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

Dr. Zach Bush (00:07):

Is that the deathbed

 

Mel Robbins (00:08):

Is that the deathbed,

 

Dr. Zach Bush (00:11):

Many of the death experiences that I've been around and wish the individual will let go of the body fully like letting go of that egoic construct, they will journey immediately off the planet and they will go to other planets. They will go to distant times and places, they'll jump to future places, and then they'll come back in and they suddenly snap out of a coma and tell you something absolutely mindblowingly ridiculous. That doesn't fit into our reality here.

 

Mel Robbins (00:39):

Holy cow, if you've ever been with somebody as they are passing on

 

Dr. Zach Bush (00:46):

They're whole, there's basically bookends of the human experience that everybody's going to have. They're going to come in whole and they're going to leave whole.

 

Mel Robbins (00:53):

If I think about my own experience of my life, there are those moments. 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 huge smile, and it was that same experience of wholeness.

 

Dr. Zach Bush (01:15):

And that's where the near death experience is a gift. You can actually feel what it feels like to be whole.

 

Mel Robbins (01:23):

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and there'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, just 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.

 

(02:25):

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, 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, and it's 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 cross 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.

 

(03:19):

And I'm also so proud of the person that I have 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? And 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. Dr. Zach Bush, welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Thanks for jumping on a plane from Columbia and flying here.

 

Dr. Zach Bush (04:26):

It's a pleasure.

Dr. Zach Bush (04:41):

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, and I think that'll be an interesting place to go on the podcast perhaps as we start thinking about death and dying. The only place we actually experienced it oftentimes is in that last few breaths where we're suddenly like, oh my gosh, the whole thing was not a chase.

 

Mel Robbins (05:12):

Wow. I all of a sudden felt this tremendous sense of sadness to think that the biggest realization for most people

 

Dr. Zach Bush (05:21):

Is that the deathbed

 

Mel Robbins (05:23):

Is that the deathbed

 

Dr. Zach Bush (05:25):

Over and over.

 

Mel Robbins (05:27):

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?

 

Dr. Zach Bush (05:48):

I hesitate call it near death just because I was actually unharmed. I think I didn't have an injury per se, but

 

Mel Robbins (05:54):

What happened

 

Dr. Zach Bush (05:57):

Was in 2010, so I'd been in academia from 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, here's the drugs that are going 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, and 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 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.

 

(06:48):

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. And so I was just 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 of, show me the other path. This is a dead end and I can't figure out my way out of here. I work 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.

 

(07:30):

And then a day came where the universe answered, and I just got this huge amount of information into my experience of all this huge path that I was here to embark on. And I felt amazing. I was plugged into the universe for the first time in my adult life I think, and I just felt all of this clarity and all this things. And a couple of weeks later, we had the largest snowstorm in Virginia, and 

(08:11):

And so I was working in the dark like five in the morning and chopping wood, carrying an arm full 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, and then I come back to the vehicle, which I borrowed my brother's four wheel 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's half an inch in Virginia, nobody drives.

 

Mel Robbins (08:44):

But you've also now got a hair between two ribs thanks to the

 

Dr. Zach Bush (08:49):

Open movement

 

Mel Robbins (08:49):

Firewood that just basically lodged itself into your side.

 

Dr. Zach Bush (08:54):

Yeah, it was an unfortunate slip.

 

Mel Robbins (08:57):

You're not talking, you don't have a wedge of

 

Dr. Zach Bush (08:59):

Sticking. No, not at all. It was internal. What's happened is it's now sending a lot of visceral chest pains through my body, which sets you up for the event that's about to happen. So I'm having that chest pain and I jump in the vehicle, I brushed it off cursory because I'm starting to run late to get to the hospital and knew 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, it beautiful, get to the highway, it's been plowed. So I called my wife, said, yeah, I'm fine. I'm amazed to the highways plowed, totally empty highways. So I zip up to 60 miles an hour and I start to relax and the heaters are on defroster, my body temper shifts and I've got this left side chest pain and I suddenly do have something called a vasovagal event where all my blood vessels suddenly dilate through me, relaxing, change of temperature, the chest pain, all that.

 

(09:52):

And 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 I felt like I had just been rebirthed. There was just 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 and now suddenly it's just river and it is 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. That's a lot of shoveling for eternity it seems like. So I was just having this funny moment of not what I pictured, but it was beautiful. Sun was filtering through and it was just overwhelmingly white and peaceful

 

Mel Robbins (10:42):

And you were just you. No car, no nothing.

 

Dr. Zach Bush (10:45):

I'm in the car in a river. Yeah, I looked down in my lap and my cell phone sitting there 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. I hadn't probably been in that state since I was 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 in nature is dazzling me and I feel amazing.

 

(11:32):

My body was like I was not experiencing any of that chest pain. I was just like I was in an ecstatic state. And so again, whether it was just passed out, I have no idea, but the state of being was I think what set into motion my next few years. From there, I actually went and left the university months after that and started to realize all of the and dreams that had been shown to me a couple of weeks earlier. And 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 part of realizing my dream, but to pay the bills. I wasn't making any 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.

 

(12:18):

And when you do that for four years, that adds up to a lot of 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. And what had happened is I had passed out on the highway and I climbed out of the river. I was soaking wet and my dog's outfit and climbing up to all the snow and thought I was 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, it's just empty. And then there's a man standing right in the middle of the lane,

 

(12:58):

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, and 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, 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 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. I got to get into heaven here.

 

(13:43):

I got to figure out what have I done? Well, so I started literally going through my life. 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 is 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. And yeah, now

 

Mel Robbins (14:08):

I can even buy the drunk

 

Dr. Zach Bush (14:09):

Driver. Yeah, exactly. He's like, this guy's on drugs at seven o'clock in the morning driving through snow or whatever he is doing. Anyway, long story short, he finally stops me. He says, hun, how did you physically get here? And so I just got really angry all of a sudden I was at the end of my wits. I was just like, how the hell do you get here physically? And he to his credit, then suddenly burst out loud and he's like, that probably looks confusing as well. And he says, my patrol car's down around the corner of the highway. And he said, 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 to that river. I don't know how I got there. He is like, well, let me show you what I just saw.

 

(14:46):

And 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 and 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 it landed on two wheels and drove for about maybe 30 meters and then settled onto 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 90 return 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 I just had an experience that was outside of my physical plane there. Something happened to me that can't be logic, and I was extremely logical human being. I wanted to understand everything I was seeing all of the time. That's what made me 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 human mind that it would lead to a deeper state of surrender to my path, whatever was going to happen next.

 

Mel Robbins (15:55):

I love that the trooper showed you the accident and here's why. When you described you 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 are largely unscathed but left with a profound near death experience that changed your entire life, and you do strike me as somebody who's 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.

 

Dr. Zach Bush (16:44):

I wish I could say I was that easy to teach, but the universe was about to see how stubborn my human mind was, and 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 a hundred feet in the air and came across back onto the highway and sat down on his 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, started up. It wasn't a scratch on the car, not a scratch on me.

 

Mel Robbins (17:17):

You drove to the hospital after

 

Dr. Zach Bush (17:19):

Drove to the hospital because again, this is a situation where nothing is running in the town. So I knew it would be more time, and by this time it'd been 45 minutes and I needed to get to the hospital quick and I was fine. I was unharmed feeling actually amazing in my body and my spirit. And so I drove and worked at 12 hour day, saw 700 patients that day just like we only had six doctors running the entire medicine floors. And so it was a busy, busy day, got home that night and by that night I had already gotten disconnected, the experience, and so I was already back in my mind. I thrust myself right back in, got to do everything, got to save the world duty, duty, duty responsibility. This is what makes me valuable as a human being, is I can go and work my ass off in a hospital.

 

(18:01):

And 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 just connect me from that event. So I went home that night. I hadn't told my wife much what had gone on, just didn't want her to worry. So I got home, told her that night and fell asleep like 11, and the phone rings at 6:00 AM and I pick it up and this lieutenant so-and-so went looking for a Dr. Bush. I'm like, oh, this must be from the accident yesterday. Yeah, this is Zach Bush. He's like, we need you in Haiti, port of Prince Bay in six hours. And 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 the top of our list for large scale emergency relief.

 

(18:40):

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, but I had trained a couple of years earlier and deployed a large group for emergency relief for Katrina, which had happened down New Orleans. So that had ended me up on some Navy list somehow. And so six hours later I was in port of Prince Bay being dropped onto the Navy ship. And so that all happened in a 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, but I needed to see all of that. 

Mel Robbins (19:40):

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

 

Dr. Zach Bush (20:17):

You are the most beautiful thing. You are the entire divine expression of your soul, and that's where the near death experience is. A gift is if you can actually feel what it feels like to be whole, it's not something to be achieved. You've always been whole. You are whole at the beginning, you will still be whole at the end of your life journey that there's only a perception that you are incomplete right now. You are the most beautiful thing. This is what happens in your 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.

 

Mel Robbins (20:54):

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. I'll never look at that term the same way again. It literally is a moment where you escape your mind and you drop into deep connection and wholeness. 

Dr. Zach Bush (21:39):

You are right now clinging to everything around you out of fear that you're incomplete, you're clinging to your little rituals. Might be your morning cup of coffee. It might be the way in which you pack the kids' school lunch. It 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, 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. And 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. If 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 wave form 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're 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.

 

Mel Robbins (22:49):

And that's the split that you're talking about

 

Dr. Zach Bush (22:50):

And that's the terrible twos and the threes and everything else that are so difficult for a child because going from a state of being complete to the terrifying reality of they're incomplete. And that's why I think two and three look so difficult on the psyche of a child and that's why they're so labile with their emotions and everything's overwhelming because starting to learn a reality of disconnected truth or disconnected to half truths.

 

Mel Robbins (23:16):

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 their whole, their 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 I just cry. I think 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 huge smile and it was that same experience of fullness. And there are other periods of my life, I think a lot of times when I'm outside and you see right now in Vermont, the fireflies are going crazy. And so when I take in a moment in nature like that and you have this blip of wholeness, that's what you're talking about, that experience right there.

 

Dr. Zach Bush (24:51):

That's exactly right. I love where you're laying this out is that there's basically bookends of the human experience that everybody's going to have. They're going to come in whole and they're going to leave whole. And as I watched those happen over and over again, I saw them, a lot of them in the ICUI spent 10 years working in intense hospital settings. And in those years I got used to seeing these moments of time where you really do see a soul showing up as exits the frailty of the human mind and then comes back in with new information to the mind, but not to itself because at no point does it get surprised about its journey. It's never like, I can't believe I just did this. It simply says, I went to this place, I saw this and I'm bringing this back to this human mind.

 

Mel Robbins (25:36):

So what you're basically saying is that in the ICU for example, where you would be the witness to all of these near death experiences and people would then wake up from a coma or they would come back to life, there would be an absolute certainty and knowingness and lack of judgment about what they had experienced during that near death experience. They just came back like, this is the truth, this is where I was. And that almost like certainty started to strike you.

 

Dr. Zach Bush (26:11):

That's exactly right.

Dr. Zach Bush (26:35):

Maybe you've had the experience of a wild animal suddenly coming into an interaction with you.

 

Mel Robbins (26:40):

Yeah, just actually the other day we were walking down the back drive. We have a logging road on the mountain that we live on, and we had the dogs and about a hundred yards down the dirt path, a black bear walked across. And so we of course stopped and thank God the dogs didn't see her. And I assume it's a her because the Cubs have been born recently and you see a lot of them running around where we live in southern Vermont. But there was a moment where she stopped and turned and looked and we made eye contact and it's as if sound and time disappeared and then all of a sudden, I don't know how long I stood there with Chris and we just saw this bear and then the thought came in, oh my God, the dogs. And then she turned and walked away and it was over.

 

(27:38):

And that's an example of what you're describing is this ability that you have in your life now to come into these moments and drop in to connection and presence in your life. It's true. If you really think about people that are dying, I mean you have more experienced this than I do, but I mean I'm married to somebody who's a death doula and a hospice volunteer who sits with people who are dying and supports people who are near the end of their life. And I always wonder, are people scared? Are they afraid? And Chris talks a lot about how no people actually seem to be more at peace. I mean, is that what you found? Do you find that people are, when they're approaching death, they're not as afraid because I think it's normal to be afraid of dying, isn't it?

 

Dr. Zach Bush (28:34):

There's great terror in the end of something because to die incomplete suggest that there's a brokenness that didn't heal. And so the reason we developed fear of death, I believe, is because we can feel this state of incompleteness that we perceived. We know that there's something deep that needs to heal and we can feel it all the time.

 

Mel Robbins (28:53):

How do you reconnect then? Or what do you say as a parent? I'll give you an example. So I was talking with one of our daughters the other day, and she lives out in Southern California. And I remember when I was in my mid twenties, I was terrified of dying, terrified of getting on a plane, terrified of a car crash, terrified of my parents dying, terrified that something might happen. And there was something in the news, I don't know what about something going on in California and she's getting herself all worked up, what would happen if there was a national disaster? And something happened to me and I said, well, you would die. And she said, yeah, but I don't want it. And I said, but once you're dead, it doesn't matter. And worrying. I was very pragmatic about it and I realized upon reflection, Dr. Zach, that