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

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 to... 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, etcetera. And I buy that. However, I do also find that facing them head on is sometimes really sad and and scary. So I was really interested when I heard that one of my favorite longtime repeat guests, sister Dong Nim, aka sister Di, had written a whole book on this subject. For those of you who don't know sister Di, 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 including her newest, which is called live beautifully, die beautifully. Sister Dee, welcome back to the show. Good to see you. Hello, dear friends. Well, so congratulations on your new book. I'm just curious. Why did you wanna write about this? 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 not... 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 thirty thirty one 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, you know, 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 is from. It means my intestines, my 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. Your life story is... And and you just told it in brief, and and, those who wanna hear more about it can go back and listen to some of, our prior conversations. I'll I'll put …