The One You Feed - How to Face Mortality and Live an Authentic Life with Alua Arthur

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

In this episode, Alua Arthur shares how to face mortality and live an authentic life. She discusses her journey of grappling with the societal constructs of a “good life” versus her inner desires for adventure and discovery. Through her personal experiences, she sheds light on the importance of acknowledging mortality and the need for comprehensive end-of-life planning. Her story captures the essence of life and the human experience, urging us to confront our fears and live authentically. In this episode, you will be able to: Embrace mortality and live fully by gaining insights on embracing life’s impermanence Explore the essential role of death doulas in providing compassionate end-of-life care and support Understand the profound impact of acknowledging mortality on making authentic and meaningful life choices Navigate the journey of grief while uncovering opportunities for personal growth and healing Gain practical advice and insights to effectively plan for the end of life, ensuring peace of mind and comfort for yourself and loved ones To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What is it that you fear? You look at what you fear, then it's gonna tell you a lot about your life and then you can start living in that direction. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,

or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Alois Arthur, the most visible and active death doula working in America today. She's a recovering attorney and the founder of Going With Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. Alois' work has also appeared in Vogue, InStyle, Los Angeles Times, The Cut, The New Yorker, and others. Today, Eric and Ailua discuss her book, Briefly Perfectly Human, Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End. Hi, Ailua. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. We're going to be discussing your book, Briefly Perfectly Human,

Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End. But before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. In my life, I think I often grappled with the idea of the good wolf being the things that society had given me about what life was supposed to mean and what life was supposed to be about, which was, or at least the way that I understood it, about success and achievement and about showing up in the world in a way that other people really valued, about having a good job, about getting married, about having children, about following this very linear path. That to me was the good wolf. The bad wolf being the impulses that I had, the impulses toward mayhem and flight and adventure and discovery that didn't fit a very linear, progressive, this is how you

achieve and this is how you do well in society narrative. And I, for a long time, fed the good wolf, but that eventually starved me. That what I thought was the bad wolf was the thing that ultimately was what led to my freedom. I'd say overall, no matter which wolf you feed, you're going to die anyway. So let's feed the ones that give us the most meaning and purpose and joy and significance and like presence while we're here. Yeah, I love that. Listener, as you're listening, what resonated with you in that? I think a lot of us have some ideas of things that we can do to feed our good wolf. And here's a good tip to make it more likely that you do it. It can be really helpful to

reflect right before you do that thing on why you want to do it. Our brains are always making a calculation of what neuroscientists would call reward value. Basically, is this thing worth doing? And so when you're getting ready to do this thing that you want to do to feed your good wolf, reflecting on why actually helps to make the reward value on that higher and makes it more likely that you're going to do that. For example, if what you're trying to do is exercise, right before you're getting ready to exercise, it can be useful to remind yourself of why. For example, I want to exercise because it makes my mental and emotional health better today. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass.

I love that you used the word mayhem. I'd like to think of my wolves as being involved in the occasional bout of mayhem. Such a good word. Before we get into the core of your work, which is about guiding people along the path of dying, there was something that you were just saying, and it made me think of a theme that sort of ran through your book. And it was that there were times that you were out living this sort of adventurous life, and you were involved in mayhem and going after things you wanted. And that there were times that that was almost as inauthentic as the life where you were doing what you were told to do. Am I reading that right? And if I am, say what makes the difference.

I think you are absolutely reading it right. Part of the difference is that for a long time, I was running away from myself. I was running away from the thing inside me that said, this life that you're living isn't working for you. I was trying to escape and try to bury it under romance and travel and just really wild experiences. I was seeking desperately. But part of the thing about seeking is often I find myself looking outside of myself for an answer, trying to find it in something or somebody else. And what I found rather was that it was important for me to seek within, to go inside, to learn what I actually wanted, who I really was, rather than just rallying against what I thought I was supposed to be going toward. Is that clear? It totally is. And I recognize a similar thing in myself to some degree also, where some of the

things that I really enjoy, which are things like travel and novelty and different experiences, is really, I think, a core part of who I am. And it can be a core way of also running away from myself also, as you've said. And so learning when I'm doing which thing is kind of an interesting lesson to learn. Absolutely. I think the come from is the thing that makes the difference because, well, to get into it just a little bit, I met a fellow traveler on the bus in Cuba very many years ago, 11 years ago at this point. And she was on a trip to see the top six places in the world she wanted to see before she

died. And to some, that sounds like one of these bucket lists, like, yes, go out and get it and do all the things that you want to do before she died. And to some, that sounds like one of these bucket lists, like, yes, go out and get it and do all the things that you want to do before you die. But rather what I heard in her was a resistance to death rather than an embrace of it. It was, oh no, I have to do all this stuff before I die rather than I'm going to die. And so let me enjoy what I can while I'm here. It's a small distinction, but I think it's the distinction that is couched in what we're talking about right now, which is the impulses that live within us when we ignore those and we do the things to try to fill something inside, or rather when we know what it

is that we need inside and we go experience what we can when we can. There's something you say late in the book, and I think this is interesting, you say, my habit of forever seeking without any promise of finding helps me guide clients through the terror of the unknown. And you're talking about guiding clients through the dying process. But I found it really interesting, this idea of forever seeking without any promise of finding and acceptance of that also being part of what we need in order to accept the end. There is a fundamental part, I think, of being human

that wants to understand and uncover things that we cannot know. I think we're societally really obsessed with mysteries. I think often about JonBenet Ramsey. You remember this kid, a little girl, right? From the 90s. I haven't heard that name in a while, but yeah. Right. And we still don't know what happened to her. And for a while, everybody was obsessed with what had happened to her and trying to uncover the mystery. I think we get really stuck with not knowing what it is that happened. And death is the greatest mystery we will never, ever, ever know. And many people, I think, set themselves on a quest to find answers for things that really have none or we will never know. And so how can we get comfortable with

not knowing? How do I get myself okay with the fact that I don't know what the next minute is going to bring or what happens after I die, when I'll die, the circumstances under which I'll die? It's a big, fat mystery. It's a big fat mystery. It's a really juicy one. And I would love it if we could all continue to like just stay seeking, recognizing that there is an answer to be found because the juice is really in the seeking, if you ask me. Yeah, I love that.

One reaction to I'll never know the answer is to just go, so why bother asking, right? Is to give up and just not be interested versus knowing that we're not going to know the answer, but we still are curious to know it. And I think that describes my worldview fairly well in that I don't think most things have answers and yet I'm intensely curious in all the questions. Same here. Same here. Same here. I think my curiosity is one of my greatest gifts, but also one of my biggest challenges is that I'm always like, I wonder how, I wonder if, I wonder if we can, and just walk a little bit toward it and keep tunneling and tunneling and tunneling until either I get bored or something else picks up my curiosity along the way. But it's something that I really like about myself, but it's something that allows me to do my work well. I teach death doulas, and I often remind folks that our curiosity about other humans is one of the key traits that is

helpful in the work, because that curiosity allows me to keep asking questions, which gives people space to share what's on their hearts or what they're curious about or what they're scared of, etc. So we're going to get into a second what that term death doula means, because that's kind of the core of your work. And before we do that, I'm going to say that I don't know now what this conversation really is going to be. Is it a conversation about how we support other people on the way to their death? Is it a conversation about what we learn about living through people dying? Is it a conversation about how to overcome the fear of death? I don't really quite know where it's going to go. So I'm sort of stating that just out loud because I'm just

really not sure. But I think the place to start is with you describing kind of what a death doula is. I'm down to stay curious about this conversation if you are. I am. I am. Great. Great. A death doula is a supportive person who does all of the non-medical and holistic care and support of the dying person and their circle of support through the entire process. So when I talk about the dying person, I mean anybody who has some awareness that when their death will come, which means probably you as we're having this conversation about mortality and certainly me. When we come into awareness of our mortality, it's important that we do some comprehensive end-of-life planning. And so death doulas can support healthy people in getting their end-of-life planning done

and also in working through any fears or anxieties around death. When people know what it is that they're going to be dying of, we can support them in creating the most ideal death for themselves under the circumstances and also to help them get clear on meaning or purpose or work through any relational challenges that they have. And after the death occurs, we can help the family members or the loved ones wrap up affairs of their loved one's life. So a lot of the bureaucratic mess that's left after a death. So we're supporting with the emotional, practical, and spiritual aspects of caring for the dying. That's a lot of different things to be doing.

Yeah, it is. And the needs are really dependent on the individual. You know, some people come and they just want practical support. But nine times out of ten, the practical support opens up a greater emotional conversation or a spiritual conversation that perhaps they weren't aware that they were also in because they were stuck on the practical. And your road to becoming a death doula, it sounds like there were two sort of key moments. One is you were referencing earlier the conversation with the woman, Jessica, on the bus in Cuba when she recognized she was going to die.

And you guys started having some open conversations about that. And she felt heard in a way she hadn't before. But then the other was a close family member of yours named Peter. Do you want to tell us about that? I would love to. Peter St. John was my brother-in-law. He was my older sister, both my St. John's husband. And Peter came into my life when I was about 21 years old. And so I really grew into adulthood with Peter. Now we were close. We got close very quickly. He was conservative, socially conservative. He was white. He was Irish Italian. He liked to fish and hunt. And I was just horrified by these activities. I was very early a social

justice warrior and just could not think of the possibility that one could kill another being. Like why? A vegetarian. Vegetarian. Peter and I butted heads on everything, but we also were incredibly close. I think the butting heads was an element of our relationship. About 10 and a half years ago, shortly after I came back from Cuba, Peter was diagnosed with Burkitt's lymphoma and I was crushed. I hoped and hoped and wished that he would be cured, understood that while a cancer diagnosis was a long road ahead, you know, I planned to journey with him through the diagnosis all the way through its completion. And I assumed the completion would be his health. But about four months after he was diagnosed,

the doctors couldn't treat Peter anymore. And I got to support him and journey with him for the last two months of his life. And for my days since then, this is still the greatest gift I've ever been given. I got to care for somebody who I love so much in his life and to his death. It grew my capacity for compassion, understanding how many people were journeying through the similar thing at the same time. And also I got to see the inequities in the system and how we really need to do better by people that are ill and dying and those that care for them because we were largely like floating out there. We had a lot of support for his body and the medicine,

but not much support for all the other things that goes into when somebody's dying. Those things felt overlooked. And so I started my practice and my business going with Grace to address some of those concerns. What were some of the things that during that experience most woke you up to the fact that this type of work was needed out there? What were specifically some of the things that you really felt like you and your family were unsupported in? Well, for starters, maybe the most basic of all, nobody ever said Peter is dying. That would have gone a really long way. They said we can't treat him anymore, or we're going to try this treatment. They said, we can't treat him anymore, or we're going to try this treatment.

This might alleviate his pain. You know, nobody said very clearly he's dying. And in the state that we were in, and let me speak for myself, in the state that I was in, I was going to hear everything but he's dying unless somebody spoke those words very clearly. I was going to hear, well, maybe there's hope or they can try this, or maybe his kidneys will start responding better tomorrow. I wasn't hearing that he was dying. That would have been incredibly supportive. What I now understand is that a lot of medical care teams shy away from using that very plain language somewhat because

of liability, I think, but also because of a lack of familiarity with conversations around mortality, not only in their training, but also with their patients. Like it's just not a part of the conversation at all. And I think it desperately needs to be. We could have prepared ourselves much better had somebody said very plainly, Peter is dying. We probably would have sought additional services. Similarly, there weren't additional supportive services where he was dying. There wasn't somebody to sit alongside us and help us figure out what to do with some of his possessions. We still had medical equipment at home, medications. He wanted to transfer title of his vehicle to his nephew. And that was really complicated after he died. We didn't know how to

talk to my niece who was four about the fact that her dad was dying. Shit, we didn't know how to talk about it with each other. I just cursed. Is that okay? That's fine. Okay. Okay. Cause I'm full of them, but I'll keep it PG. There were a lot of things that we just, we didn't know how to do and somebody to say, hey, these are some things that you should think of beforehand would have been tremendously supportive. Somebody to point out his death rally when he was having it. I thought it was a miracle. The death rally is when the dying process has progressed quite a ways and it looks like death may soon be coming. And yet the person who's dying has a burst of energy again and they start, you know, maybe cracking jokes or being like how they were before they were ill or want meals or

want to start planning trips or so. To me, it's the last little bit of life force that's burning off. And I thought that Peter was maybe having the miracle that we'd hoped that he'd had. And yet it was the last time that I actually heard his voice was during his death rally. So just somebody to point out what was going on, somebody to stand there and say, you're doing great and this sucks, or to give us some practical information would have been tremendous. Yeah. It's been about a year and a half now, but my partner's mother passed from Alzheimer's. It was about an eight-year journey through that where we were sort of primary caregivers. And my father, a little over a year now, also passed from Alzheimer's,

but I was more involved in the care of Ginny's mother. And I remember when hospice finally got involved, it was such a relief in some ways, because all of a sudden now, there were people who knew about this last little phase. I mean, it was clear once you say hospice, you mean like the end is close. I just found them a welcome relief to the overall process. It's not like we had any hope she was getting better, right? I mean, Alzheimer's, unfortunately, you kind of know where that's headed, but they were still very much a relief to just be people who understood what happened at this phase of life. Because you don't know who does know, right?

Until you've gone through it. I'm so glad to hear that y'all have that support for Ginny's mom. Hospice is tremendous. Tremendous. Had we had hospice support when Peter was dying, I don't know that we would have had a similar experience. He died in the hospital. Yet hospice does a lot, but they can't do everything. And a lot of hospice treatment is still focused on the body. There are nurses and CNAs are often the greatest allies in

the work because we can team up to make sure that we are fully covering the client's needs. I found many times where I'll be in the home or I'll arrive and the hospice nurse is there and we'll check in with one another. Hey, what's happening today? How are they feeling? How are they doing? Granted, we already have the permission of the client or of the patient of theirs to share information back and forth, but just to make sure that we are holistically covered. Also, we're often able to catch people much further upstream. Oftentimes, I am called in when somebody has a diagnosis or when they know when they get the prescription from their doctors about hospice and I can help them vet one and find a

good one for them, help them sort through their goals of treatment or their goals of care. We can also just help people wrap their heads around this disease that they've got and start to handle some of the fears of death that they may have. One of my more recent clients had just been diagnosed with a pancreatic cancer. And while it wasn't a death sentence and we don't know when they might be dying, it was an important time to start talking about the fears of death because those came up. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No Really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I can see how valuable what you do is we were fortunate in that Jenny's mom as soon as she got the diagnosis had sort of got all her affairs in order right away, like locked down and all that. And I remember thinking, even with all of that done, they're still like, you've got to go to the funeral home. You've got to. And I was just thinking of like, what would it be like trying to figure all this out if we

hadn't been so prepared for this day coming and she hadn't have done so much of that. Like it really was a huge gift that she gave us. I'm not sure I saw it that way when I was taking her to the funeral home when she was first diagnosed, but in retrospect, I mean, she gave us a real gift. I love your language about it. It is a gift. To me, it's one of the last great acts of love because the people that we love, the people that we care about are going to be deeply grieving our deaths. How wonderful would it be if then they don't also have to figure out if they should spend a thousand dollars on a casket or $10,000 on a casket, or where you would like to be buried, or if you want to be buried at all, or where the passwords

are to your email addresses, or where your money is or do you have retirement accounts there's so much stuff that if we just said would make it so much easier on the people that we care about if you've been in the experience of grief and it sounds like you have you understand how it can have a bulldozing effect on you it's hard enough to remember that the sun comes up every day and you should eat, let alone trying to then sort through like the CSI of trying to close online accounts because you don't have basic passwords. I wish that all of us would do a lot more end of life planning. So in addition to some of the planning and the things that you do, another big part of your work

is helping people come to terms with the fact that they are going to die. You and I both know that and we're aware of that, but our need to come to terms with it is a little bit different than somebody who is six months away, give or take, from death. So what do you find when it comes to working with people around the fear of death? I assume there's a wide variety in your clients and what their response and relationship to death is. Yeah, I would say the fears of death fall in about four or five major categories. And this isn't going to capture all of them, but it's a good number of them.

A lot of people fear the process of the body. What is it going to feel like? Is it going to hurt? What's going to happen to my body? How, what are the circumstances under which I'll die? So that's around the process of the body. What's it like? Another major fear of death is the fear of the unknown. What if anything happens after I die? So all the questions about annihilation and not having memories anymore and consciousness not continuing on after we die, or if they did the right things, but with the religion that they chose while they were living, etc. So a lot of questions about the unknown kind of also fits in with what happens with the body, like not being able to control the facts or circumstances around my dying.

Another one of them is the fear of missing out, life continuing on after I die, children growing older, the earth moving, what happens at the next presidential election, or is everything going to hell in a handbasket? So what happens after I die and not being around for it? And one of the last major categories, and this is the biggest one, is a fear of a life not fully lived. This sounds often like, well, I can't die yet because I have yet to dot, dot, dot. You know, for me, for a while, I just really wanted to get my book out. I wanted to get my book done. And so it was like, I can't die before I get the book done. I find that a lot of people, a fear of death follows a fear of life. That's actually Mark

Twain's quote, that a fear of death often follows a fear of life. That those that are not living fully and authentically, people that are often not prepared to die, but those of us that are in our fullness while we're living can approach death with an embrace because once we're there, we're like, well, I did it as best as I could, as much as I could. I mentioned before, I teach death doula students and a lot of folks come to the work thinking that it's important for them not to have any fear of death in order to do the work. And I think people often think that because I sit and I talk about death all day, every day, that I have none. But rather, I think it's important that those of us that do

this work build a good personal relationship with death, that we excavate what those fears are. And for any fear that we have while we're living, I can find the root of it in the fear of death. If we sit long enough, I'm going to dig it all now. But I think it's important that we like excavate what our fears of death are, because they often teach us very much about how we're living and what we value. And so we can place a greater emphasis on it while we live rather than try to shun it and pretend it doesn't exist at all, which is what many do. You know, just don't look at the thing you fear. Don't look at your death. But what is it that you fear?

You look at what you fear. Then it's going to tell you a lot about your life and then you can start living in that direction. It's quite motivational if you ask me, but I'm also biased. You have a line, I think it was from your TED talk, not from the book, although it may have been in the book also, that acknowledging death means we are not the center of the story. And that struck me as really profound, right? Because we all sort of live with this perception that we are the center of the world or main character syndrome. It's sometimes referred to, right?

We're the main character in all of this. But when you realize that you're going to die and the world is just going to carry on, it can be very overwhelming to think that. I mean, it's bad enough to think I'll leave my job and in two weeks, everybody will be like, ah, who was Eric? We don't even remember him, right? But take it to death, that's a whole different level. Absolutely. It's quite humbling, isn't it? Because here I am thinking everybody cares about the things that are going on in my life. And, you know, my neighbor knows my name, but she doesn't know anything about me. You know, it's really humbling. Yet I find it freeing also know, it's really humbling. Yet I find it freeing also that in two decades, nobody is going to remember my name. I've chosen not to have children. Nobody's carrying forth my name moving forward.

Maybe people will speak about me after I die. I don't know. But in two generations, nobody will anymore. That also means that I have the absolute freedom to do what I want because I don't have to try to impress anybody or make anybody proud in a little bit moving forward. That the mistakes that I make are also going to die with me. That the people that remember the things that I've done that I feel embarrassed by, they will die too. I feel so much freedom in knowing that everything else will carry on after I die.

It allows me to do the things that I want because they're not that important anyway. Big picture, you know, really big picture. There's already been about 102, 110 billion that have come and gone. 102 to 110 billion, billion. The greatest names in our time. You know, those people that people know in the far reaches of the world, like Michael Jackson, for example. Nobody's going to remember him in a generation or two. Nobody will speak of him anymore. And

those are the ones with the greatest fame. It's humbling. It totally is. I mean, you do realize we all talk about like legacy or impact and you realize how hard it is to make any sort of lasting legacy in the world. Even people that we talk about all the time, like Shakespeare, and he's only a few hundred years. How many people think about Shakespeare? I mean, a reasonable number, but in the grand scheme of things, not that many, right? I mean, and so even like you said, these huge names, 500,000 years from now, they're almost certainly going to be gone. And if they're not gone, whatever they were is going to be some figment of the imagination. And I think when I was young, that used to really trouble me. And as I've gotten older, I've become more comfortable with it,

almost, as you said, freed by it, because then it's like, well, don't bother like trying to suss out your historical importance because there isn't one. Bingo. One of the benefits of aging, isn't it? One of the big benefits of aging. Yeah. So one of the things that you say, although what I just said was our historical importance is nil, you talk about how everybody does have

a legacy and you're creating it all the time. Say more about that. I think it's Maya Angelou, although I'm going to mess it up. But the quote that people will never forget how you made them feel. They may forget what you say and what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. And I find that to be so true in my work, how you made them feel. And I find that to be so true in my work, that after the person that I got to care for has died, when it comes to their funeral, it's often judged by what people say about them, who they were, how caring they were, how considerate, how funny. They care more about the qualities of the person rather than their accomplishments. And yes, some people have great accomplishments and people can read an obituary that's three

pages long with all the things that people did. But often it's more about who they were while they were doing the things that people care about. I know many folks that created a lot with their lives and yet left a wake of ruin in their path. They annihilated people that worked for them. They didn't bother to look the cashiers in the eye. You know, those things are the things that ultimately matter.

Those are the bits of the legacy that we carry on as well. I'll tell you a quick story. Sure. There is a client I got to work with, not somebody who was dying, but rather she came because she wanted to plan a funeral for a gentleman that lived on the street outside of the place that she got her coffee in the morning on the way to work. And every day she'd stop and talk to this unhoused man about his life or the things that were going on in her life. And he would ask her questions. She would ask him questions and they struck up a friendship. After a while, she noticed that he wasn't there anymore and did some digging to try to figure out

what happened to him. And he had died. What she found was that there was all these folks that had died that went unclaimed by other people. And she was really taken by that. So she wanted to plan a funeral for him in particular because she knew him. We planned the funeral. We held it outside. Over 400 people came because of how she talked about him, about the impact that he had on her life. That was his legacy in her life. Somebody who by most metrics, certainly this country, whose life had no value to other people who lived on the street, who begged for change, that human, 400 people came to honor his life because of what he created in her. That's how we measure legacy. That's how it shows up for most of us. I wanted to pause for a

quick Good Wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life, right? Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we want to add in the context of our entire life, right? Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding, I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf,

go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. That's a beautiful story, by the way. And I think it's a really true thing that our greatest legacy is what we leave in other people. And yet accomplishments call to us, you know. And so talk to me about how in your own life you think about accomplishment and the value of that versus the value of who you are in terms of your legacy. Like you mentioned your book, right? A book is sort of a legacy project to some degree. It is an accomplishment to some degree, although I'm assuming you didn't do it because you wanted to be known as a New York Times bestselling author. But I'm curious how you reconcile sort of those two competing forces within us. In the early part of my adulthood, I went to law school. of my adulthood, I went to law school. I passed the bar on the first try. I was courted by some of these big name law firms and I wanted to do justice works. I went to legal aid and I was doing

the good work and fighting the good fight. And for, you know, the metrics, I was doing pretty good. I was pretty successful. I'm using air quotes around that term. And yet I was terribly depressed. I was drinking too much. I was smoking too much. I was not making time for my friends. I was totally out of touch with what I wanted and who I was in my life. All I know is I had a degree and like a terminal degree, one that many people envied or placed some value on. And I had good relationships. You know, I had beautiful men in my life. I had been married briefly. You know, I was doing things. I was living the life. And it didn't feel good. It felt terrible to me. It felt terrible. It helped me see

that the external markers of success were not mine. Like I had to redefine what success meant for me. And for me, it didn't mean the accomplishments. It didn't mean testifying to the Domestic Violence Council or all of the schools that I opened in low-income neighborhoods in LA. That didn't really matter. What mattered rather was my joy, my presence, my ability to like revel in this miracle that it is to be alive. That's how I measure my success now. Cause at the time I wasn't doing much of that and it left me really broken and sick. And so I had to break out of that. I had to break that metric, try to see what a good life meant for me. And a good life now is couched in joy and presence, like I said, and still in doing things that feel good to me because of how they

impact the world, but less in getting my name out there and becoming a New York Times bestseller, but more in the healing that people are able to access because of the work I'm able to do, how folks can feel seen because for the first time I've acknowledged that anger is a pivotal part of grief, or so is promiscuity. For folks that feel free to grieve or to feel because now they can allow themselves to have the full gamut of human emotions and share those as opposed to just the ones that we think that we're supposed to. I think that accomplishments maybe make us look good in the eyes of other people, but if I don't look good in my own eyes, then what does it matter? And whose eyes am I looking through when I'm looking at myself? I think a

big process of elderhood is somewhat shedding the societal expectations and the ideas of who we should be. And when I can come back into my authenticity, come back into my body, be at home in my body, be at home in my life, that is successful. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

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you get your podcasts. You said so many beautiful things there. And sadly, I am hung up on a phrase that you used in there about promiscuity and grief. So I'm going to have to ask you to talk about that for a second. So I can focus back on the important things here, because I didn't expect that to be something that came out of your mouth. Okay. Well, here's the deal is that the grief experience, as we know it, is like all over the place.

People have a varied number of responses to grief. And there are some that we understand and are down with like sadness or, you know, confusion or loss or I'm having a hard day right now. And yet some people experienced grief with a lot of different other things like their bodies and wanting to feel a lot of pleasure in it, grounding in the fact that they are still present and promiscuity. I really don't like that term because it's so negative now, but people, you know, people experiencing grief through their bodies sexually is a way that people do it. And I'm down for it. Like get you some, feel the pleasure,

feel in your body. Yeah. Okay. Now I'm going to go back to the important things that you said. Not that that's not important, but I'm struck by you describing the former life and the current life. Right. And it seems to me that having an impact on other people is a really defining part of what makes you, you. And when you were doing the legal aid work, you were having significant positive impact in the same way that you are now. What was it about that you weren't satisfied with or wasn't working for you compared to what you are doing now. You alluded to the word joy. Is it as simple as the sort of work you enjoy doing? And it's just that simple? You like this type of work better than that type of work? Well, for starters, yeah.

Like legal work is not a good time. There's a lot of paperwork and checking boxes and I wasn't so into it. I also don't really like arguing. I would often think that there should be better ways to come to resolution rather than everybody making their, stating their cases on opposite sides of the table. Like, why aren't we just getting real with this stuff? I often also want to argue based on what was just, not what was legal. Like that didn't, that was not a good metric to measure things by. Frustrating, yeah. Yeah, very frustrating to me. But I think even more deeply is that in the legal practice, I couldn't use all parts of myself, you know, like some of the things that I just alluded to. But I'm a super sensitive being.

I'm really curious about humans. I'm really interested in healing and how we experience the world. And there wasn't space for me to do that while practicing law. You know, imagine me standing up there saying like, Your Honor, she's really trying to heal. And look at all these traumas that led her here. No, nobody cares about that. But to me, that's how we ultimately break the cycles of violence that bring the clients back over and over and over again, and the people that are perpetuating the violence. So let's get to that. You know, let's get to that. It know? Let's get to that. It wasn't a fit.

It stifled me. It suffocated me. I felt like I was like drowning, but it was in an ocean of my own making. And so I had to get back to the surface and get out of there and say, wait, who am I? There are parts of me that I like a lot that make me me that I cannot use here. And so let's go take them someplace where we can use all of it. And this feels like a pretty good fit. I can see why that is a particularly hard situation to perhaps find your way out of. Because to your point, you chose it and B, it is important work, right? And so it becomes harder to sort of recognize like, well, I chose

it and it's important and yet it's still not for me. Yeah. I chose it. It's important. And I'm $130,000 in debt over it to this day. And it's still not for me, you know, and it's still not for me. It was a very, very difficult choice to make, but one that I had no choice about because I developed a severe clinical depression. I kept avoiding that thing inside me that said, this isn't for you. As we were talking about when we began talking, I was just avoiding and trying to escape this life that I built. And it was crushing me. And I kept pretending it wasn't happening until, well, I was an absolute shell of myself. I couldn't find any joy anymore. I couldn't find a good reason to get up and keep doing the

things that I was doing. My life had fallen into disrepair and so had my health. And if not for that, I probably just would have kept going and hoping that it got better, that I came up with an answer at some point. In some ways, I am very grateful for depression as well because it allowed me to step off the wheel for a while and like pause and try to look at my life and say what's not working and how do we fix this. So what's your journey with depression been like since then? So after you sort of realized like, OK, I can't function in this world. I'm going to have to do something different. You've taken a different path.

And I ask because I'm somebody who has had depression many different times in the past. And so, you know, it's sort had depression many different times in the past. And so, you know, it's sort of an area of ongoing maintenance for me. I'm kind of curious what your relationship with it is like now. I still dance with it from time to time. But I'll say that it has never been as deep or as overwhelming as it was then. And I think also my relationship with impermanence has shifted and that I can allow the feelings that I'm having at the time to just be that, recognizing that it will one day go. But that's a practice, that's a consistent practice, because sometimes when it feels

like it's coming again and that heavy blanket is starting to descend on me, I get scared that it's going to come and stay. It's going to be so big and overwhelming. And yet I keep reminding myself that we've been here once and we moved on. And if it were to come back in the same way, we would be able to get over that as well and give myself a lot of grace for my chemical composition and my sensitivity and the way that I move in the world. That allows me to, I think, dance with it as opposed to just get terrified or get bowled over by it. And a lot of meditation.

Yeah. That seems to be one of the defining features, I think, of depression is this sort of, hey, I'm back and I was never really even gone. And you're always going to feel this way. To me, it's embedded in the condition itself is that story, which, like you, I've gotten much, much better at sort of looking at and going, that's not true. That's just simply not true. It feels like it's true, but it's not. And being able to trust that as I've come out of it multiple, multiple times. Yeah. I wrote in my book, and I remember distinctly writing this, that depression is a liar. You know, it lies. It tells you that nobody cares, that you can't get out of it, that it's going to be this way forever. That for me, at least, that I didn't deserve joy and that I deserve this

terrible feeling and that I got myself here and that I wouldn't be able to get myself out. And I now know 10 years past this major depressive episode that none of that is true. And that, as you were saying before, it's just it's kind of baked into the condition itself. Like this overwhelming, like, oh, it's never going to get better. There's no hope. There's no way out. This is it. I'm just going to be like this for forever. Yep. Yep. What a lie. So it's kind of a cliche at this point that people say, like, the only thing that really matters is love. And yet you say nearing the end of life, I've observed that people are concerned with three major questions. Who did I love? How did I love? Was I loved? So say more. It's a cliche and it seems to be a

cliche that carries an awful lot of truth. Relationship. People are so mired in their relationships. I see so much talk about who's there, who wasn't there, who should be there, what they did to somebody, how they mess this relationship up, where they need to say I'm sorry, where they didn't, the grudges, the trauma, the pain, separation, all of that. I spend so much of my time with my clients talking about their relationships, how they were to other humans. And I do find it to be a defining characteristic of to other humans. And I do find it to be a defining characteristic of being human, but also this human ride. I think it's one of the things that imbues this human experience, even with all this difficulty, with some pleasure. You know, even when things get hard, the fact that my best friend and I,

she can say one word and I will laugh until I cry, until I cannot think straight anymore. I want to giggle even thinking about the word. I love her. I love how she shows up in the world. I love how she loves me. And that makes it feel okay when things get really, really, really difficult. Nearing the end of our lives, as we are approaching death, I think that becomes very, very starkly clear. We can see who we loved. We can see who loved us. We can think about all of our missed opportunities.

And many people are in a rush to reconcile their relationships as they're dying. In fact, it's one of the tasks of the living that we should do, that we should be engaged with consistently, is checking with the state of our relationships, who's important to us, what is still unsaid, what needs to be said, and then find the courage and the vulnerability to say it while we still have time to maybe repair the relationship if it needs some repair. But yeah, love. I mean, the Beatles said it, love is all you need, really. I mean, some bread is nice. Shelter is nice, but love goes a long way. So it's obvious, I guess it's not obvious to everyone, it seems obvious to me that reflecting upon the fact that we are mortal is a way of figuring out what's important to us and living more that way. And it also seems remarkably distant, even knowing that.

Is there a way that you know of to get people who are not around death all the time, right? If you're around it all the time, you are more tuned into it. but to actually allow this recognition of our mortality to be more influential on us, even at a further distance? Well, I think it only seems distant because we're not in relationship with our mortality. Because when we are, I know that my next breath is not promised and neither is tomorrow, that I'm not guaranteed to make it home or to my next destination, or even to finish this conversation with you. That allows me to live each day with that awareness, you know, with that

presence in my life. When we can live with our mortality, and I don't think that we need to be working in death care in order to live that way. When I'm living in relationship with my mortality, my moments are far more precious and because I know that they are finite I think that there there's a lot of different ways that we can access it first remind yourself that you're going to die as often as possible one practice that I really enjoy is just looking in the mirror when I am in the mirror I first of all just have a lot of gratitude for all my melanin but next when I'm in the mirror, I can also see the signs of aging on my body. And it reminds me that this very mortal shell will soon reach its end. And I

say soon, because far sooner than I'm ready for, I made 46 in a flash. I don't understand how I'm four years away from 50, because I don't feel that way. Yet the body, when I'm looking at my body, I'm like, oh no girl, you're getting there. You're getting up there. You know, the body constantly reminds me about my mortality. And so just like a long, solid, hard look in the mirror and not in a judging way, not in a less fat here, less cellulite there, but rather just in like an observational way. That's a really useful practice. For those that are interested in like juicier stuff, there's a number of death meditations that you can actually do. We offer one at Going With Grace. It's a nine-part series that

walks you through the nine contemplations of dying, which are written by an 11th century Buddhist scholar named Atisha. But they are the nine contemplations of death that we should all be with regularly. I think we can also pay attention to our language because so much of our relationship with death is in our language. We talk about death all the time without awareness of it. I think of the word deadline.

Like how often are people using that word in their regular lives? Deadline. This is the line after which nothing else can be done. You got one, I got one. And we're not talking about get the project done by this date, but rather the end of your life. Really, our vegetables die. They rot. They go away. We must throw them off. Our car batteries die. Our phones die. We talk about death all the time. Characters in movies die. We're engaging with it consistently.

And yet we don't make it personal. It always lives out there. And so it is not distant. It's baked in as part of the contract of being human is one day you will die. And that day is going to come far sooner than any of us are ready for. So let's get with it. So listener, in thinking about that and all the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action.

And I want to give you a tip on that. And it's to start small. It's really important when we're trying to implement new habits to often start smaller than we think we need to because what that does is it allows us to get victories. And victories are really important because we become more motivated when we're feeling good about ourselves and we become less motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure that you succeed, you build your motivation for further change down the road. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up.

Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed this conversation. Your TED Talk is wonderful. Your website is great. We'll have links in the show notes to all of those things. Thank you for the work that you're doing and thank you for being with us. It is actually my pleasure and my joy. It was great was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.

To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallynoreally.com... And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really Podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.