Cancel Your Fear of Dying: How to Live Fully by Facing Death | Elena Brower

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:00)
What would you say to someone who is afraid of dying?

**Elena Brower** (0:04)
Hmm, not much. I saw my mom. Her eyes were so afraid.
So I decided when I saw her eyes in the end of her life that I was not going to be afraid of that.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:20)
My guest is Elena Brower, bestselling author, poet, meditation teacher, hospice volunteer, and now a candidate for Buddhist chaplaincy.

**Elena Brower** (0:30)
The letting go is the whole practice. Letting go of the body, letting go of the mind, letting go of the attachments to the people that you love. It's so hard. I see how hard it is.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:40)
Her new book, Hold Nothing, is a guide to living fully as a practice with clarity and respect. Very few people would actively go to seek out helping someone die well.

**Elena Brower** (0:55)
And so many people are dying alone.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:05)
I am speechless that you are here. In my life, I have learned so much from you. And to have you on the show, to share your experience with the world. In a world where we are spending billions of dollars trying to live longer and escape death, which is something nobody gets out of.

**Elena Brower** (1:37)
Yeah.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:38)
We spend very little time and very little energy thinking about the end.

**Elena Brower** (1:43)
I've only just become more comfortable with it since my mom died. That was about eight years ago now. None of us actually really consider what it means to die well, or very few of us anyway. And I've discovered that this is one of the things that I can do in this world. Yeah.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:02)
Is to help people live well, so that they can die well. In full transparency, there are a handful of people that I really go to in my life. And you and James are on that very short list. I sent you a text and you responded with this. And this is The Five Remembrances. I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. And finally, my actions are my only true belongings. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

**Elena Brower** (3:06)
And there is no way to escape the consequences of my actions.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:09)
How can we think about and live well with such intense impermanence?

**Elena Brower** (3:18)
I think the way that we live well is by keeping all of this in mind. It's not to kind of, yeah, that's coming later.
Some other time. I just experienced learning news of a kid who was 15 who died in a very sudden accident, very unexpectedly. And that could happen any day. And I have been, I don't know, for the last five, 10 years, even more. I think about what it would be like if today were the day that somebody came knocking or calling and saying, your son or your partner has died. And of course, we may look at that and think, well, how morbid, how ridiculous. When actually, it's one of those things that keeps me living very intentionally and carefully my life without a lot of rancor, without a lot of dread. I'm ready and I'm going to enjoy this day. I'm going to enjoy this moment looking at you. I can't even believe the road that we've traveled years, many, many years, many years, probably many lifetimes, many lifetimes, many moments together. Keeping these five remembrances, which, by the way, are thousands of years old, from the Anguttara Sutta and Sutra Sutta, Thich Nhat Hanh did that translation. And I learned it from people like Roshi Joan Halifax, Frank Osteceski, the people who take the time to share what it means to really serve, what it means to sit at the bedside of people who are dying, what it means to serve people who are in penitentiary, who have very few resources for healing. And I keep those remembrances close because it helps me live my life to the fullest and do my service in all of those realms to the fullest.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (5:12)
When I was in geriatrics, and again, you and I do, we speak a lot about death and I struggle with the idea of it, especially with two little children, four and five. And when I went through geriatric training, there was, it was full of death.