Ep.12 - How Conscious Dying Can Change the Way You Live with Jan Booth.

Jan Booth is a global leader in conscious dying.  In this episode, Jan brings her experience as an end-of-life educator, coach, and death doula, and decades of experience as a former hospice/palliative care nurse,  to an open and honest conversation about dying.

Whether you are approaching end-of-life, caring for someone at end-of-life, or want to learn how to live life more fully, this conversation is for everyone. 

In this episode, Jan helps us to have those important, but sometimes hard, conversations about death.  

What You'll Learn:

• How conversations about death can help us live more fully, 
• How conversations about dying can help our relationships with one another, 
• How death can help us with presence, joy, gratefulness, and letting go
• Death as spiritual awakening, 
• How death can bring more closeness, connection, and gratitude into our lives
• How talking about death can help us prepare for what's ahead and reduce the load of grief, 
• How our dying can also be part of our legacy, and
• How conscious dying can help us heal and create meaning in our lives.

Having early conversations about dying can make a world of difference at the end of life. Jan helps us have those conversations. If you have received a significant diagnosis, this episode can help you navigate this time in your life.

With love,

Melisa 

Connect with Jan's work:

deathdoulas.com

consciousdyingcollective.com

Email Jan - janetbooth15@gmail.com

Coach with Melisa:

Email - 7genproject@gmail.com

Follow the show:

Instagram - @live.differently.podcast

**********************************************

Music attribution: 

"Wallpaper" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
 Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:06

Hello and welcome to the show. I hope you're doing well and I hope you've had a great week. For those of you who are returning, welcome back. For those of you who are new to the podcast, welcome. My name is Melissa. Today we're having a very important conversation about end of life. We're joined today by one of the leading voices in conscious dying. Jan Booth has worked as a nurse for 40 years at the intersection of quality of life and end of life, as a hospice palliative care nurse, and as an end-of-life coach, dueler, and educator. She serves as faculty for the Conscious Dying Collective, which is a death dooler program, the Integrative Nurse Coach Academy, and previously for the Art of Dying Institute Integrative Thanentology Certificate Program. Jan presents workshops on end-of-life planning and the transformative possibilities of end-of-life care. Additionally, Jan is the author of Reimagining the End of Life, Self-Development and Reflective Practices for Nurse Coaches and one of the co-authors of Dying Matters, Eight Conversations That Can Change Your Life, and Bold Spirit Caring for the Dying. It is such an honor for us to be here today with Jan Booth. And I would love to welcome her to the program. Jan Booth, welcome to Live Differently. Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm so thankful to have you here. And as we were talking earlier, I've really been looking forward to today's conversation because what we're talking about today is something that I consider to be such an important conversation. And I consider this to be an extremely sacred time in somebody's life. And so today we're going to be talking about conscious dying. And so before we jump into the having a deeper conversation, I just want to ask for the person who is listening to today's conversation, how will this conversation help them to live more authentically and live more fully in their own lives?

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think, in fact, you've hit on one of the gems of why it can be so helpful to talk about dying way upstream. When we befriend death, which is one way to say we want to have a different relationship with death and not just one of fear, there are things that change and shift within most of us. And one is that we're reminded of the preciousness and the uncertainties of life. So just like someone who has received a significant diagnosis and feels like suddenly priorities and values get really sharp. This is where I want to spend my time, and I do not want to spend my time doing that. You know, I'm really prioritizing. So I think the the befriending death, talking more openly, normalizing, talking about the end of life helps us to remember how precious the present is because we all know that's all we have. But it's so easy to have this sense that I could live forever. So I think that's a really important piece. Um, I think the other part of it is that in helping us to appreciate the present, I think we develop, we can develop more tools of being present because there are skills involved in that, right? It doesn't just kind of descend on us like a sense of presence. So uh a kind of commitment to calming the mind, a commitment to finding joy in life, a commitment to feeling grateful for what is. So some of those practices that come as a result of appreciating the present moment. I think also there's a possibility then for a different commitment to repairing or healing relationships. And um, that doesn't mean that all relationships are going to be repaired. Maybe it helps me to say I'm letting go of that particular person or that desire for my relationship with my parent or my sibling to be different. I'm letting go of that. But I think that is a really important piece as well. And then a last area that I think is really helpful in terms of sharpening our awareness is the possibility of awakening more spiritually. And, you know, we all have a different understanding of what that means. Some people who feel that they are more in a religious path, others who say I'm more in a spiritual path, and others who say I don't relate to any of that, but I feel at one with plants and trees when I'm out in nature, right? But that that part of our life that is the more transcendent part, the the times when I feel more connected to people and to life around me, um, the curiosity to explore more what do I believe happens when we die? You know, there's a lot of pieces to that, but that kind of awakening of that that spiritual nature within us, I think, also is a natural follow-up to being willing to look right at our mortality.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

Yeah, and I think that um is a really great point because recognizing that um life is finite really does kind of bring things into perspective and then provides us with that opportunity to think about well, what is life? And you know, what does it mean to me as an as a person, as an individual, what does life mean to me?

SPEAKER_01 6:04

That's right. That's right. And those are the big, you know, I think of those, those big picture questions as part of a spiritual perspective, but that's I'm speaking more for my own and belief system. But the basic questions of who am I, why am I here, what's it all about, what I'm what am I meant to do? And then uh, you know, another piece of that is what are regrets or burdens or opportunities for forgiveness that I am I'm holding, that I'm resisting. And um how might I have a different relationship with things like forgiveness and regret? Um, because you know, we we see a lot of that, those who work at the end of life, we we see a lot of people who are carrying some big burdens. Some of it is just part of being human, it's just part of the human journey, which is hard. Um, but there are ways that we can share those burdens differently, or we can let go more consciously of some of those burdens. And forgiveness is a big one. I feel like forgiveness and gratitude are two practices that are really fundamental to both conscious living and more conscious dying.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

I'd love to talk more about forgiveness and gratitude today. And I'm conscious that you've got decades of experience as an end-of-life nurse and coach working in hospice, palliative care, and education. And I'm curious to know, in your experience, what is death?

SPEAKER_01 7:42

So the clinical answer to that is the the stopping of breath and heartbeat. And that is from the system that most of us work in, and I'm speaking here in North America in the US, you know, the system, the very physical-oriented medical care, that is that is death of the physical body. But I think one of the things that has become more clear to me in my work over the decades with both holistic nursing and health coaching, and then end-of-life work as well, that whole combination is that there are skills a lot of us don't learn around the many losses of a lifetime, the many small deaths of a lifetime, and um the grief that is present in that. So I would expand beyond the clinical death definition to say that we from the beginning of our birth to the end of our last breath, we are experiencing many losses and deaths that often don't get talked about or appreciated when we only focus on the physical death of our body. And the reason I say that, and I think that's important, is that those are great opportunities to practice. Practice with being aware of what it feels like a loss, to understand often the grief that's involved, the confusion that can be involved in it, the cognitive changes, the emotional, spiritual challenges that are involved in that. So I would include the many losses of our lifetime in an understanding of death as well.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

So it sounds like death is also about finding peace with loss and grief and understanding the role of loss and grief in life.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

Right. And part of the curiosity that I've carried over the years that I encourage other people to explore is what do we think happens after the physical death of our body? Because for many people who are exploring more uh from a spiritual perspective, for many people there is a sense that that perhaps our our souls or spirits come from somewhere, we incarnate and they go somewhere, so that the physical death is different from whatever may continue on on the other side. And I think in the world I live in here in the US, many of us have lost touch with a sense of ancestors, of coming from a lineage, of a sense that there are beings that we don't see who are somehow holding us. And that is very common in many indigenous traditions that again a lot of us have lost. We, you know, there's some talk of angels in certain um religious sense, or even maybe in a kind of new age sense, but when we lost a more whole person approach to how we look at health and healing and dying, we lost some of that great mystery, and we lost some of that sense of um retaining human wisdom and what have we learned as humans over time. People have been dying as long as we've been being born, and uh we've been around a long time, and we also see dying in the natural world around us, so there's so much wisdom to help us not just navigate that with as much peace and as little suffering as possible, but also to put it into some kind of bigger picture. And I'm someone who loves the bigger picture, I love context, I love trying to understand how how we are meant to do this as humans. What are the tools and resources we can draw from? What are the rituals that have been meaningful and all of that? So um that that fascinates me still.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

Yeah, it is so fascinating because it helps us to really understand who we are and what life is, not on a day-to-day level or a transactional level, but really kind of getting a sense of being connected to something that we can't see and something that we can't touch, but something that is also us.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Yes, yes, I I agree. And some of the um enjoyment I have in in teaching these days is, for example, I teach in a in a Death Doolah program, and one of the practices we do with with people is a simple practice called Goodbye to Hands, where people look at their hands and imagine themselves as little babies first coming into the world with their little stubby, cute fingers and that their loved ones around them. Hopefully, we're looking at their little hands and just imagining what these hands have been to us throughout our whole life and how they have shaped us. We've we've taken in the world through our hands, and the hands are tools for the work we do in the world, for how we care for people and cooking and gardening and all this, right? So we're just getting really focused on our hands and then imagining that there will come a time, as there will, when I have a last time of looking at my hands. And that um is another practice, you might say, of being willing to bring my mortality on a more regular basis into everyday life. If I look at these hands and don't take them for granted, um, there's a gratitude piece to that, there's a letting go and perhaps a grief part of someday saying goodbye to these hands. And there's also um a forgiveness piece of this as well. Um, I'm sorry, I didn't care for you more. You know, so it's it's um there are some very practical ways that we can remind ourselves of some of the deeper things that are part of of being alive and having a body that we um move through life with that we will need to say goodbye to.

SPEAKER_02 14:10

Yeah, in your teaching, you teach that end of life is a vital and purposeful stage of human development. And I'm hearing some of that coming through in what you're saying now. So, what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 14:25

When death is seen as a crisis or as a failure, we lose huge parts of the experience. One of the things we lose is a sense that there is a reason for our dying. You know, just like in the natural world, nothing lasts forever. Animals, plants, trees, you might get very old as a big tree, but everything dies, right? And it dies so that it makes room for other things. And then, you know, you can, whatever your belief system is in terms of why we live and why we die, but that that it is the way the system works. It's not a bug in the system or a failure of the system. And so when we study human development, we look at the development of children from babies to teenagers to young adults, and we look at phases of life and midlife and being an elder if we're lucky to live that long. And then we sort of stop as if everything after that is kind of an embarrassment. Oh, then I diminish and then I die. And and I I choose to elevate the end of life right up with all the other stages of development that have purposeful tasks, you might say. And a lot of things can happen. And I'm talking about slow death, not sudden death. Sudden death is a whole other thing, right? But more expected death. So, you know, purposeful. What is something we do purposefully? We look back and we review our life, right? And it's not a one-time thing, but it's something I notice in I'm in my late 60s, and I notice I'm I more regularly am doing that kind of life review. What was it about? What went well, what didn't? What relationships might need more repair? Um, if I want to die uh with community support, what am I doing now to build that, etc.? So there's a sense of life review and sharing that with other people. And and there's also the developmental part that I think is really challenging for many of us who are in a culture of independence and not interdependence, is that um coming to a different understanding of needing help and asking for help and having a different role in life of needing to be cared for, that can often, I know in my North American culture, can really be among the biggest challenges. People who grow up in a more communal collective society, I think struggle less with that. But there is something about the humility and the receiving when I have been someone who always gave, that as challenging as it is, I think there are some gifts in that, because one of the gifts is that then there are others ideally who can step in and give to us. So it's it's a flow that is part of being in the human family. We care for and then we are cared for. It was easier when we lived in more commonly in multi-generational extended families, right? It was maybe more natural to be able to care for the grandparents, maybe living with us and to see the decline, but also to see the the wisdom of the elders as well, and the the wisdom of being able to learn how to care for others, the younger kids, uh, being asked to help do something for grandma or grandpa, or growing up with a different sense of how we care for each other. And this is one of our biggest challenges right now, I think. Um, what is it that we need to change and evolve so that we can be more of a death caring community? And this concept of community death care is you know one of the kind of leading edges right now, I'd say, in the death positivity or conscious dying movement, is we've lost so much community and community care. How do we, in modern times, when life is very different than it used to be, how do we care differently for each other so there's less isolation, there's more collective caring? And that takes real intention to create that. Those are a couple examples of what the opportunities that are there when we hold up dying as something of a more sacred rite of passage, initiation, human development. What is it that I learn as the person who is dying? Shedding, shedding, shedding. Who am I when I shed this, when I shed that? And if I only see it as a loss and not of any gift that is also there, it's really hard. If I only see myself as a burden, if I only see it an embarrassment that I'm not able to do what I used to do, it's really hard. So this is a whole kind of different conversation we're trying to bring in of what are the healthy parts of this, what are the what sense of well-being is there at end of life, possibly? How does it impact the community in a positive way to embrace caring for each other differently?

SPEAKER_02 19:58

Yeah. And it's this a sense of empowerment there as well, because I think um we've gotten to the stage where we think of end of life as removing somebody from the community and putting them into the into the hospital and caring for them then and there, and really disconnecting them from their own lives and their community and their support system, but seeing it as a place, death is a place where we take people away rather than a place where we bring people together and we create this beautiful experience of love and holding and wholeness and care and understanding of what we all mean to each other, rather than a medicalized moment in time. So it kind of removes it from being a discrete. And I I love what you said about the failure. Like you know, the body has failed, and so you know, we as a community or we as a family have failed this person to one being as you know, this is the time where we come together and we hold each other in this beautiful sacred space and not isolate or withdraw, um, but moving, becoming close.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

So you think that it's beautiful how you said that. And so if you think if we hold that as the goal that we're working towards or the the compass point that we're focused on, right? Um what is it that I need to do in my life right now so that that is where I end up, some version of that that I end up. And um there's some, there are a couple places that I've seen again and again that where we get tripped up. And one of them is um in simply talking more openly about death and dying, about serious illness, about the hard work of caregiving. One of the main reasons why I think we don't do it is because by doing that, I'm also inviting. In grief. I'm inviting in the conversation about grief and loss. So there's pain there. So so often, how many times have we heard ourselves or families, people we've worked with as nurses say, let's not talk about that now? That's just going to bring everyone down. We'll talk about that later. So, you know, a relationship with discomfort and pain is often a relationship, a different kind of befriending of grief. And so what we lose by not having those conversations is a chance to connect, is a chance to be vulnerable together, is a chance to acknowledge we are all walking this walk. You're ahead of me right now, but we are all going to walk this walk. So we lose something. So then the second area that we can get tripped up in, where it's complex and there's some skills in navigating, is this shift from a focus on cure to a focus on comfort. And in a medical system, you know, the default in our healthcare system is that aggressive care is a default. So unless we say otherwise, right? And there's also a kind of, it's like a heroic journey of people who overcome disease. You see it especially in the world of oncology and cancer, but in many other ways too. There's a heroic side to I beat such and such, or you know, all the work as caregivers that we put into encouraging our loved ones. We need you need to eat more. And I let's go outside and get some walk. And so much life energy goes into not dying, that when we get to that place where the disease is no longer responding to treatments, where the benefits of treatments are being outweighed by the burdens, right? Or when our functioning is the quality of life, is our ability to function and the quality of life of our lives is much less. That is the place where there's a complicated shift from my focus on sort of the heroic surviving to I'm not getting better and I'm moving into the end of life. And I wish that our health, my healthcare colleagues were more skilled in this area, because this is a this is one of the reasons why I think we don't say this is the time to shift to a focus on comfort. What's most important to you? Where do you want to be? Who are the people that are going to be caring for you? And where we might more likely say, well, maybe there's some other treatments we can do, right? There's a lot that happens in that kind of uh shadow area that feels fraught. And so one of the one of the ways that I hear myself talking more and more with people is to anticipate that that's going to happen if we're dying slowly, like most of us will. And to to focus instead of how can I keep from not dying, to think way upstream in chronic disease and serious illness about what is my compass aimed at? What are the things that are most important to me? What are the values and priorities I hold? What are the goals of care that I want to follow based on who I am? Because I think that's what shifts the and helps us in these hard parts, uh, shifting, for example, from cure to comfort is to have a stronger sense of who am I as a person? What has been most important to me, and how is that consistently going to help me through this time that feels so unfamiliar? What are the highest priorities for my life right now if I have limited time? And when we don't talk about these things as we don't reflect on it as individuals, we don't talk about them in our families and friends, our healthcare team doesn't talk about it, then inevitably it comes to a time of crisis. It's the ER, it's the ICU, it's the frantic 911 phone call. Um, because we didn't anticipate, we weren't sure what to do, we panicked, we're exhausted, we're not thinking clearly, right? And so that was heartbreaking for me to see again and again. And I knew I wanted to be part of something different that helped us to give us some skills to navigate differently, not just out of fear.

SPEAKER_02 26:41

Yeah, and I think that communication is really important. I think back um years ago I had a conversation with my grandfather, um, and he had um uh chronic illness and um had passed out, and my grandmother called the ambulance and took him to the hospital. Um he was in ICU on uh ventilator for a couple of weeks. And when I was talking to him, he was very angry at my grandmother for calling the ambulance and for taking him to the hospital because he was ready to go. Um, and so that you know, I thought, okay, we this is a conversation that we should have already have had because you can't put that on her, right? You know, this is these are your wants, this is what you want for your life and what you want for the end of your life, and you can't put that decision on her and expect her to make that. That's your decision, and you have to communicate that to her so she knows what you want, and we have to now have a conversation around what does your life mean? What does your relationship mean? What does the end of your life mean to you, and what does it mean to your family as well. And so I think these are really um integral conversations that we have to have with each other, and I love what you're saying about not waiting until that crisis point, because that's exactly what happened there. Um to kind of pull it back and have these conversations as a normal part of our life, um, you know, as you said, you know, when we, you know, from younger to talk talking to kids about, you know, that's right, the end of life and and these things being normal, um, so that we can really enrich our life and enrich our understanding of what it means to be um in family and in community with each other.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

And there are opportunities with kids, with pets, with grandparents, with having plants in the garden, flowers, you know, vegetables uh in a garden where we see a cycle of life and we can normalize that cycle of life and that we are part of that cycle of life as well. Right. There, there it's a whole different perspective. And it's interesting because I think of someone like your grandfather, who of course I didn't know, but I know a lot of many, many families who uh an end of life looked like that, and then the the guilt or the anger or the confusion that is there for everyone, right? And um I would imagine that your grandfather had agency over his life in many ways, made a lot of important decisions, took a had a sense of responsibility, probably for family, for finances, for and it's it's a strange phenomenon when when we are so death phobic and death averse that people who normally in their lives up to this point have taken real responsibility and accountability, we become strangely passive. And there's a lot of reasons for it. I think fear is a big one, not wanting to um hurt, like I said earlier, not wanting to bring everyone down. Um also our healthcare colleagues are not helping us a whole lot there to introduce these conversations and normalize them. So it's it's an it's an odd phenomenon to me, you know, more planning for a summer vacation than for the the end of life. And uh and the the stakes are high for what people can be left with. I mean, there's all kinds of research that shows the impact of last-minute decision making on the process of grief. And it's a longer and often more complicated grief afterwards when it hasn't been clearly stated, when I've made decisions that I didn't feel prepared to make if I was speaking uh as someone's medical power of attorney, et cetera. So um it's a gift, it's a gift to have these conversations earlier. And we often say, well, it's it's too early, let's wait, but it's too early until it's too late. And in our country, hospice referrals, even after 50 plus years of being uh, you know, part of our healthcare system, hospice referrals are still mostly at the last minute. Says a whole lot when most of us are dying slowly, that it just always feels too early until it's not, until it's too late. And so normalizing that it may well feel too early, but what if we were to talk about this ahead of time? Um, so that we can um all be clear what someone wants. And then there's a whole other benefit, which is by talking about it earlier, it connects us. Like you said earlier. We miss that opportunity to be connected when we fear that this is gonna be a hard conversation, so let's not have it.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

But what we miss is so significant, and I think there's a lot of people who are afraid of dying, and so they don't want to have that conversation, or they feel like if they talk about it, they're gonna bring it on, they're gonna make it happen faster. Um, and then there's also I think an element of um, for some people, uh being afraid that by accepting death that they've given up on life and what people are going to think about them or what that means then um in terms of uh moving through and healing through that process.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Yeah, I think that's I'd like to come up with a name for it. It's it I I the only thing that I think of is sort of this heroic sense uh of um I'm not gonna die, I'm still a vital person. I'd like to redefine that idea of what is heroic. So I think of this wonderful man that I cared for in hospice many years ago, and he was um getting close to dying, and he was remarkably cognitively still very clear. And his three adult children were really struggling. Their mom had died some years before, and this was really hard for them, and they did not want to talk about it. They didn't want to, even him being in the hospice program, they didn't want him to talk about it. And he was saying, I'm really struggling, I want to talk with them about it, and they are having such a hard time accepting it. And he said, I want my dying to be my last great act of parenting. And I've never forgotten it because it gave me a way to hold something that is hard to put into words. Like, what if how we die is part and a really important part of our legacy? And when the only story that is acceptable is fighting death, yeah, and that that's not gonna end well for any of us if it's all about fighting death or trying to survive it. But what in that in what he said about parenting, it was the something that I feel very grateful both my parents were able to do, which is to bring us along together. Uh, if there were tears, there were tears. If there was confusion, there was confusion. But um, we were in it together. And uh that to me is how I'd I'd love to see the culture transformed to a point where that becomes more the heroic story. I I hesitate using heroic, but a sense of um the value being put on people who are modeling not just an acceptance in some sort of Hollywood version of dying, but the maybe the struggle, but also the gifts that are there, people who model curiosity and not just fear, um, people that model asking for help, you know, all of that whole side of things, which is so different from the culture of independence, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, don't get other people involved, don't be a burden, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's part of the transformation right now, is that we really are moving towards a different um, a new time of understanding uh community and how much we've lost.

SPEAKER_02 35:23

Yeah, I think you have really highlighted something there in terms of us feeling like as an independent, um, you know, the whole productivity, we go to work, we produce. There's all of these um outcomes, and it's all about generativity, right? So we we we produce, we produce, we produce, and accepting the end of life, we're saying, you know what? I'm not going to be productive in a way that's an output. I'm going to value something that's very different. And I think it comes down to how we value each other and how we value ourselves and how we value life. And you know, we we can't get into this mindset of it's me producing this stuff that contributes to this productivity cycle. There's a whole lot more that's going on in our lived experience, and it's not just about an output, it's about our relationship to ourselves and our relationship to each other, and our relationship that's to you know, to this gentleman's point, that stays behind and continues to give that's right.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

Yeah, that's so so beautifully said. Yeah, it's a it's a very different lens to be looking through.

SPEAKER_00 36:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

And I think, I mean, we have all kinds of history and written history and oral history, understanding that we haven't always been like this. And I don't mean that humans haven't feared death. I think there's been evidence of plenty of fear of death and of the unknown. But I think this particular period of, I don't know, 70 or 80 years, kind of post-World War II, maybe, um, where we had so many amazing medical advances that it did seem like we could beat death, because there are many instances of people who were able to live way past what we would have lived in the past. The modern experience of an understanding of dying in a lot of our industrialized Western societies is very different in this very tiny period of time of you know, decades compared to the whole of humanity up to this time. It's a kind of strange phenomenon that how did how did so quickly we move from a kind of different understanding of death and a different safety net of care for each other when we were living more collectively or with extended families? Um, it's it's remarkable how quickly that changed. And so the need to, in the 1980s, more or less, 80s and 90s, to have advanced directives because then we realized, oh my goodness, we can keep people living on machines in a vegetative state, and we don't really know what to do with them. Some people say we should let them go, other family members say they need to still be there. So we had to clarify kind of in a new way than we ever had before, what is death, kind of like your initial question. What is death and what agency do I have over my life? Um, so it's a kind of strange time that we're in, and I think that's why this draws so many people coming into death doula programs, people interested in green burial, people who are going to death cafes, people who are um wanting to talk more openly with their families. I think if the pendulum swung way more to a more industrialized outsourcing of death to other places, there are many people that are saying we want to come back to a different relationship with death and uh draw on what many humans have drawn on in the past because this doesn't feel right. This is this is hard and isolating and to purely see everything on a physical level is is limiting.

SPEAKER_02 39:26

Yeah, exactly, very limiting because there's a discrete beginning and an end, and there's nothing in the middle. You know, all the all the stuff in the middle is about our work and what we're doing, but not how yeah, how we're living. So um dying has been described as an opportunity for healing, and we've talked a lot about that in our conversation today as well. And some people might have a hard time with the idea of death being a form of healing. And so, how can people heal through end of life?

SPEAKER_01 39:58

I think one of the most potent areas is in our relationships with each other, and that's where the the possibilities of repair or prioritizing relationship or bringing in forgiveness, asking for forgiveness, giving forgiveness. What is it that would help me to have more peace in my heart and soul at the end of my life? Right. And a lot of it is forgiving ourselves, coming to terms with our regrets, you know, what went well in my life, what did I not do so well? Can I forgive myself for that, etc.? So I think that that healing more on the heart and soul level is probably where the most potent healing can be because it's very different from cure. And often in kind of modern healthcare, healing and cure can get be can be synonymous. And um it's kind of like wellness and well-being. You know, wellness we think of vitality and returning to vitality. And something when I brought integrative holistic coaching more into my nursing practice, the shift for me in being an end-of-life nurse was saying, what is wellness at end of life? Sort of like what is healing at end of life? And I realized it really isn't wellness, it's well-being. Like, can can there be such a thing as dying well? Can I be well as I'm leaving my body? And um, it's hard to see that because there's so much loss involved and and real grief. And um of the most amazing experiences that we can have for many people, it's having a more conscious, intentional, you might say, positive experience around someone's death. And that can be really enlightening. Like it wasn't just awful. Many people coming into programs that I teach in or coming to death cafes are coming because they've had an experience that they didn't expect. They thought death was all bad and scary and loss and tragic. And they had this experience where people came together, where meaning was made, where family legacy was strengthened, where song and um storytelling enriched the experience. Um, telling stories gave a chance to have a sense of cohesion and coherence about life, all of that. When people have that experience that I think we had much more in the past when we weren't so isolated from each other at the time of death, when people have these experiences, it really can blow up people's minds and expand their hearts. So, like, how come I didn't know about this? So, all of that can come under the for me, the category of well-being and healing. It doesn't mean that there isn't grief and loss, it doesn't mean that there aren't tears, but that in connecting with each other, in being able to say, you mattered to me in this life, and thank you for what you brought to me, you know, all those things that don't get to be said if we don't talk about any of these things to the very end when everyone's exhausted. But what does it mean to be able to earlier than the time of death say to my beloved friend, this is so hard, I'm gonna miss you so much. And this is what I have loved about our relationship, you know, that we often don't say those things until there's a sense of pressure. So those are some examples that come to mind right now about the healing that is possible. I mean, healing in the sense of a whole, not healing as in fixing or curing, right? But healing as in a sense of a whole. So, how do I get to a place in my life where I see dying as part of my human expected human experience? If I haven't really before That earlier, it's hard to do that at the end. So, yet another reason to be curious and reflective and look for opportunities with friends who are seriously ill or family members who you're caring for to push past some of that initial discomfort, to speak from the heart, to not wait until the end, but to express those things now. And I think that's one of the beauties of uh one of the gifts that's involved in people being seriously ill is that it puts a fire under us to say the things that are already there.

SPEAKER_02 44:42

Yeah, yeah on our hearts. Yeah, and to live presently, to be in those moments and to take those opportunities when they present instead of taking the opportunity when they present, but to create those opportunities for ourselves and for each other too.

SPEAKER_01 44:58

This this sort of strange idea that I think a lot of people have is that if I talk about dying, or if I talk in a way that acknowledges you are dying, then it's going to make it happen faster. Or like you said earlier, or it's a way of saying I've given up on you. That we've somehow associated part of that heroic thing we were talking about earlier, I've somehow associated that the most helpful thing I can do for someone is to encourage them to keep going, right? So what gets missed when we do that? And so often I think these conversations of saying to a friend, for example, who has just gotten a really serious diagnosis and may only have you know weeks to months to live, to not be afraid to say, I'm not sure what to say, but I just want you to know that I love you and I'm gonna be with you in whatever way I can. You know, to to acknowledge that it's awkward that we don't often know what to say, but to be willing to take that first step through that initial discomfort, and right on the other side of that initial discomfort or taboo that many of us, you know, feel is connection, closeness, vulnerability, honesty, uh, genuine relationship, opportunity for genuine emotion, tears, quiet, whatever it's gonna be. But I think it's that initial period of discomfort. It's too soon to talk about it. I don't want to bring her down, I want to be upbeat, you know, that keeps us from this really rich territory that's right on the other side of it. Even if it's just quiet, sitting together.

SPEAKER_02 46:48

Yeah, exactly. I don't know what to say, but I'm here with you.

SPEAKER_01 46:52

That when people say, What do I say? I I often that will be a sentence that I offer. If it isn't clear on your heart what to say, that is an honest statement. I don't know what to say, and I'm here. I may not always know what you need, but I'll ask you or I'll offer. I think with practice, that gets easier to be real with people in that way.

SPEAKER_02 47:22

Yeah, and it's developing that trust in another person, and as we said earlier, allowing ourselves as well to be taken care of.

SPEAKER_01 47:33

When I think about what I would want to hear from people in my last weeks and months, um for me, I don't want anything fake. I think that would be a burden on my heart. And so anything false, rather, um, as much as we can to, you know, for me to be able to say, you know, today is a really hard day. Um, I'd like to be alone. I would love for you just to sit here. Um, can you help me get out of this bed and sit on the porch? I'd love to just feel the sun on my face. You know, whatever. Just some sense that I'm still in life until my last breath. I still matter, even in my very limited abilities, and we can still connect even though I'm moving in a in a very different direction than you are, and you can only go so far with me. That genuine, authentic connection with people towards the end of life, I think is a real gift. I heard that many times, many times from people who were dying when I was a hospice nurse. Um, a kind of relief to be able to just say what they were experiencing, that they felt they had to kind of put a face on for their family members because their family members were so sad and they couldn't talk about it. And so to have someone that you could just kind of let down and just be slowly dying was a relief. And that that made an impression on me to think, oh man, that we haven't practices as a family and have some sense of being in this together. The energy that it takes to put on false feelings when both people really just want to kind of be real, but we're protecting each other or we're kind of pretending. So there's so many different facets of this that I think are complex, they're also simple. If we haven't reflected, talked, shared, explored ahead of time, it's really asking a lot of us to, in these last days and weeks of our lives, come to some more existential understanding of what is death and what do I want to leave behind. It can happen, but it's just a lot harder.

SPEAKER_02 50:12

So it's something on as well.

SPEAKER_01 50:15

Oh, there's oh, there's and and the level of energy, you know, because a natural part of the dying process is that we withdraw more and more inside, we're talking less, we're less interested in the the ways of the world, um, fewer people we're interested in connecting with, we're not eating and drinking as much, all of that is a very natural kind of process of shutting down. So to be trying to kind of go into new territory with people at that time is is really hard. So um, yeah, so how can we practice that um with each other well well ahead of time? And that's one of the reasons that my my colleague Trish Rux and I wrote this book called Dying Matters: Eight Conversations That Can Change Your Life, is because we wanted to give some structure to how people might talk about this together. And so each chapter is a different conversation that feeds into this idea that we're whole people and complex people, and that this is as much about living as it is dying, because these conversations change our lives now.

SPEAKER_02 51:22

Yeah. They deepen your life and they make your life more rich and recognizing the complexity of what life is and what we mean to each other.

SPEAKER_01 51:32

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. All those years at the bedside in hospice, seeing, hearing, and feeling how unprepared the great majority of families were dying people and their families, their loved ones, how unprepared they were, how uncertain about how to navigate all of this, all the regrets, the things that they felt they couldn't say, and then it felt too late suddenly to be trying to figure all this out. As much as I loved that bedside hospice nursing, I had this sense of I want to work upstream. I want to be more in communities. I want to help people to open up conversations that are different than the ones that we're having. So that not only will that have the possibility of changing, like we just said, how we live and how we connect to each other, but will change how I come into the end of my life. So that's where a lot of my work has been going over the last 10 or 15 years has been looking at ways to open conversation. Where are some of the kind of leading edges in the in this kind of conscious dying death positivity world? Um, what are some of the new models that are helping us? Because I wish it was happening in healthcare, but it isn't really still. And even hospice people are coming in at the last minute. So, how do we affect this? And so been a part of teaching in a variety of different programs. Um, a colleague and I, Trisha and I, who have done a lot of teaching together, felt like, well, what if we were to write a book where here is a way to have a bigger picture of what the benefits of more open conversation might be? And each chapter is focused on a different facet. So the first chapter is on the big picture, like what is happening in healthcare? Why is this so hard? You know, what can help you in terms of clarifying your values and priorities that can be that kind of guiding light for you when you go through uncertain things? The second chapter is on care and comfort. Like, how do I want to be cared for? Who's going to care for me? How can I think about this ahead of time? What kind of comfort is important to me? Um, the third chapter is focused more on heart matters, you know, around things we've talked about, like forgiveness and repair of relationship, letting go, uh, gratitude, things like that. Um, and certainly talking about grief as well. And the next chapter is on spirit and soul matters, you know, some of that curiosity about the spiritual aspect of living and dying. The chapter after that is the whole conversation about a more practical side of what is the paperwork that would be really helpful to have filled out? Who will speak for me if I'm not able to speak for myself? And we purposely didn't start with that. We wanted that to be informed by all these other pieces so that the values and priorities and this bigger picture of who I am inform those pieces of paper. The next chapter is on after death care. What are the possibilities for disposition of my body? What kind of rituals might be important? Then a chapter on community death care and how we can be a part of building more death caring communities with some very practical ways to do that. And then the last chapter is, you know, how talking about dying changes how we live, which is kind of that bridge to why these conversations are as much about living as they are about preparing to die. I think that that was one of the biggest breakthroughs for me after many years of hospice nursing. And I started to understand this different picture of sort of the art of dying and the art of living and conscious dying and all of these terms. I took a weekend course with Christine Longacre, a Buddhist teacher and author. She wrote a wonderful book called Facing Death, Finding Hope. And she said something that just blew my mind. Living fully, healing ourselves, and preparing to die are all the same work. It took me years to really understand that. And I feel like I'm still living that because how can healing ourselves and living fully be in there with preparing to die? But it gave me a whole different picture that, in some very practical ways, comes out in this book, where this is not a book about how to die or how to get into hospice sooner or how does the body die, although we talk a little bit about all of that. But that really is what interested me about these conversations. It's not just conversations so that we can know what matters to each other if we are part of that care circle. Yes, that's important, but it's this whole other piece that really um is alive in me of why I feel it's so important that we talk about this.

SPEAKER_02 56:46

And it's not just the medicalization, navigating the healthcare system.

SPEAKER_01 56:52

It's so much more than that.

SPEAKER_02 56:53

Yeah, that's incredible. I think that's such a valuable and needed resource for people, um, you know, as a touch point of what we've talked about in the conversation today, can also really open those conversations and give people opportunity to reflect on what those things mean to them as well as they're navigating the stage in life. And I think there's also this um misunderstanding, I think, in terms of what we've done as a healthcare profession in the heroics of prolonging life. I think what we've also done is created this false dichotomy that we we live, we live a long life and then we die. And that really isolates the people in between who don't die at an old age. Um, and so what I really want is for everybody to feel like there's a place for them and that they're a part of this conversation, they're a part of this beautiful journey, and that we're not just talking about what happens when we're older, although we are, we're also talking about everybody else in between because you know death comes at any time in life. Yeah, absolutely. We don't want to isolate and push those people away either.

SPEAKER_01 58:13

No, that's right. And that, you know, when you talked earlier about could we start these conversations with kids? I mean, that's why I I really do see it as a cultural transformation, a societal transformation, because how do we have the skills and wisdom to be able to navigate a young person dying? How do we help people to understand the role and the intelligence of grief and not just the debilitation of grief, right? I mean, I just feel like there's so much that contributes to our suffering when we don't have a way to hold this as something more than tragic or a mistake or unbearable. Yeah, I I really appreciate you saying that because um, although most of us by statistics will live to be older, many of us won't. What's some context we can hold that in in a way that doesn't feel like life is out of control or there's some punishment somehow when we did something wrong, bad things happen, or we did something wrong. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:19

That pulls back for me to what you were talking about with forgiveness is you know, forgiving others and but also forgiving ourselves. And one thing that we didn't really touch into was this sense of gratitude. And I feel like that is such an important link here.

SPEAKER_01 59:37

Yeah, I mean, the possibilities for having more awareness of our gratitude when we're busy producing and we're busy with all the balls in the air of our lives and we're busy trying not to die, we can forget about gratitude as a regular practice. And so one gift of serious illness for some people, like we said earlier, is to recognize I don't know how many more sunsets I have, I don't know how many more holidays I have or birthdays, right? And it can go either way. We can choose to see only pain and suffering in that awareness, or we can choose to say, I'm I choose to be grateful for the time that I have. I choose that I I still have the opportunity to feel love and connection with the people I care about. I I choose to feel grateful for the wind and the rain and the sun on my face and all of that. I think gratitude is an immense practice uh for living, for dying, for living with illness, for the hard work of caregiving, you know, to be able to find those moments of gratitude. It for me, it's one of the deepest practices there is.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:55

Yeah, I definitely agree with you. Um and I think that there's so much opportunity there in um you know, being in the energy of gratitude, um, you know, for us to be able to draw from that in a positive way.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:09

Yeah, these can be very small things. I mean, we're talking sort of big picture, but it can be a very small thing. I mean, I think about something as simple as a family sitting around the bed of someone who's dying, and people aren't sure what to say. Some people maybe are on their phones because they don't know what to do, kind of with the time, right? And something as simple as going in and, you know, looking at the hands of, let's say, the man that is in the bed, you know, and and I, as the nurse or as the doula, come in and just put my hand on the hand and say, My goodness, I can only imagine all the things that have been created by these hands. You know, tell me about your grandfather or your father or your husband or whatever. Tell me about his hands. What did he make with these hands? What did he do? And to sort of model for people things that maybe they haven't experienced of how we can talk together and um share stories. And to me, that's a very simple practice of opening a conversation that in many ways is about gratitude because the stories that are going to come out are gonna be what he did with his life. And isn't he lucky he had those experiences? And aren't we glad that we shared in some of those? Grandpa had this amazing raspberry patch, and we ate those raspberries, and so we're all kind of reliving that story together, looking for opportunities for small practices of closeness, connection, and gratitude.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:44

Oh wow, closeness, connection, gratitude.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:47

Yeah. After someone dies, when we're looking back, you know, that's often what what is meaningful and what we remember, along with the pain of, like people say, the quantity of the love we felt for someone is often equal to a quantity of grief we feel. I mean, that's a little bit too simplistic, but but that's a very real part. The grieving is a very real part. It's a developmental part, it's a part of letting go, it's a part of acknowledging that time in my life, that person, our relationship has completely shifted and changed, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:21

Yeah, shifted and changed is beautiful. That's a beautiful way to reframe it because it shifted and changed, it hasn't ended.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:28

That's right. It's a different perspective that changes how we might move through it. And I think this idea of our legacy is not just how we lived, but our legacy is also how we how we died. Um, not to put pressure, you know, like it has to look all perfect. But if we're able to create some of those moments of connection and closeness and gratitude. And that also includes talking about hard things sometimes. You know, life is complex and life can be messy, and we hurt each other and we are hurt by others. So there are some tough conversations in there as well that can bring a kind of closeness as well, acknowledging um some of the hard parts of that relationship. But if we can create some of that sense of um this wasn't only a tragedy, we told wonderful stories and contributed to who we are as a family and our memories and our stories of who we are as a family. That is part of the legacy that lives on, that often doesn't get talked about. How often do we talk about grandpa's raspberry patch? That then gets carried on somehow, you know, in the great mystery of life, that gets carried on energetically into how I synthesize all of this in the days and months afterwards. Do I feel only regret of all the things I couldn't say, didn't say, none of us could say? Do I feel only guilt that I didn't know what to do? Speaking for my husband, I didn't know what he wanted. That may be in there as well. But can we create more of the opportunity for the closeness and the connection and the gratitude for the time we had together? That lives in us afterwards.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:22

And it's that love, I think, as well, that we're able to show. You know, it's not, um I guess to reframe as well, not necessarily communicating that we've given up on somebody, but it if we want to be heroic, it's that heroic demonstration of the other ways in which we can love this person through life.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:43

That's beautiful. Yeah, the other ways we can love them. It it's pretty limiting that my love and loyalty is expressed only in wanting you to get better and stronger. That's so limiting.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:00

It's the expectation that you stay here for me. You know, what is it about you and how how can I show up for you?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:07

Yeah, and we we talk about well in in my work, but also in this book, when we talk about grief, we talk about anticipatory grief and you know that grief that comes when I am sort of seeing what's ahead and I'm I'm feeling the pain of that grief, knowing that he's not going to get better, that those treatments aren't working, and that our family and our my life will be completely changed, right? That that that's also an opportunity to feel ahead of time and to practice going towards that grief, could you say, instead of just rejecting it? There are times when denial is a good thing and we we need to just take a break from that. But there are other opportunities to feel that grief, to recognize the losses ahead, to come to some kind of an understanding of that before the actual death. It doesn't take away that, it doesn't guarantee, well, if I do this grieving ahead of time, then I won't. It just means that that maybe the load is a little bit lighter.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:17

And that maybe my heart wasn't as overwhelmed and perhaps shut down. Yeah. And um, so even you know, being able to have some of these conversations before someone is in their last hours uh can be can be so helpful. And and any of us listening who have had those experiences know how valuable it is. Um and it's a gift we can give when it's our turn to kind of model that I welcome real connection, even if it means we we're sad together, yeah, or even if it means we have some hard conversations, I welcome that. And we can model that, right? That's part of our legacy when it's our time to model how we go through that.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:05

Yeah, because we're not born alone and we shouldn't die alone. But I think what I'm hearing you saying is there's there's such beauty and such an opportunity in understanding that this is something that we do together, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:19

Right. And so young people watching this process where it's more of an open conversation, a recognition this is part of the human journey. This can feel really hard, and yet we still can do it. We can do hard things, right? That, you know, the formation of a young person by watching that, let alone the rest of us, right? And especially then when I am in that time of my life, um, when it's me who's a seriously ill one and the one who is dying, um, to have had a practice of something different. And I think that's again, that's what gives me a lot of hope and encouragement in this slow transformation that's happening in how we talk about dying and how we reframe dying in modern culture, modern industrialized Western culture, is that more and more people are drawn to a new way, but we need models for it. We need to be able to share when we see something like my friend's mom that was so amazing what happened with their family. I didn't know it was possible. And you know, that has a ripple effect. And sometimes we need a model of that. Some people are telling me the American TV show The Pit, which is about a hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I'm hearing from end-of-life friends of mine that there's some amazing modeling in a new way of dying of grief, of conversations from healthcare practitioners with patients and families. It's being modeled very differently in that TV show. So anywhere it can happen is is a good thing, where it it helps us to reimagine how it could be. For those of us who have lost a sense of dying is a purposeful stage, dying is a sacred event, dying as a community event, dying as part of what it means to be human. So movies and TV shows that are showing something more along what we've been talking about, I really welcome them because that gets us talking. We may not have it in our own lives, but we see another group of people and it's like, oh, that's very different from what I experienced, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:39

And then it opens up another avenue to have the conversation. And I think your book is an incredible way as well that people can, you know, have a resource that they can gently, you know, touch into. So when does your book come out?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:53

Um, it's it's been out for about a month now, and we decided to self-publish through Amazon. So it's available on um Amazon. It's called Dying Matters: Eight Conversations That Can Change Your Life. And the other part of it is not just the upstream and the more holistic approach, but we really encourage people to go through this book together with people in their lives, with a book group, with a faith community, with a work group, with neighborhood, you know, just to underline that we can talk about these things together and learn from each other. Because this is not a book that says, here, you want to die well, you want to die, you know, consciously, and then here is the roadmap. It's not that book. This is the book that says, here's some great questions, here's some really interesting context, here's some inspiration. Now go talk about it and you explore hearing yourself talk with others, you explore based on your values and priorities. And that's what really mattered to Trisha and I is that we wanted to empower people to have more clarity about what does matter to me. So, what decisions am I basing my choices of medical treatment on? And can it be something besides I don't want to die and fear? Not that not wanting to die isn't something that we may need to be holding on to through some tough treatments, right? But more a sense that I want to be as best I can living the whole of my life, however long that is, with clarity of what matters most to me. And how do we have that clarity with all the crisis that can be in the medical system when you're living with serious illness or having a medical crisis or looking right at, oh, we're here. We're I'm not going to survive this. Right. And if that's the first time I'm really understanding that, that's really hard for everybody.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:03

So how can I have more clarity about what matters most to me and what happens when we talk about these things with our friends and our family and our book group? How does it change our relationships and how does it change how I'm looking at my life? Some of the places maybe I'm stuck or I'm troubled or relationships I'm struggling with. How does talking about this whole part of my humanity and my mortality, how does it impact these parts of my everyday life?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:34

That's I think such an opportunity for a different unfolding, which is such a gift. So thank you for that. And thank you for being here today. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you want to talk about?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:47

What it comes down to for me is um in moving this from a taboo subject that is only seen as tragic and something to be fixed, like in making that big shift to this other way of looking at things. I do feel like we have to each explore how do I deal with pain? How do I deal with grief? How do I deal with hard things? How do I deal with not knowing? Because all of that is probably, unless I die suddenly, all of that is going to be part of what's ahead for me. So even that part of those life skills, dealing with uncertainty and dealing with inner, you know, soul or heart pain, um, can I be with it a little longer before I distract myself or I numb myself? Because I feel like we're living at a time when our potential to numb and distract is huge between our devices and our laptops and our TVs and our food and our overconsumption and our moving fast, fast, fast, fast, right? Modern life has made it really easy in some ways to not sit with pain and discomfort and uncertainty. So that area, I think, is a is a really interesting place to dip our toes into. You know, people who have been in recovery of some kind, uh addiction recovery of some kind, have a deep understanding of this. They've had to come right, right face with, I am choosing not to distract or numb. I'm choosing to look at this pain and find some meaning in it, find some way of healing path through it. But a lot of us who have not had that deeper experiences can can put off these conversations, um, can not want to wrestle with some of the harder questions about medical treatments and things like that. And so I think that relationship with pain and uncertainty and not knowing is a really interesting area. Um, it's a little harder to talk about, but as just one in my um years of working with people in in these in the area of serious illness and death and dying, those are the things that can keep us stuck.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:09

And so, what's the main message that you want the person listening to take away from today's conversation?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:15

Talking more openly about death, dying, grief, and loss changes how we live. I think that's really at the heart of it. It changes how we live and it changes our relationship with each other. And that wonderful Ramdas quote we are all just walking each other home. How different might our lives be if we look at each other and sort of recognize every one of us is going to die if we look at each other and recognize I am part of a human family, and we look at the people in our lives and in more immediate lives and say, you are my people, you are my community. How can I be there more for you? And how can how can we share this complex life differently together?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:06

And I think talking about death, dying, grief, and loss is a powerful way to change our relationship with each other.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:15

So, how can people connect with you? How can they reach your work?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:19

One place where they can not only have the Amazon link, but also see a little bit more about the work I do is through a website called deathdoulas.com. And the other thing I'll say is that on the page, the tab for our book, we also have 10 downloadable one-page documents for all kinds of professional groups, like how you might use, if you're a healthcare professional, a funeral director, a life coach, uh hospice worker, etc., how you might use this book in different ways. So that's helpful. My email is janetbooth15 at gmail.com. One of the programs that I teach and that I really love is uh Conscious Dying Collective, and all of our work is online now, uh, all of our teaching, and we have wonderful programs for people who want to be dualists, for people who just want to have more of an understanding of the possibility for befriending death and befriending grief. We also have um other shorter courses on the dementia journey and on things like eco-grief and the use of um plant medicine in overcoming death anxiety, a lot of different interesting shorter courses, and that's uh consciousdying collective.com. That's another place where I'm really loving teaching and being a part of creating those curricula.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:48

Fantastic. Well, I absolutely um encourage people to touch in with those resources and to connect with you. So thank you again for being here today and for having this incredible and incredibly important conversation with us.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:01

Well, thank you for the invitation and for the work that you're doing to bring um voices like mine and many others to your platform. Really, really appreciate it. This is, as you know, a conversation that is not always easy to find a place to land. So thank you for being a um a compassionate and um welcoming place to land.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:28

Live Differently is made on unceded Warundry Land in Melbourne, Australia. It's an independent production of the Seven Generations Project, founded and led by its host. Live Differently is possible because of our listening community. My thanks to all who listen and give by sharing and supporting the show. This podcast is shared for educational and inspirational purposes only. While we explore topics related to health, spirituality, wellness, and alternative living, the information provided in interviews and host presentations is not a substitute for professional advice. Please seek guidance from a qualified professional who understands your individual circumstances before making any changes to your health or lifestyle. The views expressed are the presenter's own, and any actions you choose to take based on this content are your personal responsibility. By listening, you acknowledge that you are responsible for your own well being, your own health, your own choices, and your own outcomes. Okay. I will see you next week. Have an amazing week, and I look forward to welcoming you on the next episode.