50. Living Joyfully By Facing Death With Grace with Alua Arthur

This is one of those conversations that changed me. "The only fact of our life is death," yet we spend most of our time trying to ignore it, instead of developing the tools to embrace it. But don't think for a second that this episode will bum you out or make you feel icky-it's quite the opposite!

Alua Arthur is the most prominent death doula in America today. She is seeker, a recovering attorney and the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization, where she has helped thousands of people confront this inevitable stage of life.

Her TED Talk, “Why thinking about death helps you live a better life” has received 1.5 million views since it aired in July 2023. Alua's work has been featured on CBS’s The Doctors and in Disney’s “Limitless” docu-series with Chris Hemsworth, as well as in Vogue, InStyle, the Los Angeles Times, The Cut, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. Alua’s journey to death work started when her family fled a murderous coup d’etat in Ghana in the ‘80s – a time of chaos and fear that dramatically impacted her life and influenced her restless, peripatetic spirit. Her new book Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life By Getting Real About The End is a deeply transformative memoir that encourages us to think about how embracing our mortality can help us lead better, more fulfilling lives.

WE COVERED:

• Our cultural obsession with youth and against aging-we shun elderhood and everything it's associated with, i.e. death
• We have a hard time accepting the one true fact of our lives: we are human and we won't be here forever
• Getting comfortable with death, it's a privilege to even be able to imagine how we want our death to come. It shouldn't come as a stranger
• Potato chips as self care
• The role that psychedelics can play in helping people facing end-of-life stages

RESOURCES:

Going With Grace

TED Talk

Book: Briefly Perfectly Human

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Work: www.ericahuss.com