Tracee Stanley and Dave Asprey discuss dying well: writing your own eulogy each year, visualizing your last moment to anchor on love, and practicing Yoga Nidra to rehearse letting go. Stanley shares her atheist grandfather's spiritual awakening at death, showing how curiosity can dissolve fear.
Tell me, what is a graceful death?
Yeah, Well, I think a graceful death is definitely one in which you have considered your last moments of life way before you learn that you are about to die. Right. That you consider the fact that even though we like to think that we are eternal, that this body is not eternal, but that we go back into nature, and perhaps there is a part of us that is eternal. And so it's one of the reasons why I put a couple of death practices in the luminous self is because I notice the reaction to people. I used to have this practice where I would write my own eulogy every birthday, and that eulogy would include all of the things that I left undone that I really wanted to do and that I had regrets around, and that would fuel me to be able to do those things in the coming year. And I remember telling a few people that this was my practice, and they were horrified. Like, oh, my God, if you write your eulogy, that seems like bad luck. And why would you want to do that? I was like, why would I not? What would happen if I learned tomorrow, God forbid, that this was my last day on earth? Why wouldn't I want to live now from. However, it would be that I would want to be living in that last minute of my life? And for me, when I think about the last minute of my life, and this was a practice that I was given from a teacher named Charlie Morley, he's a Buddhist, former Buddhist monk. Is narrow everything down to the last second of your life. What would you do in that last second? And so when I did that practice, I was like, okay, I'm going to bring that forward in my last second. I want to love.
Yeah, what would you do in that last second? You would love.
I would love. And so why wouldn't I not make my whole life about love and why. And the other column of things is, what would you stop doing? If you learned today that you had one year left to live, what are the things that you would stop doing? Well, I would definitely stop looking at Instagram. I would probably. I would probably stop binging on Netflix.
Stop listening to podcasts. Oh, wait, no, no, don't do that. Don't do that.
Maybe depending on the podcast, but there would be a lot of things that I would stop doing because I have limited time, and suddenly everything gets really clear about what is really important. And if I can devote myself to what's really important and who's really important, then my life in the here and now and the present starts to shift.
That's that's really beautiful. And people. People will think about almost anything before they'll think of death. And I've seen books about death, and they never. They never perform well. And it seems only really advanced spiritual people do it. And I. Because of whatever spiritual stuff I've gone through and all, I. I don't. I don't have any fear. I'm kind of, like, curious and a little bit, like, joyful. Like the same as having kids. The next. Like, whenever the next time I die is like, oh, yeah, it's like. Like a reverse birth. Let's. Let's see. Let's see what happens there. And I. And the limited experience I have with. With that kind of thing. I had a family member who's, you know, an atheist. My grandfather passed him. He, right before he passed, said, you know, I've been an atheist my whole life because I'm a scientist. And now that I'm on my deathbed, I've been really reconsidering all of the spiritual things and all the Christian stuff, and the whole family is leaning in. He goes, and I'm more convinced than ever that it's bullshit. And he says, but because. Because I'm a scientist. He goes, I've never done this before, this dying thing. And I'm thinking to myself, I think you have, my friend, but I'm not going to say anything. And he then says, I'm going to leave a sign if I can, after I die, so just look for one and, you know, I'll do what I can. And of course, a week later, and I'm not saying he did or didn't do this. No one know. There's. His name was Larry. There's a big billboard that goes up in the town where he died. And I stayed. No idea. I just said, where's Larry? And there was no brand, there's no logo. And everyone's like, what kind of ad campaign is this? Maybe it was coincidence. I don't really know. And like I said, never will. But the idea of you can be curious about death or you can be terrified of it. Curiosity stops fear. And dying in fear and terror seems like a bad way to go, even if life's over. So love is a great thing and maybe curious. Love is a great thing, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, we really have to come to terms with the fact that we are closer. You and I right now are closer to dying than we were when we started this podcast.
I don't agree. I'm aging backwards.
Well, you may be. You might be Aging backwards. And I have to come to the upgrade lab so I can learn how to age backwards too.
I'm so joking.
But we're. But we are. We're closer to death. And the more that we look at that and know that to be true, we can think about what are the practices that prepare us to be able to release and let go gracefully and consciously. And Yoga Nidra is actually one of those practices. Yoga Nidra is a practice of dissolution. And that is what happens when we die. We dissolve.
How do we know that? That's how it is. All the skeptics I've spoken to, including many in my family, saying, you can't know any of that.
How do we know that's true? You can't know any of that. But what we do know is that the physical body does decay, and that's a form of dissolution.
Fair point.
Right. Okay. So if nothing else, we dissolve back. If we were to leave your dead corpse on the ground, you would eventually turn to dust. And that's a dissolution. Now we can argue about what happens to consciousness, because nobody knows. And we can also argue what does. Do we choose a new body? Do we choose a new something? We can all argue about that. But the fact of the matter is, is that the material body, the physical body, is going to dissolve.
In fact, it doesn't even exist anyway, right? Because, you know, you eat something, it becomes part of you. Poop some other part of you out, and you're like, oh, wait, I'm actually just more like an Eddie in matter. Just a slow moving Eddie that farts. Of course it dissolves because it didn't ever exist.
There you go.
You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.
