Life Lessons From a Hospice Doctor: You Have It Completely Backwards

0:00Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. podcast.

0:07There's been a topic that's been coming up a lot in my life lately, and it's not exactly the lightest topic. So I was thinking, should we even talk about this? But the theme just keeps coming up. So I decided to pay attention to it and lean in because everything that happens to you in your life is teaching you something. Your relationships, your mistakes, your wins, the things that trigger you and just get you so mad, all teachers. And perhaps one of the most impactful teachers is death. It's a natural part of life. And lately it's been everywhere. I mean, just yesterday, my daughter was at a funeral for somebody who died so suddenly.

0:57Just a few days ago, I was talking to our other daughter who lives out in Los Angeles, and she was mentioning all these natural disasters in California that have been in the news and how much it scared her. And I said, well, why is it scaring you? And she said, well, what happens if something happens and I die? My mother-in-law, she's been coughing a lot, like a lot. And it's been going on for almost two years. And she keeps and says, oh, it's nothing. We all want her to get a scan. Why? Because we're afraid. We're afraid she might have something that's undiagnosed and might be dying. And in just a few hours, I'm hopping on a plane to fly to Nashville and give a speech.

1:39And it's, you know, one of those little planes. And as much as I love flying, I don't know about you, but I can never get on a plane and not have the thought of my death crossed my mind. And I'm not afraid of dying anymore because I've gotten to the point in my life where I'm so proud of all the things that I've accomplished and changed in my life. And I'm also so proud of the person that I've worked so hard to become, the amends that I've made. But whenever I do think about death, I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness because I just don't want to miss out on more of my life. And so as it just kind of keeps coming up, I thought, well, why don't you and I lean into this and talk about it together?

2:27And so I've reached out to a world-renowned expert who is so incredibly wise and comforting and profound. He also happens to be a triple board certified medical doctor who has spent a lot of his career with people at the end of their lives. and he is here today to share the wisdom and the lessons from what he calls the science of the soul, which is how to let death, the fear and regrets of people dying, near-death experiences profoundly shape your life.

3:16Hey, it's your friend Mel, and I'm so glad that you are here with me today so that you and I can spend some time together. It is always an honor to spend time with you. And I just want to acknowledge you for choosing to listen to something that will truly change your life. And if you're a new listener, welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast family. I am so glad you're here. And today I am absolutely thrilled for you and I to have an incredibly meaningful and profound conversation with Dr. Zach Bush, who is joining you and me on the podcast today. Dr. Zach is a triple board certified physician specializing in hospice care, internal medicine, and endocrinology.

3:58He is one of the most compelling medical minds currently working to improve our understanding of human and environmental health. He did his residency in internal medicine at the University of Virginia, where he was also the chief resident along with a fellowship in endocrinology there. He completed his hospice training at the Hospice of Piedmont, a community-based hospice center in Virginia, where he also became the associate director. He is the founder of the Seraphic Group, where he focuses on root cause solutions for human and ecological health. Dr. Zach is known for his work both in gut health and the microbiome and for his profound work with hospice and how you can learn from his extensive experience working with people near the end of their lives, from the regrets and the fears of people dying, and from near-death experiences.

4:50And more importantly, how you can use these profound life lessons to live a more meaningful life. Please help me welcome Dr. Zach to the Mel Robbins Podcast. It's a pleasure. Can you tell the person listening what they might experience in terms of their life changing if they take to heart everything that you're about to share with them today? It's going to change absolutely everything in your life. And that's going to be everything that is expressed through your being, which might be relationships. It might be jobs. It might be your different roles you're playing in your communities. It might be your spiritual practices, your religious worldview.

5:33And I think that that'll be an interesting place to go on the podcast, perhaps as we start thinking about death and dying. It's the only place we actually experienced it oftentimes in that last few breaths where we're suddenly like, oh my gosh, the whole thing was not a chase. Wow. I all of a sudden felt this tremendous sense of sadness. Yeah. To think that the biggest realization for most people is at the deathbed. Is at the deathbed. Over and over. you have spent so much time in your work with people who are either at the end of their life or who are dying or who pass on you have witnessed countless near-death experiences and you have so much wisdom to teach us have you ever had a near-death experience?

6:24I hesitate to call it near-death just because I was actually unharmed I think I didn't have an injury per se but I what happened? I was, this was in 2010, so I'd been in academia and all my trainings and practices and ultimately in faculty and all that at the University of Virginia after my training at the University of Colorado. So 17 years of just this very inside the box, Western medical mindset, you know, here's the drugs that are to save the world, here's the disease, here's the drug, all of that paradigm. I was developing chemotherapy and I was using vitamin A compounds to kill cancer. And so that was my world.

6:58And I found myself very depressed during those last few years as I started to watch the pharmaceutical companies placing blocking patents to keep these drugs from getting to market. And that was the beginning of a journey into kind of the unfortunate reality that we actually have a healthcare system that's really dominated by the need to manage disease instead of cure or heal. And so that was a pretty dark situation. I was in a couple hundred thousand dollars of school debt. My kids were heading towards college soon. I had no money, no savings account. I was working paycheck to paycheck. I was getting paid$70 ,000 a year in a university setting as a faculty member, a doctor, two sports specialties.

7:43And so I was just like trapped. I was financially trapped. I was energetically, emotionally trapped. And in that depression, I started just calling out for help, I think, to the universe to like, show me the other path, because this is a dead end and I can't figure out my way out of here. I worked too long to become the expert that I am. I can't imagine what I would do next. I can't spend any more money. I need to start making money, but I don't know how to make money. And a day came where the universe answered. And I just got this huge amount of information into my experience of like all this huge path that I was here to embark on.

8:16And I felt amazing. I was like plugged into the universe for the first time in my adult life, I think. And I just felt all of this clarity and all those things. and then I went home and a couple weeks later we had a large snowstorm in Virginia. I've never told this story on podcasts so I'm not sure how this is going to go.

8:35We had a huge snowstorm and I heat my home that I built with my family and kids. It's a log home in the woods of Virginia and I heat it by firewood and so I went out to chop a bunch of firewood in the morning before I went to the hospital and so I was working in the dark like five in the morning and chopping wood carrying an armful of wood, I slipped and fell and a piece of wood separated my ribs on the left, which is kind of a tearing of all the muscles between the ribs. So it was just a lot of chest pain. It wasn't, nothing was broken, but it was just pain. And so I finished working and got all that wood in there.

9:08And then I come back to the vehicle, which had borrowed my brother's four drive because this massive snowstorm had been forecast. And so we had 22 inches of snow. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, used to driving in snow, no problem, but snow is half an inch in Virginia, nobody drives. But you've also now got a hair between two ribs thanks to the firewood that like just basically lodged itself into your side. Yeah, it was an unfortunate slip. You don't have like a wedge of wood. No, no, no. It was internal. What's happened is it's now sending a lot of visceral chest pain through my body, which sets you up for the event that's about to happen.

9:45So I'm having that chest pain and I jump in the vehicle and brush it off cursory because I'm starting to run late to get to the hospital and I'd be one of the few doctors there. So in a rush to get there. And so I drive slowly for the six miles to get to the highway and you're driving over just pristine, untouched snow. And it's just like driving on marshmallows. I get to the highway, it's been plowed. So I call my wife, said, yeah, I'm fine. I'm amazed the highway is plowed, totally empty highways. So I zip up to 60 miles an hour and I start to relax and the heaters are on, defrosters, my body temperature shifts and I've got this left side chest pain and I suddenly do have something called a basal vagal event where all my blood vessels suddenly dilate through me relaxing, change of temperature, the chest pain, all that.

10:27And I passed out instantly. And I woke up in a river with no evidence that there was any civilization around. And I felt amazing. I felt like in that moment, There was just this, this bliss state. And I thought I had disappeared into a different universe or a different timeline of humanity. I don't know what happened, but I was on highway now, suddenly it's just river. And it's a, it's an ecosystem I've not seen in this area before. It just looks different and there's 20 inches of snow. And my first thought was like, wow, I just didn't picture snow in heaven. Like that's a lot of shoveling for eternity.

11:07It seems like, so I was just having this funny moment of like, not what I picture, you know, but it was beautiful. Sun was filtering through and it was just overwhelmingly white and peaceful. And you were, just you, no car, no nothing. I'm in the car in a river. Yeah. I looked down in my lap and my cell phone sitting there and I, and time sitting right on it. I pull up my last call. So it'd been seven minutes that I'd been out, which is a very long time for a vasovagal event. It's usually a couple seconds. And so I don't know what happened during that time. And it's not very important, but I experienced for a moment what I'd seen my patients do, which is experienced myself, felt myself for the first time as an adult or as a young child.

11:48I hadn't probably been in that state since I was, you know, two or a little bit before. The lack of fear, guilt, and shame, the lack of any sense of I'm incomplete to the sense of I am here in this new universe. And I've landed somewhere in space time and I've landed in this thing and nature is dazzling me. And I feel amazing. My body was like, I was not experiencing, you know, that chest pain. I was in an ecstatic state. And so again, whether it's just passed out, I have no idea, but the the state of being was, I think what set into motion my next few years. From there, I actually left the university months after that and started to realize all the companies and dreams that had been shown to me a couple of weeks earlier.

12:27And in that journey, I got a third subspecialty in hospice and palliative care. And so I was running a nutrition center for reversing chronic disease through food as my like kind of part of realizing my dream but to pay the bills because i wasn't making money in clinic i was working as a part-time medical director for a hospice and in that i was admitting 80 patients a week to die and when you do that for four years that adds up to a lot of you know death and dying and i had this new anchor point of i remember what it feels like to be without fear guilt and shame in my body i remember the elation of being whole for a moment and I remember how fast I fell out of it too as the day unfolded.

13:07And what had happened is I had passed out on the highway and I climbed out of the river. I was soaking wet in my doctor's outfit and I climbed up through all this snow and thought I was like in a wilderness and then suddenly got up to the top of this embankment and Highway 29 was right there. There was no cars on it, just empty. And then there's a man standing right in the middle of the lane. A man? A man. And he's a state trooper. State trooper hat, the whole thing. No car in sight. So then I was like, oh my gosh, maybe this is the gates of heaven or something. And this is obviously St. Peter.

13:37And of course, I would make him a state trooper in my mind. And so I'm like having this complete existential experience. And it starts to get really ridiculous in those next few minutes because he looks at me so confused, like very earnest. He never cracks a smile. He's looking at me climbing over this bank and I've got my doctor badge on and I'm in loafers and dress shirt and everything else. So I'm like crawling out of the woods. He's staring at me and he's like, son, how did you get here? And so then I'm like, oh, shoot, this is my resume. Like, this is, I got to get into heaven here. Like, I got to figure out what have I done well.

14:13So I started literally going through my life. Like, well, I grew up in this little church in Boulder, Colorado, and I'm the oldest of three kids and I was a great big brother. And I was this, and then I did this, and missions work in the Philippines and birth babies. And I'm a doctor, I'm a great dad, and my kids are in ballet and fencing, and I'm doing this stuff. And he's looking more and more concerned, which makes me feel like I'm failing the test. He's like, this guy's on drugs at seven o 'clock in the morning, driving through snow or whatever he's doing. Anyway, long story short, he finally stops me.

14:43He says, son, how did you physically get here? And so I just got really angry all of a sudden because I was at the end of my wits. I was just like, how the hell did you get here physically? And he, to his credit, then suddenly burst out laughing. He's like, that probably looks confusing as well. And he says, my patrol car's down around the corner of the highway. I got a call on my radio that somebody got off the highway and I was looking for you. And how did you get here? And I said, well, my vehicle's down that river. I don't know how I got there. He's like, well, let me show you what I just saw.

15:10And so he takes me back around the corner of the highway. And you can see where my vehicle drifted off the highway at 60 miles an hour, jumped a six foot embankment of snow that had plowed over the guardrails. And the vehicle had dropped about 30 feet off this cliff side and landed on two wheels and drove for about maybe 30 meters and then settle on the four wheels on this steep embankment, drives nearly a quarter mile around the corner on this embankment, finds the only break in the trees, takes a 90-degree turn, drives down into the river without touching a tree. And that's where I woke up. And so when he showed me that, I started to get this overwhelming experience of like, I just had an experience that was outside of my physical plane.

15:47There's something happened to me that can't be logic, you know, and I was extremely logical human being like I, I wanted to understand everything I was seeing all of the time. That's what maybe a great scientist and doctor and everything else. And this was just something that was so outside of the mental constructs that I could put nothing together for this. And it was exactly what I needed. I needed an experience that was so radically outside of my, my human mind that it would lead to a deeper state of surrender to my path, whatever was going to happen next. I love that the trooper showed you the accident.

16:23And here's why. When you described your car drifting off, jumping a 30-foot embankment, landing on two wheels, then driving a quarter of a mile, then taking a 90-degree turn through two trees that it missed and ending up in a river, and you were largely unscathed but left with a profound near-death experience, that changed your entire life. And you do strike me as somebody who is extraordinarily smart and logical that you needed the universe to deliver something unexplainable to wake you up to the reality that there's something bigger going on and you're going to be the one to figure it out. I wish I could say I was that easy to teach, but the universe was about to see how stubborn my human mind was.

17:13And so they actually managed to lift that vehicle out of the river by its back bumper with two tow trucks on different sides of the river. And so the vehicle was suspended 100 feet in the air and came across back onto the highway and sat down on its front bumper. The state trooper pushed on the roof just slightly and it just started to tip down onto its wheels. They lowered it down onto the four wheels. I got in and started up. It wasn't a scratch on the car, not a scratch on me. You drove to the hospital after? I drove to the hospital. Again, this is a situation where nothing is running in the town, so I knew it would be more time.

17:48By this time, it had been 45 minutes and I needed to get to the hospital quick. I was fine. I was unharmed, feeling actually amazing in my body and my spirit. I drove and worked at the 12-hour day, saw 700 patients that day. We only had six doctors running the entire medicine floors. It was a busy, busy day. Got home that night and by that night, I had already gotten disconnected from the experience. And so I was already back in my mind because I thrust myself right back in. You know, got to do everything, got to save the world. Duty, duty, duty, responsibility. This is what makes me valuable as a human being, as I can go and work my ass off in a hospital.

18:24And so by the end of the day, I'd already lost touch with him. And so here's probably one of the most important events in my life. And it only took 12 hours in the hospital to disconnect me from that event. So I went home that night. I hadn't told my wife much of what had gone on. I just didn't want her to worry. So I got home and told her that night and fell asleep at like 11 and the phone rings at 6am and I pick it up and this is Lieutenant So-and-so, we're looking for Dr. Bush. I'm like, oh, this must be the accident yesterday. Yeah, this is Zach Bush. He's like, we need you in Haiti, Port-au-Prince Bay in six hours.

18:55And he's like, wait, wait, wait, who are you? This is Lieutenant So-and-so from the US Navy. And we've got you on top of our list for large scale emergency relief. There was just a huge earthquake in Haiti and we're sending the Navy ship comfort into the bay right now. We need you on that ship to run a hospital ward. I was like, I'm not in the Navy. I'm not in this, but I had trained a couple of years earlier and deployed a large group for emergency relief for Katrina, which had happened in New Orleans. So that had ended me up on some Navy list somehow. And so six hours later, I was in Port-au-Prince Bay being dropped onto that Navy ship.

19:28And so that all happened in the 30-hour period. And so that's how stubborn I think my mind was, is I needed even a deeper schism and break from my reality at the hospital. And I worked on that Navy ship for a couple of weeks and took care of 780 women that had been crushed in that earthquake that became quite famous. And I needed to see all of that. And so the universe in a very short period of time took me out of my mental constructs and challenged me with a whole bunch of new realities that, again, just once I came back from that, I couldn't reintegrate into my previous belief systems. Dr. Zak.

20:03That story is incredible. And you know, I know there's someone in your life who needs to hear this. So we're going to take a minute to hear a word from our amazing sponsors who allow me to bring you this conversation and world-renowned experts at zero cost. And while you're listening to them, please share this episode with someone you love. And we'll be right back waiting for you after a short break.

20:40welcome back it's your friend mal and you and i are here today with triple board certified dr zach bush so dr zach what are some of the biggest takeaways and lessons that you've learned from being around so many near-death experiences from having a very profound one which you've just described, from witnessing so many people that have died in two natural disasters and as your work as a hospice doctor, what are some of the biggest takeaways that you have that you wish people who are living, anybody that can hear this would know? You are the most beautiful thing. You are the entire divine expression of your soul.

21:33And that's where the near death experience is a gift is it can actually feel what it feels like to be whole. It's not something to be achieved. You've always been whole. You were whole at the beginning. You will still be whole at the end of your life journey. If there's only a perception that you are incomplete right now, you are the most beautiful thing. This is what happens in near death experiences. If you can start to feel the universe, if you start to feel yourself, you start to realize you can access information. that never entered your mind. You know what I just freaking loved about both your story and the way that you're explaining this is that you've defined a near-death experience as a completely different thing.

22:20I'll never look at that term the same way again. Like it literally is a moment where you escape your mind and you drop into deep connection and wholeness. So how does somebody listening access what you've learned from near-death experiences and from witnessing so many people dying and caring for them as a hospice doctor? How do you bring that wisdom or that experience into your day-to-day life? You are right now clinging to everything around you out of fear that you're incomplete. You're clinging to your little rituals. It might be your morning cup of coffee. It might be the way in which you pack the kids' school lunch.

23:01It might be the way in which you drive to school. It might be the way in which you show up at work. It might be the way in which you organize your email box. You've got all these rituals in your day. This is the rituals you have developed. Anything that takes you out of that construct for a moment, when a child says something, you get goosebumps, or an elder speaks to you, and you get goosebumps. That is a momentary near-death experience. That's why child speak is so deep and often gives you goosebumps. when a child drops a wisdom bomb on you, lights you up in those goosebumps. That's an experiential moment of a soul speaking.

23:36If you've gotten goosebumps from anybody speaking to you, that's one of their moments where they just came into alignment with their coherence, their complete waveform of truth. And a child is always speaking from that space to a certain age, which is typically around age two, they start to learn how to watch behaviors around them. And this is when they start to get an idea of they are different than others. They're the kid and that's their brother. And so they're being trained to believe that they're separate from everything. And that's the split that you're talking about. And that's the terrible twos and the threes and everything else that are so difficult for a child because they're going from a state of being complete to the terrifying reality of they are incomplete.

24:17And that's why I think two and three look so difficult on the psyche of a child. And it's why they're so labile with their emotions and everything's overwhelming because they are starting to learn a reality of disconnected truths or disconnected to have truths. You know what I just got is that if you consider what you're saying, that any human being that comes into this world, you're born, that you are completely intact and whole and basically an expression of pure love and connection and oneness with everyone around you. and you can see that in a baby's eye, that if you then jump all the way to the end of someone's life and if you've ever been with somebody as they are passing on.

25:07They're whole. They're whole and your ability to look at them in the eyes with love, forgiveness, all of it is the now same experience. And if I think about my own experience of my life, there are those moments, whether, and, you know, I just cry, I think like one that comes to mind is thinking about being at the bottom of the aisle on my wedding day, and I looked straight down the aisle, and Chris turned, and he flashed this like huge smile, and it was that same experience of wholeness, and there are other periods of my life, I think a lot of times, like when I'm outside and you see like right now in Vermont, the fireflies are going crazy.