Speaking with a professional who helps people to die

From mindless tasks to industrial great AI to ease of mind.

Supercharge your transformation with industrial AI.

Transform the everyday with Siemens.

Strangle the balcony, you dangly Anthonies.

Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast.

I've been enjoying the wonderful November chill in the air.

This morning...

I went down to the river at 8am

and the water was like glass, still glass.

It was about minus four degrees

and there was a beautiful

smoky mist curling over the surface of the water

and everything was sparkling with frost because the sky was completely clear.

baby blue with a pure slanty golden sun and I took in big breaths

and just admired admired the wonder and splendor.

I marveled at the river just after dawn freezing cold no one else around

and as I took in nature with every one of my senses I reminded myself how lucky I am how lucky I am to be to be healthy to be able-bodied and to be to be in the right frame of mind

to get up at eight in the morning just to enjoy a river just to enjoy the beauty of a freezing cold river I really asked myself to be grateful to be grateful for shit that I'd normally completely take for granted I was grateful to simply be alive and to say to myself this is enough this here is enough getting up at eight in the morning enjoying a river, that's enough.

And the reason I'm doing that is because I've had a very intense week.

You know that last week my documentary came out on television, The Land of Slaves and Scholars.

Very well received.

Thank you to everybody who sent me a kind message about that documentary.

But as I said last week, because

because I made something on corporate media, a big RT1 documentary, because of that it means I get covered in the newspapers and on the radio and all that type of shit.

So that means I'm I'm an Irish celebrity for like a week or maybe two weeks.

I'm an Irish celebrity.

And it's particularly intense.

It's very strange because of the huge amount of harassment that comes with that.

So I release something in the corporate media.

Maybe once a year, once every two years.

And what that means is, you know, you release a book or something or a TV show.

and then you get covered in corporate media.

Radio, television, newspapers.

And it means you then reach an audience that don't usually think about you and that comes with harassment.

People are very upset that I wear a plastic bag on my head and present serious documentaries.

That seems to be the bones of it.

No one's quite used to that.

But since the pandemic, since after the after the pandemic, what used to be plain begrudgery has turned into it's become politicized.

So aside from reading comments and receiving messages where people are like, oh, it's that stupid prick with the bag on his head.

Now,

like just today, I got accused of being a Freemason.

I don't know why people think I'm a Freemason.

And I got accused of being a paedophile.

Why?

Why would someone think that?

Well, because I'm on television, you see.

And people who are on television.

People simply appearing on the television or making a television show, even if it's just in Ireland, an RTE,

that means that some people genuinely believe that you're part of

an international sex trafficking cartel and that you eat children for adrenochrome and energy.

So I get called a paedophile and a Freemason.

Because I made a documentary.

Because I made a documentary and this documentary went out on RTE1 television.

Middle-aged men, middle-aged men up and down Ireland are furious with me because I wear a plastic bag on my head.

This week, this week, the mixed martial artist Conor McGregor was found guilty of rape in a civil trial, in a civil trial in Dublin.

One of the Irish newspapers posted an article about my documentary.

My documentary about early Irish Christianity and then all the comments underneath this was just very, very angry men whose reality and sense of safety had become destabilized because I'm wearing a plastic bag in my head and it is it's 97% men

one or two comments from women but it's it's men it's very angry men and the same newspaper posted another separate article about

about the verdict of Conor McGregor's rape trial and I compared the comments.

There were much more men vocally upset and angry and demanding justice

because I'm wearing a plastic bag on my head than there were men vocally outraged and angry and disgusted about Conor McGregor and that was particularly depressing.

That was very depressing.

So the past week has been challenging.

It's been very challenging because you're talking about I'm just trying to live my life.

But because I put something out there in corporate media and it's being reported in in corporate media spaces it just means I'm getting

like hundreds hundreds of comments and messages all day from men who either just just think I'm a fucking idiot for wearing a bag on my head which is fair enough I don't really mind that but then the other men who are just as angry but they're more conspiratorial they think i'm a Freemason.

They think I'm part of a larger plot and that I'm funded by big pharma and that I'm towed out.

I'm towed out to spread globalist propaganda.

I don't know what the fuck they believe, but

they believe it enough to feel entitled to threaten my safety.

And then of course, like I said, lots of wonderful supportive messages from people who enjoyed watching the documentary and that's nice too.

But I went down to the river this morning because it's all bullshit.

It is all bullshit.

Some of the negative comments I was receiving, I was taking them on board.

I was allowing them to hurt me, to impact my self-esteem.

So I got up nice and early to witness a wonderful, crisp, sparkly winter morning, to ground myself and to truly to say to myself

how dare I allow myself

to be emotionally impacted by the negative opinions of strangers when I have the the privilege of being healthy, able-bodied, mentally healthy and able to get up and enjoy a river in the morning and just bask in the absolute splendor and glory of fucking nature because that's what matters.

That's what actually matters.

Strangers saying mean things to me that they're just gonna forget about in five minutes.

Strangers saying mean things to me, that just wounds my identity.

That wounds the part of me that would like to be, that wants to be liked, who doesn't want to be liked.

I want to be liked by everyone, and it's painful when people don't like me.

But my sense of identity, how I'd like other people to see me, these things aren't real.

I have a choice, I can choose whether or not I allow a person's negative comments to hurt me.

That's actually a choice that I have.

I haven't hurt anybody.

I haven't done anything bad.

I just made a documentary, put it on TV and happened to be wearing a plastic bag on my head.

This is confusing and frightening for some people so they get angry because on the internet anger is a very easy emotion to feel.

It's easier and more satisfying and feels more actionable than feeling vulnerable and threatened and confused, which is what some of these men feel like when they see a serious documentary presented by a man with a plastic bag on his head.

So I've got a choice.

I can choose whether or not I allow that to hurt me.

And I went down to the river to practice gratitude.

The humility, the humility of realizing that my health and being alive, that these things are actually a privilege.

that some people don't have these things, that this is a privilege for me to be able to enjoy a wonderful morning.

Touching the earth like that, it's a great way to for me to understand that it's all bullshit, it's all fucking harsh shit.

Newspapers, TV, radio, whatever the fuck, it's bullshit, it's vacuous harsh shit, and so is all the harassment that goes along with it.

And you know what?

It'll be gone next week.

Next week, it'll be gone.

I'll be back in the world of independent media, just making my podcast.

And I don't have to upset people's daz.

They'll go back to forgetting that I exist.

But

expressing gratitude

and recognizing the privilege, the privilege of simply being alive and being healthy.

I find it's a wonderful thing to do when

You're stressed out about stuff that has to do with your sense of identity.

There's problems and then there's

I'm experiencing a lot of pain because strangers on the internet are saying mean things.

It's challenging but I genuinely have a choice about whether I want to be hurt by that or not.

And the beauty of nature, the beauty of a morning, reflecting on my mortality, understanding that I'm going to die someday, appreciating that all human beings are equal.

I'm no better or worse than anybody else.

Other people's opinions of me don't matter.

My achievements don't make me better or worse than anybody else.

That type of existential humidity.

That's what sets me up for a nice day where I can say, you know what, I'm a good person and I deserve to have a nice day.

Now I know I'm in the extreme situation for like a week where because because I'm on a public platform like TV and newspaper, I get a bizarre amount of harassment.

But I don't think it matters.

All of us, like was it a beautiful morning today when you woke up?

Was it a beautiful crisp bright November morning?

Did you notice it and were you thankful for being able to notice it?

Or were you worried about the future?

Were you angry with somebody who said something to you three weeks ago and now you're redoing what you should have said in the argument in your head?

Were you jealous of another person?

Were you comparing yourself to another person and feeling like shit because you think someone else is better than you?

Or were you feeling better than somebody else and feeling superior?

Did you have a shit morning because of completely avoidable pain?

Avoidable pain centered around your sense of identity.

And if you were,

chances are you didn't notice the beautiful morning and would greatly benefit from

reflecting on humidity and being genuinely thankful.

for the privilege of being alive and being healthy.

So that's why I've chosen to put out this week's podcast.

This week's podcast,

I speak to a wonderful, a wonderful person called Laura Coleman.

She's a qualified psychotherapist.

She's a humanistic psychotherapist and also a play therapist.

But she's also a death doula.

Laura Coleman works in hospices with people who are dying.

people who are literally at the end of their lives.

And she works in a professional capacity as a psychotherapist

to

to guide people

through their death journey.

She's a death doula and there's no way to listen to her speak, to listen to her speak about people who are dying without coming away from it experiencing humility.

Experiencing the humility of I should be really grateful to be alive and right now is the time to choose how I want to live and do I really want to choose being upset by other people's opinions of me and this might sound like there's nothing depressing about the chat that me and Laura have it's fucking fascinating

and she speaks about

like she might be working with three or four people a day who are dying and she speaks about near-death experiences that people have

people who have died actually died and come back and the things that they say,

she speaks about

what all people who are dying, what they wish they would have done differently in their lives.

She's a wonderful woman and a qualified, qualified psychotherapist.

She's fascinating.

So without further ado, here's the chat that I had with Laura Coleman, the death doula, in Mayo about a month ago.

And they're becoming much more common.

A death doula is somebody that helps people to die.

Makes it as easy for the person as possible for them to die.

You all know that we don't talk about death very freely.

It's not, you know, I'm not morbid, but I talk about death a lot.

And when I get a wee chance to chat to a big crowd about death, I take it.

Delighted to be here.

So a death doula will help the family, they'll help the patient, just whoever needs a bit of support.

And I've done it so many times before with other people.

So that just I can help them then through things that they've never been through before most people only die once

um

i i had never heard of a death doula until i researched you for this podcast and what struck me as quite beautiful is that i have heard of the word doula and a doula is somebody who

helps a mother to give birth and after care as well Exactly.

And I do find that there's just something beautiful about the fact that the word doula is used there.

It's someone exiting the world and also entering the world.

And

I'm very curious about what you do, but also I don't want to think about it because it's really depressing.

You know, it's that contradiction.

Yeah.

And I suppose, to be honest, a lot of people think that's what it's about.

When I go into a house that I'm going to sit down and say, so you're dying.

That's not the way it works.

So a death doula, you talk about a birth doula, and that's the book ends of life, birth doula, death doula.

And I often say, if we talked about birth the way we talked about dying, there'd be uproar.

So if a woman was in labour, so there's a person in the bed and they're very unwell, they're coming near the end of their life, and the family trying to not let the person in the bed think that we all know they're dying.

And the person in the bed needs to talk or wants to talk about dying, but they're afraid to upset their partners.

One time I was working with this lovely man, he was an elderly man, lovely man, and he was in hospital.

And I was on the way in to see him, and I met his wife on the way out, she was going for a coffee, and she said, Laura, I don't think he knows that he's dying.

And I said, I think he does.

He's been talking to the consultant a few times, I think he does.

And I said, you head off for the coffee and I'll scoot in and have a wee chat to him.

So his name was Michael, lovely man.

And I said, Michael,

Maura thinks that you don't know what's happening.

And he said,

I said, what has the doctor said?

And he said, oh, it's not good, Laura, it's not good.

Time's short.

And I i said maura doesn't know that you know that and so they're the kind of you know uncomfortable conversations that you can make a wee bit lighter thank god i have a i have a good sense of humor and i can bring it to people because they don't lose their sense of humor just because they're sick or dying and most people kind of whisper around them and

don't be talking and you know don't be saying that and people really that i've met doesn't matter what age they're they need to talk to people to figure out those things that they're going to do at at the end that they need to do that they you know the the things they want to say to the people they're leaving behind and that's that's how i got into this job and that's why i wanted to help people just ask yourself this question am i afraid to die am i afraid of death

and if i am why

What is it that I've been told down through the years?

What is it that I think death is that's making me afraid?

And, you know, Stoics think that, you know, there's well I suppose Socrates and I'm not a very philosophical person at all but Socrates talked about there's the body lives and then it dies and you've only two things to worry about and it depends on what your beliefs are so if you believe there's nothing well then there's nothing and if I'm nothing well then there's nothing to fear if there's nothing And the other one is that death is maybe a sort of a hallway or an entrance or a journey to another, to another existence.

And if you believe that, well, great.

Because the body mightn't be going with you,

but whatever bit is on the inside will be going with you.

The mind or the soul or

whatever you want to call it goes through that tunnel.

You're also, you're a psychotherapist, you're a humanistic psychotherapist.

And something,

and I know from humanistic psychotherapy,

it's about the client, we'll say.

So

how does it work with.

first off?

Would you be working with multiple people in the same day?

Oh, I.

Yeah.

So in the morning, you could be helping someone and they have a belief they could be Christian or Muslim.

And then in the evening, the person is completely atheistic and they have no belief in an afterlife or anything like that.

How do you navigate that as a doula?

So

I wherever they want to go, that's where we go.

So it's not I have my own opinions, obviously, and I was rared Catholic, I'm not particularly religious, but I was rared Catholic and I so I have that ingrained in me.

But the first time I worked with a woman who was Buddhist, she needed to be

her funeral had to be arranged really really quickly.

She didn't have family.

There was nobody.

She was she moved here from a place far away because of her her choice in religion.

And so she had to be everything had to be done within 24 hours.

Whereas in Ireland we take our time and do it.

But depending on what the person I'm sitting with, so sometimes I'm having a conversation with the person about the first law of thermodynamics and that the energy that is in the body energy doesn't die it just changes form and then the next person is talking about Jesus is going to come and meet me and you know I'm going to go to heaven and I'll see all the people that I've loved and I go there too so it's the same as what I would do if I was in a session with anybody about anything else it would be whatever they needed to work on I meet them there and lucky enough that I'm I've been with the hospice for 24 years, so I have a lot of experience.

I was arranging a wedding for somebody at the end of their life.

It was going to be easier for the wife afterwards if they were married with all the property and things.

And then in the afternoon, I was going in to sit with a man to do what we call dignity therapy, where I'd be finding out sort of the

things that had happened in his life that had given him purpose and meaning.

And we put it together in a little audio track, and then I go away and edit it, take out my voice, and then I type it up and give to them in a little book format, or they have it for their family.

And one thing that's become more common, I think anyway, in my years, is motor neuron.

And I had the loveliest sister-in-law, I loved her dearly, and she died from motor neuron.

And there's a new thing that we're doing, and I'm at the forefront of death and dying, so I know all the new tricks that are coming out.

We have a thing that we use now, it's a QR code on a headstone, and you can go to the headstone, click, it brings you to the website, and there's pictures of the person or their favorite music or whatever.

And when I was speaking to

about that, about putting a QR code, we had no

proper recording of our voice.

And I said, That'll never happen on my watch again.

Whoever I'm working with, I will make sure that I get a recording of their voice for themselves or for their family.

There's, I trust me, if there's one thing you'll love after your mother or your father or your partner or somebody dies, to hear to have their voice like i i what i'd like to know about is you're going to have your people who who who are accepting throughout the end of their life yeah but then you're going to have people who are not accepting or are terrified what does denial look like to a person who's just been told they're going to die just say the me man who i mentioned that was in the hospital and his mother his wife has gone down for the tea

when she came back i said more

i said michael rechat there and he knows exactly what's happening so there's a lot of conversations that need to happen here now.

He had two sons and they had things that need to be sorted and if we don't talk about it, you definitely can't plan it.

If we're all walking about pretending that we're not going to die or or wishing that the person that we love isn't going to die, but we actually know they're dying.

That's part of the work that I would do.

I'd go in and just talk about it normal.

Like said, you know, like what are your biggest fears about dying?

When the person knows they're going to die, there's no, there's no like, um, there's no need to pussyfoot around it when a doctor or consultant has said you're coming near the end of your life and you know you've got a little bit of time left my job then is going to help them so what do you want to do with that what do you what mark do you want to leave what what do you not want to leave unfinished what do you want to leave messages or directions or you know words do you want to leave for the people you love you know what would you tell them to do like the thing i mentioned there dignity therapy one of the the questions is can you remember something that you're really proud of?

I remember working with a lovely wee woman, she was a teacher, she never got married, and she was a teacher all her life.

And I remember introducing the thing about dignity therapy and explained to her, there's just week conversation, and I'll answer a few questions, and you'll answer them, and we'll just see where it goes.

And the purpose of it is so that she gets a bit of purpose and meaning from looking back at her life.

What was the purpose of her life?

And she said, I don't think it's going to be very interesting because I never had any family.

I never got married.

You know, I've been a spinster all my life.

And I don't think...

And I said, how long have you been teaching?

She'd been 36 years a teacher.

And I said, I think there's a lot of stories in them 36 years that your nieces and the people after your nieces, you know, your

future grand nieces and nephews, that they'll really appreciate knowing how you impacted people.

And so I said, tell me about some of the stories, some of the tough cases that you had some of the tough people that you'd help and oh my god it was love it was lovely i i cry a lot when i'm working with people because it's very moving work but i genuinely genuinely think that we need to talk about it we really do need to talk it's very easy for me to say well i'm not afraid to die and genuinely i'm not afraid to die because i do think personally there's something more maybe there's not but i'm going with the there's something more and it's making me feel good if you say i think there's nothing nothing after it or great if there's nothing after we'll go with that for you but I think the more we talk about it the less fear there is but if it's always don't mention don't say now that he's dying

years ago they could tell the doctor not to tell the patient don't tell him he's dying imagine how unethical it is like it's I try very much myself

to be okay with just the concept of my own mortality.

If I don't understand and recognize i am going to die and it can happen at any point then i can't enjoy the present moment exactly um something that really changed my perspective is

have you ever heard of the tibetan sky burial yeah yeah

so so it's it's just for the audience it's certain buddhists in tibet where they don't have they're up in the mountains they don't have soil to dig so their way of burying people is they will leave the body on a mountain and vultures come down and the vultures pick the body apart and they scatter the bones all over the valley.

But then trainee Buddhist monks walk into the valleys of corpses and they meditate there.

And they meditate alongside

pieces of bodies that are decomposing specifically to confront death.

It was this.

There was a sect within Catholicism known as as the Poor Clares.

So the Poor Clare nuns in France, there's a monastery, a Poor Clare monastery in France, and there's this little room

and they look like big concrete toilets.

So it's like a throne and there's a hole in it.

But what these were is when the older nuns died in this monastery, they would literally place their body.

on this thing and the body would decompose and the young nuns would go there and they'd do their rosaries, and they would, it's there is death, there is a body decomposing in front of me, and I can't ignore this.

If I'm to be spiritually present, I have to go, there it is, and this is life.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

What you're doing is a bit like that, but not as yucky.

What people say to me often, though, is like, What?

Why would you ever get involved and spending most of your day talking about death?

And I think anybody that knows me, and I think there's a few people here that knows me,

I have fun, I enjoy life, I squeeze every bit of crack out of it because we do not know the day or the minute.

And every morning I get up, and every time I go to bed, my father used to say, you get up in the morning, you don't know who's going to be taking off your shoes at night.

And that's a fact.

We do not know.

Confronting death, and it's not like, oh, big story for confronting death.

It's just like looking at it and saying, okay, I know I'm definitely going to 100% die.

And then living every day.

The big mistake we make is we think we've got plenty of time and none of us know.

Yeah, I know.

Is there,

when you're dealing with people who are at the end of their life,

is there any message that you find in common that something that they would wish they could say to themselves when they were younger?

One of the questions in the dignity therapy is, if you went back to your 15-year-old self or your 30-year-old self, what would you tell them?

And it's a lovely piece of work because you actually get like the real, the real rawness of I should have done.

Why didn't I?

Why did I let other people mainly people just are sorry they didn't live the life they wanted to live themselves?

That we conformed to, you know, getting up in the morning, going to work, nine to five, coming home, doing whatever you do at home, doing the home to work and work to home and home to work, and instead of squeezing whatever bit of crack you can into life.

And

was the fear judgment from other people or other people?

If you were being honest, we all say, oh, I don't care what anybody thinks about me.

But we kind of do.

You do, like, yeah.

We kind of do.

Like, if you're being honest, you kind of do.

Yeah, like, you can, I saw you're thinking, I was, you said, I had the choice of being a psychotherapist or a mad bastard.

But most of us, most of us try to kind of edge away from the madness.

I think my children would say, I've embraced the madness.

I've kind of, you know, kind of run with it a bit.

It suits me.

A fair fucking play to you.

Something

I had the benefit of having much older siblings, so something that really guides me is

I'll embrace.

I find that a lot of people don't do what they want to do because they're terrified of failing.

This fear of failure.

So what I do is I deliberately try to fail.

I fail so much much that failure isn't frightened anymore.

And what I've found is

I don't think there is such a thing as failure.

The only failure that I want to avoid is

doing nothing because I was scared to try.

I don't want to be older or someone who's dying if I'm lucky enough to die when I'm old.

And I don't want to look back and go, I didn't do that because I was scared.

Because often the fear is it's bullshit.

You're just scared of what other people think.

It is.

I'm wearing a bag in my head.

I'm up on stage with a bag in my head it's ridiculous like it's grand i'm having crack i'd rather do this than be in a job i don't want to do you know what i mean i'd encourage you to do it too as well i'm a play therapist as well so i work with kids and one of the things oh lovely and one of the things we do with my husband's a play therapist too so we do a lot a lot of playing in our house but they the one of the things that we do with parents or with even when i'm working with teachers i'd be telling them how to build somebody's self-esteem a child's self-esteem and one of the fastest ways to build a child's self-esteem is to say oh i got that wrong because you're encouraging yeah sometimes even big people get it wrong so i'd almost go out of my way to you know do the wrong thing in the play with the vast majority demonstrate failure

because i'm saying even big people get it wrong it's one of the it'll it helps them to attempt things way faster.

Building a child's self-esteem helps the adult.

The adult that you'll meet is a different adult if that child has self-esteem.

I say, I faked confidence for years, but when I eventually had good self-esteem, you don't need to fake the confidence.

It'll just be there.

And the same with kids.

If you can put that bit of self-esteem into them, you needn't worry about the confidence.

They can be quietly confident because they're shy, or they can be outwardly confident.

And how would you define self-esteem versus confidence?

Self-esteem is what you think about yourself on the inside, but that's all right saying what you think about yourself on the inside, but it's what you've fed me, what my parents, or society, or the teacher, or that you know, what people have told me about myself.

They held up a mirror and go, That's who you are.

And I'm like,

and so if that's good, I'll have internal self-esteem.

So it's on the inside, self-esteem.

Confidence is what you show other people.

And

people can have shit self-esteem and be very confident.

Can appear very confident, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just before we go for a break,

do you ever do play therapy with adults?

All the time.

All the time.

Actually, I have a woman, she's 63, and she comes in and she's going to say, playroom.

She comes, she knows, because if you're an adult and you're nursing stuff that went wrong for you, and it's in here, or it's holding you back, or whatever it is,

if it's going on, it happened when you were younger.

So

it happened either when you were a child or an adolescent.

So whatever your trauma was, and wouldn't it be lovely if nobody had trauma?

But life has trauma.

And so

if we go right back to the play bit

we can take it all the way up and work with the bits work with the bits and so what you're doing you go back to before the trauma trauma happened but even the muscle memory of play even lovely and i'll tell you something so i i do a bit of teaching i teach play therapy for a college in limerick would you believe and um and so when i'm it's two adults playing and you would not believe one's the the child taking the place of the child one's taking the place of the therapist and you would not believe how difficult a lot of adults find it to sit down on the floor and play

because we're worried about right and wrong.

Of course, and also this one's going to think I'm an idiot.

And so,

it's very freeing, very freeing, like I could have a 19-year-old that only goes into the playroom, a 12-year-old that wants to have talk therapy.

And these could be children, or parents, or you know, people who are either sick or the family of the person who's sick or dying.

So, I bring

play is a huge part of what I do.

And what I mean, so so

my job as a writer, what I'm

looking for consistently is the feeling of flow, right?

That feel if I can get fucking flow, then I can write.

But

the hardest thing about writing, about doing anything creative, is is this fear of failing.

And what'll have you afraid of failing is,

first off, it's your ideal self.

The desire for me to be seen as a good writer by other people.

That'll fuck me up immediately.

My, I sit down to write, I've got this blank page and I'm thinking, oh God, this better be good.

Or what if this is shit?

And the only thing that will break me out of that and into flow is when I engage in play.

See, the beauty of playfulness is there's no such thing as right or wrong.

Like kids playing with Lego, like little kids playing with Lego, they're not like, I'm not making something.

I am doing Lego.

I am doing Lego for the sake of doing Lego.

Whereas as an adult I'm conditioned to be right and wrong.

So just that story I read out at the start there, The Donkey,

like

that started off as a blank page.

And it started off with maybe two days of me terrified, terrified.

What am I going to write?

Oh, this is shit.

I'm awful.

I'm a terrible writer.

Until eventually I engaged in playfulness.

And how I engage in play, it's I seek out failure.

And what I mean by seek out, if failure is the thing I'm terrified of, well, let's fucking fail.

So I just said to myself, and I do this often,

I'm going to write a story about a fatass shoving a donkey into a car.

And I'm going to do this for 10,000 words.

And that's beginning with failure because that's a ridiculous idea.

How are you going to write a story about a man shoving a donkey into a car?

But because I began with failure, now I'm in a playful state.

And now I begin writing and now I'm entering flow state.

And now once I'm in flow,

that story, yeah, it's about a man with a donkey and pushing a donkey into a car.

But really what it's about is

it's a man whose father

has dementia and he kind of wants to not visit him anymore because he doesn't recognize that person.

And really what I'm doing is

my dad got a brain tumor and I was told, I was 19 and and it's like he's going to die in six weeks.

And I did the full palliative care thing.

I watched my dad go from being my fucking lovely dad to a week later being,

couldn't talk, couldn't move.

He was wearing an happy in one week.

And it was tough.

And I was very, 19's quite young to be dealing with that.

So that left me with a lot of trauma.

And I don't like thinking about those feelings.

I don't like remembering him in that state.

I couldn't cry for about 10 years afterwards.

You know, it really stuck with me.

But the playfulness of writing like that allowed me to go ripe.

So that story, really, it's my dad.

You know what I mean?

It allowed me to go into all those feelings and to process it.

But that's play.

That's how I use playfulness

to get it.

It gets me beyond my defense mechanisms.

Yeah.

And then I can cry.

And it lets the creativity out as well.

Creativity, yeah.

I mean, creativity is just

creativity is adults playing.

That's all it is.

It's playfulness for adults.

And you don't get old because you're getting older because you stop playing.

And

that's one of the things that fucking pisses me off about school is,

but all of us played, all of us started off crayons, mala, every fucking single one of us.

And when we were one or two years of age, we weren't good or bad at it.

It's just a thing we do because it's class.

And then you get to school and all of a sudden, you're brilliant at painting you are you not so much

but you know what i mean and then you end up splitting and some of us become the good at art people and then other people it's just gone it's gone i think everybody should be making art for the sake of making it and fuck this good or bad

you make art and or or even to play carl jung was great at that carl jung used to

He was about 70 years of age and he used to make sure that every single day he went and played with sticks at the end of his garden.

Seriously, I'm going to go down and play with modern sticks.

Why?

Because I used to do it when I was three.

You know what I mean?

We better take a break soon.

Are you enjoying this?

This isn't too heavy for you, is it?

Because...

It is something I was saying to you beforehand that I am mindful of people's safety tonight.

So we're making sure that

we're speaking about this in a way that we're not going to get too heavy with it.

You know what I mean?

Because you were saying there, though, about

play isn't good or bad, and death in and of itself isn't good or bad either.

It is what it is, but it isn't good or bad.

I've never thought of it that way.

That's an interesting way because for me, it's like, no, death is awful.

Because you were trained to think the death and you had an experience that left you traumatized, so that makes it awful.

Yeah.

Whereas if I love

some of the people that I've sat with when they're dying, and they're just so peaceful, and you know they just drift away.

It's like going to sleep.

And they look like they're going to sleep and it's just lovely.

And then more deaths can be very tough.

But death itself, it's going to happen.

It's neither good or bad, but it can be a tough death or it can be a good death as in a death that didn't hurt so much.

Or unnecessary suffering.

I think that's why I do the job I do.

If I look at pain that I've experienced in my life, the vast majority of pain I've experienced, it's not something that was actually happening to me.

Most suffering that I experience, it's the worrying about what if or why did I do that?

Ignoring the present moment, fucking ignoring the present moment, and my life is, what if that happens?

Wouldn't that be terrible?

Oh God, this is awful.

I hope that never happens.

Why did I say that to that person there six years ago?

What a cunt.

But we, I can live my life.

All of us can live our lives in that continually.

What if and why did.

and that is completely unnecessary suffering.

Most of my pain has been that.

Yeah.

And shit that's bad that actually happens.

Like even my dad dying, that was no crack.

But at the same time, I wouldn't be who I am if it didn't happen.

True.

Like facts, like I just simply wouldn't because that

it was like the hammer of life hitting me into the side of the head and saying, You have to be an adult now.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So they you said they're about the future.

So if your mind is in the future, that causes anxiety.

And a way of avoiding anxiety is to bring yourself right back to the moment.

If your mind is in the past, you're feeling low and your energy will jump.

So the past is about

low energy.

Yeah.

And the future is where anxiety takes you.

What if, what if, what if?

And the way to get working away with both of them, come back to the present.

Be in your body.

It's the only place you've got.

Be in your body.

I remember working with a young fellow one time and

he was in foster care for years.

Lovely lad.

I worked for seven years, but he was in foster care.

And

the father in the foster care home died and he was the carer.

So he went off to the young fellow had to go to another home for a while.

And it was way down in Belmullet.

And he came back and he was all buff.

I hadn't seen him for six months.

And he had been in the gym.

And this is true as God.

He said, I said, geez, you must have been spending a lot of time working out.

You look mighty, you're so all muscle.

And he said,

I realized, Laura, this is the truth, 16-year-old.

I realized, Laura, this is the only place I have to live.

He'd been in many as a house, but this is the only place I have to live.

No matter how fancy your house is,

what's going on in here and up here that goes with you everywhere?

Fair play, Tim.

Let's have a little ocarina pause now.

We'll have a slight break in the conversation.

Wonderful fucking chat there with Laura Coleman.

She's astounding.

I'm going to play my ceramic otter, and you're going to hear a noise, which hopefully won't disturb any dogs.

And then adverts are going to play.

Very gentle.

Tired of your car insurance rate going up even with a clean driving record?

You're not alone.

That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant.

Jerry compares rates side by side from over 50 top insurers and helps you switch with ease.

Jerry even tracks market rates and alerts you when it's best to shop.

No spam calls, no hidden fees.

Drivers who save with Jerry could save over $1,300 a year.

Switch with confidence, download the Jerry app, or visit jerry.ai slash acast today when you're starting off with something new it seems like your to-do list keeps growing finding the right tool helps and that tool is shopify shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 of us e-commerce and best yet shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping if you're ready to sell you're ready for shopify sign up for your one dollar per month trial at shopify.com slash retail go to shopify.com shopify.com/slash retail.

It's Stock Up September at Whole Foods Market.

Find sales on supplements to power up for busy weeks.

Plus, pack your pantry with pasta, sauce, and more everyday essentials.

Enjoy quick breakfast for less with $365 by Whole Foods Market seasonal coffee and oatmeal.

Grab ready-to-heat meals that are perfect for the office.

and save on versatile no antibiotics ever chicken breasts.

Stock up now at Whole Foods Market, in-store and online.

That was the Ocarina pause.

You'll have heard an advert there for some bullshit.

I don't know what the advert was for.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, please consider becoming a patron.

This podcast is my full-time job.

It's how I earn a living, it's how I rent out my office, it's how I pay all my bills, it's how I live, it's how I survive.

This podcast, it's how I have the time and space to make the podcast.

This past week of

making

making fucking documentaries that go out in corporate media, that go out on the television,

has really reminded me of how horrible, how horrible it is to be living in that landscape, to be putting out work in that landscape and how grateful I am to have this wonderful fucking audience here.

You see when you put something on television, you're arriving into people's living rooms, not necessarily with their consent and that this pisses off a lot of people.

You end up on people's timelines and they didn't ask to see you and this makes people angry.

But with a podcast, with independent media.

No one's listening to this or doesn't want to.

If you're here listening to this, it's because you made a choice and because you're curious and passionate and interested and you're seeking out something.

And that means for me,

I just have an audience of people who are chilled out and nice and kind and calm and don't think that I'm a Freemason who works for big pharma, who sacrifices children in satanic rituals so that I can drink from a gland in their neck.

that gives me eternal life.

This is what people believe.

This is what people believe and this is what I'm being accused of.

Now, not a lot of accusations.

Like a couple.

But that's enough.

That's enough.

Most of the negativity is people calling me a stupid cunt.

That's fine.

But Illuminati stuff is a bit much for being on fucking RTE.

It's a bit much.

I'm a paid shill.

I'm a paid shill for vaccine manufacturers.

So anyway, yes.

Support for this podcast comes from you the listener.

Via the Patreon page.

All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's it if you can't afford that don't worry about it you can listen for free you can listen for free everybody gets a podcast i get to earn a living and you know what if you are listening for free the person who is paying they're paying for you to listen for free a nice kind model there everyone gets the exact same exact same experience and i can tell advertisers to fuck off they can't influence my content in any way patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast and if you are becoming a new paid patron try and do it through the desktop because if you become a patron through the patreon app on your apple iphone apple the greedy fuckers are going to take 30 of that so fuck them so do it through the desktop if you can patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast upcoming gigs i'm taking it handy for november and december i'm not doing any gigs.

No point doing fucking December gigs just in case someone decides to bring an office party, a Christmas office party to the podcast.

That ruins a podcast very quickly.

So my next gig, I was in Vicker Street last week.

It was unbelievable.

Amazing gig in Vicker Street last week.

So because of demand, there's a second Vicker Street date.

And this is now in January.

Monday the 27th of January.

I'm in Vicker Street.

That just went on sale.

Then in February, I'm in Leisureland in Galway on the 9th tremendous crack there Crescent Hall in Drahada 21st of February Belfast the Waterfront Theatre 28th of February then in March I'm in the INEC on the 7th of March that's in Killarney

Cork opera house there on the I don't know if that's even out yet is it

I'm in Cork anyway in March.

Australia, New Zealand sold out in April.

Oh and just fucking added.

Just added.

On Wednesday, the 23rd of April.

Limerick, my home city.

I'm in the fucking University Concert Hall in Limerick on the 23rd of April 2025.

That's that goes on sale tomorrow morning.

That's the biggest ever Limerick gig that I'll be doing.

Actually, that gig, that gig's in the University Concert Hall, which means technically...

I'm going to be gigging in Yartley's Couch, the spiritual home of this podcast.

So that's...

that's very nice.

If anyone's thinking of visiting Limerick, that might be a good one.

Come to that gig on the 23rd of April.

We got a new Brazilian buffet.

There's a new Brazilian buffet opening up this week as well, across the way from the Hunt Museum.

And then June 25th, big giant massive tour of fucking

England and Scotland.

No Wales this time.

So June 25,

Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, Norwich,

Norwich, Norwich.

And then there's definitely an Edinburgh in there somewhere.

Just not written down here.

Fan.co.uk forward slash blindbuy for those tickets.

I think I've listed out all my 2025 gigs there.

Fuck it, why not?

Back to my chat here with the magnificent Laura Coleman.

This is where we speak about near-death experiences.

Laura was trying to convince me to move from a plastic bag to a cotton bag.

He's sweating like mad.

He's some crack.

No, he's some crack.

Something I was asking you backstage and I'd love to for you to ask it in front of the audience is.

Do you really want to ask that?

Do you really want to ask you?

People at the end of their life,

what is like a common regress?

Biggest regret, don't even have to think about it.

I work too much.

Every person, doesn't matter if they're in their 20s, their 50s, their 80s,

one of their biggest regrets is always I work too much.

I didn't spend enough time with my family.

I thought too much of what other people were thinking of me and people aren't thinking about you at all.

When you realize how little other people think about you, you get on with your life, do what you want.

And so that's a big huge regret.

I worked too much.

I didn't spend enough time with the people I loved.

Always.

And then I try and help them to spend that bit of quality time because we still have time.

Hopefully, we have still a bit of time.

So we can make the most out of a week we can make the most out of six weeks

and the thing is if you think of those regrets the system of capitalism that we live under needs us to think you're not working enough that's what it needs us to think because if we stop thinking that way then the system doesn't work

the system also

also really really needs us to

care about what other people think because a good way to solve that is to buy shit.

You know what I mean?

If you're very concerned about other people's opinion, if it's your physical appearance, then you can buy a bunch of shit to improve your physical appearance.

Or if you want people to think you're more successful, you achieve that by buying things.

So we have a system.

It's just that's really dark.

It's dark that people get to the end of their lives and the things that they're regretting are the values that our system is most upholding.

Other people's opinions matter and work fucking harder or you're worthless.

That's just the fact of life.

And I think all of us can identify with that.

It's something I often think of because I get great meaning from work and I love, like, I adore working and I like it.

But I wonder at the end of it, will I go, Jesus Christ, you should have chilled out there and just hung around with a daisy a bit more or something.

Are you saying this work?

Because to be fair, if you're getting paid to do this, this is great work.

I do.

I do love it.

Yeah.

Well, that's another way to think of it.

Yeah.

I mean, I actually genuinely love it.

I like, I absolutely

like

my definition of my personal definition of success for me is, can I earn a living doing the thing I love doing?

100%.

And that's what I'm doing.

Like, you know, I mean, my job is, I don't know, if I wanted to do a podcast next week talking about the history of this theater, which I might do,

it's completely possible.

You know what I mean?

And that's what my job is, to be as curious as possible.

Isn't Isn't it something else, though, that a random thought comes through his head, and boom, he's got a podcast out of it?

It's brilliant.

That's how, but that's the

openness.

That's openness.

Like I said, I'm always fighting this fear of failure.

I don't allow anything to come in and say that, what a silly idea.

If it's silly, I run with it.

I try to be playful as much as possible all the time.

There's great crack and play, you know yourself.

100%.

And I'll tell you, it's the making of you.

Thank you very much.

You're a great lad.

Thank you very much.

I'm trying to phrase this in a way, I don't want to say spooky, like supernatural.

In your work, have you encountered any...

Because this was a huge question that people were asking.

encountered anything supernatural or anything that made you go, wow, that's odd.

Well, I'll take it.

I'll take that question and I'll run with it.

but I'll call it natural.

Okay.

But it is like for somebody who wouldn't have experienced it, they might think, geez,

that was strange.

But in the work that I'm in, and for anybody that has ever worked in palliative care, we tell the family to expect the person who's coming near the end of their life to see people who have already died.

Yeah.

And that it happens so regularly, we have to tell people because often the person in the bed thinks they're actually losing their mind as well.

And they'll say, like I remember a 16-year-old saying to me, I see granddad behind the door.

And

me going, yeah, he'll be there.

And that's, I suppose, for us that work at the end of life and his family would have been quite religious.

It was a lovely thing because he actually could have a sense and a visual even that nobody else could see.

because he was so close to that veil of death, he could actually see somebody from the other side there in the corner.

For me, I think it's a lovely thing for them to see I'm not gonna lie and say the first time that I was sitting beside somebody's bed and they said there was somebody behind me I have to I got the hairs in the back of my neck were standing up I was like oh Jesus but they but I got used to it and now it's like yeah that's something that yeah so the people that love you who have gone before you whether it's your father or your grandfather or whoever it is they'll come to meet you if If that's like if you think there's nothing and you're looking at somebody behind the door, that's going to be scary for you.

If you're an atheist and you're like, no, when you're dead, you're dead.

And then you see somebody in the back of the door, that's going to be frightening.

But if you have some kind of an idea of that, maybe there's something more.

That's what I'd like to know about there.

Is this happening to people who have a belief about an afterlife?

Have you seen it happen to a person who doesn't have a belief in an afterlife?

It has.

It actually has.

And you see, then sometimes people say, oh, that's the drugs.

Like

they're on morphine or they're on whatever.

And maybe it is.

Maybe it is.

But all I know is it gives a lot of people a lot of comfort.

If I was dying in the morning, and if my kids and my husband were sitting there beside me, and I and I was saying, I see my mother, wouldn't they be like, oh, that's great.

Now, you know, granny's, they are going to be, you know, helping her along or whatever.

It's a lovely thing, even if it is the drugs, it is a lovely thing.

But it happens very regularly.

It happens in people who are dying at home who don't have medication or who aren't being medicated.

So it's a thing and it's a fact that people do see.

And it's one of those things where

it's the meaning that you give to it.

I mean,

there's the cynical side of things which says this is just what the human brain does.

Like I'm sure you've heard of all those theories about

what's the name of that fucking chemical that's in ayahuasca.

Is it DMT?

DMT.

So some people say that...

You know, when people die, that the brain releases the natural DMT and that's where they get the...

like.

Have you spoken to people who've seen the tunnel, I've seen the light, and all that crack?

I have actually had several people over the years.

There was one man, and he made it to the hospital.

They announced him that

he was gone.

And then they went to the city.

Oh, wow.

Somebody else came around.

Yeah, so they came back and did the

electric shock, and he came around again.

And he sat in the bed.

I had talked to him for about 45 minutes about an experience that he says he didn't know.

Was it five days or five seconds?

It was just this no space, and there was he described it as a light.

Was

he very chatty about this?

Was he oh, he was a big deal?

So, I suppose for me, it was his consciousness still had it, so his body was dead for all intents and purposes, for whatever many minutes.

I can't remember how many minutes, but wow, that's a lot, that's some minutes were some, yeah.

So, he was, and they cha-chinged him back, and and he didn't know he couldn't tell if it was

days or weeks or seconds, but it just felt like space and this light.

I was like, that is so interesting.

And he could talk about the space and the light.

And every time anybody else came in, he was like, And the space and the light.

And they were the only two big words, really, that kept coming out of it.

But he was it peaceful?

If he's speaking about it a lot, that means fuck me, that was class.

That's exactly what he felt.

That's exactly, he was like, this is unreal.

And, you know, people talk about, you know,

what'll happen after.

And you said it a minute ago, you said, depends what you think yourself.

Like, you know, I can, you can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven, depending on what you allow yourself to think.

Don't you?

Yeah, because I'm not into, to be honest, I'm not into the idea of heaven.

I'm not into the idea of anything that doesn't end.

No matter how class heaven is, it's not class.

If it doesn't end, then it becomes eventually torture.

You'd be tortured good stuff, would you?

If it never ends, yeah.

I mean, the law of diminishing marginal returns, the law of the limiting margins.

Mars bars are class.

I don't want to be forced Mars bars forever.

You know what I mean?

No matter how wonderful Mars bars are, there needs to be an end to the Mars bars.

And

it's about the loss of the Mars bar, too.

Like,

I did a podcast once on sparkling water, right?

There's a specific type of sparkling water that's you can only get in Spain it's called Vichy Catalan right and it's it's sparkling water that's it comes from a fucking volcanic volcano and it's naturally sparkling it comes out boiling hot and sparkling and it tastes a bit like bread soda and it's the nicest sparkling water in the world right it's so fucking nice I refuse to buy it online or take it home with me from Spain it must live in Spain and I can only taste it when I go to Spain once every two years do you know what I I mean?

Yeah.

Because I know if I get this sparkling water and I have it all the time, it loses meaning.

Part of the joy, I was in Spain two weeks ago and I tasted it then.

The joy is the memory of it.

Lovely.

But if I imagine a heaven of perpetual fucking Viki cattle and sparkling water, I'm going to be ringing up the devil.

Here, what's the crack down there?

You know what I mean?

You were saying about a Marsberry.

Did you ever get a deep-fried Marsbury?

A deep fried I did over in Edinburgh.

We did too.

That is daily.

That's fantastic.

That is not fantastic.

You didn't like it.

Oh, I did.

I quite enjoyed it.

No, we shared it between five of us.

It was rotten.

So that's your idea of hell.

Do you know that

the modern, and this is a fact.

So, first off, if you look at the Bible, right?

The Bible doesn't actually mention hell.

The description of hell in the Bible is...

It's a place where God's love isn't present.

That's it.

Which says God's love isn't present.

This business of eternal torture and fucking fire and devils, there's no mention of that in the Bible.

That actually comes from Cork.

I'm fucking serious.

I'm Nihola.

Hold on.

There, in the 11th century, in Cork, there was a manuscript written called the Visio Tsnugdalis, right?

So it was, it was...

The story goes, right?

So this is the 11th century.

So that's what, nearly a thousand years ago.

There's a story about a knight.

So he was a knight in Cork.

And this fella lived a terrible life, debauchery, right?

Drinking, riding, whatever he wants to do.

And he would go nuts on the drink.

And then one weekend, he got so drunk that he had a hangover that basically killed him.

So he spent an entire weekend dead.

And then he woke up on the Monday and it's like, I wasn't dead at all, but let me tell you what I saw.

So this manuscript is called The Vision of Tnog Dalis.

And Tnogdalis basically says,

Because I spent my life riding and fighting and doing all these bad things, I visited a place where there are specific tortures for the things that you did in your life that were wrong.

So, if he's like, I saw people who were gluttons, so that they were being force-fed on a mountain, and then I saw other people in a lake of fire.

So, this entire vision of hell that we have, it comes comes from this manuscript in Cork a thousand years ago.

But this manuscript, it ended up becoming the medieval equivalent of a bestseller because we've got the Irish storytelling tradition, so it was a really good story.

So back then, what would happen is it would be written in a monastery and then it would go to another monastery in Europe and a monk would read it and go, this is a great story, I'm going to write another one.

So all the monasteries in Europe started to copy this one story about the knight in Cork who visited the hell and saw demons and saw goblins and devils and fire got reprinted and reprinted and rewritten until eventually by the 15th century there was a painter by the fellow of hieronymus bash and hieronymus posh he's the one who painted the visions of hell he took all his inspiration from reading this book so hell as we know it comes it's it's cork it's a kind of seriously It's about cork in the 11th century.

It's bullshit.

There's no mention of it in the Bible.

No mention at at all and we've been we've believed this now about devils and fire and all that crack i went a bit off topic

no um i need to take my son back from cork

have you spoken to anyone who had a a fucking near-death experience and it wasn't fun No, actually, no.

Which is interesting.

No.

I haven't.

Even somebody who was a bit of a twat and he was not a nice man.

He was really hard to work with.

I found him really difficult to work with.

I did my best, but he was a really hard man to

even just be in his energy he had really negative energy the creature and um

and he had a near-death experience and and actually was a nicer man after it

but that's the that's the truth he could have been no more than that he could have been that's what I want to know how many people change how many people here's here's one

when people have these near-death experiences is everybody

Wow, that was real or are some people skeptical?

That was chemicals in my brain as I was about to die this fella this fella he would have anybody else now to be honest i haven't i don't know hundreds of people who died and came back i only know a few but the that fella he actually did make changes his voice even was softer wow maybe he did damage when he was in there i don't know but he but he definitely he changed dramatically didn't still particularly like him but he you know

have you looked into

like

are there people practicing your profession in countries where psychedelics are legal in therapeutic use and they're incorporating psychedelics into your profession?

I know that for a fact, that they are even in this country.

Okay, they're doing it on the sly.

Yeah, well, yeah.

Well, yeah, people are using psychedelics.

I don't use it in my practice, but

why would they do that?

What is the purpose of psychedelics and palliative care?

What do you think?

Well, I spoke to a fellow called Dr.

Paul Litnycki in Australia, and he was given the license by the Australian government to study LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA.

And he was using psychedelics in palliative care.

I think it was huge doses of psilocybin.

And what he said is, I'm giving these people a dress rehearsal for death.

So I'm giving them a psychedelic experience to let them go, maybe this is what will happen.

And you know, and my personal take on this, if you think, you know, any psychedelic would help you, well, that should be your choice.

If you think it would make the last part of your life any bit easier, why wouldn't you?

And

what he also said to me, too, and it harks back to something you said earlier, which I found fascinating, when you were speaking about play therapy and you were speaking about trauma and how an adult can play.

and just the actions of that play can maybe take them back to a younger part of themselves.

Well, this fellow was using

he was using psychedelics to help people address pre-verbal trauma

so people who had experienced trauma so young that they hadn't learned to form words yet yeah and he said that that was the most difficult to access because

How do you verbalize trauma when words don't exist?

So he was using psychedelics as a new way for people to access.

I mean, they could be six months old, whatever happened.

And psychedelics were helping these people with that to get back to that world without words.

What they would have been doing there, and we do it in play, we do holotropic breath work.

Even being in the womb, there can be trauma when you're in the womb.

You know, if the mother was using drugs or if there was a trauma that happened, somebody died, there was a car accident, a child in the womb can experience that as trauma.

The adult has some conscious awareness of it.

The child has it more as a subconscious level.

And so, doing what you were saying, like when we spoke about holotropic breath work earlier, and holotropic breath work brings you to your subconscious.

So, you let go of that conscious mind.

People are looking at me, you know, you're, and you move deep down into the body where the subconscious lives, and that's what you feel.

I'd love to speak to you about that because

breath work is it's it's it's the closest you can get to psychedelics without taking a psychedelic.

Like, even

myself, right?

So, I don't do holotropic.

I'd love to get into it.

I just do standard breathing meditations.

It's probably similar though.

Yeah, just like, it's fucking amazing.

Like, when you can get handy at meditation and when you can get your breath so slow that it's like, how am I even alive right now?

You know what I mean?

It's, it's so,

but something really profound that happened for me.

And I'm not,

I don't really believe in the supernatural, but

I'd been, so I'd go to this river every single day and I would meditate there for 10-15 minutes just for anxiety.

And I'd been doing this every single day for about two months, just on this riverbed.

And

I came out of the meditation.

And when I came out of it, I looked across the river and I saw my dad, who'd been dead 10 years.

I saw him.

And he went into the reeds.

And then a voice came on me that said, I'm okay.

And then I snapped out of it.

And

then as well.

And then I looked towards a nettle.

And the message I got from the nettle was,

me and you are one.

We're like brothers.

Do you know what I mean?

And it doesn't, the thing is, I don't believe I saw my dad's ghost.

I don't know what that was, but what matters is it fucking gave me great meaning.

Like a weight was lifted off.

I don't, like, I don't need that to be psychedelic

or to be supernatural.

Something very meaningful happened to me.

I think what it was personally, right?

Wherever I'd gone in the meditation, so calm.

Anxiety doesn't exist, anger doesn't exist, emotion doesn't exist.

That wonderful, beautiful center of meditation where it is what it is.

Whatever place I'd gone to there,

it allowed allowed me to safely access repressed grief.

And it allowed me in that moment to go,

let go, your dad's dead.

He died 10 years ago.

I don't need that to be supernatural.

For me, it's about the meaning.

And I took a fucking hell of a lot of meaning from that, you know.

And someone else might come away from it and go, I fucking medited there and I saw a ghost of my dad.

And you know, it's interesting.

We say supernatural.

Yeah.

Is that really, really natural?

Is supernatural just very, very, very natural?

It's hard to fucking know.

Well, when you go, if you want to go at it though, what the fuck is natural?

Like, you don't know, but it's true.

Like, because the thing is, like, even

like we're here in this room, right, and there's fucking speakers and all this shit.

At the end of the day, it's a bunch of light and it's bouncing into our human brains and we're interpreting this as visual information.

But I bring a fucking bat into this room and the bat can't see.

But the bat could fly around this room and it would safely not hit you into the head, but it can't see.

But the bat is using echolocation.

But what's the room to that bat's mind?

Yeah, where are we going now?

I know, I know, I know, I know.

Just talking about, but I'm just talking about what is the nature of what is real.

Our reality is human beings.

We're back, we're back.

We're human beings.

So we're...

That was a bit bad, all right.

We're, but no, it comes from Descartes.

Rene Descartes.

We're human beings and we interpret this world using our human being senses.

So we've got sense, we've got smell, we've got hearing, we've got fucking sight, right?

And our brains take all this information in.

A bat doesn't have that at all.

A bat is all echolocation.

But what is reality to a bat?

And that's a lovely question.

We don't know because they can't talk.

Exactly.

And

everybody in this room perceives through their senses their reality.

And it'd be different for you or me.

We're sitting here in the almost the same position but there's a very different experience for me i'm all you know starstruck looking at you in your plastic bag which caught me out of it

and you're all you're all saying i thought you were younger

um

i'm absolutely in awe with of your your wisdom and your compassion now you tell me i'm old when people say your wisdom and your compassion

that's practically an insult i'm not

Do you ever reflect your work into, we say, Irish traditions?

Like I reckon in Ireland historically we're pretty good with death compared to other cultures.

We certainly are.

You know,

even

like an old school wake.

Like, I mean, you'd have people drinking with the corpse.

You know what I mean?

In particularly rural areas.

And then you had a form of singing called keening.

Yeah.

You know, and we had all these traditions, rituals, and music around death.

And death didn't seem,

I've thought about it.

I think it might come down to temperature.

Because I know in countries where

in countries where it's hot, where they couldn't preserve the body, like Spain, for instance, you tend to have distance from the corpse.

But in Ireland, we didn't have to have that.

The decomposition didn't happen as quickly.

Something I heard too was

when people died,

the only place that was cold in the village was the cellar of the pub.

So the body would go down there and then people are mourning going, there's a lot of drink here.

And that's how we ended up with the Irish Wake.

That's something I heard.

But how do you feel about Irish traditional death practices?

I think you might have made that thing up about the pub.

I don't know where I fucking heard it.

I'm not saying it's fact.

Someone told me when I was pissed.

So don't quote me on it.

Tonight is all souls night

actually you said that to me when i asked you to speak you said tonight was all souls nights and last night was all saints night so last night was about me

and tonight is about who you

so all souls so i'm from donegal and we are very very traditional people in donegal and i actually

messaged a few of my friends and a few of my sisters and I said, do you all still do the thing on All Souls Night?

In our house, the place had to be all tidied up.

the fire all the ashes around the fire had to be tidied up and then there was two glasses of whiskey there was a bit of barn brack that was probably left over from halloween but this is this is actually very common and and there would be cigarettes my mother and father smoked like troopers and must be everybody belonged to them did too and it was like it was very um

you know are these for like you're leaving it out for the dead people yeah like you would for Santi.

Like you would for Santa, except Santi doesn't get the fags.

Santa doesn't get the fags.

But isn't that love?

So you're leaving whiskey and and fags out for dead people.

Are you telling me they don't do that in Limerick?

No.

It's a real kind of a respect thing.

And I remember us tidying it all up and then up to bed at night.

You'd be up in the bed terrified in case you'd hear anybody downstairs.

But it was.

And the whole thing of it is and was, there's a lot of my sister-in-law's a lot younger than me and she still does it.

She still does puts out the cigarettes and puts out the whiskey.

But it's a very traditional thing.

So before Christianity we had samen.

And with samhon it's tonight the veil between the dead and the living is very thin, so the dead can walk amongst us.

And then, with the process of Christianization, they brought in All Hallows' Eve or All Souls' Day because to basically go, look, you can still do the shit you want to do, but let's just say Christ is involved.

You know, that's pretty much it.

Because people are like, I'm not getting rid of this.

You can fuck off.

No, just bring Christ into it.

It's fine.

And because that's what it sounds like to me.

It's, it's.

I never knew about that.

I never that sounds love.

So your own relatives come back.

That's what they told us.

But I remember saying, Jesus, would you not be afraid?

You know, like if you went down to the toilet or something, because we don't have the one toilet downstairs, if you go down to the toilet in the middle of the night and you met some of them.

And my mother's answer was, but sure, they're all your own people.

Like, they don't, it's only your own that come to you.

Not next door people come to you.

It's only your own people that will come.

So you need to be afraid.

And again, it's all interpretation, isn't it?

It's all and they're not going to want to freak you out.

Your great-grandfather's not going to come to the future and go, woohoo.

My father threatened to come and haunt us if he could.

Have you looked at, I can't think of the country, but there's certain alien cultures.

Is it Mexico?

Is it Mexico?

No, no, no, it's in South America.

Guatemala.

Where they literally take out the dead bodies.

They take the bodies out of the bag.

And they give them flags and they give them drink as well.

And they dress them up and they dance with them and they parade them.

Everybody dresses their own corpses up and leaves them outside in chairs and things and dress and then puts them in.

This is every year.

It's like, here's my granddad from 30 years ago, and like literally every year they change the clothes.

Diem Mortes.

Yeah.

It's the festival, they call it a festival.

It's a festival.

The issue that's the problem that's happening with it now is

so it's not widespread.

It's a small area.

I think it's Asia.

I'm not sure.

Because, where is it?

Leitrum.

Because of the fucking internet, because of the internet.

The internet is fucking ruining it.

So you've got these people in the village, and these people are digging up their grandfather and taking them out and giving them cigarettes.

But now all these tourists are coming from abroad, taking photographs of it for Instagram.

The people are very poor, and now the tourists are paying for photographs with corpses.

So the tradition is in danger of...

The respect is being lost.

And the people,

if they're incredibly poor, they're doing it under duress.

You know what I mean?

So it's being exploited by outside forces.

But to be honest, they were doing it anyway.

Like, they were doing it.

They were doing it anyway, but it's

a few bobs.

It seems weird if a Yank is involved.

Ah, it's true.

It's true.

Do you know what I mean?

The English aren't great with death.

Well,

that's a bit unfair, but as I understand this,

it takes ages for them to have a funeral, doesn't it?

Aye.

Or you could be three weeks waiting.

What are they at?

I don't know.

There's so many of them.

But there's people dying every day.

Everywhere.

But what?

Like.

Is it the Victorians?

Is it Protestantism?

Let's go with the Protestants.

Sanitizing.

Sanitizing death.

We'll go with the Protestants.

We'll blame the Protestants.

Sanitizing it.

Do you know what I mean?

And

making it something that's happening over there.

Like, do you have any thoughts on that?

And...

Like, you have some cultures, so Irish wake culture, I reckon that's pretty good.

Death is is right there.

Like even even, sometimes I could say to like American people,

some places in America, it's like, what do you mean you show people the corpse?

No.

It's hidden away.

In Ireland, there is the dead person.

You come and visit it, the whole neighborhood.

Like, I think that's healthy because what you're doing is, here is the person, they're dead, this is death.

Yeah.

And then other cultures, are like death isn't happening.

Just straight into an incinerator, there's the ashes.

And how do you feel about that because the meanings that are that are being given to that is one healthy is one not or does it matter in my experience and that's all i can speak to is my experience but in my experience when we children let them see the the person who's died if they want to if the child doesn't want to well then no that's a pain but i remember even when my mother died the grandchildren were in and out and in and out and then they were drawing little pictures.

First they were kind of a little bit cagey coming in to see my mother and then coming out and granny was such a big part of their life and then they were drawing pictures and putting in pictures, and they were bringing in little things and putting things in on top for her.

And she had this little, you know, the shroud thing.

And they were tidying that up around her.

You know, they, they actually, and so they have a conscious, I remember Granny in the coffin, and I remember,

that's part of what dead is.

You know, that's part of what it is.

But

a lot of people, I think,

Irish people in particular, they actually think that they, after they go to the week, that they can go outside and comment on how well or not well,

an awful bad looking corpse.

I think people need to sort their shit out if they're thinking that way.

Like, honest to God,

if I can think of

that's the opposite of rest in peace.

Like, if I could think of the exact opposite of rest in peace, it's commenting on a corpse's haircut.

Can you imagine that's going to happen to you?

You'll probably be dead years before.

I'm wearing a fucking bag in my head when I'm dead.

But

I have thought about

when I die, right?

I'm

so every single plastic bag that I wear, I never throw it away.

I keep them all.

So I've got thousands and thousands of plastic bags.

And I was thinking for the crack, right, when I die,

instead of a headstone, I'm just going to build like a giant kitchen sink, right?

A huge fucking kitchen sink.

And then I'm going to get every bag I ever wore and put it inside a larger plastic bag and put that under the kitchen sink that is my coffin or my fucking

Or just hop into a

I'd love to throw my corpse into a hot air balloon.

You should put write that down, I'll make it happen.

Do you ever help with that?

With like people with

very strange requests.

Yeah, actually, some people have some really interesting requests, and I do write them down in my phone to remember for myself.

You know, there was this, I'm sure you must have seen it, it went all around the internet, where the boy recorded himself knocking, let me out, let me out.

The fuck, could you imagine?

and i i could see me doing that especially because of the job i do you know big gas wouldn't i

what about um

what what are the laws around that stuff though would you get people

you can do what you want with ashes can you i think so you can get your ashes made into a tattoo and stuff and you can get them made into jewellery into jewellery yeah um I know America is a bit more liberal.

The writer, Hunter S.

Thompson, I think he had himself himself shot out of a cannon.

That was interesting, yeah.

Yeah, but like...

But somebody has to go and pick him up, don't they?

Like, where did he go?

Actually, no, it was his ashes shot out of a cannon.

Oh, that's better.

Yeah.

Sorry, that's a big difference.

That's a huge difference.

What's the role of pets?

The role of pets in death.

Like, when my dad was dying, it was really shit that we couldn't bring the dog along.

The dog just wasn't allowed into the hospice.

And And see, he is now.

The dogs are allowed in now.

Personal dogs.

Yeah, and horses are allowed in.

Yeah.

Well, that's fucking great.

We had to get a surrogate dog.

Yeah.

It's about getting a surrogate wife.

You have a relationship with your dog.

It's like...

So my dad's dog wasn't allowed in.

We held him up outside the window.

But then they had like this...

communal hospice dog

that you had to project your own dog on top of and it just felt a bit wrong

it's like cuddling somebody else's wife, isn't it?

And that's it.

Have you ever seen any animals

act strange?

Because people would say that animals can sense things that we can't.

I do think they can, yeah.

Have you ever experienced that?

No, personally, no, I haven't.

But my own...

In our own experience, my brother, when he died, the dog would not leave.

He lay under the coffin the whole time, would not leave.

Didn't eat,

didn't go outside the house.

He stayed under the coffin for two days solid.

So, like, the dog understood.

Must.

The dog was mourning.

Yeah, oh, the dogs, the animals definitely mourn.

They definitely mourn.

Like,

there's this wonderful little statue in Edinburgh called Greyfriars Bobby.

And it's a statue of a little terrier.

And it's outside a graveyard called Greyfriars.

And it was a terrier, and his owner died.

Dog just stayed there every single day for like seven years.

You know, the dog just understood.

No one showed the dog that's where he's buried, just that was his duty, and that's what he did.

Um,

hold on, I see.

I had so many wonderful questions from the internet.

What about how do you bring the family into it?

The family into the process of the into the pro like.

I'm assuming it's not like when someone's dying, like you've got the people who are going to be bereaved as well.

So,

do you ever have the entire family in the room or everyone all of you together speaking about deaths oh actually yesterday just yesterday um i had to go to a house and there was a person who

who has an end-of-life diagnosis and everybody her husband her children were all in denial these are all adult children now they were all in denial and as in I don't think she's that bad.

I mean, she looks good.

And two of the daughters had gone to meet

the consultant and he explained to them in very clear terms, it's short time, could be before Christmas.

Now, this woman's up and walking about and you know, not driving and doing everything that she's, but her disease is still very progressed.

And

so, we had to have first, and I kind of try and break it up because it can be very, you know, very hard for people if they're all in together.

One will trigger the other.

So, what I did was break them down into kind of groups.

So, I spoke to two, and now I'm already working with the patient, patient so I've been working with her for quite a while and so she didn't need to be in in the first instance her husband he's like he just just says I don't want to have this conversation and I said I know how difficult this is it's really really tough for you but the reality is that this is what's happening and her disease has gone very they said maybe Christmas they've told her to get her affairs in order and she can't do that unless we have this conversation so that you can so that you can support her through this.

it gives the person who's whose life is ending gives them a bit of power it gives them a bit of i'm in control here i can i can decide what i'm going to do what i'm not going to do i i love doing a thing called a what not to do list you know people have to do this and do that and do the other what things do you not want to do you don't want to you know who do you not want to have time with but so speak to him what is the purpose of a

a what not to do list it's like it's like a kind of a ficket list i'm not these you learn more from the what not?

Of course you do.

I'm not going to listen to what other people are saying.

I'm not going to do this because somebody else thinks I should do it.

A what not-to-do list coming near the end of your life.

We should have them now.

Yeah.

Never mind when you're coming near the end of your life.

But so for that house, the youngest child in the family, obviously finding it very difficult.

It would be unnatural for them to say, okay, that's fine.

Oh, that's grand.

Thanks for telling me that.

Of course, there's tears.

That's normal and healthy.

Of course, there's resistance.

Normal, healthy.

But then, when we could all come in the room together, and they could sit, I'm sitting in a chair a little bit further away, and they're sitting on the two sofas side by side, holding each other's hands.

And saying, So, we've got some time.

We are very lucky.

We know that your mother still has some time.

So, there are some things she'd like to do.

We've discussed them.

She hasn't been able to discuss them with ye yet because she didn't want to upset ye, and you're trying not to upset her.

But now that it's all out in the open,

that woman will run with these last few good weeks before she actually gets really unwell.

And they'll make the most of it.

Her daughter will come home from where she's working away and stay at home.

It'll be lovely for them.

And if we didn't have that conversation,

you know, it'll run up to the end.

We all know she's dying and nobody got to do or say the things they wanted to say.

And how much of what you do as well?

Are you consulting with...

with say a medical professional and what i mean by that is

like

so my own die right he got six weeks to live.

I'd say

there was maybe about two weeks of that where he was present, you know what I mean?

And then the rest of it, there's not much he could have done, you know what I mean?

Because he was effectively in a coma.

How much, like, would you consult with a professional and say, right, so this, this, this lady here, she, she might have until Christmas.

What's the window for her to do something meaningful here before she progresses into the illness?

Often, like, so we'd call them MDTs.

I'm not always invited to MDT if I'm being honest and you prefer to be outside of it because then I say to the patient so what do you know that's happening?

So they get to tell me.

So but sometimes I'm included and sometimes a referral

too.

And a referral will come through a GP or it'll come through a consultant or whoever.

That's fine.

I'll go where I can go.

But they

I like to kind of separate myself a little bit.

Like I've been a psychologist for a long time and

my job, I feel, is to help to empower them that they finish their life the way they want to, as best we can.

Obviously, like, some people do want to do mad things like throw their body into a hot air balloon, but most people just are happy enough to kind of you know go away for a weekend with their family and do something nice.

Are you shaming my proposed death?

I'll sort it, I'll sort it.

Um,

so it's it's

it sounds to me it's it's humanistic psychology.

Everything is client-led.

And so it should be.

And it should be patient-generated.

Now I have to be honest to say,

like I have a fine son who's in the medical profession and he they're actually moving it back to being more person-centered, I think.

Wow.

I do genuinely think it is.

It used to be like you wouldn't be able to, like I know hospices have changed a lot for

how people see death and dying and it's a home from home and all the rest of it.

But it's still, you know, there's still tubes and all the rest of it.

You said to me a minute ago, would you have all the family there?

A lot of the times when it comes near the end, the nurse will come in and remove all the tubes and wires and things and the family will get to do what they want to do and I'll already have told the family what the person wants, what the person in the bed wants to happen.

Because there can be simple little things like I want you to say the rosary or I don't want you to say the rosary.

I remember waking up one day myself, I was sick, which is why I got into this job.

But I remember waking up from, i i don't know what it was it must have been some kind of a coma too i don't know but and the priest was there anointing me and and one of my brother-in-laws was beside him and i i literally thought what the hell is that because i was coming around going like what and there's this priest who i like no no and and i'm lying in the bed going do these feckers think i'm going to kick my clogs like i was only a young woman but So some people don't want the priest and some people do want the priest.

And so it's usually they're very simple requests.

It's usually not anything too major.

But even if my request was a small, simple thing, at least I'm in charge of my request.

I'm in charge of

how this show ends.

Do you...

Something I remember from

my dad literally dying, like actually, because I was present in the room when he died,

helping the person for them to let go.

And it was something I think there wasn't a death doula, but someone in the hospice had said to my ma, you need to encourage him.

When it happens, we let you know when it's happening.

It's important that everyone tells him to let go.

And I remember being young, going, How the fuck?

Like, what the fuck even is that?

Is that part of your like letting go?

Like, what does that mean?

Is it like drifting off to sleep?

Like, for me, I think the letting go is that the body now has died or the body is not going to get better it's the body is surplus requirements anymore and that energy that you know that whatever that energy is that whatever you want to call it soul always sounds a little bit fuzzy but whatever it is whatever you that that me that isn't just my body and when that when it's coming near the time where that the body is going to die that needs to go somewhere And so when people are saying, tell him it's okay to let go, tell him that, you know, that you're going to be okay, that he can go whenever he's ready to to go or whatever that what you were told to do and what you're doing is you're saying to them don't you don't need to fight this death it's it's a natural progress into whatever might be into nothing but it's still the next step it might be into nothing or it might be into heaven whatever you want to believe and to allow them that we're going to be okay because i've seen people hang on and hang on and it's you said the avoidance of suffering human beings we move away from suffering and towards pleasure as often as we can it's a human condition and when we're dying sometimes the person in the bed is hanging on and suffering more than than they need to even if they're not in pain because thank god now people aren't in pain but when you say hanging on is it is it a physical act or an emotional act or is it a tension I to me it's definitely a tension.

It's a resistance to letting go of this body, this bit.

It's a resistance to letting go of that.

And

if you're younger,

if you're afraid to go, I can see why a person would hold on.

I don't know why they would hold on.

And then when the people that love you say, it's okay for you to let go, we're going to be okay and you're going to be okay.

They have to be okay because it's the next step anyway.

We can't stop it.

We can't undo it.

We can't, there's no other exit.

That's it.

And so it just helps the person because you're hearing is the last sense to go.

And so I always, I remember being in a house and they were all young adults and the mother had already died and the father was dying and they were they were lovely look but they'd never

they were very young when the mother died the youngest was only three so they were very young when the mother died and when the father was dying they just didn't know what to do and to have me there i'm hovering in the background like a piece of furniture i'm not you know i'm not in the middle of it i'm i've already done all the given them all the support they needed before this and and just reassuring them that you know your daddy can still hear you you can go back up and talk to me again if there's anything you want to say now's the time And I'm staying way back.

That's their precious.

Now, I do feel I become part of the family.

Sure, I could be in out houses for a year and a half or two years.

You know, if a person went from diagnosis to death, I could be in a note for a long time.

And I grieve.

I grieve them as well.

These are people that I've had

very intimate, very, very intimate conversations with.

And I just love that word intimate because I think helping somebody to come to the end of their life is extremely intimate.

And the word intimate comes from, into me, you may see.

And so they let me see into them.

And I get to experience them in a very, very deep, profound way.

How do you then navigate

emotional burnout?

Like, do you see a supervisor?

If you're working my work, I'm a supervisor myself, but you have to see a supervisor.

It's just part.

It's part of the...

keeping the thing safe and that everybody's doing what they should be doing and having it kind of you know that it that there's an official way of doing things and not doing things.

But for me, we play a lot.

Play a lot.

It's just, it's just.

Play as part of supervision.

Play as part of being married.

Play as being part of being a mother.

You know, just keep it light.

It doesn't.

It's not that I don't take people home with me in my heart.

Of course I do.

Of course I do.

But I know I'm no benefit to them or myself or anybody else if I carry all that heavy hurt.

Because then I go into the next house and I'm bringing energy that shouldn't be there.

So it's

I'm fairly good at letting go of what I need to let go of.

I don't let it go in my thoughts, but I remember them, of course.

So, for

your own mental health practice, for your own head, like

what are you doing?

What's standing to you with keeping yourself

grounded and present?

I suppose I'm doing the job a long time, which helps, even though I've met very new psychotherapists, very new psychologists who are really good at their job job too.

It comes as part of the work.

You know that it's like you're, do you remember, I mentioned to you about energy, like our emotions are energy.

And if I'm with somebody who's come to the end of their life and they're really struggling or the family all around them are really struggling, I'm a compassionate person and I pick up their energy.

And so I have to do certain rituals that I do.

I kind of visualize having a kind of a Velcro coat.

And that when I'm leaving that house, I take off that Velcro coat that all the emotions are stuck to and I hang it on the nearest tree.

Wow.

And I pick it up on the way back again.

And it's symbolic to me, but it works.

But it works.

Jeez, that's fucking gorgeous.

Me or the coat?

That's amazing.

That is so the visualization of that helps you.

You're seeing other, you're seeing

grief, and everything is sticking, and you can take that off.

And that visualization.

And do you meditate?

Are you into breathing?

I absolutely love holotropic breath work.

I do it regularly.

And it's just, I remember Ivor Brown, you would have heard of Ivor Brown.

He died earlier in the year.

He was one of my lecturers when I was training.

And Ivor was big into holotropic breathwork, emptied wards in St.

Brendan's Hospital in Dublin himself and Dr.

Jim O'Nahu.

And they trained me in.

holotropic breath work and for myself it's I remember one of them saying at one time it's like a general absolution you don't have to say because sometimes there's too much trauma if the person has a huge amount of trauma in their life and then they come and they have to start to tell you every single thing that ever went wrong or where somebody hurt me that can be re-traumatizing and obviously we'd be very careful in dipping in and out but the the holotropic breath work just helps to lift it all it's and you don't it's like you know that thing the rising tide floats all about well the holotropic breath work lifts all the traumas and then we have to go back and pick up on on the cognitive things but it's people ex express sort of, or people say they feel like there's a lightness in their body afterwards.

I have a young fellow that I'm working with at the minute, and he's had a lot, he had a huge birth trauma, like very almost died, birth trauma, and mother almost died.

It was really traumatic for all of them.

And he, so in his lived world, there was nothing, there was nothing, like he wasn't abused.

The only thing that they could identify was this birth trauma.

And he's like 26, 27, lovely lad.

And talking just doesn't get to it from him.

It just gets no relief.

He gets really tense in his body.

That's the pre-verbal.

Yeah, that's the yeah, exactly.

And so, if your trauma is pre-verbal and I'm trying to make you talk about it,

it feels like you're going around in circles.

You're like, I am not getting relief.

I'm not getting, I don't feel like I'm getting this out.

And for him, the breath work, he'll go, oh, just feel great now.

He absolutely loves it coming out.

Yeah,

I find it very powerful.

And

breath work is like how it's hardcore meditation.

It's meditation, but it's really deep breaths and very focused.

Is it like Wim Hoff?

It's a bit like that, but it's actually almost like,

so it's kind of like you, like if anybody, I'm sure you've all heard of neuroscience, but how the mind and the way you think about it and how it affects your body and how your body, the feelings, how you think about these feelings.

And so with

like with neuroscience and psychotherapy, we now understand how the mind, as opposed to the brain how the mind experiences trauma and how the body remembers that trauma and stores it in the body so it kind of leaks out every now and again when you when it gets too high and so with with breath work and with with anything that is non-verbal so any type of process that you're doing is non-verbal breathing is non-verbal like so you breathe all day every day you don't tell yourself to breathe you don't tell your heart to beat you don't tell your blood pressure to stay stable all of that happens automatically.

That hind part of the brain controls all that.

And so, for this, every system in the body, when your body gets stressed, your cortisol, which is one of your stress chemicals, rises.

And so, when the body gets stressed, your body feels different than it does when you feel relaxed, obviously.

And so, when the cortisol rises,

your breathing gets

sharper, you breathe harder.

Like a panic attack, you're looking for the breath.

Or even not as not as dramatic as a panic attack, but you know, just your hum of anxiety.

A little bit of that kind of edgy feeling.

and you know the body starts to give you little signals it starts to you know twitch a little bit or or you feel tension in your shoulders or you're or somebody some people as a self to bite their fingers or bite their nails or pick their skin different people use different ways of doing it but in neuroscience what we know is that you cannot control your heart.

You can't say heart slow down.

So when you get a fright or you trauma is re-experienced, your heart goes faster.

Your breathing gets more shallow.

Your body sends a message to your brain.

Something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong.

And the brain's going, what is it?

What is it?

What is it?

The body's still experiencing this really uncomfortable feeling.

The adrenal glands start to pump chemicals into your body, causal stress, chemicals, neuroadrenal.

And so they're all being pushed into your body.

Your body now feels like something terrible is wrong.

Imagine if you're coming to the end of your life and feeling like that.

You can't control

your endocrine system.

Your stomach actually starts to make acid because it thinks you're going to have to fight or run away from something.

And so all of these systems are going.

And you're wondering why you're feeling nervous or anxious or stressed because all of these systems are happening in your body simultaneously.

And the only one, it's like a domino effect, the only one that you can actually get in and control is your breath.

So when we do holotropic breath work, it's really fast, deep breathing.

And it's kind of like I explain it to people who aren't, we'll say, you know, who don't understand neuroscience.

you know, younger people, whatever,

most of us don't.

I didn't understand neuroscience until I learned it.

So, you know, I wouldn't expect anybody else to know it.

But when they, when, when we're doing it, the way I explain it is that you're breathing really really quickly and your body now thinks you're in a stress situation but you're sitting back in a recliner chair nice and relaxed so the message is going to the brain something's wrong something's wrong and the brain's going I don't think there's something wrong because he

looks really comfortable sitting here maybe we're misinterpreting something so what you're doing is you widen this window of tolerance to stress And it works really well for a lot of people to widen this window of tolerance so that your system doesn't kick in too early and say whoops something's wrong is it something anybody could learn on youtube like just from videos no no no you do have to have a coach do you to be honest not even so much a coach as a minder you need some because wow big stuff can come up like i if i only met so if i only met you and we'd done five six ten sessions i don't have half of your story but so you you never can do it on your own you have to be with somebody so it's not safe to do it on your own you're just it's that's exactly how people describe the therapeutic use of psychedelics.

Yeah, probably.

You can't just go and do the MDMA on your own.

This is not just a thing you take.

This is a whole suite.

So are you speaking about holotropic therapy then?

Well, it's holotropic breath work as a tool in the therapeutic process.

Okay.

Now, I have people at the end of life who love that little bit of relaxation that it gives their body.

So there's different degrees of it, obviously.

You know, you can use like less or shorter sessions.

But people always seem to describe it as feeling much more relaxed in their body.

We do a lot of stuff.

If anyone in the audience or anyone listening wants to do a bit of that, because it sounds fucking class, like what would we look for?

A halotropic therapist?

It's kind of usually only as kind of a tool, but we'll say Stanislav Groff was the man that sort of, I don't know, he invented it, but he came up with it anyway.

And he trains people all over.

People trained all around ireland all over europe america every it's very popular part of of psychotherapy but not everybody like a lot of a lot of girls and men trained with me when we did it but not everybody uses it i just i think if you feel confident in using it it works so well really does

and so you you look up polytropic breathwork online you'll find loads of people that do it but it is not something you do on your own absolutely not because you could there could be stuff going on in there that you don't even know because i've heard that about

it's it's it's something I recommend meditation a lot to people and a few listeners early days flagged with me you got to be careful about recommending meditation to everybody because some people have body trauma

and meditation could be very unsafe for that person because they may have been assaulted they might have been in a car crash and all of a sudden the shit is coming up because they're doing even a body scan.

And I didn't know about that.

I'd never thought about that, you know?

So I'm guessing that's what you're referring to.

It is.

And the thing is, some people's bodies, like you said, are not safe spaces.

And so you need the whole therapeutic kind of, you know, the

whole relationship and all the safety nets that are there so that you can go in and come out.

Titrate it, just in, take a little look, let's see what's in there.

So five minutes meditation.

Like meditation is like it's a buzzword, really, isn't it?

Like really all that you're saying is, can we just slow everything else down?

Forget about what's happened, what's happened before, forget about what's going to happen when you go out the door.

And you stay here with your body, your breath, and me, and I'll help mind you.

You don't need to worry, I'll mind you.

And to go inside and just see what comes.

And it might only be a minute or two, and then people can.

And what you're trying to do, the whole point of it is that you get comfortable in your body.

If you're comfortable in your body, you're comfortable in yourself.

It's you know, does what it says on the on the on the 10.

Mick, I, I, I was using meditation to

so that I could be mindful throughout my day a lot.

You know what I mean?

Like one thing I do, and I tell other people to do it, is

if I'm, like I said earlier, worrying about the future, what if, or thinking about the past and I want to be in the present moment,

I'll pick up an orange.

Oranges are great for this just because they're leathery.

And when you pick into an orange, it explodes and you might get something in the eye.

And it's the smell of citrus.

Orange is the...

I I think it's the most mindful fruit and I'm serious.

So if I want to get myself to the present moment I will eat an orange and that's all I'm fucking doing.

And every single part of that, I'm noticing the feeling of the leathery skin.

I'm noticing the smell, the explosion, the taste.

And I'm bringing every single one of my senses to just that orange and nothing else.

And the five or six minutes it takes me to eat that orange, that grounds me.

So, and what you're talking about there is coming to your senses.

You know, your mother said that I has no sense, or that, or that was a bit senseless.

And what you're actually saying is that you weren't present, you weren't being in this.

So, coming to your senses is just paying attention to your senses.

That's all.

That's all.

And then you have that sixth sense that you have.

Which, what's the sixth sense?

I don't know.

You have that's a bit freaky, isn't it?

We all have a sixth sense.

The sixth sense.

So you know know, your normal senses, so pay attention to something.

So, pay it, listen to something.

What are you listening to?

What can you feel on your skin?

Is it warm?

Is it cold?

And you're just going through your five senses, and then you sit with it.

Just sit with that, and your sixth sense will speak to you.

Like, in your personal, I have a sixth sense.

Uh, you get that funny feeling about somebody, you either like them or you don't like them.

I liked you right away.

I think I'm not sure.

I thought he's nice enough, lad.

But some people don't get that vibe.

Do you ever sit beside somebody on the bus or you're in the queue at the post office, office and somebody comes too close to you and you're like, that's your sixth sense?

Mine,

I'm pretty handy at pattern recognition, but then I got diagnosed as autism.

And can it still be good, though?

Yeah, but like

my sixth sense, but it is pattern recognition.

Like I said, I got a vibe about this building.

I have a feeling if I, if whatever about this building, if I go researching deep into it, I'm going to find something class.

I bet you will.

I don't know why.

It's just, that's my sixth sense.

You're welcome.

Laura Coleman,

I cut it short there, I cut it short there at the clapping.

There was plenty and plenty of clapping, it's just it can sound particularly abrasive on the podcast, so you'll have to imagine the glorious round of applause that Laura got there.

What a wonderful chat that was.

What a humbling chat to reflect on death like that.

I'll be back next week with a hot take.

Thank you so much to Laura Coleman for that wonderful conversation.

I'll be back next week with a hot take.

Don't know what about.

In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, and feel grateful that you're simply alive.

That's enough.

That's enough.

Dog bless.

Okay, real talk.

Quitting or cutting back on nicotine doesn't have to mean changing your whole vibe or skipping out on your friends.

That's why I'm into Quit with Jones.

They make discreet, great-tasting nicotine mints.

So when everyone else heads out for a smoke break, you're still right there, fresh breath and all.

Plus, their app is actually helpful.

You can log your mints, track your progress, connect with other quitters in the community, even play this one-minute game that helps cravings pass.

And with the combo of digital support and nicotine replacement, studies show people have way better chances of sticking with it.

If you're ready to take a step toward quitting or just cutting back, go to quitwithjones.com/slash fresh 10.

You can take the free quiz and get $10 off your personalized quitting journey.

That's code FRESH10.

And just a heads up, the mints contain nicotine, which is an addictive chemical.

Jones is FDA approved for 18 years and up.

Hey, it's Mark Maron from WTF here to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

And I'm sure the reason you're listening to this podcast right now is because you chose it.

Well, choose Progressive's name your price tool, and you could find insurance options that fit your budget so you can pick the best one for your situation.

Who doesn't like choice?

Try it at progressive.com.

And now, some legal info: Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates: Price and Coverage Match Limited by State Law.

Not available in all states.