I mean? And then the rest of it, there's not much he could have done. You know what I mean? Cause he was effectively in a coma. How much, like, would you consult with a professional and say, right, so this, this, this lady here, she, she might have until Christmas? What's the window for her to do something meaningful here before she progresses into the illness?
Often, like, so, we'd call them MDTs. I'm not always invited to MDT. If I'm being honest, I nearly prefer to be outside of it, because then I say to the patient, so what do you know that's happening? So they get to tell me. So, but sometimes I'm included and sometimes a referral-
It's less medical, too.
And a referral will come through a GP, or it'll come through a consultant, or whoever. That's fine, I'll go where I can go. But they, I like to kind of separate myself a little bit. Like, I've been a psychologist for a long time, and I, my job, I feel, is to help empower them that they finish their life the way they want to, as best we can. Obviously, like, some people do want to do mad things, like throw their body into a hot air balloon, but most people just are happy enough to kind of, you know, go away for a weekend with their family and do something nice.
Are you shaming my proposed death?
I'll sort it. I'll sort it.
So, it's, it's, it sounds to me, it's humanistic psychology. Everything is client-led.
And so it should be. And it should be patient-led. Now, I have to be honest to say, like, I have a fine son who's in the medical profession, and he, they're actually moving it back to being more person-centered, I think.
I do genuinely think it is. It used to be like you wouldn't be able to, like, I know hospice has changed a lot for how people see death and dying, and it's a home from home and all the rest of it. But it's still, you know, there's still tubes and all the rest of it. You said to me, Amanda, would you have all the family there? A lot of the times when it comes near the end, the nurse will come in and remove all the tubes and wires and things. And the family will get to do what they want to do, and I'll already have told the family what the person wants, what the person in the bed wants to happen. Because there can be simple little things, like, I want you to say the rosary, or I don't want you to say the rosary. I remember waking up one time myself, I was, I was sick, which is why I got into this job, but I remember waking up from, I don't know what it was, must have been some kind
of a coma too, I don't know, but, and the priest was there, anointing me, and, and one of my brother-in-laws was beside him, and I literally thought- What the hell is that? Because I was coming round going like, what? And there's this priest who like, no, no. And I'm lying in the bed going, do these fuckers think I'm going to kick me clogs? Like I was only a young woman. But so some people don't want the priest and some people do want the priest. And so usually they're very simple requests. It's usually not anything too major. But even if my request was a small, simple thing, at least I'm in charge of my request. I'm in charge of how this, how this show ends.
Do you, something I remember from my, so my dad literally dying, like actually, because I was present in the room when he died, helping the person to, for them to let go.
And it was something I think, there wasn't a death doula, but someone in the hospice had said to my ma, you need to encourage him. When it happens, we let you know when it's happening. It's important that everyone tells him to let go. And I remember being young going, how the fuck, like what the fuck even is that? Is that part of your, like letting go? Like what does that mean? Is it like drifting off to sleep like?
For me, I think the letting go is that the body now has died or the body is not going to get better. It's the body is surplus to requirements anymore. And that energy, that, you know, that whatever that energy is, that whatever you want to call it. Soul always sounds a little bit fuzzy, but whatever it is, whatever, that me, that isn't just my body. And when that, when it's coming near the time where that, the body's going to die, that needs to go somewhere. And so when people are saying, tell them it's okay to let go. Tell them that, you know, that you're, that you're going to be okay, that it, that he can go whenever he's ready to go. Or whatever, that's what you were told to do. And what you're doing is you're saying to them, you don't need to fight this death.
It's, it's a natural progress into whatever might be into nothing, but it's still the next step. It might be into nothing or it might be into heaven, whatever you want to believe. And to allow them that we're going to be okay. Okay, because I've seen people hang on and hang on and it's you said the avoidance of suffering. Human beings, we move away from suffering and towards pleasure as often as we can. It's a human condition. And when we're dying, sometimes the person in the bed is hanging on and suffering more than than they need to, even if they're not in pain, because thank God now people aren't in pain.
When you say hanging on, is it is it a physical act or an emotional act or is it a tension?
I I to me, it's a definitely a tensionist of it's a it's a resistance to letting go of this body, this bit. It's a resistance to letting go of that. And I, you know what, if you're younger, if you're, you know, if you're afraid to go. I can see why a person would hold on, you know, why they would hold on. And then when the people that love you say it's okay. For you to let go, we're gonna be okay and you're gonna be okay. They have to be okay because it's the next step anyway. We can't stop it. We can't undo it. We can't. There's no other exit. That's it. And so it just helps the person because your hearing is the last sense to go. And so I always think, I remember being in a house and they were all young adults and the mother had already died and the father was dying and
they were they were lovely, but they never, they were very young when the mother died, the youngest was only three. So very young when the mother died and when the father was dying, they just didn't know what to do. And to have me there. I'm hovering in the background like a piece of furniture. I'm not, you know, I'm not in the middle of it. I'm, I've already done all the given them all the support they needed before this and and I'm just reassuring them that, you know, your daddy can still hear you. You can go back up and talk to him again if there's anything you wanna say, now's the time. And I'm staying way back. That's their precious. Now, I do feel I've become part of the family. Sure, I could be in outhouses for a year and a half or two years. You know, if a person went from diagnosis to to death, I could be in a note for a long time. And I grieve. I grieve them as well. These are people that I've had.
Very intimate, very, very intimate conversations with. And I just love that word intimate because I think helping somebody to come to the end of their life is extremely intimate. And the word intimate comes from into me you may see. And so they let me see into them and I I get to experience them in a very, very deep, profound way.
How do you then navigate emotional burnout? Like, do you do you see a supervisor?
If you if you work in my work, I'm a supervisor myself, but you you have to see a supervisor.
Of course, yeah.
It's part of the keeping the thing safe and that everybody's doing what they should be doing and having it kind of, you know, that it that there's an official way of doing things and not doing things. And but for me, we play a lot, play a lot. It's just, it's just.
Play as part of supervision?
Play as part of being married, play as being part of being a mother, you know, just keep it light. It doesn't. It's not that I don't take people home with me in my heart. Of course I do, of course I do. But it's I know I'm no benefit to them or myself or anybody else if I carry all that heavy hurt. Because then I go into the next house and I'm bringing energy that shouldn't be there. So it's and I'm I'm fairly good at at letting go of what I need to let go of. I don't let it go in my thoughts, but I I remember them, of course.
So for your own mental health practice, for your own head, like, wha- wha- what are you doing? What's standing to you with keeping yourself grounded and present?
I suppose I'm doing the job a long time, which helps, even though I've met very new psychotherapists, very new psychologists, who are really good at their job too. It's kind of, it comes as part of the work. You know that. It's like you're, do you remember, I mentioned to you about energy. Like, our emotions are energy. And if I'm with somebody who's come to the end of their life and they're really struggling, or the family all around them are really struggling. I'm I'm a compassionate person and I pick up their energy. And so I have to do certain rituals that I do. I kind of visualize having a kind of a Velcro coat. And that when I'm when I'm leaving that house, I take off that Velcro coat where that all the emotions are stuck to and I hang it on the nearest tree.
And I pick it up on the way back again. And it's it's symbolic to me, but it works, but it works.
Jeez, that's fucking gorgeous.
Me or the coat?
That's amazing, that is. So the visualization of that helps you. You're seeing grief and everything is sticking and you can take that off. And that visualization, and do you meditate? Do you want to breathe in?
I absolutely love holotropic breathwork. I do it regularly and it's just, I remember Iver Brown, you would have heard of Iver Brown. He died earlier in the year. He was one of my lectures when I was training. And I was big into holotropic breathwork, emptied wards in St Brendan's Hospital in Dublin himself and Dr Jim O'Donoghue, and they trained me in holotropic breathwork. And for myself, it's, I remember one of them saying at one time, it's like a general absolution. You don't have to say it because sometimes there's too much trauma. If the person has a huge amount of trauma in their life and then they come and they have to start to tell you every single thing that ever went wrong or where somebody hurt me, that can be re-traumatizing.
Obviously, we'd be very careful and tipping in and out, but the holotropic breathwork just helps to lift it all. And you don't, it's like, you know that thing, the rising tide floats all boats? Well, the holotropic breathwork lifts all the traumas. And then we have to go back and pick up on the cognitive things, but people express sort of, or people say they feel like there's a lightness in their body afterwards. I have a young fellow that I'm working with at the minute and he's had a lot, he had a huge birth trauma, like very, almost died, birth trauma and mother almost died. It was really traumatic for all of them. And, and he, so in his lived world, there was nothing, there was nothing, like he wasn't abused. The only thing that they could identify was this birth trauma. And he's like 26, 27, lovely lad.
And talking just doesn't get to it from him. He just, he gets no relief. He gets really tense in his body.
Just the pre-verbal.
Yeah, that's the, yeah, exactly. And so if, if your trauma is pre-verbal and I'm trying to make you talk about it, it feels like you're going around in circles. You're like, I am not getting relief. I'm not getting, I don't feel like I'm getting this out. And for him, the breathwork, he's like, oh, she's very great. No, he absolutely loves it coming out. Because it's, I find it very powerful.
And breath work is like, it's hardcore meditation. It's meditation, but it's really deep breaths and very focused.
It's almost.
Is it like Wim Hof?
It's a bit like that, but it's actually almost like, so it's kind of like you, like if anybody, I'm sure you've all heard of neuroscience, but how the mind and the way you think about it and how it affects your body and how your body, the feelings, how you think about these feelings. And so with, with like with neuroscience and psychotherapy, we now understand how the mind, as opposed to the brain, how the mind experiences trauma and how the body remembers that trauma and stores it in the body. So it kind of leaks out every now and again when you, when it gets too high. And so with, with breath work and with, with anything that is non-verbal, so any type of process that you're doing is non-verbal, breathing is non-verbal.
So you breathe all day, every day. You don't tell yours to breathe, you don't tell your heart to beat, you don't tell your blood pressure to stay stable. All of that happens automatically, that hind part of the brain controls all that. And so for this, every system in the body, when your body gets stressed, your cortisol, which is one of your stress chemicals, rises. And so when the body gets stressed, your body feels different than it does when you feel relaxed, obviously. And so when the cortisol rises, you, your breathing gets sharper, you breathe higher.
Like a panic attack, you're looking for the breaths.
Or even not as, not as dramatic as a panic attack, but you know, just your.
Home of anxiety.
A little bit, that kind of edgy feeling and you know, the body starts to give you little signals. It starts to, you know, twitch a little bit or, or you feel tension in your shoulders or your, or somebody, some people as a self to bite their fingers or bite their nails or pick their skin, different people use different ways of doing it. But in neuroscience, what we know is that you cannot control your heart. You can't say, heart, slow down. So when you get a fright or you, trauma is re-experienced, your heart goes faster. Your breathing gets more shallow, your, your body sends a message to your brain, something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong. And the brain's going, what is it, what is it, what is it? The body's still experiencing this really uncomfortable feeling, the adrenal glands start to. Pump chemicals into your body, cortisol, stress, chemism, noradrenaline. And so they're all being pushed into your body. Your body now feels like something terrible is wrong.
Imagine if you were coming near the end of your life and feeling like that. You can't control your, your endocrine system. Your stomach actually starts to make acid because of things you're going to have to fight or run away from something. And, and so all of these systems are going and you're wondering why you're feeling nervous or anxious or stressed. Because all of these systems are happening in your body simultaneously. And the only one, it's like a domino effect. The only one that you can actually get in and control is your breath. So when we do holotropic breathwork, it's really fast, deep breathing. And it's kind of like, I explain it to people who aren't, will say, you know, who don't understand neuroscience. It could be, you know, younger people, whatever, some, most of us don't. I didn't understand neuroscience until I learned it. So, you know, I wouldn't expect anybody else to know it.
But when they, when, when we're doing it, the way I explain it is that you're breathing really, really quickly. And your body now thinks you're in a stress situation. But you're sitting back in a recliner chair, nice and relaxed. So the message is going to the brain, something's wrong, something's wrong. And the brain's going, I don't think there's something wrong because he looks really comfortable sitting here. Maybe we're misinterpreting something. So what you're doing is you widen this window of tolerance to stress. And it, it works really well for a lot of people to widen this window of tolerance. So, so that your system doesn't kick in too early and say, whoops, something's wrong.
Is it something anybody could learn on YouTube, like just from videos?
Oh, no.
No, you do have to have a coach, do you?
To be honest, not even so much a coach as a minder. You need some, because big stuff can come up. Like, if I only met, so if I only met you and we'd done five, six, 10 sessions, I don't have half your story. But so you, you never can do it on your own. You have to be with somebody. It's not safe to do it on your own.
You're just, it's, that's exactly how people describe the therapeutic use of psychedelics.
Yeah, probably, yeah.
You can't just go and do the MDMA on your own. This is not just a thing you take. This is a whole suite.
Of protection.
So, are you speaking about holotropic therapy then?
Well, it's holotropic breathwork as a tool in the therapeutic process.
Now, I have people at the end of life who who love that little bit of relaxation that it gives their body. So there's different degrees of it, obviously. You know, we can use like less or shorter sessions or. But people always seem to describe it as feeling much more relaxed in their body. We do a lot of stuff.
If if anyone in the audience or anyone listening wants to do a bit of that, because it sounds fucking class. Like, what would we look for? A holotropic therapist, like?
Would you, do you know, it's kind of usually only as kind of a tool, but we'll say Stanislav Grof was the man that sort of, I don't know, he invented it, but he came up with it anyway. And he trains people all over the people trained all around Ireland, all over Europe, America, ever. It's a very popular part of of psychotherapy. But not everybody, like a lot of, a lot of girls and men trained with me when we did it, but not everybody uses it. I just, I think if you feel confident in using it, it works so well, really does. And so you you look up holotropic breathwork online, you'll find loads of people that do it, but it's not something you do on your own, absolutely not. Because you could, there can be stuff going on in there that you don't even know.
Because I've heard that about, it's it's it's something, I I recommend meditation a lot to people. And a few listeners, early days, flagged with me, you got to be careful about recommending meditation to everybody. Because some people have body trauma and meditation could be very unsafe for that person. Because they may have been assaulted, they might have been in a car crash. And all of a sudden, this shit is coming up because they're doing even a body scan.
And I didn't know about that. I'd never thought about that, you know. So that, I'm guessing that's what you're referring to.
It is. And the thing is, some people's bodies, like you said, are not safe spaces. And so you need the whole therapeutic kind of, you know, the the whole relationship and all the safety nets that are there. So that you can go in and come out, titrate it, just in, take a little look, let's see what's in there. So five minutes meditation. Like meditation is like the buzzword, really, isn't it? Like, really, all that you're saying is, can we just slow everything else down? Forget about what's happened, what's happened before, forget about what's going to happen when you go out the door. And you stay here with your body, your breath. And me, and I'll help mind you, you don't need to worry, I'll mind you. And to go inside and just see what comes. And it might only be a minute or two, and then people can, and what you're trying to do, the whole point of it is
that you get comfortable in your body. If you're comfortable in your body, you're comfortable in yourself. It's, you know, does what it says on the, on the, on the ten.
Mick, I, I, I was using meditation to, so that I could be mindful throughout my day a lot.
Love it.
Um, like one thing I do, and I, I tell other people to do it is, if, if, if I'm, like I said earlier, worrying about the future,
what if, or thinking about the past, and I wanna be in the present moment, I'll pick up an orange. Oranges are great for this, just because of their leathery. And when you pick into an orange, it explodes and you might get something in the eye. And it's the smell of citrus.
Mm.
Orange is, I find, I think it's the most mindful fruit. And I'm serious. So if I want to get myself to the present moment, I will eat an orange.
And that's all I'm fucking doing.
And every single part of that, I'm noticing the feeling of the, the leathery skin. I'm noticing the smell, the explosion, the taste. And I'm bringing every single one of my senses to just that orange and nothing else. And the five or six minutes it takes me to eat that orange, that grounds me.
So, and what you're talking about there is coming to your senses.
Your, your mother said that boy has no sense.
Or that, or that was a bit senseless.
And what you're actually saying is that you weren't present, you weren't being in this.
So, coming to your senses is just paying attention to your senses, that's all.
That's all. And then you, you have that sixth sense that you have.
Which, what's the sixth sense?
I don't know. You have.
That's a bit freaky, isn't it?
We all have a sixth sense. The sixth sense, so you, you know your normal senses, so pay attention to something, so. Pay, listen to something, what are you listening to? What can you feel on your skin? Is it warm? Is it cold? And you're just going through your five senses, and then you sit with it. Just sit with that, and your sixth sense will speak to you. Like, you know, a person that, I have a sixth sense, uh, that, you get that funny feeling about somebody. You either like them or you don't like them. I liked you right away.
Oh, thank you very much.
I thought, yeah, I thought, he's, he's nice enough lad. And, but, but some people don't get that vibe. Do you ever sit beside somebody on the bus, or you're in the queue at the post office and somebody comes too close to you and you're like, oh, that's your sixth sense?
Mm-hmm. Um, mine, I'm pretty handy at pattern recognition, but then I got diagnosed as autism.
And can it still be good, though?
Yeah, but like, I suppose it is pattern recognition. Like I said, I got a vibe about this building. I have a feeling if I, if, whatever about this building, if I go researching deep into it, I'm gonna find something class.
I bet you will.
I don't know why, it's just, that's my sixth sense.
You're welcome.
Laura Coleman, thank you so much. I cut it short there, I cut it short there at the clapping. There was plenty and plenty of clapping, it's just, it can sound particularly abrasive on the podcast, so you'll have to imagine the glorious round of applause that Laura got there. What a wonderful chat that was. What a humbling chat to reflect on death like that. I'll be back next week with a hot take. Thank you so much to Laura Coleman for that wonderful conversation. Be back next week with a hot take. Don't know what about. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, and feel grateful that you're simply alive. That's enough. That's enough. Dog bless.
Okay, let's see, we got the four kids, four gifts each, six teacher gifts? Wait, oh, what did we get Andy? And the dogs. Oh, can't forget the dogs.
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