Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 126: Hansa Bergwall, Reminding Us That We Die So That We Live

Episode Date: March 14, 2018

The WeCroak app, which sends reminders that you're going to die -- five times a day, is not meant to be morbid, founder Hansa Bergwall said, but to make us stop and appreciate the moment we're living in. "Remembering that you're going to die is really important," said Bergwall, a publicist, writer and meditation teacher in Brooklyn, who was 11 years old when his mother died. "Sometimes that's all it takes to take a deep breath, change the program and do something different, feel something different." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I'm Dan Harris. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey people, why would anyone make an app specifically designed to remind you that you're going to die? And why would I hardly recommend it? Well, answer both of those questions coming up, but first your questions, and before I answer your questions, which again, I don't know in advance that just played to me by my evil producer Josh when I'm looking at right now who calls them from a

Phone number a voice mail line that we set up that you can you can call in and leave questions and I'll give you that number in a second Josh plays them to me and then I just respond off the cuff. You should just know I'm going to issue this caveat every time. I'm not a meditation teacher nor am I a mental health professional I'm just a journalist and a meditator, and I do my best to answer these. So here we go, question one. Yes, my name is Joe, and I'd like to know, when you're driving down the road and you're still cupping out people and knowing that, and you can't irritate you, and you've been meditating for a while, is that eventually going to change a little, or are you just going

to notice how much of a jerk you're still being and then kind of stop it on your. That's awesome, an awesome question. All I can tell you is how it's worked for me, which is that I don't drive much because I live in New York City and so I'm in the backseat of taxis. But I am in plenty of situations where I notice that I'm getting pissed And I would say that of that I Evolved my inner

Demons anger is a is a biggie. I just I just noticed that experience a lot of anger And I think in my bad old days I would Act out the anger. I wouldn't be a I mean, I knew I was angry, but I wasn't I wasn't really Act out the anger. I wouldn't be a I mean, I knew I was angry, but I wasn't I wasn't really Sort of non-judgmentally aware of the anger I wasn't mindful of the anger so that it did just kind of own me. It was like a puppeteer and I was super unpleasant a lot a lot not all the time, but you know enough and while I

Definitely after nine years of meditating, I definitely continue to be capable of being overtaken by my anger, I notice that I notice a few things. One is some percentage of the time, maybe 10, maybe more depending on the day. I see the anger or more accurately. I feel the anger usually in your body. There's a reason why we call them feelings because actually you do feel them. It feels bad usually. I feel the anger and I know that I'm getting angry and I am less likely to just yell and scream or say something snide

that I'm going to regret for a while. The other thing that I've noticed is that when I do get overtaken by the anger and I'm not mindful at the beginning, I can catch it more quickly. I can catch it more quickly. And I, so I'm quicker to apologize or at least stop being a jerk. And I would say, you know, I've quoted him many times on this before, but Sam Harris is a friend of mine and a previous guest on this podcast talks about the half-life of anger. The natural half-life of any feeling of emotion is actually kind of short, but we tend to re-up our anger through neurotic, obsessive, compulsive thinking. And so what would normally be a one minute or two minute experience of anger can last

an hour, can last a lifetime, because we're just re-upping it voluntarily on some level. And what I've been able to do a lot less of that, I think, by far for sure, not perfect, but a lot better. And so I'd leave you with one last thing, which is that you may be noticing, I don't know where you are on your practice for you at the beginning, middle, wherever. But there's an expression that's, that I talk about. This is my most recent book. Something that happens when you start to be more self-aware through meditation is that thing, things hurt more, but you suffer less.

So anyways, you're actually more mindful of your anger when you're driving down the road, but you may be suffering less in that you less, you're less likely to act out on it, you're less likely to feed it, you're less likely to make other people suffer as a consequence. So it's an interesting thing that happens, that that somehow being self-aware, which can cause in the short term a little bit more pain because you're actually in touch with how painful it is to be angry. Over time, you're suffering less because you're not acting it out, you're not feeding it, and you're therefore a lot less miserable in the long term.

So just a bunch of random thoughts, but it's a great question. All right, question number two. Hey, Dan. My name is Jamie. I'm a longtime reader and listener about first-time caller. I've been meditating for a while and using your app most recently, but I found that when my phone is dead or when it's just unavailable, I feel like I'm addicted to using the app to facilitate meditating. So I was wondering if you had any advice to help me meditate away from the phone

since I know one of the things you want to do is disconnect and just kind of be at peace. So yeah, any tips for breaking away from the phone and meditating on your own would be great. All right, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. I'm ad-libbing this.

I'm making this up, so don't take this as gospel. But I, well, first one thing to know. Some people think that, that guided meditations are really, training wheels, I don't, I don't think so. I think, I do a lot of meditating on my own, but I also use guided meditations usually on my own app,

but actually almost, no, always on my own app, I gotta almost always on my own app. I've got to be a smart businessman here, but I switch back and forth. And so I think you're kind of in the opposite situation where you're go to, whereas my go to is just to sit and put a timer on and go on my own, your go to is to use guided meditations. I actually don't think that is really problematic.

I don't, to me, that doesn't sound like an addiction. You may have an addiction to your phone, which would be a separate issue, which by the way, I probably share. So, no judgment here. So, what I would say is if your phone's unavailable for some reason or not charged, give a shot, just give it a try doing it on your own.

Set a timer, or yeah, set a timer. I know, okay, where are you gonna get a timer if you don't have your phone. If you have an analog clock around or if you just decide I'm going to sit and try it aim you know I'm going to look at a clock with a that doesn't have a timer on it and I'm just going to do my best. I'm going to close my eyes and see if I can make it to five minutes and occasionally I may have to open my eyes to check where I am. And just do the basic meditation steps. The basic meditation steps are super simple, not easy, but super simple. Close your eyes or maybe keep them open just a little bit, sit with your back reasonably

straight. That's the first step. Second step, kind of bring your full attention. No, not kind of definitely bring your full attention to the feeling of breath coming in and going out, pick a spot where it's most prominent, your nose, your chest, your belly. And your third step is just when you get the strike to start again, and again, and again, and every time you do that, that's the bicep curl for your brain. So you can remember those. Go ahead and try it. It may suck the first time, it may suck the

tenth time, but I think actually just over time, consistently giving that a shot, you will, over time, consistently giving that a shot, you will get up on water skis, and you'll be able to do it on your own, and I think you'll wean yourself. Or you'll play yourself in a situation where you have a balanced practice where some of that you're doing it on your own and some of that you're using guided.

But I just wanna be clear, if you're used guided every time, I don't see that as a problem, and I don't see it as an addiction. Phone addiction, which again, I share is a big topic. We've talked about it before on this podcast. We will talk about it many, many times because it's the problem of our age,

or at least one of the problems of our age. If you want to call and get me to maybe, in some cases rather, lamely answer your questions. Here's the number 64688383266468838326. Okay, cool. Let's get to our guest this week. His name is Hansa Bergwell and he runs in half,

which is called We Croak. And yes, it is about reminding all of us that we are going to die, which sounds first blush like something that's, well, morbid, yes, but that's by design, but morbid in a bad way. But, you know, actually, it turns out, and you'll hear me talk about this, and you'll hear him talk about it even more eloquently, the mind actually likes being aligned with what is true. And so we spend most of our lives running away from this basic non-negotiable fact, and that actually feels worse than syncing into it. And so this app, which I use regularly, weak-roak, it pops up on your screen, your phone,

and you swipe it, and then you go to the app, and it has just a little quote, and then you get back to your day. Hans is going to describe it in more detail, but I actually think it's kind of a great way to co-opt this distraction device at your phone and turn it into something that reminds you of something that your mortality, that when you're aware of, actually can bring a lot more, can make your everyday life much more vivid and consequential and add important perspective.

Anyway, that's my take. You'll hear me give it more in this interview and you'll hear Hansa actually speak about it at length and way better than I can. And just a little bit of background on him. He's a writer, he teaches yoga, he's a daily meditator, he's got a small communications agency, he started this app kind of on a lark and it has really taken off.

And as we get deeper into his story, you'll hear there's some pretty powerful personal reasons that That he's engaged in this work. So here he is. Hansa Burgua Before we get to the app let me just ask you a little bit about you. How did you end up in the meditation world? I actually grew up in it my parents were two hours a day meditators before I was born They had a guru from the Seek

region of India. So all through when I was growing up they were meditating during the Amrit Vela which is a fancy word for a couple hours before dawn. So it was very much a part of how I grew up. So was this Hindu meditation they were doing? Yeah it's from the Seek region India, which is a different tradition. So Sikh meditation? Yeah, I didn't know there was Sikh meditation. Oh yeah, they've got some real amazing practice in that part of the world, actually, if you're,

I haven't been myself, but I've heard that in Amritsar, there are alarms that go off at like three or four in the morning to wake everybody up to meditate. Interesting. So you grew up with parents doing this, I would imagine you then found the whole idea repellent because they were your parents doing it, or did you get into it because of them? Well, the kind of meditation they were doing is something that they thought was for adults. So they taught me when I was a kid, just the basics of some mindfulness meditation.

So I kind of knew what to do. I knew how to calm myself down before a pop quiz in school. And that's about as far as it went when I was growing up. It was just, it was in the house. It wasn't a big part of my life for most of my early childhood, at least. Are your parents still around by the way? No, my mother passed away when I was 11, quite suddenly of an aneurysm. Oh, no.

And your dad? He's still around. He's still around, He's still around. Is he still doing the meditation? Yes. He took a hiatus for maybe a decade after my mother's death, but he's back to it now. Interesting. So when did you start to do it of your own volition in a fulsome way?

I would say that, you know, the death of my mother definitely turned me into more of a seeker just because there was a lot of grief in my life. So it's funny now, but the first thing I wanted to do was go look for her. So all these esoteric practices and meditations and funny books that you might read in the new age section of a bookstore suddenly became very appealing as I was a teenager. So some of my first experiences in meditation where I was just one trying to find some kind of solace and two, you know, checking out of some of these things people say, you know, are true and can you like reach beyond? And that was sort of how I got started on my, on my road.

What kind of experiences do you have in that context? Oh, wow. Well, started on my road. What kind of experiences do you have in that context? Oh, wow. Well, I've got into for a bunch of years a kind of shamanic style of meditation where you use either drums or a rattle. And it's like a guided meditation, but you have much more visualization

as part of the practice. So I've had some pretty vivid and beautiful experiences, you know, talking to different, you know, take your pick, parts of my imagination, parts of the spirit world, versions of, you know, my mother, and they were cathartic, if not totally, what's the word I'm looking for? If I still don't know what that is, and an evidence-based kind of way, but they were beautiful experiences. So I don't even know, I mean, I've never heard of Shimonic,

and I understand what the words mean, but I don't actually know what the thing is. So how would you even do that kind of meditation with a drum? Would you be in a room full of other people doing it, or would you have your own drum, and you'd be listening to a recording with somebody telling you how to do it?

You can do either. And basically the frequency of a drum or a rattle at a certain frequency just helps push the brain into a very, very light translate where you can have a meditation that has a lot of visual phenomena occur. Interesting. So you were doing this in your teens?

I was doing that in my teens. Would your friends like that? I did not talk to a lot of them about it. It was something I found because my parents were definitely hippies, so some people who are into some of these more left field things were around, and I went out, and then I found them. Now where'd you grow up?

Concord, Massachusetts. Oh, okay, I grew up in Newton, not far away. Okay, yeah. We used to play you guys in high school sports. I think you guys beat us on the regular. So where did things go from there in terms of your meditation career? So I did that for a long time

and I even taught that a little bit through my 20s, just a very simple guided meditation with usually rattling. And then a couple years ago, I got very into condolining yoga and meditation and I eventually did a teacher training and now a teacher a little bit. So that is a different tradition of yoga and meditation that comes out of also the Sikh region of India. So I meditate now in more traditional practice about an hour to two hours every morning. What is Kundalini yoga? I don't actually, again, it's a phrase I've heard before, but I don't know what it is.

So it's a practice of yoga that includes a lot of different mantra, mudra, which is hand positions, repetitive movements, and asana, which is, you hold yourself in a position. So there are many, many, yeah, there are many different kinds of meditations and yoga sets that you do in this tradition. But it's a great place to go if, as I was really frustrated, for example, by mindfulness meditation, just sitting there,

noticing my breath and noticing I was distracted a lot. So in this path, you have things like meditating for an hour, holding your hands above your head. That sounds horrible, like medieval horrible. No, it's fun. You train up to it and the conversation changes from, oh, I'm distracted again. Oh, I'm distracted again to I'm in horrible pain this is how it's this discomfort People doing why is that better? I don't think it's better. This is discomfort. Keep doing it. Why is that better? I don't think it's better.

It's just that if you have a lot of nerve energy, which I do, something that gets me moving really helps me focus. Fair enough. I actually buy that for sure. The whole putting your hands above your head for an hour. I'm not yet on board with, but I get it in theory at least. Yeah, and you don't have to do that to get have a great experience. There's a lot of meditations with your hands

over your head that are only three minutes. And they're actually a great thing to do before a mindfulness meditation, because they can sort of get out some of that nervous energy. And then you can sit and relax a little bit more into just noticing the breath. So do also traditional mindfulness meditation where you're just feeling your breath coming in

and going out and then when you get distracted, start again? Yeah, of course. You're pretty eclectic in your meditation style. Yeah, I am. I think if it works, I've always looking for something that works. Looking back at all of these years of meditating,

what would you say the benefits have been for you? Well, one, they helped me get through some really hard times and grief events, so that's not nothing. It's huge. Yeah, so I think they're a great thing to turn to any time that the going gets tough. You know, there's a certain amount of happiness and just letting go of the small stuff that comes in when you can drop down into yourself and notice you're there. So that's the other one. And notice what? Notice that you're there and your body with your breath. That's something that can recur throughout the day if you meditate a lot and that it makes you feel better. I heard a great description of the way most of us operate, which is we're like Macy's day parade floats. It's just, you know, like a giant snoopy. That's our head. We're

completely disconnected from the body. And we're just floating through the world with no we forget we're there in many ways. It's all head. That came to mind, as you said, what you were saying about noticing you're there. Yeah. And I have a lot of natural tendency toward Macy's day balloon head. I think that's what you said. So I think there's a lot of just happiness and well-being in the body when you can get in touch with it. Yes, even if it's holding your hands above your head and suffering.

Even that way, it's amazing how good it can fail. So you teach meditation, kind of, lean yoga meditation or all the aforementioned flavors. Lately, it's been mostly the Kundalini yoga meditation. So the app, yes, we croak. Yeah, so we croak. So how did this come about? By the way, I'm a user, and I really enjoy it.

It reminds users they are going to die five times per day, randomized times can happen anytime, just like death. And the message is always the same. Don't forget, you're gonna die. It's wiped, see the quote. And then we have a database of around 250 quotes right now from Buddhist meditation teachers, stoics, philosophers, poets, palliative care professionals, anyone that I've come across in my readings and searching

for great quotes that provides, I think, a bit of wisdom or at least an interesting angle to consider mortality. I'm fully in favor of this. I think it's a great idea. I think contemplating death and whatever form it comes is incredibly healthy. However, let me just play devil's advocate and now having admitted that. I'm sure a lot of people come up to you and say, why the hell would I want to be reminded

that I'm going to die five times a day, let alone one time a day? So remembering that you're going to die is really important. And it's amazing how often you have to come back to that practice to keep it close. There's a huge natural tendency of the mind to want to hide and run away from that. And so, in different wisdom traditions, actually, in the East and the West, and for thousands of years, people have recommended that we do this. and for thousands of years people have recommended that we do this. The Buddhists had all kinds of meditations that they would do in graveyard over bodies that were decomposing or really extreme stuff.

And then I found the Bhutanese maximum, that to be a happy person, you have to contemplate death five times a day. And then in the West, for example, the Stoics had a practice of momentumori and remembering they were gonna die as a way of finding happiness. So this is something people have done for a really long time in different traditions and reported great results.

So that was how I got interested in it is because I am looking for happiness, usually trying to get even more than 10% and this came recommended. And it seemed extreme enough. Like, why would really smart people I respect sit in graveyards over a rotting body meditating on that if it wasn't something, you know, I should do at least a little bit of. So I decided to start weaving it into my practice a little bit and became a big proponent. I really found it made a difference. Do people still do the thing where they sit in the

charnel, you know, in the graveyard? It's not actually the graveyard, it's the charnel grounds where the bodies are laid out for the, the, the, the, the, the, the vultures, right? And they would sit and, and watch the body decay as a way to, I'm not an expert in how much of these practices continue by how many people are aware. I just know that they've been written about a good deal. And that's far from the only record of this, contemplating death coming up. There's all kinds of meditations on death

you can find from this tradition. The benefits paradoxically, thinking about mortality, your mortality specifically, can make you more alive. Yeah, it helps you drop into your body and your breath, like we were talking about and cherish the present moment, and the things that you have today, without thinking about

mortality or tendency is to go right for the next shiny thing over the horizon, which never satisfies for long, and we always keep punting that final reward over the horizon toward the next day. And without remembering that we may not have a next day, that's where we are. We're in the future. we're running, we're seeking, and when we can stop and say no, today might be it. Then we can notice the birds are singing, the breeze is beautiful, there's a loved one, our family member, we can call, whatever it is we need to do to make that day better. And then that's absolutely right. It's so counterintuitive and we don't want to do it, but it really does work. It also puts things in perspective.

It puts things in perspective. Protects us. I think one of the first Buddhist maxims, and you can correct me here if I get getting this right, but that is that we suffer because we don't see the world correctly. We see it in a way that is through the funhouse mirrors distorted and I think one thing at the root of how we don't see the world correctly is our own death. We tend to pretend it isn't coming or isn't going to happen at any time. And that can really distort our idea about what this world is and what our human life is.

Yeah. No, that's right. And when I meant, it puts things in perspective, you said the exact right thing, but I'm just thinking about how in my own life, you know, I spend so much time worrying about how I'm doing in my career, for example. And having a, you know, then I'll get a notification from you, telling me I'm gonna die, which of course is dunderously obvious, but still, you've forgotten it.

And you realize this whole thing is going by so fast. It's all gonna be over very soon. And is the thing I'm worrying about right now really that consequential? And that's actually a huge service. And that's actually the most common response we get from the WeCroak app is people say it pulls them back. No matter how much they know it, some point during the day they've forgotten. And whether they're scrolling Facebook or getting

caught up in a work professional thing that doesn't matter in the big picture or caught up in a personal or family drama, the message will come in and surprise them and all of a sudden that bigger perspective is there and sometimes that's all it takes to take a deep breath and change the program, do something different, feel something different, be in a closer perspective to the truth. So how many people have downloaded the app? A little over 17,000. Wow.

That's a lot of people. I mean, I'm sure you will reach even more people, but the fact that there are 17,000 people out there who will opt to be reminded five times a day that they're gonna die, I find that kind of reassuring. Yeah, it's pretty wild. When we made this app, we thought it would be us and our friends that this was our way of taking control back over our phones.

And it's really gone and traveled around the world. It's been downloaded on over 90 countries. And we've sent nearly a million and a half reminders at this point that the users on the app are going to die. What kind of negative reactions have you gotten, either from people who just don't like the concept of the app or from people who are actually using the app? I suspect not much on the letter. Right, because there's a 99 cents pay get,

I think we're really getting the people who kind of get it and want it. Yeah. But I think it's so natural that there's a version to thinking about death. As I said, we have to do it a lot exactly because of that aversion to not taking it squarely and thinking about it. So there's a lot of responses of like, why would I want to do that? I think about death too much as it is. Or that sounds morbid or something like that. And how I have to say is when you try it, you realize it gives you a lot of happiness. And so it's worth doing.

It really puts things in perspective. You enjoy the moment more. And so when people say things like that, they don't seem to be really considering death and it's honest way about their death. They're just probably having some other kind of thought come in because pretty overwhelmingly, if you have a real practice of remembering that your life is precious and short of an unknown amount of time, you take a little bit more pleasure in the little things.

It's probably almost certainly more painful to run and hide from this reality than it is to turn around and face it squarely. And I heard this interesting thing. I was on a silent meditation retreat in December. One of the teachers, she had this phrase, she said, turns out the mind likes thinking about death. It's something like, the mind likes to be aligned with what is true. It's counterintuitive, but again, if you try it for yourself,

it turns out to be true that somehow there's something comforting may not be the right word, but satisfying about embracing the truth of our situation. Yeah, I think the mind wants to make good choices and to feel like it's making good choices and creating good thoughts for you. And if it has a more accurate map, it can make better choices in that day and you'll feel that. Much more of our conversation right after this quick break. Celebrity feuds are high stakes.

You never know if you're just going to end up on page 6 or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud, from the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears.

When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App.

You said something before, but when you made this, you wanted to take control of your phone. Oh, yeah. So, at this point, I think, at least for me, you know, I don't think I can really say my phone is separate from me. I look at it so many different times during the day for my job, for my social life, for so many things that the apps, also known as thinking tools on there, are basically part of my mind because I look at them so much and I see them so much and they give me so many notifications.

And like a lot of people, so many of them weren't serving me. They were trying to eat up more and more of my life through a little addictive patterns meant to hook me into constant scrolling or updating or comparing, and I wasn't immune to these sort of little thought hooks that were coming in on my phone. I had to have one because I live in New York City and it's very useful, and professionally it was required. But I really felt like it was hurting my mental well-being at the same time. So I got really angry, maybe a little bit enraged, and my way of nourishing myself was to find

someone to help me make this app that would come in at random times during the day and sort of remind me to cut it out whatever it is I had been caught up into. It's so funny how even for those of us who like me and you want to be reminded of this that we need to be reminded so frequently. I mean, I volunteer in a hospice once a week and I do a death contemplation, at least try to do a death contemplation a little three minute exercise that my teacher Joseph Goldstein teaches, I might as well just say what it is, he teaches a series of three three-minute exercises that he calls jokingly this turbocharged root

to enlightenment. Two of them have nothing to do with contemplating your mortality, but one of them does, one of them is to think about how many generations have come on the planet before us and how they've all come and gone and then sort of systematically go through the people you know and think about how they have finite lives and then to finish with yourself. And I try to do these three three-minute exercises every night before I go to bed. So I do that death contemplation, you know, on the regular, I have your app, I go to a hospice for a couple hours a week,

and yet I forget it all the time. I completely lose touch with it all the time. It is so easy to lose touch with this. Yeah, and so do I. It still surprises me. Most times I get the notification, even several months in to this project, and having made the app and knowing it's coming. It will catch me. And I go, oh, yeah. This totally changes that moment.

What are some of the stories you're hearing from users about? You said a little bit about this, but I'd love to hear more, but what it's doing for them. about this, but I'd love to hear more about what it's doing for them. So to be honest, I've cried a couple of times at the stories that have come in from users. I didn't intend for this, but there's some people out there using it for some really serious work. A woman reached out who was using it to get over the death of her son. Another woman reached out to tell me that her mother was dying of dementia and that this is papis venom.

Really helpful. Her not just being caught up in that story of this suffering, but also in appreciating the time they do have in the moment. So there's some people getting attracted to it who are turning to it because they really need something strong that helps them throughout the day. And then I'm also getting a lot of people who just need something to help them turn off their Instagram or Facebook or have a little bit more phone control and a little bit more helpfulness if you reach out and say, you know, love in this app. This is great.

So it's been, you know, the gamut and it's been amazing to hear it being used as design just as sort of a simple tool that can get you through the day a little bit a couple percent happier or You know also being used for people who are really gone through it So it must be really gratifying for you to have created this thing kind of on a lark a little bit out of rage a little bit out of creativity a little bit out of thirst for wisdom but to think as you said that it was just gonna be for you and your friends to restore a little bit of what I like to call text sanity, to then have it take off, have 17,000 people downloaded and I assume more after this podcast and to be getting notes from people talking about putting it to use in such, you know, intense and powerful circumstances.

It's been humbling and beautiful all over again when hospice workers and palliative care people, you know, write to say kudos, you feel like a million bucks, because those people are heroes. Yes, they are. And, yes, they are. You know, also another thing that's come out of it

is people have written me from around the world who are practicing Stoics with the momentum or a practice or practicing Buddhists who do a lot of these death contemplations like the one you described. People from Christian community and Muslim community talking about analogous death contemplation practices. So I didn't know it when I made the app, but thinking about death as the mindfulness and wellness tool is very much a living tool that people love and are using all around the world. What is the Memento Mori practice? Yeah, so it comes out of stoic philosophy that term and it's basically an idea that you keep an object to like a skull

on your desk or something like that or some objects to remind you that you're going to die. So it's kind of the same idea of having something close on you like an app, except it's just an object that represents death because they also knew that the mind wouldn't do it on its own. You needed something that would carry in life to get you there. Yeah, like a stone in your pocket or something like that. Yeah.

So you're like a next gen, momentum worry. Yeah, like a next gen, momentum worry. They actually, when Roman generals of a certain time, there's a story that when they came into the city with their victory parade, they would have a slave behind them, reminding them they are mortal over and over and over again during the pageantry. This was something that was brought up and that when the times of London covered the app, which I thought was an amazing story.

So do you think the experience with your mom at age 11 is part of what's driving this? Yeah, of course. It was a very early and violent kind of ripping of the veil toward this truth that death is going to happen to every one of us and it can happen at any time. And no one in my family was ready. Yeah. Even after all the meditation. Even after all the meditation. Well, I think this is why the death contemplation is an important part of the meditative life, is my parents were early pioneers in the health food movement. So I think they thought that with all this meditation and exercise and healthy eating and brown rice and kale and tofu, that they could expect more reasonably that they would get to enjoy longer lives than most of their neighbors. And that's a form of a very tempting form of negotiating with the truth of death that it can happen for anyone at any time.

And a very baguiling one. And so when death hit, it hit really, really hard. There was no real sense that this could happen to us. We were if we thought we were special. And that was not true. It's not true for anyone. If I'm honest though, that's the way I think about myself. Even after all the work I've done, I take pretty good care of myself, reasonably good

genes in my family. So even after, you know, and I use your app, some part of me suspects death is for other people. Yeah, and that's, that's a, it's really natural inclination. And the problem with it isn't that you shouldn't do these things. I mean, I eat healthy. I think it's a great thing to do. It's that death is going to come, and we don't know when, and if we're not at least a little bit prepared, we can suffer a lot from that experience. Do you find death less scary or I find more acceptance with it and it helps me live my life today.

And that's pretty much it. I have a better day today if I'm keeping it close than if I don't. I very much want to be alive and I know that part of that is remembering that my mind will run off in places that aren't good for it. If I don't remember that, my time is precious. The writer Stephen Bachelor once told me he's written many great books, including Buddhism without beliefs. He's not afraid of death of being dead because he won't be there to experience fear, but

he's afraid of the dying process. Because that's the other thing the Buddhists talk about. It's not just that you will die, but that you are subject to aging illness and death. Aging illness, death, we are of an nature to get sick, we are of an nature to age, to decay, to die, and accepting that helps in our sense of our own identity of what we are as people and human beings that we're not surprised

when the gray hairs come in, or if we get sick, or as we break down that our identities are flexible and close enough to the truth that they'll weather that. I would just alter it slightly, that you probably, I mean, I'm surprised, I have some gray hairs and it's surprising every time I look in a mirror, because I think of myself as a picture myself as young, and I think of myself as young, and I look at the mirror sometimes like,

who is that old person staring back at me? So it is surprising on one level, but I think what the training, the app gives, that these exercises that we've already discussed, gives you, is that you don't, it's not like a vampire confronted with garlic. You don't just automatically curl up into a ball and try to distract yourself or react with rage, that you're actually, you can lean into it with some more curiosity, and what

that leads you to is what you keep saying, which is a more fulsome embrace of your actual life as you're living it right now. Yeah, and I think when we accept these parts, these tender parts of ourselves that we're going to age, that we can get sick, that we can get tired, this is also the doorway to loving kindness and compassion that we start to notice that all the other living beings around us share this with us and we can open up a little bit more of our hearts to them if we remember the fragility of life. I agree with that 100% of we we one of the sources of suffering described by the Buddha and just obvious to anybody who bothers to look, is this feeling of separation that we are somehow this self-contained unit separate from the universe, which is ridiculous because we're part of the universe and our atoms are switching

out. We're eating food from the universe and then expelling it. We're just inextricably part of this thing, but we don't feel that way on some gut level. And thinking about your own mortality and the fact that this is the condition of any living being actually does give you a connection that feels good. And this can sound a little combi-ah when set aloud and only ingested intellectually. But when you start to do these practices, which kind of pound this wisdom into your neurons, it feels different and it feels good. In hospice, as scary as I find dying to be, still, the people I've met, I've met many

of them now, who are dying, they don't seem that scared, many in many cases. And I don't know if this is just something that nature does, but I remember sitting with one older guy, a really smart guy who said that as his death approached, he increasingly felt himself to be part of a larger system. I don't think he had any religious belief that he was operating on. I don't think he had any meditation practice either. I think he was just like what he'd come to.

He realized that he was part of this larger natural order, inextricably a part of it, and that death didn't feel unnatural or somehow wrong. It's just part of the way things go. By all accounts that with the right practice or hospice care, or really preparing yourself ahead of time. People can have really beautiful deaths where they come to a sublime acceptance of what's coming and their part in it. And I want that for myself. So that's part of why I do this practice. And I read about it, and especially the

palliative care community of sort of what a huge amount of variation between very what sound like very painful deaths and very serene ones. And I think that with the right approach, it doesn't have to be a scary or a difficult or a painful experience necessarily. So what's next for you? I mean, you have a varied career. You were discussing this before. we were rolling. You do some PR work for food companies. You teach Kundalini Yoga, you have this app. Are you gonna build more apps?

Are you gonna build out this app? What are you thinking? You know, I've gotten so many emails from people saying, please don't make changes to this app. I'll pay more, I'll do this, I'll do that. Just don't add like advertising or this or that. So I think I'm not going to build this one out, this one is going to stay really, really simple. But you're going to add more quotes. And we're going to add more quotes, definitely. As far as the future, I've got a couple

of ideas. Maybe I'll start a week rogue podcast to have more conversations about death with people I've been thinking about. That's a really good idea. And other than that, this has only been traveling the world for a little over a month. So I'm giving myself time to plot the next thing. It's really been that short a period of time. It's been in the world since July and August. That's how long I've had it on my phone.

And there were I think 86 people who had it through December when it suddenly started to catch on. How did that happen? How did it suddenly start to catch on? There was a two page print feature on it in the Atlantic magazine. Our mutual friend, Jay Michelson, sent that to me and actually a million people sent it to me because they knew I'd be interested in.

That's how you ended up on this podcast. How did they find it? Well, I reached out to them because they had written about phones and the distraction sort of economy. I had built this app basically as a homegrown solution to that, DIY app making, I guess. And so I just, I shared it with her. And she tried it out, along with a bunch of other mindfulness apps.

And I didn't do too much more promotion of it until it came out. And it ended up becoming, instead of what I thought it might be, which is like a footnote or this or that, to be a two-page feature all about this one experience of her practicing death contemplation for the first time in her life and how powerful it was for her. Well, you've done a great job building this app, doing this interview, and I appreciate again you coming in to talk about it. Are there things I should have asked you about that I failed to ask you about? You can download WeCroak by typing in one word, W-E-C-R-O-A-K on either the iOS app store or the Android app store.

Google. You look for the little strawberry frog climbing down and get started, give it a try. What's the deal with the frog? It's a poison dart frog, so if you put it on a little dart and shot it at someone, it could actually kill them. So it was sort of using nature's own signaling or image of death to remind us, I thought it would be beautiful. And then, of course, there's the fun pun of weak croak. So I wanted a frog. I thought it would be beautiful. And then of course there's the fun pun of WeCroak. Right, so I wanted a frog. I should have put that together.

I don't think that's either. Yeah. Well, I'm a dummy. I get it now. And what if people, if they want to reach out to you in any way, you're on social media, how can you, or you have a website, is there any way people can watch? Yeah, I have a at WeCroak app, Twitter account,

which I'm using and following for people to express anything that they feel about it. Also I read the emails that if you go to the WeCroak.com website and fill out the form, I will get that in my inbox and try to get back to you in a timely way. This is still a homegrown project. Two of us having a lot of fun promoting something that we're really passionate about So if you have an experience or just want to reach out, please do we love hearing from you. Awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast if you liked it

Please take a minute to subscribe rate us also if you want to suggest topics You think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter, at Dan B. Harris. Importantly I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members.

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