Transcription
[music] It was somewhere around 10 or 11 p.m. when all of the sudden I had this sense of impending doom. And I remember looking over at my husband and telling him, "Clear as day, I'm going to die."
They immediately rushed me down to surgery. There were doctors and nurses surrounding my bed. They were dumping blood products into me as fast as I was pouring blood out. I was so cold. I was in so much pain. My whole bed was shaking from my my shaking. I was in shock. I remember glancing up at my monitor. And the monitor said 46 over question mark. And one of my last conscious thoughts was, "Wow, I didn't know it could read that low."
[music] And then all of the sudden there was no pain. I was no longer cold. [music] There was a sense of welcoming and nurturing even while I [music] was still present in the the hospital room and at some point I became unconscious [music] and my first thought at that point was oh yeah this is dying. It was a remembrance. [music and clears throat] It very much felt like something I had done before. It was not the least bit scary. And from that point forward, [music] I was no longer in physical reality. I was completely outside of our constructs of [music] space and time.
[music] >> [music] >> My name is Danielle [music] Slupesky and I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. We kind of bounced around a lot as a kid. I think my eighth grade year I went to three different schools. It was very clear to me that a lot of the things happening in my household weren't happening in my friend's household. [music] Lots of drinking, lots of arguing, lots of fighting, lots of money issues. That was a bit challenging to deal with. And the way that I got through was perfectionism.
Um I managed to be, you know, MVP of volleyball, basketball, softball. Eighth grade [music] year, I got almost exclusively straight A's. I developed really young kind of this duplicitous life, right? There were these things going on internally, things going on at home, things going on [music] around me that I was just distracting and stuffing down and then this really successful outward persona where it very much looked like I had it all together. I think part of why I've developed the coping mechanism of perfectionism was that I wanted to keep keep things together in the family and I [music] had this very real fear that if somebody really knew what was going on that maybe CPS would have gotten involved or foster care and like then my brothers and I would have been separated. I'm the oldest of three and my [music] next youngest brother is about 6 and 1/2 years behind me and then they're about 18 months apart and so it was a big thing for me as a kid to kind of make sure that we stayed together.
I also had a lot of medical problems as a kid, headaches, [music] migraines, I had seizures. My first big surgery was my tonsils and adoids and that was at 11. and they gave me a a liquid coding prescription and I remember my mom giving me the bottle, you know, and just kind of like, "Okay, well, here's your medicine." And very quickly I realized it was awesome, right? It felt great. It was distracting. It was numbing. It was, you know, euphoria. And I remember bringing her the bottle and saying, "Okay, well, I need more." And her being like, "Wo, wo, you're not supposed to be done yet." Right? [laughter]
At [music] 13, I was diagnosed with something called adolescent blouse disease. the growth plates in my shins closed [music] up inappropriately and so it caused kind of a deformity a bowing out of my lower legs. Um and so my first surgery I was 13 for that and my last one I was 18. [music] And so high school was wheelchair, walker, crutches, cane [music] for a big portion of of high school and which coincidentally was you know when Forest Gump came out. So, I got lots of those [laughter] Run Forest Run jokes constantly.
I graduated high school. [music] I don't remember what day graduation was, but literally the next week I started an EMT course at our local community college. [music] Um, got my EMT certification and absolutely loved it. I worked for a company that did kind of onsite [music] on scene medical care for concerts and festivals and at nightclubs in San Francisco and things like that. Um, I always joke, but it's true. I was hanging out in clubs before I was legally allowed to be in them. You know, I'm a little baby 18-year-old EMT. And after I started working as an EMT, it was just like, oh, I want to go be a paramedic. Got into NCTI, which is a paramedic school, because of my seizure history. Then realized I could not get an ambulance driver certification. [music] So, that track kind of felt like it got closed on me. and [music] I looked at what classes I already had, what was available, and said, "Oh, I'll apply for nursing school." So, I went to Cal State Hayward and got my bachelor's of science and nursing. [snorts] And immediately from there, I did my preceptorship in the emergency room at Eden. And it's so level one trauma center. It was [music] intense to say the least. A lot of trauma comes from things we do [music] to each other. lots of assaults, you know, gunshot wounds, stabbings. I was wholly unaware of how sensitive I was at the time. And I couldn't [music] I wasn't handling it well. And so my addictions just kind of took off working in the [music] ER. I was a great nurse. Like you wanted to be in my room if if you had something big going on. And the minute I would get off, it was either a drink or multiple prescription pills. But it was also fairly normalized in the setting that I was working in where many of us would get off at 7:00 7:30 in the morning and we knew the restaurant around that served alcohol at that time. [music] And we rationalized it by saying, "Well, we just got off work, right? Everybody else has happy hour. Why why shouldn't we?" And so that entire time I was addicted to prescription pills and drinking far too much. So, I was a very functional addict and alcoholic. [music]
In April of 2013, a group of fellow [music] nurses, we got together and we got a limo. We'd set up this, you know, kind of [music] booze cruise of our own, if you will. And somewhere along the line, I was [music] pretty much blacked out drunk and going to get out of the limo, my heel caught on the doors and I came [music] down on my my knee on the curb and I had a non-displaced, meaning it didn't need surgery, fracture of my femur. And so I was immobilized for 8 weeks. During that immobilization, being off work and home, unbeknownst to me, I [music] was developing a blood clot in that leg. And so when I went back to work in June, [music] um I was trying to make up money, make up PTO. And so I worked several overtime shifts [music] back to back. So literally a 16- hour shift. And my leg was really red. It was really sore. [music] And I did what all good nurses do. I grabbed an Ace wrap and I wrapped it up really tightly and I powered through. And when I came home that morning, it was June in California and nice and warm outside. And so I intended to go sleep in the backyard. [music] So, I was in my bathroom putting on sunscreen when I passed out cuz unbeknownst to me, that clot had moved from my leg up into my lungs. I had also right before with intentions of going to sleep in the backyard taken a whole bunch of medicine, right? I had taken a sleeping pill, pain pills, a benadryil that I got itchy from the sleeping or from the pain pill. So, what I call a handful of pills. And so when I passed out, I stayed down for somewhere around 8 to 10 hours. And the way I passed out, my head was actually [music] inside of our bathtub and my legs were on the outside so that the edge of the tub was kind of across my lower abdomen and hips. When muscles don't get blood flow, they die and then they release their protein into the bloodstream, which clogs up the kidneys. So, when my husband came home from work and we kind of start talking through, you know, what may have happened, we're kind of trying to figure out, you know, [music] did I break my back? Did I hit my head? You know, what happened here? Because my legs did not work. I couldn't move my legs at all. Um, so we called 911 and they took me to our closest hospital. In the ER, they found this large clot in my lungs. It's clear that I'm in kidney failure. So, I ended up being admitted to the ICU. I entered the hospital at 67 lbs. And fast forward to day 10, I was 209. So, I was just blown up with fluid everywhere. At one point, I mean, the the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet literally split open, right? There were just blisters on my legs of fluid eking [music] out of me. and a resident at the time decided that she would help relieve some of the pressure in my abdomen and make it easier for me to breathe by doing a procedure called a paracentesis where they stick a needle into your abdomen to drain fluid. So when this resident did that um [clears throat] and she did the procedure inappropriately too, she wasn't using an ultrasound to guide it um and so instead my bowels were perforated so she just poked holes in my intestines. And so over the next 2 days after that, I slowly leaked stool into my belly and became septic. [music]
It was somewhere around 10 or 11 p.m. when all of the sudden I had this sense of impending doom. And I remember looking over at my husband and telling him, "Clear as day, I'm going to die." They immediately [music] rushed me down to surgery. They were unable to complete that first surgery and sent me back [music] upstairs opened up. And so in that first 36 hours, I think they went in three different times. Because I was so swollen and it was such a major effort to do all of this, they used something called retention sutures, which [music] are the same type of thing somebody that has open heart surgery will have. And then they needed to restart the blood thinning medicine because I still had this blood clot in my lungs. So they [music] restarted Hepin. Then this incision bled out. There were doctors and nurses surrounding my bed. They were dumping blood products into me as as fast as I was pouring blood [music] out. And I remember like I was so cold. I was in so much pain. My whole bed was shaking from my my shaking. I was in shock. I remember glancing up at my monitor and the monitor said 46 over question mark. And one of my last conscious thoughts was, "Wow, I didn't know it could read that low." And then all of the sudden [music] there was no pain. I was no longer cold. There was a sense of welcoming and nurturing [music] even while I was still present in the the hospital room. And at some point I became unconscious and my first thought at that [music] point was oh yeah this is dying. It was a remembrance. It very much felt like something I had done before. [music] It was not the least bit scary. And from that point forward, I was no longer in [music] physical reality.
I did not have a moment of out of body where I was observing everything happening. It's like once I was out, I was elsewhere. And from that point, everything feels like it happened all at the same time. I was completely outside of our constructs of space and time. It's taken me a long time to even pull apart individual pieces of this to be able to put them into language. And so at some point I found myself. And when I say myself, I was not Danielle. I was me, right? I I feel like I'm currently playing the role of Danielle. Um but at this point, I was that larger infinite me. And I didn't have a body at that point. Um, I could [music] see 360 but not just in one plane. It was more like a spherical form of vision where I could see everything everywhere. And [music] the light, it was directly above me and it was it was [music] everything. It was very similar to when you're swimming [music] and you're down below the surface of the water and you look up and you know where the sun is. There's this focal point of light, but it's very diffuse [music] and kind of sparkly around the edges. It was God, [music] source, universe, right? Whatever terms like we try to use human wise, that light felt like the totality of everything. And [music] I knew that I was a part of it. I came from it. I belonged in it. I've never felt a sense of homesickness or longing for anywhere on the planet. [music] You know, we moved so much as a kid that felt like home on a level that I'd never experienced here. And yet, I had no way of getting to it. I had no propulsion method, right? It felt very similar to a dream where like if you're trying to run and you can't, you know, or you're trying to swing or punch and you just can't. And so it felt to me in that moment it was a sense of desperation and it felt like drowning. Not because it was painful or because I was scared but because I needed that light just as much as I need oxygen now. It felt that way to me that I needed to be in the light part of it just as much as I have to breathe now. And so it was very much that of just this knowing that that light was everything.
At some other point or at the same time, I [music] found myself in this room. It was just this big huge expansive space, but it felt very [music] mechanical, similar to the way that a a revolving door is arranged [music] like like this or a um an old Kodak slide carousel, [music] you know, very much that setup where each one of these little individual sections was somehow both a still shot that I could look at like a photograph. It was also a movie or a 3D holographic sort of rendering of this experience that I could look at third person, but I was also somehow in the experience as myself, but I wasn't just experiencing it from my perspective. It was from the perspective of everyone else also in the room. It's like my perception split in all of these different ways in this one moment. And at first I had time to really sit with and be in each one of these experiences. I was able to know exactly what other people were thinking and feeling. I was also able to experience in very real time the effect and um impact of not just my words and my actions, not just the external parts of me, but also my thoughts and my energy. And I seem to have a tiny bit of access to what happened to a person prior to this interaction we were having that gave them the perspective that they held in that moment, right? like this is why they're perceiving me this way. This is why they feel the way they do. And I also had a little bit of access as to how this interaction changed them. I'm now very aware that every interaction we have, we're sending someone either off in a neutral position, right, or a more positive or a more negative place than they were before we started together. There were moments where, [music] you know, I did something great, right, and they felt really good. There were moments where I was doing a lot of wrong, right, or bad things, quote unquote, and those didn't feel good. It was a sense of discerning for myself, right, what felt good in my body and what didn't. [music] So, it wasn't like I was judging, but I was analyzing, right? And I was doing it with the same sort of energy you might teach a kid how to tie their shoes with, right? Where if they get it wrong, you know, you don't necessarily scold them and and punish them. You're just like, "Nope, let's undo it and try again." And it so it was very much that motherly nurturing sort of way that I was reviewing all of Danielle's experiences. [music]
And so now I recognize very much the impact of [music] our interactions as people, right? And sometimes an interaction can be as simple as you're driving down the road and you have a judgmental thought about somebody walking on the sidewalk. We may not think that that has an effect, but it does. And so this whole experience made me way more conscientious about those experiences and interactions that I'm having with people. And I have a much deeper awareness of [music] my thoughts and my energy, right? And so this this idea of leading this duplicitous life like I used to just doesn't work anymore because it [music] it's so clear that you can be doing all of the right things and saying all of the right things on the outside, but if the intention behind those things [music] isn't pure, it's almost just as bad as doing bad things. And the difference between doing something again with [music] conscious intention and living and doing things completely unconsciously. I was living a very unconscious life. You know, it was kind of like what do I need to do to get through this workday, to get to the the end of the day, to get through this [music] week, to get to the weekend, to maybe get a vacation at some point this year, you know, and just in survival mode, just getting through. And I had a lot of self-hatred might even be the right word, you know, like I we were so far away from self-compassion or self-love. There was this [music] deepseated belief in my notworthiness, [music] in my not good enoughness. And part of what I also realized in this experience [music] was that treating myself internally that poorly [music] again felt just as bad as when I had actually done something to another human or said something bad to another person. It [music] had the same effect in the same feel to me. And so it it's changed not only how I interact with the outside world, but how I my internal dialogue and how I treat myself.
Some of these memories were ones that I would have considered inconsequential, but it felt like I went through every single moment of my life at one point or another during this experience. One of the the memories that has stood out probably the most to me was first or second grade. [music] There was one girl in our class that was kind of always bullied. And now looking back through adult eyes, she was clearly being neglected and likely abused at home. And there were these three popular girls, right? As [music] as popular as girls can be in first or second grade. And they were bullying her. And the three of them were standing kind of had her cornered against a wall in kind of our courtyard area. And I was playing on the playground on the monkey bars. And I saw it happening and I jumped down and I ran over there full steam ahead and I got between them and I laugh at myself so much but cuz tiny me literally hand on my hip finger out shaming these girls you know letting them know that what they're doing isn't okay. And in that moment I felt what it felt like to be shamed right that that these girls knew that what they were doing was wrong. But I also felt like what it this other girl felt to be stood up for. And this is one of the things about um recognizing your impact in interactions is that this was one of the first times anybody made her feel worth [music] standing up for, that she understood her own value. And I was able to see how that that one little moment shifted [music] things for her. Um, and so it again it was very real in that moment and still gets me because it recognizing how much we have an opportunity to harm or to heal in everything we say and do. If that moment gave her this opportunity to view herself in a new way, where did she then take that, right? Who else was she then able to help and heal? And so very much feels like kind of flinging pebbles into a clear smooth lake where you watch all of these little ripples and they all bounce off of each other and it just keeps [music] going. [music]
I had tons of time to be with each one of these things and to feel through it and then it felt like it would click over. [music] it would just go to the next one and I was somehow all of a sudden in the next scene [music] wherever I focused I was like instantaneously. So kind of that idea of you know where your attention goes energy flows and so all all I had to do was focus on somewhere or something and I was there [music] and eventually that clicking started to happen faster and faster and to the point where it all felt like it was all happening all at once where I was experiencing my entire life from the perspective of every human I'd ever come in contact with all at once And as this thing was spinning, it seemed to create like a suction force or like a vortex where I started to be pulled upwards and there was no ceiling or floor in this apparatus that I was in. Um, but somehow I knew with everything in me that if I crossed this invisible threshold above me that I would not be able [music] to come back, right? That that was the end of it. And when I had that thought or realization, my husband was the next thing that popped into my mind. And I knew that he would not be okay if I left under those conditions. And so as I'm being pulled up and I'm getting closer and closer to this threshold, it it kind of makes me laugh now because I literally feel like I kind of put my finger up at God and was like, "Hold on a second. Give me a minute." Um because I had every intention of continuing on. I had every intention of going home. Um but I had to come back and say goodbye. So my thought process then, if I can even call it a thought process, it was just this instantaneous sort of happening was I'm going to go back. I'm going to say goodbye and I'll be right back. I knew that that meant I had to get back in my body, which was really broken at the time. I knew how painful that was going to be and was not looking forward to it, but I also felt compelled to do so. I had to. And the way I thought I could get out of this thing, this spinning room, was to kind of jam the gears or break it. And I punched, which still doesn't make a lot of sense cuz at that point I didn't have a body. I wasn't me. But when I did and I I pushed through the the spinning, it's like I found my husband's hand on the other side and we did this like cliffhanger moment where almost by fingernails [music] it felt like he pulled me and as this thing was spinning, I had to kind of flatten out. It felt very cartoonish. Um where [music] I flattened out and was kind of and like pulled back into my body.
From the 3D perspective, I had been reintubated, so I'm back on, you know, the ventilator. They'd pumped enough blood in me and blood products that I had stopped bleeding, [music] but I hadn't responded to staff or doctors or nurses at that point. When he got to my bedside [music] and was holding my hand and kind of, you know, squeeze my hand, squeeze my hand in my ear, I believe that's when I had this kind of I [music] have to go back moment cuz I sensed him in the physical world. [music] and I squeezed his hand and it was clear I was still in there. I don't even know how long after that before I actually became conscious, but my hospitalization was 3 and 1/2 months total. So, it was a long time after that that I was still in the hospital and still working through the physical ramifications of everything going on. [music]
All of our friends at that point were doctors and nurses. And I mentioned part of some of this story to a couple people who instantly um were very logical about it. And we're like, [music] well, that makes sense, right? You were hypoxic. You were low on oxygen. You were bleeding. You um the brain probably releases DMT when it dies. like all of the standard kind of materialism ways of looking at these experiences. [music] And so I just kind of shut down with it and did not talk about it any further. I discounted it myself. I did everything I could to discount it because the implications of it being real were far more than I was ready to deal with. I had been raised Lutheran and the God that I was taught about was not at all the things that I had experienced. [music] I didn't have a framework for this loving, nurturing, non-judgmental, open creator. I also didn't have any space for a lot of the after effects that I've now had [music] where I was empathic and sensitive to people before, but this is on a whole different level. in a crowd of people, I would all of the sudden be really angry [music] or be really sad or be really anxious and it would almost come and go as quickly as we were walking through the crowd. At times I would actually hear things, you know, that no one else heard. All of that together, I surmised I must be crazy, right? That somehow this experience has like induced schizophrenia. [music] And at one point I told my husband that I'm pretty sure I'm schizophrenic. I need to go see somebody. I've got to talk about this. Like cuz this isn't okay. I had no no place to put this other than pathology, right? I I pathized all of it.
The minute [music] I was cleared by the medical team, my husband and I moved down to the Virgin Islands. We sold everything we owned. We quit our jobs [music] and just said, "We're going to go make up go of it. I had started a very small house cleaning and property management business. So I I managed some Airbnbs for some [music] people and one of my clients was a gentleman that was pretty much a hoarder and had just stacks and stacks [music] of paper everywhere. And his wife had brought me in to clean his office while he was off having a medical procedure so that she kind of snuck me in to do this. And I'm cleaning around all of these piles and it was the craziest thing. I about a third of the way down in this huge stack of papers, I went right to this folder [music] that was kind of old and yellowed and like an old '80s looking report, you know, actually done on a typewriter. [music] And I pulled it out and I sat on his his bed and I instantly started reading it. And as I was doing so, I was scolding myself like this is highly inappropriate. Like what are you doing? Like you don't go through people's stuff. Like I've never done something like that before. But as I start reading, I realized that it was a thesis paper that a college student had written on near-death experiences. [music] And this gentleman was one of three that was interviewed. And he was a diver who had a scuba tank had blown up on the dock next to [music] him and kind of blown apart his his torso. And the way he described the light was exactly the way I do. and he described [music] this kind of circular sort of setup that he was in where he was reviewing his own memories. And I just started balling. I lost it because in that moment I knew, well, if someone else has experienced [music] this, it can't be just a hallucination or misfirings in my anatomical brain, right? That there was something here. And I went downstairs and just sat on their couch holding this thing waiting for them to come home. and they walked in and I'll never forget his eyes got huge when he saw what I was holding and he looks at me and sees, you know, that I've been sitting here crying and he he looks at me and he goes, "You've seen." And that just opened up this whole conversation. He had never even told his wife about this experience. [music] Um, again, who knows how long that folder had been in that stack of papers and never moved. Um, but that was the f the first time that I for sure knew that this was a very real experience. It wasn't something that I had just made up.
And then in 2017, we got [music] hit with hurricanes Irma and Maria back to back in the Caribbean. Everything grew mold afterwards. That mold growth got me really sick [music] again. And I got down to like 104 lbs. I was [music] lots of medical things going on. And part of that [music] healing process was me getting really quiet and [music] my voice came to me clear as day. Well, you're not doing what you said you were going to do when you came back. No wonder you're sick. And the message I received was it was like look you can exit if you want to [music] but like you wanted to come back and do these things. So let's do the thing. And then I had to kind of really sit with so this really was real [music] right and now I have to lean into all of that and what it means. And so I had this remembrance that part of what my plan was or the plan was with coming back was to help people understand that death isn't the end, right? That it's not this big scary thing. It's just a a transition into the next state of being, the next place of being, if you will. [music] And I eventually I came out of this experience and I told my husband, "Well, I'm supposed to be a death coach." Um, and he just kind of looked at me like I was crazy at first, you know, and I said, "Well, yeah, not a life coach, but a death coach." [music] And explained. And so I sat down at my computer and I Googled death coach. And then that's when death doula popped up. [music] And prior to that, I'd never heard the term. I didn't know it was a thing. Um, and so I immediately found my training school and did that. All of this was just kind of this remembrance of not only the experience itself, but kind of who we are, right, as as humans, right? That we're just it feels to me now like we're pretending, right? We're just kind of playing these roles for a while and like, okay, I've taken on the role of Danielle this goround. Um, and that's [clears throat] literally how I refer to it. It very much feels like this is a thing I've done before. I will do again in some other iteration. And for me, the the point of this goaround is compassion and connection. And how do I find it? How do I foster it? How do I cultivate it? Um, and working at end of life is kind of the culmination of that. It's the [music] it's the most humbling and rewarding thing I've ever done. And it kind of pulls together all of the experiences I had prior to becoming a nurse, right? the challenging things of childhood, the some of the traumatic events, the nursing experience itself, the medical care experience, the near-death experience, [music] like all of the sudden it's like it all makes sense. And it's like, oh, that's why I'm so passionate about [music] working with people at end of life and preparing for end of life, especially in this very intentional, conscious way. Because as we're preparing for a conscious death, we automatically start to live a more conscious life, right? just by virtue of having these conversations or listening to stories like this, it's bringing new awarenesses [music] into your sphere, right? You're likely to hug your kids a little bit tighter, right? be be a little nicer to your spouse. Um be a little nicer to yourself when all of the sudden you're very aware of the finite time that you have available. And that there is this infinite part of you that is here and learning and experiencing and and loving and losing and and all of the things that come along with being human. Um, we have so much opportunity as humans incarnated on this planet to experience and give and receive [music] and lose. And there's so much value even in those loss experiences. Life is very much like this tapestry. [music] Here we see the backside. So, we see all the loops and the the knots and the frayed ends and you get to the other side and it's like there's this beautiful picture that makes perfect sense [music] and every single one of those threads is necessary to make the picture make sense. And so, I say often like I would never give back any of my experiences. And I've been through some tough ones. Um when I was 11, my biological father and grandfather were killed by homicide in Oakland. And so [music] even that experience, right, I I wouldn't give back, right? It opened up so many opportunities for learning and loving and forgiving, right? To choose to forgive the man that took their lives. Like that's a that's a big ask for a human to do. And what a beautiful opportunity, you know. So, so much about my [music] experience and what I do now is to help people understand that, right? To understand that there's there's tons of opportunity for these sort of opening and awakening experiences. And you don't have to get sick to have them. You don't have to die to have them. [music] Um, but you do have to be conscious and intentional about it. You do have to choose to [music] see things from that sort of perspective. I now view all experience as an opportunity to learn. And [music] even when I am in the midst of really challenging experiences, I try in those moments to to kind of get into my [music] future self of what is here for me. There's always something here for [music] me. I don't believe life happens to us, right? Life happens for us. Um, [music] even the most horrific things. And there's there's value in even those experiences if we choose to kind of digest the experience and alchemize it into a meaning of some sort, right? Whether that's for us personally or for those that we can help with that experience, but that there's a purpose for all of it. I also feel like a lot of these things happen maybe because we're not on our path, right? We're not where we should be at at [music] a certain stage. And I think that that's exactly why I had the medical experience I did, right? I was living, like I said, extremely unconsciously really um negatively to myself. And [music] I think it was it was I needed the 2x4 upside the head.
>> [music] >> I think the purpose of life incarnating in a human body is experience. Just experience [music] that the one mind God, right? Your source universe. It's very similar to like a fish doesn't know that it's in [music] water, right? Because it's surrounded by water. pure white light and love energy that I believe source is is the culmination of all things. It's all emotions. It's all experience. It's all frequencies. [music] And therefore, it can't actually experience anything. It had to develop a system with which to feel, right, and sense and be and do. And [music] I think that that's what incarnating into a physical realm and a physical body is. The word doula is ancient Greek and it means a woman who helps or serves. [music] Um so we often hear about it in reference to birth and motherhood. But we do that same work on on either side of the I call it the opposite side of the same coin whether we're talking about birth or death. And it makes a lot of sense to me, especially when [music] I think it was Edgar Casey's quote that birth in the physical is death in the spiritual, right? And death in the spiritual is birth in the physical. And so it's again that idea, this continuous eb and flow of the universe. And it's almost now I think that the whole cycle is almost just like God [music] taking a breath. Every breath is a a new beginning and an ending, a new birthing [music] and a death. It's almost like the universe is just breathing us into and out [music] of existence. [music] Heat. Heat. [music]