Live Without Regrets: Buddhist Strategies for Facing Aging, Illness, and Loss | Sister Dang Nghiem

We live as if we'll live forever, then die as if we've never lived. A Zen nun and MD on the daily practices that break that pattern. Sister Dang Nghiem, MD, has a new book called Live Beautifully, Die Beautifully: Field Notes from the Edge of Impermanence https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/827249/live-beautifully-die-beautifully-by-sister-dang-nghiem/. Sister D was born in 1968 in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, the daughter of a Vietnamese mother and an American soldier. She lost her mother at the age of twelve and immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen with her brother. Living in various foster homes, she learned English and went on to earn a medical degree from the University of California – San Francisco. After suffering further tragedy and loss, she quit her practice as a doctor to travel to Plum Village monastery in France, founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, where she was ordained a nun in 2000. Sister D is the author of a memoir, Healing: A Woman's Journey from Doctor to Nun (2010); Mindfulness as Medicine: A Story of Healing and Spirit (2015); Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness (2021); and The River In Me: Verses of Transformation, Collected Poems (2024). In this episode we talk about: The Buddha's Five Daily Remembrances, and why you'd want to practice them Why our denial of aging and death causes far more suffering than aging or death How thanking your changing body can turn dread into gratitude Thich Nhat Hanh's wisdom of "the non-toothache moment" and hidden everyday happiness Treating despair and negative self-talk as small deaths we can release Why it's natural to fear death, and how to fear it less Why grief has no finish line, and the cost of rushing through it Related Episodes: Buddhist Strategies for Reducing Everyday Addictions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx1a-ErCrcc Your Negative, Ruminating Mind: Here's Your Way Out https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-negative-ruminating-mind-heres-your-way-out-sister/id1087147821?i=1000725483386 This Episode Will Make You Stronger https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/this-episode-will-make-you-stronger-sister-dang-nghiem/id1087147821?i=1000544294179 Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: This episode is sponsored by: Tin Can: Go to tincan.com/HAPPIER http://tincan.com/HAPPIER to get $10 off your first order. To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dan Harris?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. One of the things that I both love and resent about Buddhism is that the practices, many of them, are really designed to help you face some hard truths about the fact that you are going to get older and to get sick and eventually die. And that is true for everybody you know and love. The idea, as far as I understand it, is that it's less stressful to face these hard truths directly than it is to kind of spend your life ducking and weaving and denying and dissociating, et cetera.

• 0:44Dan Harris?

  And I buy that. However, I do also find that facing them head on is sometimes really sad and scary. So I was really interested when I heard that one of my favorite longtime repeat guests, Sister Dang Niem, AKA Sister D, had written a whole book on this subject. For those of you who don't know Sister D, she's a medical doctor and a Zen Buddhist nun. She practices in Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village tradition. She's the author of five books, including her newest, which is called Live Beautifully, Die Beautifully. Sister D, welcome back to the show.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Good to see you. Hello, dear friends.

• 1:21Dan Harris?

  Well, so congratulations on your new book. I'm just curious, why did you want to write about this?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Well, I faced loss and death since a child. My brother and I, we didn't know our father. And at the age of 12, my mother disappeared. And we have never found her body since. And then I came to the United States at the age of 17. And soon after that, my grandmother died. So pretty much those very important people in my life passed away when I was quite young. And then my partner died in a drowning accident when

• 2:05Speaker 01

  I just finished medical school. I was 30, 31 years old then. So in that way, my whole life, I have faced loss and death. And it was excruciatingly painful. I didn't know how to embrace loss and death. And so on the path of practice, I have learned that death doesn't have to be a painful thing. And that includes old age, sickness, separation from our loved ones. We can learn to live beautifully and die beautifully each day.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Because death doesn't take place just when we stop our respiration. But death takes place every day. So I wrote this book from my direct experience. And in Vietnamese, there's a saying, it's from Ruo Geng Phao Phoi, it means my intestines, my liver and my lungs. Because I have lived through this. And so I write this, and I hope to benefit many people, young and not so young.

• 3:21Dan Harris?

  Your life story is, and you just told it in brief, and those who want to hear more about it can go back and listen to some of our prior conversations. I'll put some links to our prior conversations in the show notes for anybody who wants to go deeper. But your personal story is remarkable, and even more remarkable for my POV is how you've used it to help other people. You have structured the book around the five daily remembrances. Maybe can you just walk us through, what are the five daily remembrances? And why did the Buddha think they were so important?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  These five remembrances were practiced from the time of the Buddha. The monks and nuns practiced them daily by going to the chano ground to look at corpses. So, and then in our Zen tradition, we also contemplate on this daily. We even have guided meditations for this. So briefly, the five remembrances are to help us face one of those deepest human fears. And the first one is that we are of the nature to grow old, and there

• 4:42Speaker 01

  is no way to escape. The second remembrance is that we are of the nature to be ill, and there is no way to escape it. The third remembrance is that we are of the nature to die, and there's no way to escape. The fourth remembrance is that we are of the nature to be separated from all those we love and cherish. And there is no escape from that. And the fifth remembrance is that our actions are our true continuation now and into the future.

• 5:23Dan Harris?

  Sometimes the way that fifth remembrance is articulated is our actions are our only true possessions. In a world where everything's changing all the time, the closest we can come to a true possession is the kind of jet stream of our actions. People hearing this for the first time, or even those who are like me, hearing it for the 1,000th time, might have the reaction, well, this seems deeply unpleasant. As a Buddhist teacher of mine, sometimes jokes that the Buddhists really know how to party. So I'm just wondering, like, why would anybody want to put themselves through these five daily remembrances? As

• 6:06Dan Harris?

  which, as the Buddha recommended, you know, you should go through them twice a day. What's the upside?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  These remembrances are deeply unpleasant to most of us, because we don't want to remember that these are our, they are our true nature, that these phenomena take place every single millisecond in our daily life. So if it's something so natural, and it happens constantly like that, but we don't face it, then it's actually not facing it,

• 6:52Speaker 01

  it's the denial of it that causes us angst, anxiety, and displeasure. And the more we run away from it, the more fear and anxiety and displeasure we experience. It's just like, you know, people with Hansen's disease or leprosy. So the bacteria destroy their motor nerves and also their sensory nerves. So they don't feel it. And so when they hit their hands on a table or on a hard object, and it causes, you know, this open wound,

• 7:32Speaker 01

  they don't feel the pain. And so they don't address it. They're not aware of it. But when we feel that there is an injury, and we, you know, even if it's very mild, and we take care of it immediately, then it doesn't have to fester. So in that way, life is that way. When we are not aware, or we deny the truth that we are growing old, that, you know, our body is becoming weaker, or being sick, or that we are dying, then it is like denying what's really there. So then we don't really take good care of it until the final

• 8:13Speaker 01

  stage. And then we are forced to confront a very harsh reality. So the practice helps us to familiarize these natural aspects of our life, to befriend these aspects of our lives, to embrace them, and to make the best of them. And I can say to you that being a mindfulness practitioner, although I don't have the title of a doctor, I don't have the luxury of living the high style life, my life is very simple. And yet, I feel at peace with myself, with the nature of my own body. And I'm not afraid. I can say confidently

• 8:57Speaker 01

  that if today I'm diagnosed with, like, cancer, or if tonight I'm going to die, I feel at peace with it, because I live with it each day, and I make the best of it. So I don't have the kind of regrets that many of my patients faced, that I witnessed in them, that when they face a severe diagnosis or death, they get very frightened. And mostly because they have so much unfinished business. They didn't take care of their relationships, of the many things that were important to them. If things were to end abruptly, they

• 9:42Speaker 01

  didn't take care of them. We live as if we live forever. And then when we die, we die as if we've never lived.

• 9:51Dan Harris?

  Let me say that back to you. We live as if we're going to live forever. That part I understand, because none of us wants to think about the fact that life is finite. And then you said, the second part is, we die as if we've never lived. What do you mean by that?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  We die as if we've never lived, because we don't face these aspects of our lives. So we live quite superficially. We may pursue the things that aren't that important to us, because we feel we have all the time in the world. So we'll waste a lot of time on the things we do daily, the relationships that are not nurturing, that are not healthy.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Activities that are not really meaningful to us. And that is why when we die, death comes as if it's so sudden. So it's a surprise to us. And then we regret having not lived our lives really.

• 10:55Dan Harris?

  If you're a regular listener of this show, you know that we're always adding amazing new teachers and new guided meditations and hosting live sessions over on my app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. What you might not know is that we also now have a full library of not just guided meditations, but also short courses and challenges. We've got a meditation masterclass with Joseph Goldstein. We've got Sharon Salzberg covering the Eightfold Path. We've got Diana Winston with her Reset Challenge. And next week, we are dropping a new course from Sharon Salzberg and Andy Gonzalez. It's called Taking Care of Yourself So You Can Take Care of the World. It's an eight-part course to help you develop skills for resilience and clear seeing. And remember that you're really no good to anybody if you're not taking care of yourself

• 11:40Dan Harris?

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• 12:22Dan Harris?

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• 13:07Dan Harris?

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• 13:19Dan Harris?

  So you really feel that based on all of the meditation practice you've done and all of the contemplation of your own mortality, that death doesn't scare you. If you got a diagnosis this afternoon that you had a few days to live, that you could handle it with equanimity. And I mean, I just have to say for myself, you know, I, I'm not a monk or a nun, but I do a decent amount of meditation practice and I try to contemplate my mortality at least twice a day, as the Buddha recommended. But if I, I think that if I got a lethal diagnosis, I would be terrified. So yeah, how do I have what you're having?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Well, it's both the contemplation and also the very concrete practices in daily life. In medicine, we learn that every cell in our body is programmed to die and is called apoptosis, every cell in our body. Some cells, like the hair cells and the skin cells, are programmed to die after a short period of time. That's why our skin cells love off constantly, our hair falls off. Blood cells have like a lifespan of about 120 days.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  I know heart cells, brain cells have a longer lifespan, but everything in our body is programmed to die. That's called apoptosis. Now by chance, only one cell, it escapes that program. That program is turned off. It's mutated. And then that cell continue to proliferate, to multiply itself instead of dying on time. And that's cancer. And it brings about death, you see? So for life to be possible, our own life and the life of humanity and all living beings

• 15:33Speaker 01

  on this planet Earth, life is possible because death is a part of it. It's programmed into our life. And when there's no death, there is no life either. They are like the yin and yang. They go hand in hand together. You see, I studied medicine and, you know, I learned that. But it didn't bring home in the way that when my partner died suddenly from a drowning accident, I was devastated because I thought that, he said to me that he would live until I was 80 years old and he would always be there for me.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  When he died, suddenly to me, I realized that I had taken him for granted because I thought he would always be there. So when my depression kicked in, when I was going through a lot in my life, then I would turn my back on him. What I mean is that when we are not aware of the impermanence of life, we take a lot of things for granted. We take our loved ones for granted. And so the intellectual understanding of death doesn't help to transform or remove our fear.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  But it's the daily practice to look at my own hands, to see the age spots on my hands, and to put lotion on my hands and lovingly massage my own hands several times a day. To look at myself in the mirror and to see, you know, my eyes take these crow feet and breathe and smile and say, I am of the nature to grow old. And I'm so grateful for all the years that I've gone through, for all the people who

• 17:35Speaker 01

  have helped me in this life, for all the efforts that I've made and others have invested in me, you see? So along with the simple recognition of what is, I also give rise to gratitude. I also give rise to gladness, to be able to look at your, the changes in your body, the injuries that you've sustained, the sickness, the pain that you, that you experience. And to, at the same time, to give rise to gratitude. Thank you, hands, for having been there all these years to help me make so many things possible, you know?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  So in that way, when, when something gives up, like when I was facing early menopause, because I got very sick with low blood pressure and then with Lyme disease, instead of feeling only grief and resentment, I actually practiced to thank my uterus, to thank my ovaries, to thank my body. And I just said, you know, thank you for having been there, for functioning so well,

• 18:56Speaker 01

  to give me all this, you know, good health and good skin and good mood and, you know, cardiovascular protection. I give thanks to all these positive benefits all these years. And now I know that you are, you know, you're going out. And I just want to let you know that I'm very grateful for you. That's, I talk to my uterus in that way. Instead of feeling resentful and angry and grief over it, we can practice to express our deep gratitude for the companionship that we've had all these years.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  So in that way, this, this a tenderness, there's this love, there's this peace. And instead of just grief and angst.

• 19:49Dan Harris?

  I think what you were saying is that, so for many of us, when some part of our body stops working as well, and this is true for even for young people, you find in your mid twenties that you're, you're not as flexible as you were in your teens. And you find in your thirties that, oh, I've got maybe a few gray hairs or a few worry lines on my face and, and it just intensifies as you get older. A lot of us, when we notice that our bodies are changing, we're getting older, our health isn't as good, you know, the key functions of the body aren't, aren't there the way we've counted on, we were terrified and maybe angry.

• 20:30Dan Harris?

  And what you're saying, I think, is that the antidote to that is to revert to gratitude for all of the service your pancreas put in over the years.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Gratitude. Each day, each day, we offer gratitude. Exactly. Instead of taking ourselves, our life, everything we have for granted.

• 20:54Dan Harris?

  It seems that essentially what you're arguing is the problem is not the aging or the changing of our bodies. The problem is our resistance to the changes.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  That's beautiful then, absolutely. Growing old, being sick, going to die and be separated from our loved ones, they are facts of lives. They're not the problems. It is our denial of it, our rejection of it, and our taking everything for granted that brings about dissatisfaction and suffering. So yeah, they are not the problems. The problem is our own denial. And by the way, denial can be an acronym for don't even know I am lying.

• 21:54Dan Harris?

  Speaking of relating to your body as it ages and also as you bump up against the inevitable health problems that we all will have, your teacher, the legendary Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, had this expression that I love, which is "the wisdom of the non-toothache." Can you talk a little bit about that?

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Dan, you have definitely practicing and studying the Dharma. Makes me very happy to know that you also come to our monasteries to practice. You know, absolutely. That's what we've been talking about all along. Everything that we have, when they don't make noise, when there's no pain, that's the wisdom of the non-toothache. We should celebrate. And Thay also said that, you know, 80% of our feelings are neutral. Only 20 of them are painful or, you know, or happy. 80%, that's the non-toothache. So those 80% of the time when things are neutral,

• 23:01Speaker 01

  actually, if we give rise to awareness and gratitude, they, that 80% of the time can be turned into happiness. Oh, I'm so glad that I can walk to the mountain today. That's what I said yesterday when I went hiking. Because 10 years ago, I could barely made it to the meditation hall, let alone hiking up the mountain on our monastery ground. You see? So all of us have been there, that we have been sick or we have had some kind of impairment. And we suffer so much, even a toothache. You just want to be relieved from it.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  But then the rest of the time, when we have a non-toothache, we are not happy. Why shouldn't we be happy? So I often give rise to that wisdom of non-toothache. And it brings me, not the happiness of the eating chocolate, chocolate, you jump up and down, you know what I mean? It's not the high of like, meeting somebody. It's not, it's like this quiet, deep peace and gratitude that is long-lasting, that is very nurturing. When you know many of the things you have now were the things that you wish for, you know?

• 24:25Speaker 01

  A partner, or a job, or a child, or a living space, the kind of health that we have. Many of these things that we now take for granted. When we were younger, a few years ago, we desired that. We worked so hard for, you see? So as we work hard each day, we should also practice stopping to recognize all the efforts that you've made, that we've made. And also to recognize what we have, the conditions of happiness available to us. Even nature, even here in Arizona, in California, is only in the 90s. Whereas in Arizona, where my brother is right now,

• 25:10Speaker 01

  it's like 112, 115, 117 degree, you see? So being aware of that alone, it stops me from complaining that it's so hot. Because I remember what the people in Arizona, in other hot places, you know, desert places, what they are enduring. So gratitude helps us to, to be more content with our lives, but also help us to be more compassionate and empathetic with people who don't have as much as we do. The Chinese character for gratitude has two particles.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  The top part is niang, which means conditions. And the bottom part is heart or mind. Gratitude means the heart, the mind is aware of all the conditions, all the conditions that are present in our lives, all the conditions that have helped us to be where we are right now. Innumerable conditions have come together for you and I and all of us to be where we are right now. That's gratitude.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  It brings about an open mind and an open heart. And in Buddhism, Thay elaborated on this also, is the teaching on inter-being. I brought a model.

• 26:48Dan Harris?

  For those who are not watching, but listening instead, she's holding up a yin yang icon.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  And half of it is black and half of it is white. And on the black half, there's a white dot. And on the white half, there's a black dot. And this is a very deep teaching. In the black, there's the white. In the white, there is the black. In us, there are innumerable conditions that make us. These conditions can be favorable and unfavorable, but they have come together. In us, there are innumerable other beings and non-beings. And so this gratitude also helps us to be more embracing,

• 27:39Speaker 01

  less discriminative of the unfavorable conditions or of the people and conditions that we don't like. But we embrace them all.

• 27:54Dan Harris?

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• 28:38Dan Harris?

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• 30:34Dan Harris?

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• 31:54Speaker 02

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• 31:58Dan Harris?

  Sister Dee and I are talking about the five daily remembrances, which, and I'm putting these in my own words, are just bringing to mind twice a day, if at the least, that this body is of the nature to grow old, this body is of the nature to get sick, this body is of the nature to die, someday I will lose everything and everyone I hold dear. And then finally, my only true possessions in this context are my actions. For the last 30 minutes or so, we've really been dwelling in the zone of aging and ill health. Let me, let's go to death, which is of course, everybody's favorite subject.

• 32:42Dan Harris?

  You say in your book, which again is called Live Beautifully, Die Beautifully, that living and dying are not separate. They're not two different things. What does that mean?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I just show a yin yang model. So in death, there's life and in life, there's death. And we share about apoptosis is that life is made possible because a programmed cell death. In Buddhism, we don't see death as the final respiration. But death takes place every day, every moment of our life, not just in the sloughing of our skin cells or hair cells or the aging and death of our old cells. But death also takes place more constantly in our own mind.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  For example, a thought of despair, a thought of hopelessness, that's death right there. When I was, since I was nine years old, I was suicidal. And I often thought of jumping into the river pretty much every time I rode a bicycle over the river. And in Vietnam, there were many rivers and it became a habit. Death, suicidal ideation became a habit. So as I grew to be a teenager and as an adult, whenever I had difficulties, I often resorted to death.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  It's like a default mechanism, even though, to be honest, a lot of those times I didn't want to die. What I wanted really was to be free from a particular situation that was painful. You see? So many of us, we harbor thoughts of despair, of hopelessness, of anxiety, of alienation, and that's death because it brings about the sickness of the body. First of all, it weakens our immune system.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  All those years of thinking so negatively, desperately about myself, about my life, that just weakened my whole body, including my immune system. Because every thought we produce, it also brings about a release of hormones, of emotion hormones into our bloodstream. And the hormones that are released into our bloodstream, it has an effect on our whole body. It can speed up or slow down our thinking. It can speed up or slow down our heart rates, our respiratory rates.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  It can give us energy or just suck out the energy, the life from us. We just feel like, you know, extreme fatigue and low energy at all. Negative thinking, all these strong emotions weaken our mind and our body and brings about premature aging, sickness and death. Physically, psychologically and spiritually, that's the kind of death that I think is very important for us to be aware of and to take care of in daily life.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  So we learn in the spiritual life, we learn to be aware first and foremost of our body. For example, mindfulness of breathing, you know? Then you recognize what kind of breathing pattern you are experiencing at the moment. Is it peaceful, deep, slow? Or is it hurried, short, labored? And you know that there's an emotion, a thought that accompanies that breathing pattern. And you learn to take a moment to just come back to your breath, relax your body, release

• 37:09Speaker 01

  that thought, relax that feeling to bring it back to equilibrium. You see, we can do that each time we have a thought of despair, of anxiety. We can learn to breathe with it, relax it and say, I'm here, I'm here for you. Help me to take good care of you. So in that way, we learn to release death in each moment, the thoughts and feelings of despair, of hopelessness, of angst. We learn to embrace it, relax it and release it each moment. That is how I see we can learn to die beautifully each moment.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  And dying beautifully enables us to live beautifully. And to live beautifully enables us to die beautifully. That is why I feel I'm not so afraid of death or whatever that comes because I learn to live as beautifully and I learn to die as beautifully as I can throughout my day.

• 38:12Dan Harris?

  It seems to me like a through line in your approach to your own mind is talking to yourself in a supportive way, which I think most of us are not in the habit of doing. I think most of us are in the habit of talking to ourselves with more cruelty than we bring to any other relationship.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Yes, interestingly, we have a built in, they call default mode network that keeps chewing and re chewing whatever unpleasant things that happened in the past. It's like a cow that would regurgitate, you know? And then we just chew all that. And that's what our mind does when we preoccupy with ourselves with, you know, work or with entertainment or with whatever. Underlying current, the mind keeps regurgitating and, and what's the word, chewing?

• 39:12Dan Harris?

  Ruminating.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Huh?

• 39:14Dan Harris?

  Ruminating.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Ruminating. It keeps ruminating whatever unpleasant thing that happened to us today, yesterday or 10 or 20 years ago. And it brings about much negativity and angst. So it does that automatically. But we also have embedded in our biology is the seed of mindfulness. We can also bring up mindfulness to, to smile, to breathe with that kind of regurgitation and rumination. And we can say, smile, my dear, you have this moment. Now you are an adult. Now you have more control over your life.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  What can you do in this moment to help yourself, to help another person so they don't have to suffer like you suffer before? You see? So mindfulness can help us stop that rumination or regurgitation in our mind and helps us to touch life in the present moment, to see life in the present moment and not through the lens of the past or the lens of the future.

• 40:27Dan Harris?

  I don't think you're going to want to hear this, but even as much as I find everything you're saying about death to be compelling and reassuring, I'm still pretty scared of it.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  It's okay to be scared of it then because it's a part, I think is one of the deepest fears of a human life. Death, I think the fear was born with us. That's natural with the, with even a newborn child would have fear to pain and death would experience that reflexively. So it's a part of us. And it's of course, it's also rehearsed through generations, right? It rehearsed by everybody. So it only deepens. So that's why it takes practice to see that it's an old friend.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  It's always been there, our ancestors, we and then our descendants, we all, we all through that experience, all of us. And what can we do with this life? Because there are those who live a short life, but very meaningfully. And there are those who may live a long life, but they have four regrets. And pain, and they can cause a lot of suffering to themselves and others. So it's not the quantity of life, but it's the quality of life that we can deepen in our daily life.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  And to me, one of the ways to do that is to befriend these five remembrances. So that we can remember that our life is impermanent and we should cherish, nurture the positive conditions available to us. And if they are not so positive, it also gives us the courage to change, to find a better way for ourselves and for our loved ones, for many people. And that, to me, living a meaningful life, it helps us to touch eternity. Like the Buddha, the Buddha lived a simple life.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  His whole life was devoted to practice and sharing the Dharma. Now, the Buddha was 2,600 years ago. But today, many of us benefit from his teachings and practices, you see? So his life is eternal because of the choices he made. And so each one of us, we can come from very humble background or some of us have more advantages in our lives. But if we live deeply, we do the best we can. Our lives become eternal, it become long lasting through those who remember us, through the people that we help,

• 43:27Speaker 01

  through the things that we help change in our families and society. So a part of fear of death is because we see our body as this confined, you know, how tall we are and how much we weigh and what we look. And so when we die, we see that it ceases to exist, you see? But if we see our life, ourselves is not confined in this physical body. But not only our children, our ancestors and descendants are parts of us, but it goes into the fifth remembrance.

• 44:07Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Actions are our true continuation. The thoughts, the views, the ideology that we generate in each moment affects us and affect those around us, near and far. The words that we say, whether they are loving or harsh or cruel or kind, they affect the health of our body as well as those near or far. And also the behaviors, the bodily actions that we carry out each moment, they also affect us and many others. So when we see ourselves, not as just this body,

• 44:50Speaker 01

  but through our thoughts, our speech, our bodily actions, we see ourselves in others, then death is not so frightening, you see? Because you see, like an image of a Buddha with a thousand hands and thousand eyes, you know, the eyes, one eye in each hand. So then if you lose one hand, you still have 999 other hands and 999 other eyes, you will not be afraid. But if you see yourself only this one hand and one eye, you lose it, of course you'll be frightened.

• 45:30Dan Harris?

  So one way to shave down on our fear of death is to think about the quality of our actions as living on well beyond this one life, how we treat our children, how we treat our friends. That has ripple effects, incalculable ripple effects that live on even if, even when we, this vessel that we currently occupy no longer is breathing.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  You are very deep then.

• 46:03Dan Harris?

  I'm stealing it from you.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yes, the rippling effects take place every moment. And they will continue to take place. Like the life of the Buddha, the life of Gandhi, the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, the life of my grandmother that nobody knows about, you know? Just a simple farmer, never went to school. And yet she has had the greatest impact in my life. I am who I am thanks to my grandmother. So each one of us, we need to have no complex, whether we are important or not important. All we need to do is to learn to live beautifully

• 46:50Speaker 01

  and die beautifully in our daily life. And we know we have lived a meaningful life. And we don't have to fear so much. It's okay to have a little fear. You know, one time I drank a cup of water and as I was swallowing it, I realized, was that like a little tiny piece of metal in the water? And I just sat very still because, you know, I couldn't remove it. So I, I thought, okay, if it's a piece of metal, it could cause internal bleeding and I could die tonight.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  And I just sat very still on my bed and I breathed and I review my life. And I felt it's okay if it happens tonight. Of course, there are things I could do better that I could do, but I've also done the best I can. And I was at peace with it, you know? And I went to bed and in the morning I woke up and I breathed and smiled and I thought to myself, thank you for another day, for another chance. So I didn't take my life for granted. And so being aware of that actually helps us to cherish our life more deeply.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  And again, it's the quality of our life that makes it long lasting eternal. It's not the quantity. Time is relative, it's a mental construct. If you ever have a chance, please go to one of the places. And that is the Sequoia National Park. And you see trees that are so gigantic. And one tree is like almost 3,000 years old, even older than the Buddha. And other trees, 2,000 years, a thousand something years. So when we are in nature and when we are in front of a magnificent

• 48:57Speaker 01

  rock tree like that, we learn to be more humble and to be more a part of nature. And in that way, we touch immortality through the magnificence of life. We're not confined or trapped in this body, in these particular views of feelings that we have rehearsed so many times in our lives that they become our identity. And we don't even know that they are optional.

• 49:34Dan Harris?

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• 50:17Dan Harris?

  just being able to see everything in one place really calms the nervous system. But that's not all they do. They've got a weekly AI recap that can catch a spending spike before it becomes a problem. They've got these easy to read diagrams that helps you visualize exactly where you're spending each month. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use code happier at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com using the code happier.

• 50:52Dan Harris?

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• 51:28Dan Harris?

  There's this line in the Christian tradition, which we in the West hear all the time at funerals or in movies, where you see a funeral scene, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And it's easy to kind of just let that roll over you, let that expression roll over you. But if you take it seriously, oh yeah, okay, I'm, I'm going to die and I'm going to return to a system that I'm already a part of anyway. It can put death in a different and more reassuring perspective.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Yes. And that's what we all need. We all need to learn to look at death from different angles and not just one angle. And that is frightening. It's the, the end of everything because it is not. And I also want to, to share a little bit about grief, that grief is a process. It doesn't have like a finished line. When we experience a loss, we were devastated. And at the same time, many of us feel pressured to quote,

• 52:40Speaker 01

  unquote, move on, to, to live a normal life. It's also not only for death, but grief for the loss of functions in our body, the, you know, the loss of our youth. Yeah. Old age, sickness, separation from others. All of those aspects also bring about grief. And we also need to give time and space for us to go through that. Grief has a strong effect on our body. So when my partner died, literally the next day, many strands of my hair turned

• 53:23Speaker 01

  white. And I had very long hair, like down to my waist, and it's just turned white. And so in that way can affect our health a great deal. It's important to, to give ourselves space and time to take care of ourselves, to go through the process properly, to be patient and loving. When we allow ourselves the time to grieve, then in that way, we also allowed our loved one who passed away to live on in us as well. You know, to recognize

• 54:05Speaker 01

  them in many aspects of ourselves, of our life. If we don't allow ourselves to grieve, we quote, unquote, move on quickly. That unfinished grief can cause us to fear relationships, to not be able to live deeply our lives, and also to not be able to hold our loved one in our heart because it's too painful. You see? So in a way, it's like you make sure your loved one die for sure. Yeah. But like, I can think very lovingly and full

• 54:48Speaker 01

  gratitude for my grandmother, for my mother, for my partner, because I've learned to grieve through this practice of the five remembrances, to know my own mortality, to know their mortality, to remember all the things that they have, that they have given me, all the conditions that are still existing in my life because of them. So in that way, they are, they, they live on in me and they have a chance to go through life and to grow old with me. You know, in my book, I share about the death of my grandmother, who was not educated in

• 55:31Speaker 01

  any standards. She learned to read from her own son, but she was a spiritual person. And you can live a life so successful, but your death can just be for fear and anxiety. But my grandmother, she lived a humble life. She raised us the best way we can, she can. And when she died, she died with peace. She knew the time of her death. She asked to be washed, to change her clothes. And she put her hands together in prayer, and then she

• 56:09Speaker 01

  breathed out peacefully. And her beautiful death gave me peace. Cause it broke my heart when I heard my grandmother die. But when I found out how she died, I didn't feel pain anymore. Her beautiful death also taught me that it was possible not to be afraid of death, that you can live beautifully and die beautifully. You see, my grandmother has the greatest impact in my life, in her life and in her death. She taught me many lessons. And we all can do that for ourselves and our loved ones.

• 56:54Dan Harris?

  It's an incredible story. And so much of what you've said today has been extremely, extremely helpful and insightful. Sister Dee, I just want to remind everybody of the name of your book before I let you go. This is one of many books she's written. It's her latest. It's called Live Beautifully, Die Beautifully. And I will put links in the show notes to all of her books and to all of her appearances on this show. So you can go deeper if you'd like. Sister Dee, really appreciate your time. And again, congratulations on your new book.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dan, for doing what you're doing. It's very meaningful. Reaches many people, benefit many people. Bless you, my dear, and keep contemplating on the five remembrances, okay?

• 57:40Dan Harris?

  Twice a day, I'm on it.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  You're on a beautiful path, my dear.

• 57:44Dan Harris?

  Thank you very much for listening to the show. If you care about supporting independent media and creators who are trying to make the world a little bit saner, you can hook us up by liking or rating and reviewing and following the show wherever you watch or listen. Subscribe me for my newsletter on Substack, following me on social media. All of these things really do help us grow. It's a big deal to us and would just take about 30 seconds if you have the time and inclination. Thank you again for watching. Thanks for supporting what we do. Now to the credits. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Barissa Schneiderman, DJ Cashmere, David Hart, and Hayden Broome. Post-production is handled by the great folks

• 58:29Dan Harris?

  over at Greenhorn Creative. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thank you for listening. Deuces.

• 58:37Speaker 03

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