Do you have disturbing thoughts about your own death? Or horrific daydreams where you play out different scenarios involving your own death, or that of your loved ones?

I think of it as the "elephant in the room" when we’re talking about spirituality and our souls. We’re probably all having these thoughts a lot more than we’re talking about them …

You Might Die Tomorrow is Kate Manser's life’s work dedicated to helping you live urgently, love openly, and enjoy your life — by thinking about your death.

It’s about an inspiration to live today.

www.youmightdietomorrow.com

Deathbed Meditation

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Kate:

Yeah, I was just like everybody else. I didn't really think about death very much, other than thinking that I was totally invincible all throughout high school, doing a lot of dangerous things.

But at the time, what precipitated my shift, from going from not thinking about death to embracing death, which is where I am today, was a period of intense death anxiety. I don't know if you've ever been there, Slade, but I was just consumed by death anxiety.

At the time, I was in a marriage that was very unhappy and I was just in decision paralysis agony, didn't know what to do, and then I had three people die around my same age in unrelated tragedies in a span of six months.

So that just sent me into a tailspin oh, Ohmygod, I could die at any moment. I need to be scared all the time.

Slade:

Mmm... So tell me, what are some of the components of death anxiety? What are the thoughts and the voices that you're hearing? What are they saying?

Kate:

It was like there was a movie in my head all the time of a really gory, not fun movie happening where like, if I was driving into an intersection, for example, which you do, we do all the time. I would just have this quick snap vision of a Mack truck coming and taking me out as I went through the intersection. And then it would just continue. That movie would continue and I would think, oh, what would happen?

The paramedics would come, then my family would have to be notified. All down just this dark tunnel of mortality.

And then the same thing would apply for other people in my life. I would imagine getting the call that my mom had died unexpectedly. And I think the phone was kind of a trigger for me because I had gotten a couple of these unexpected calls when three of my friends died. I had that negative association.

And so I was just afraid of death all the time. It was just this mysterious unknown thing that I couldn't control but put all my energy into trying to.

Slade:

Okay, so it was much more visceral violence, suspensful gory movie kind of stuff for you. It wasn't even more the existential stuff. It was actual... Well I've heard before that that's kind of a PTSD thing? To, in the moment, be struck with flashes of anxious violence. I mean, anything can cause you to have PTSD. You could have it around the trauma of those phone calls. You know what I'm saying? The ones that had happened in the past and that was some kind of lingering energy that was getting triggered.

Kate:

Oh yeah.

And it was the gory moment of death, for sure, but it was also.. My mind was very preoccupied with all the things that would happen after the death occurred. Because that's what's unknown. We don't know if we're going to be like the stoic, you know, if we lose someone in our life that we really care about, are we going to be the stoic survivor or are we going to be like crumbled under the circumstances?

So I would have trouble sleeping at night because I would imagine the whole scenario. What would happen if my husband had died unexpectedly, and calling his family and going to Brazil to have a funeral there and all of the things that would happen.

It got to the point that, I had always been someone who was like, pretty much a lover of life, but during this period, which lasted about a year and half, I was putting all my energy into death anxiety and it had completely clouded the beauty of life.

Slade:

Okay, so I have to tell you. There was this synchronicity involved with our meeting. The day before I was introduced to your site, a woman had posted in our Facebook Shift Your Spirits community asking if anyone else had obsessive thoughts about death.

Kate:

Wow...

Slade:

And she was really quick to say that, it wasn't really negative, it wasn't violent. She wasn't contemplating suicide or anything like that. She was just kind of putting it out there that she thought really often about death. But more from an existential place.

That's why I was surprised that you were talking about these kind of violent scenarios, the actual death itself. She was kind of talking more from a place of like, being really profoundly aware, like this clock ticking and having this limited amount of time on earth and she just put it out there and said, you know, that she was thinking about it in a contemplative way.

She found it odd that more people didn't talk about it, right? It's like this elephant in the room, especially in a community like ours where we're talking about spirits and communication from those who've passed. That kind of stuff. She was asking if anyone wanted to chime in and say how they felt about it.

And it was weird because it was one of those posts where a lot of people were liking it or responding to it without commenting. So I said, "Yeah, I really do think those thoughts actually, and I wasn't sure what to say though in support of that other than... I feel you.

Kate:

Yeah.

Slade:

And then the very day, there you were with your message and I thought, okay, this is obviously a conversation that I need to have for everyone who was probably seeing that post and thinking, I don't even know what to do with this.

So help me reframe this in a positive light. How did you get to a place where you could embrace your death?

Kate:

So believe it or not, it was another tragic and unexpected death of someone around me, same age, so it was like the fourth. A year and a half had passed since that six months where I had three in a row. I believe it was, yeah, about a year and a half went by and then a friend and coworker of mine at Google, Dan Freedenburg, was climbing Mount Everest and he died in the Nepal earthquake, in an avalanche, when he was up at base camp.

Man, I was so angry initially when I heard that he died, because he was a really vibrant, adventurous, goofy, very intelligent person, and very well liked among Google and his friends. He dated a celebrity and what my first reaction was, was just anger. That he had taken part in an elective sport, really, and took his life in his own hands and ultimately it was his choice to climb Mount Everest. That ultimately took him out of this world, away from all of us.

I was so mad at him at first.

But then as I thought more about it, I realized that climbing Mount Everest is something that you don't just like do on a random Saturday. It's something that requires a ton of mindful energy. It's very expensive. You have to train really hard for it and it's a choice that you make over a long period of time.

I realized that he was a very smart and vibrant person and he had put a lot of thought into climbing Mount Everest. He accepted the risk that came with that because, as I looked back on his decision, I came upon this realization that he HAD to climb Mount Everest in order to truly live. That if he had stayed on the ground, he also would have died in a way as well, because he would have been living out of his system of values and not living his authentic life.

That was when I suddenly saw death in a new perspective, which was that I have no control over when I die. Dan had no control over when he died and he decided to live vibrantly and take calculated risk.

I could die climbing Mount Everest if I ever did that, which I probably wouldn't.

I could die in that intersection that I was so afraid of going through all the time.

Or, I'm a very clumsy person! I could probably die climbing the stairs, and I'm putting so much of my precious energy into worrying about death when I could be putting that energy into living while I'm still alive.

That was really the main turning point for me, was just like, hey, I could die tomorrow and whereas when I was with the death anxiety, that was the most terrifying thought. Suddenly, a light had been shown on it and I was like, oh! I could die tomorrow! And that's the most freeing concept I've ever experienced.

Slade:

So that's interesting. The fact that we could make that a freeing concept.

So how do you recommend, as we're listening, we're all probably now really feeling the anxiety about it. So how do we manage that?

Kate:

Yeah. I'm actually doing some research right now for this for the last chapter that I'm working on for my book. Like, psychologically we manage our fear of death. I believe that fear of death is... And many, many scientists and psychologists believe that fear of death is like the one universal fear that all humans share. We're not all afraid of snakes but we're all afraid of death.

The research shows that the best way to manage our fear of death is two things:

Because, I know I can say for myself that the more I invite death into my life, the more I think about it and meditate on it, the better I feel and the more vibrant I live while I'm still alive.

Slade:

So how do you think we can use this sense of our mortality to empower us? To help us make decisions about what we're doing in our lives?

Kate:

Man, in death, everything seems to just fall away and become clear. Death is this... There's something about it. There's something about the finality of it that we have so much going on in our lives that when we look at it from the perspective of death or the end of our life, we realize how little of it really matters to us.

That's what I've found is the best way to help me make decisions in life is, I actually do this thing that I call the Deathbed Gut Check, which is that when i'm faced with a decision that I'm having trouble making, I don't know what to do. I get decision paralysis with the best of them and I'm frozen and trying to figure out what the heck I want to do with my life.

I do the Death Bed Gut Check, which is, I will close my eyes and imagine myself on my deathbed. I'm on my deathbed and I'm looking at the present moment or the tough decision that I'm trying to make, I'm looking BACK at it from the perspective of being about to die.

I am given a sense of clarity and I imagine myself thinking, like, ok, I'm on my deathbed, how do I feel having done Option A. I observe the visceral reaction in my body. Do I feel a lightness of being, or do I feel a pit at the bottom of my stomach?

I do the same thing for Option B.

Because it's so loud in our lives, with all this stuff that swirls around, and it's difficult to focus on... get that perspective of what matters. I use that sense of mortality to get perspective and help me make decisions in life. And that five second Deathbed Gut Check has helped me make some really, really important decisions and also really simple ones.

And it's something that, death is accessible to all of us and it's a tool that is radically underused.

Slade:

I have to share with you that several months ago, I was working with a healer around some creativity blocks and I was really struggling with the book that I was working on. Part of my struggle was that I had another book that I really wanted to be writing instead, and I had this HUGE sense of guilt about abandoning one to work on the other, and abandoning all that work and etcetera etcetera.

I was just angst thinking about it, as authors do. You know, just ridiculously blown up into this existential crisis.

The woman I was sharing all this with came back to me with just a really simple question: If you had only enough time to live and produce one of these books, which one is it?

Kate:

Wow.

Slade:

And it was INSTANTLY...

Kate:

gasp It was!

Slade:

You know what I mean? The answer was like, Oh.

Kate:

Lightning bolt.

Slade:

Yeah! It was like, so just flashed through your body. Like, all the thinking and worrying and pros and cons list just fell away.

Kate:

Yes!

Slade:

Yeah, so I will now call it the Deathbed Gut Check.

Kate:

Yeaaaah.

Slade:

It's a great way to think about it.

Well, so you also have something called the Deathbed Meditation. Tell us about that.

Kate:

The Deathbed Meditation actually came from the Deathbed Gut Check, because I had observed these positive effects of imagining myself on my deathbed and helping me make decisions in life that... I became curious about the deeper effects of meditating on mortality.

So I started googling around and I learned a lot about how pervasive death-awareness is, particularly in the Buddhist religion. But I couldn't find an actual meditation similar to what that Deathbed Gut Check is, from the perspective of our deathbed, looking back over our lives, and so I wrote one.

I've been facilitating it now for I thin