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

Dan Harris (0:04)

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. One of the things that I both love and resent about Buddhism is that the practices, many of them are really designed to help you face some hard truths about the fact that you are going to get older and get sick and eventually die. And that is true for everybody you know and love.

The idea, as far as I understand it, is that it's less stressful to face these hard truths directly than it is to kind of spend your life ducking and weaving and denying and dissociating, et cetera. And I buy that.

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

Sister Dang Nghiem (1:19)

Good to see you. Hello, dear friends.

Dan Harris (1:21)

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

Sister Dang Nghiem (1:27)

Well, I faced loss and death since a child.

My brother and I, we didn't know our father. And at the age of 12, my mother disappeared and we have never found her body since. And then I came to the United States at the age of 17 And soon after that, my grandmother died. So pretty much those very important people in my life passed away when I was quite young. And then my partner died in a drowning accident when I just finished medical school. I was 30, 31 years old then. So in that way, my whole life, I have faced loss and death. And it was excruciatingly painful.

I didn't know how to embrace loss and death. And so on the path of practice, I have learned that death doesn't have to be a painful thing. And that includes old age, sickness, separation from our loved ones. We can learn to live beautifully and die beautifully each day.

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

Dan Harris (3:21)

Your life story is, and you just told it in brief. And those who want to hear more about it can go back and listen to some of our prior conversations. I'll put some links to our prior conversations in the show notes for anybody who wants to go deeper. But your personal story is remarkable and even more remarkable from my POV is how you've used it to help other people.

You have structured the book around the five daily remembrances. Maybe can you just walk us through what are the five daily remembrances and why did the Buddha think they were so important?

Sister Dang Nghiem (4:04)

These five remembrances were practiced from the time of the Buddha. The monks and nuns practiced them daily by going to the charnel ground to look at corpses. And then in our Zen tradition, we also contemplate on this. Daily we even have guided meditations for this. So briefly, the five remembrances are to help us face one of those deepest human fears. And the first one is that we are of the nature to grow old and there is no way to escape. The second remembrance is that we are of the nature to be ill and there is no way to escape it.

The third remembrance is that we are of the nature to die and there is no way to escape.

The fourth remembrance is that we are of the nature to be separated from all those we love and cherished and there is no escape from that. And the fifth remembrance is that our actions are our true continuation now and into the future.

Dan Harris (5:23)

Sometimes the way that fifth remembrance is articulated is our actions are our only true possessions in a world where everything is changing all the time. The closest we can come to a true possession is the kind of jet stream of our actions. People hearing this for the first time or even those who are like me hearing it for the one thousandth time might have the reaction, well, this seems deeply unpleasant. As a Buddhist teacher of mine, sometimes jokes, the Buddhists really know how to party.