to those who will miss me.

Before every dose of chemo, he ran a meditation he had written for himself.

Every time he felt worse, he smiled.He also once explained the IP protocol for two days with one slide.

Antti Hemminki was born and raised in Helsinki and calls himself a coach at heart: for technology salespeople, and for adults and kids in sport.

He thinks in pictures. Straight after school, he stood in for maths and physics teachers, chalking electrons onto blackboards, and he has drawn the world from the top left to the right ever since. In this conversation he does it out loud. A twenty-year-old who was pretentiously ambitious, and a sixty-year-old who intends to stay playful.

A gentleman in south Helsinki with a T-shirt about grandchildren. Why he isn't religious but is highly spiritual, and how he steps into a bubble on a crowded bus or under a heavy squat.

A grandfather who came home quiet from a Soviet prison camp, and one who sold lampposts to London without a word of English. Why Finland should stop compromising and start copying the best of everyone else.

Then the harder ground. What the young should study in 2026. Why you should define the I before you argue about AI.

Consciousness, a word he says nobody can define, him included. And the meditation he built for every round of chemotherapy, and why he now thinks the illness didn't shape him so much as he had been shaped to face it.

Then mortality. What he'd change with exactly one year left. How he'd choose to go. The two men from the past he'd most like to question.

Stay for the closing question. Every guest gets the same one, and nobody answers it the same way.

Content note: this episode discusses suicide and grief.

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For nine years, Belma thought her partner's bookshelf was a little strange. Meridians, the third eye, life on other planets. She nodded along and never really understood.

In April 2024, he took his life, and in the worst moment of hers, she says, everything he had ever tried to tell her fell into place. Like pressing a download button.

We talk about the Jesus year: Belma was 33 when he died, the same age her mother was in 1992, when she fled Sarajevo with two small children, one of them Belma.

About a retreat where she felt her mother's fear from inside her own two-year-old body.

About crying everywhere, the wrinkles that came from it, and why she never once held the tears back.

About family constellations, a room full of strangers, and a sceptical engineer asking how a stranger could possibly have known what he felt.

About silence on a dune in the Egyptian desert, the diamond she is still looking for, and a man selling a book outside a shop in Sarajevo who taught her something she has never forgotten.

"It is like an old friend knocking on my door. I know who it is. I open the door, I welcome the sadness, we have a nice coffee, then I let them go."

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If this episode touches something painful, please reach out to someone. findahelpline.com lists free, confidential support in your country.

Helen grew up on a small farm in the southwest of England, the kind with woods and little fields, where nature teaches you without you noticing.

Then she followed the shoulds: a big insurance broker, a career the school careers counsellor would have signed off on, and a feeling she couldn't shake. So she did what she has done since she was three. She asked why.

We talk about the knot of wool you can't untangle from the inside, and the friends who tell you you've now told the same story three times.

About an injured ski instructor who became her first reason to believe in healing, and why she calls the hands-on part "doubling up on the placebo."

About oracle cards on a Friday, and a past life with her yoga teacher that she only understood when she left the class. About the year nature started whispering come back, come back, we need you, and how estate agents' windows in Germany led to a Spanish village with a mountain at her back and a plot of orange, fig and pomegranate trees.

Then death. Four years ago she blacked out at the wheel, ten miles from home.

"All that drive, I'm thinking, I hope I get back to see him, but I might die. But I wasn't scared."

About Helen

Helen is a coach working where identity meets spirituality. She grew up on a farm in Devon, spent her early career in insurance broking, and has lived in Spain for seven+ years.

Shawn Wolfe's grandfather was nineteen when the army flew him to Vietnam. He came home to a country that didn't want him, had six kids, painted houses, drank, and stayed angry at the world, until something happened in the family that he could only call a miracle. He walked into a church, asked for forgiveness, and spent years driving around America in a van, singing to strangers.

Shawn wrote a song about him called 1969. He never got to play it for him. His grandfather died of COVID while Shawn was in China and couldn't leave.

We talk about the wolf-pack family Shawn comes from, and the track team from Amish country who decided they needed him and started giving him rides.

About a father with Ouija boards, the Kabbalah and a Grateful Dead poster above his bed, who painted warehouses in slow-motion tai chi.

About eight years in China, an ayahuasca retreat in Barcelona that ended on the night of the wolf moon with him laughing like a child, and a face he recognised in the sun at a water temple in Bali.

About going home, and why home stops being home when the people are gone.

Then death. Shawn isn't afraid of it. He's curious.

"Death is just the longest part of my existence, technically, I think. So it's like, why would I be afraid of that?"

About Shawn

Shawn Wolfe is a guitarist and songwriter from central Pennsylvania. After eight years in China he moved back to the United States in 2026, and now lives in Nashville with his husky.

Mentioned: Zach Bush · Rupert Sheldrake · Tao Te Ching · Hachi: A Dog's Tale

Five years ago, Pia Streng would have reacted first and thought later. Now she stops, lets the feeling pass, and decides afterward what it meant.

Part of that comes from nearly thirty years of yoga and meditation.

Part of it, she says plainly, is menopause, and she is not shy about what it changed.

We talk about the house full of grandparents, aunts and uncles she grew up in, and the grandmother who still guides her thirty years after her death. She was a businesswoman who spoke several languages, sold tomatoes and apples from the family garden, and never pushed her opinions on anyone.

We talk about the day Pia learned she was pregnant and felt she had jumped off a cliff. About walking into an Ashtanga class in Helsinki nearly thirty years ago, when nobody around her meditated, and knowing before she reached the door that this was hers.

About what comfort has cost Finland, why intelligence without consciousness isn't enough, and the quiet place inside her she goes back to when she needs to heal.

Then we turn to death. Pia lost a close friend far too young, and this spring, two older relatives. Somewhere along the way she started asking a different question about grief.

"What if it's not sorrow? What if it's love that is so strong that it becomes painful, and looks like sorrow?"

About Pia

Pia Streng is Finnish and the mother of two grown children. She has spent her career in fast-paced, demanding work and has practiced yoga and meditation for close to thirty years.

At 3am on her fortieth birthday, Kristen Brandao woke up and could not stop crying. She had built exactly the life she set out to build: two children, a marriage she loves, a career as a dentist. Underneath it sat a question she had spent years talking herself out of. Why does this feel so unfulfilled?

That morning something in her said: if you write it, she will come. She opened her laptop. She had never written anything in her life. Six months later she had a memoir, Magenta Me.

We talk about the seven years she spent holding back grief after losing her mother, and the love she always felt was just behind a wall.

About a grandmother who spoke only Portuguese and a granddaughter who spoke only English, and how they understood each other completely anyway.

About inherited fear, what anxious patients carry into her dental chair, the Gene Keys, and the wild daughter she refuses to put in a box.

Near the end I asked her: if you could design your last moments, what would they look like?

She didn't hesitate.

About Kristen

Dr. Kristen Brandao is a dentist, author and mother from London, Ontario, now practising in Burlington, where her patients know her as the singing dentist for the way she calms nervous systems in the chair.

In 2026 she published her midlife memoir, Magenta Me, about the grief she suppressed after her mother's death and the breakdown that became her way back to curiosity, creativity and connection with herself.

She shares her story to help others integrate their own grief.

At twenty, Ali A. Mujeeb ran from his own sensitivity. At forty-nine, he calls it his kintsugi: the Japanese art of mending a broken bowl with gold, so the cracks become the most beautiful part of it.

Ali had been to more than twenty funerals before he turned twenty. He was one of the few boys his age in the family, so he often stood in the grave himself, holding the head of a grandmother or an uncle as they were laid to rest.

We talk about what that does to a person's relationship with living.

About the armor children build when there isn't enough love, and how it hardens into the beliefs we defend as adults.

About burnout as a worthiness wound, why Maslow's pyramid was never a pyramid, and what it costs to feel a lot and care a lot in a world that rewards the opposite.

Near the end I asked him: people who come back from near-death often say it was the first time they felt fully accepted. So while we're still here, when do you feel accepted, and who is in the room?

He sat with it. Then: "When I let go of seeking to be seen is when I was seen."

About Ali

Ali A. Mujeeb was born in Dodge City, Kansas, the son of Indian immigrants who raised him, in his words, "materialistically modest but intellectually wealthy."

He works on the business side of a global tech company, mentors young sales professionals on burnout and on building a life that isn't eaten by a quota, and has been married for nineteen years. He is the father of a college-age son.

Books mentioned:

· Autobiography of a Yogi (Yogananda)

· The Untethered Soul (Michael A. Singer)

· Transcend (Scott Barry Kaufman) · Power vs. Force (David R. Hawkins)

· The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life (Boyd Varty)

· Mastery (Robert Greene)

· It Didn't Start With You (Mark Wolynn)

Listened to, we hope, in a quiet room, in a quiet mind.

What if I died before I could tell the people I love what I've learned about living?

That question is what started this podcast. In this first episode, I share where the name to those who will miss me came from: an idea for a book, born around the time I became a father, and meant to leave something behind for my children and the people closest to me. I talk about how thinking about death has become freeing for me, why being a parent made it harder again, and why I think the question that matters most isn't whether there is life after death, but whether there is life before it.

You'll also hear who I am (a Finn living in Catalonia, trying to wrestle a hedonistic ego on the path to awakening), what to expect from the show, and a few lines from Rumi's When I Die to close.

If there's someone you'd love to hear on the show, or if that someone is you, I'd love to hear from you.