You Don’t Need a Near-Death Experience to Remember How to Live
- Apr 20
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 22
Ken Breniman is a queer author, licensed clinical social worker, yoga therapist, and thanatologist guiding fellow mindful mortals at the threshold of life, death, devotion, and (r)evolution. His work blends neuroscience, primatology, Celtic wisdom, and psychedelic integration to invite braver ways of being human.
Let’s start with a little pop culture play before we get too serious. For years, I assumed that if Death Becomes Her ever got a sequel, it would be Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep leading the charge. But I wonder, would they still want to glamorously refuse death with a wink and a potion made by Bruce Willis, or would they finally let Death become the star of the show?
Instead, in a plot twist I didn’t see coming, it’s Nicole Kidman stepping into the conversation, openly sharing that she’s training to become a death doula after the loss of her mother.
Now that’s a real-life sequel I can get behind. And from this seasoned thanadoula, I’ll say it plainly, the more, the merrier. Because while Hollywood has often treated death as something to outrun, defeat, or digitally enhance away, real life keeps inviting us into a different relationship.
We’ve seen beloved public figures, including Bruce Willis, openly navigating serious health conditions. These are tender reminders that surrender is not a failure of the body, but part of the human experience.
Ms. Kidman’s coming out as a doula-in-training isn’t just celebrity news. It’s a timely cultural opening. And maybe, just maybe, an invitation to anyone willing to stay with it instead of walking out, changing the channel, or scrolling to something more comfortable.
This is not a how-to
Recently, I was interviewed by The New York Times about my work as a death doula. Even writing that feels a little surreal. Death, which is often hidden, sterilized, and avoided, is finding its way back into mainstream conversation.
The 2020 pandemic, as horrific as it was, helped stimulate that conversation. Now, more mindful mortals, like Ms. Kidman, are reminding us of the ultimate spoiler alert: none of us get out of this alive.
For someone who supports others in dying, I know that appropriate humor plays a role in softening some of the “bad news.” But here’s what didn’t make it into that interview. My relationship with death didn’t begin in a training program. It began early. Very early. And not just once.
A childhood car accident.Moments in altered states, through breathwork, plant medicine, and lucid dreaming. Experiences that felt like brushes with death, close enough to the edge that something in me reorganized.
Now, let me be clear, I’m not here to prescribe near-death experiences. You can’t schedule them like a yoga class. That’s not the point, although a little time in corpse pose doesn’t hurt, yoga practice or not.
Humans have a pattern: when something powerful emerges, we try to package it, sell it, condemn it, or control it. The medical system is basically doing that with psychedelics. We’ve done it with technology. We’ve done it with almost everything that carries transformational potential.
So while this isn’t about chasing the edge. It is about deeply listening to what the edge reveals. For me, what emerged wasn’t invincibility.
It was perspective. A sense that life is more continuous than I was taught. That identity is more fluid than I assumed. That death, while mysterious and often dreaded, may not be the full stop we imagine.
And interestingly, that hasn’t made me reckless. It has made me more precise about how I live this most precious life.
Death has been around for a very long time, we just forgot how to be with it
The role of a death doula may sound modern, even trendy. It’s not. It’s ancient. Long before hospitals and institutional care, humans died in community. Death was witnessed, tended, and integrated into the rhythm of life.
Across cultures, there have always been guides at the threshold. In many Indigenous traditions, death is understood as a transition, not a disappearance. Community members gather, sing, pray, and accompany the dying.
In parts of Asia, families remain physically present, tending to the body and maintaining connection through the final breath. In Tibetan traditions, teachings offer orientation through the dying process, not certainty, but companionship.
In Ireland, wakes invite storytelling, grief, and humor, offering a full-spectrum honoring of life and loss.
In many African traditions, ancestors remain in relationship. Death transforms connection rather than ending it.
What we now call a “death doula” is, in many ways, a way of remembering. Remembering that death is not only medical. It is relational. It is emotional. It is spiritual. It is communal.
Modern medicine has extended life in extraordinary ways. And, in the process, death has often been removed from daily life.
It has become something to manage instead of something to meet. So when people ask what I do, I often say, I help people find ways to become more mindfully mortal.
What the primates remember (that we complicate)
In the primate world, the one I keep returning to, we have an opportunity to learn the primal instincts around accepting death and letting go.
All of the great apes have been observed lingering with their dead. A gorilla mama carrying a stillborn baby on her back.A group of chimpanzees holding vigil, protecting a dead body.
We don’t fully understand what they experience. But something is happening. They don’t theorize death. But they don’t avoid it either. They remain in a relationship with it.
Spend enough time with primates, and you start to wonder what we began to forget when we came down from the trees and set out to become “civilized.”
Modern sapiens, on the other hand, seem to oscillate in a very human way. We either avoid death entirely. We sanitize it, medicalize it, push it out of sight. Or we over-intellectualize it until it loses its immediacy and sacredness.
Wisdom may live in between. Not in pretending we fully understand death. And not in pretending it isn’t coming. But in allowing it to be part of the conversation.
Why death is my most honest co-therapist
In my work as a thanadoula, I often say that death is my co-therapist. Death cuts through the noise faster than any modality I’ve studied. It has no interest in our personas or defenses. It asks direct, uncompromising questions.
Sometimes I joke that it’s like a strange multiverse collaboration, like if Thanos showed up and, instead of snapping half the universe away, sat down with the Avengers and asked: “Alright, what actually matters here?”
It’s absurd. And also deeply accurate. Because when death gets close, really close, something clarifies. What matters becomes obvious. What doesn’t quietly fall away.
What the dying keep trying to tell us
In my work, I hear this again and again from people nearing the end of life. I wish I had been more honest. I wish I had taken that risk. I wish I had let myself love more fully.
Not grand regrets. Human ones. These insights are not reserved for the dying. They are available now to anyone reading these words.
5 ways to access edge-of-life clarity (without almost dying)
So if we’re not chasing death, how do we access that clarity safely? You don’t need a crisis to wake up.
There are legal, intentional ways to step outside your habitual mind and access a deeper perspective:
Float tanks: Where sensory input drops away and the mind softens, often revealing what’s been underneath the noise.
Sound baths: Where vibration bypasses the thinking mind and reorganizes emotional experience.
Breathwork: Guided practices that can open powerful, non-ordinary states and emotional release.
Psychedelics (where legal and safely supported): Not shortcuts, but amplifiers that can temporarily loosen identity and deepen meaning.
Meditation retreats and contemplative reflection: Whether guided or self-directed, both create space to ask honest questions about how you’re living, right now.
Each offers a glimpse, not of Death itself, but of what falls away when we stop clinging so tightly to who we think we are.
We are born with the instinct to cling, just watch a baby orangutan, yet we must also learn the graceful art of letting go. And when identity softens, life-affirming clarity emerges.
You don’t need the edge, but you may need a reminder
So maybe the invitation is not to be flippant about or flirt with death. Maybe it is time to stop living as if you have unlimited time to become yourself.
To let mortality interrupt the trance. To wake you up. Because the people I sit with at the end of life rarely ask for more productivity. They want the truth. They want a connection. They want love that hasn’t been over-edited.
So perhaps the real wisdom is this: Live in such a way that your life does not require a last-minute apology. Live so your love arrives on time.
Live so that when death pulls up a chair, it finds you already in conversation with what matters most.
And if all this growing attention from the media, from culture, from unexpected places continues to build.
Then maybe, just maybe, we begin to shift the script, and instead of calling Ghostbusters when things get existential, we call someone willing to sit with us. A death doula. Someone who won’t run from the ending and helps you honor your final chapter with the dignity and grace your life deserves.
Read more from Kenneth J. Breniman
Kenneth J. Breniman, Grief Guide & Mindfully Mortal Therapist
Ken Breniman is a queer author, licensed clinical social worker, certified yoga therapist, and thanatologist whose work lives at the intersection of mortality, meaning, and transformation. Drawing from neuroscience, primatology, Celtic wisdom, and psychedelic integration, he challenges the myth of human exceptionalism while honoring the precious role each of us plays in the ongoing evolution of our species. Ken is the author of a three-body solution and subversive acts of humanity, and the creator of the See-Soul children’s grief literacy series. Through writing, teaching, and ritual-informed practice, he guides mindful mortals toward deeper humility, resilience, and collective becoming.
