In this episode of Awakening Streams, Sensei Michael Brunner reflects on the five regrets of the dying and the five great fears that shape so much of human life. Drawing on Bronnie Ware’s work with hospice patients, the talk examines the regrets people most often name near the end of life: not living authentically, working too much, failing to express their feelings, losing touch with friends, and not allowing themselves to be happier. Sensei Michael connects these regrets to the deeper patterns of fear, ego, and karmic habit that Zen practice asks us to face directly. Death, illness, loss of esteem, loss of livelihood, and the fear of being heard all reveal how tightly we cling to the story of who we think we are. The teaching is ultimately a call to courage: do not squander your life. Face what you avoid, live more genuinely, cultivate your intentions, encourage others, and use the time you have to practice in a way that leads to compassion rather than regret.
In this episode of Awakening Streams, Sensei Michael Brunner reflects on the five regrets of the dying and the five great fears that shape so much of human behavior.
The talk begins with the work of Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse who spent years caring for people during the final weeks of their lives. From those conversations came five recurring regrets:
Sensei Michael uses these regrets as a mirror for practice. They reveal the consequences of living from habit, fear, and the expectations attached to the small self.
The talk then connects these regrets to five great fears:
Each fear points to something we cling to as part of the story of who we are.
The fear of death exposes our attachment to the idea that the story of “me” must continue.
The fear of illness reveals how tightly we identify with the body.
The fear of losing face or esteem shows how much energy we spend defending a social identity.
The fear of losing livelihood exposes how deeply self-worth can become bound up with status, money, and security.
And the fear of public speaking can reveal an even deeper anxiety: that if we speak honestly, the story we have constructed about ourselves might begin to fall apart.
Sensei Michael emphasizes that these fears are not separate from practice.
They are practice.
What we repeatedly fear, avoid, defend, and rehearse becomes a form of training in itself. If those habits are practiced more consistently than meditation, courage, and self-inquiry, then regret becomes predictable.
The teaching repeatedly returns to the urgency of time.
Do not squander your life.
Practice means facing what is in front of us now rather than putting it off. If something keeps arising and we want to avoid it, that very avoidance may be pointing toward the place where practice is needed most.
The talk also reflects on failure, mistakes, and community. Sensei Michael reminds the Sangha that everyone will act unskillfully at times. Practice is not about creating an image of perfection, but about learning to see human frailty clearly, restore one another when we fall short, and resist the impulse to cast others aside.
The same applies to livelihood, relationships, friendship, and courage. None of what we accumulate is permanent. What continues is the effect of how we use this life.
The episode closes with a direct challenge:
Get up. Practice. Take on new responsibilities. Stretch your boundaries. Encourage other people.
If we spend more time feeding distraction than cultivating practice, compassion, and intention, the direction of our lives becomes increasingly clear.
The invitation is not to live in fear of regret.
It is to use regret as instruction.
To live more genuinely.
To face what we fear.
To stop making excuses.
And to use the time we have to live a life that matters.
In this episode:
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Thank you for all being here.
We're coming close here to the end of Ango. And Ango is really meant to be a time where we shake up the patterns of our habitual consciousness, or habitual patterns of existence. We cut through our karma.
But this is our last get-together, and the next scheduled time to meet is actually during Rohatsu sesshin.
And so our habits are gently calling to us, right, to come back.
And so I just wanted to talk a little bit about practice and about something uplifting, like, I don't know, how about death and regret?
So I want you to just consider for a moment: what do you think the top regrets of people who are dying are?
Yeah?
I happen to know, because I have a list of them that was compiled by a researcher. Her name's Bronnie Ware, and she's an Australian nurse who spent several years working in what we would call hospice, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives.
And so we would ordinarily think, well, I don't want to hear this.
I don't want to know.
But I think it's a powerful, powerful tool if we want to have some understanding about how to live our lives skillfully, but also how to understand where these habitual patterns of consciousness, our karmic consciousness, where that road ends.
So I have these regrets here.
The first was:
“I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not what other people expected of me.”
The second one was:
“I wish I hadn't worked so hard.”
And to be clear, they're saying worked so hard for a living, for their vocation.
Third was:
“I wish I'd had the courage,” there's that word again, “to express my feelings.”
Next one was:
“I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends.”
And the last one was:
“I wish I had let myself be happier.”
Pretty compelling.
The first one: “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not what others expected of me.”
This was the most common regret of all.
When people realize their life is almost over and they begin to look back clearly on it, it's easy to see how many of the things they wanted to accomplish were left unfulfilled.
And most people had not honored even half of their core ambitions or dreams and had to die knowing it was because of choices they had made.
Or probably more importantly, choices they had not made.
Instead, they did what they felt others wanted of them.
But of course, those others are going to die with these same regrets.
So this concept of others, created by us clinging to a concept of self, and we have this crazy tautology, right?
We cast all of our core energy, all of our core ambition onto others, who themselves aren't living up to their own true ambitions.
So health brings freedom that very few of us realize until we don't have it anymore.
And then this thing comes out ringing true:
“I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not what others expected of me.”
The next one was:
“I wish I hadn't worked so hard.”
There's probably a better way to put it:
“I wish I hadn't spent so much time at my job.”
Because people who did have a fulfilling vocation actually registered very high on the work that they had done, that they had worked hard.
But if they're working a job, if they're doing it for the money, there's a big disparity between men and women with this one.
Although the good news is this disparity is catching up over time.
It used to be a particularly male thing, that they would cast themselves into the vocation.
But women are catching up now as they're more and more regularly becoming primary breadwinners.
And missing their children's youth, missing their partner's companionship, and dying with deep regret for spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work experience.
It isn't the labor we're talking about.
People who work hard for meaningful things find a lot of joy in them.
It was just that their values were misplaced.
But again, through the lens of dying, they were able to see much more clearly.
“I wish I hadn't worked so hard.”
The next big regret was:
“I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.”
So many of us suppress our feelings in order to keep peace with others, who ironically aren't at peace with themselves either, right?
So as a result, they settle for a mediocre existence and never became truly who their heart wanted them to be and who they're capable of becoming.
They lived inauthentically because they lacked courage.
And Bronnie talked about this and said that she thought that many of the people that she saw dying had developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment that they carried as a result of this inability to express their feelings.
So particularly sad.
We get crystallized inside of a mold and then decide, at some point, we just want to keep peace.
We just want to make our way through life without facing the issues that are right in front of us.
But it comes up in the end.
“I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.”
The next one was:
“I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends.”
Kind of singular.
People wouldn't truly realize the full benefits of old friends until they were actually dying.
And it wasn't always possible to track people down in that time to say the things that they felt needed to be said, to tell people what they had meant to them.
And they were all experiencing regrets that they didn't get to spend more time with their friends, probably as a result of some of the prior regrets.
We all get so caught up, we think, in our lives.
But we're really not caught up in our lives.
We're caught up more or less in trying to make peace with our inactivity, our inability to manifest the life that we want.
And so we push everybody away.
And move into a shell.
So these friendships that would normally challenge us and inspire us to really rise to the occasion of this life slip by.
And they all say that friendship requires time and effort, but that they felt that that would have been time better spent than where they invested it.
Everyone, almost universally, misses their friends when they're dying.
The last of the top five regrets of the dying was:
“I wish I had let myself be happier.”
Such a profound lesson here, right?
So first off, the fact that that would be in the top five.
People would come to that realization at the end.
They didn't realize, though, before then, that happiness is a choice.
They'd stayed stuck in old patterns and old habits.
And the so-called comfort of familiarity overflowed into their emotions as well as their physical lives.
So fear of change had them pretending.
Pretending to others.
Pretending to their very own selves that they were content.
But deep within, they longed to really laugh and be silly and have joy and happiness in their life.
It didn't surface until it was very difficult, in those final moments, to actually have that.
“I wish I had let myself be happier.”
So I don't know about you, but I read these regrets, and I see reflected in them a lot of the issues that come up for us in our practice.
This is the core of all the things that we're talking about all the time.
Not because we did some in-depth study and addressed these five core causes, but because it's obvious where this karmic path points.
This is the deep matter of our spiritual work.
Opening to life in a way that's authentic.
Moving past habits and conventions that, frankly, don't serve us.
We serve them.
And moving past them and living.
Working with what's coming up directly in front of us.
The spiritual path has evolved around these, around this final wisdom that people recognize, the epiphanies that they have when they recognize how fleeting time is.
And time is fleeting.
We try to impress this all the time.
At the end of every night of sesshin:
“Do not squander your life.”
When we meet during koan study and talk about what's coming up in our lives, we talk about the importance of working with it now.
Don't put it off to the side.
Do it now.
If something is coming up and you want to avoid it, walk into it.
That's the big joke around here.
Don't ever tell Sensei what it is that you're afraid of or you don't want to do, because that's the thing he's going to make you do.
There's a reason for that, right?
The reason for that is this.
This is why.
So you'd say, well, this is kind of outside of the Buddhist tradition.
It's incorporated in our tradition as well.
Our fears are really what motivate what we regret.
And inside of the First Turning teachings are the five great fears:
Death.
Illness.
Losing face or esteem.
Another way of putting it would be losing one's mind.
Loss of livelihood.
And the funny one that comes up fifth in the five great fears in Buddhism is public speaking.
It's a real thing for some folks.
So we consider death.
Unless we're a bit neurotic, this isn't something we ruminate on all the time, every day.
And yet it's a truth that we need to be very, very cognizant of.
Yeah?
So when we have a close call, a car accident or an illness, or our loved one has one of these things, we're forced to face it directly.
And then it dominates the mind stage, right?
But in a real way, death is never far from our thoughts, in the sense that we have to consciously act to suppress that fear.
You have to constantly pretend like that's not in store for us, right?
It's always nagging, sitting right next to the stage of consciousness, but we never consciously admit that it's there.
And it creates, or helps create, this boundary of the small self.
It helps us to define what we call our life.
We see ourselves as alive because we identify with this small self, what our egos need to exist to hold together this narrative, to keep doing the work.
And we're always afraid of the story ending.
And this is the biggest ending of them all.
The truth is, all of you are going to die.
You're all going to die.
But in a bigger way, the question is:
Are you going to live?
If we're able to accept that thing, then we can actually find the truth in our life.
The next great fear is illness.
The fear of illness, like the fear of death, is ego identification with the body and the consistent low-level vigilance about threats to it.
So we spend a lot of time tied up and worrying about this body, which at the end of the day we know is destined to be wracked with disease and illness.
You say, well, I don't see this directly.
We see it sometimes.
We don't often eat right or exercise because we really want to be healthy.
We eat right and exercise because we want to look healthy.
Because we want to put off the perception that we're ever going to get old.
But in truth, every one of you is going to get sick.
Even though it's hard to believe for all these young people here, you're all going to get old.
And so it's important that we use our vitality wisely, recognize it in the full light of that understanding.
We know we have this very precious moment to work toward our intentions freely.
The next is losing one's mind, or losing face or esteem.
I don't think we're as afraid anymore, it seems like, of this distinctly vague notion of having a mental illness where we lose our grasp.
I guess Alzheimer's could be one of those.
But losing face or esteem certainly is on the world stage right now, right?
So we can be categorically cast off from civilized discourse.
And for a lot of us, this is a fate worse than death, precisely because we've watched the devastating toll that it takes on other people.
All of us can think of people whose lives are ruined because they made a misstep.
They did the wrong thing.
They were relegated to the garbage heap of humanity.
From there, there's very little chance of being redeemed in today's day and age.
It's important for all of you to know that you're going to have times of trial brought about by your own unskillful acts.
All of you are.
Every one of you is going to make a mistake that's going to bring discredit to the story that you want to tell.
You need to cultivate a practice that walks circumspectly and recognizes that.
And be very careful, when you see it happening around you, that you not relegate humanity to that garbage heap.
Look at it as a special opportunity to practice.
I've told you before, if we're not seeing each other make mistakes as a Sangha, then we're doing it wrong.
We're not practicing closely enough.
Every one of us, we need to see those human frailties.
We need to see that because it reminds us of the importance of our ardor and our practice, of bringing some degree of skill and precision into how we practice, how we practice this thing we call life, and how we pick up others when we see them fall short of their own expectations and restore them.
In most of the First Turning teachings, the only way that you could really be removed from the Sangha is if you were guilty of relegating other members of the Sangha to this garbage heap.
In other words, if you castigated these people in speech or in deed.
So it's kind of like the thing that now has become acceptable, that we all do and we actually find some virtue in doing, picking on others, elevating the self while putting other people down, was the only thing that we said, hey, that's not what we're going to engage.
But it's important for us to note it so we know what to do when it comes up, how to act with skill.
The next one is loss of livelihood.
And I hardly need to even talk about it, because all of us at some point in our lives have agonized over this.
We're going through a period of a lot of anxiety in the world and in the country.
Many, many people lost their jobs during the pandemic that's now in the rearview mirror, but frankly, its effects are still lingering economically.
But I can't, I mean, I don't know, have any of us not lost a night's sleep worrying about our livelihood?
And this can predispose us to things like drinking or taking drugs, stresses relationships, ends marriages.
Even for otherwise healthy people.
This is a big one.
Because, especially as we get older, but it affects everybody, we're not able to envision making a new start.
Because we think that all these things that we've created are so substantial, and we're so hidden in this vestige of who we feel we are and the value we place in it, that we can't imagine losing it.
It's probably less about the money than it is about the ego.
And so it can be paralyzing.
There's a wonderful truth to keep in mind here, and it's wonderful if you actually keep it centered on your stage:
All of you are going to lose everything you have.
You're all going to lose it all.
You're not taking any of it with you.
You'll be a faint memory whose only continuance will be the actions that you took in this life.
That'll be all that's left.
That'll be the only way you'll be remembered.
So how are you using that great livelihood?
The real livelihood.
Your ability to still act with volition.
On your volition.
The last of those five fears was public speaking.
I think in another way it's also a fear of being heard.
There's an old adage that says, “It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
We're afraid of being found out.
The other four are such great fears that it's curious that public speaking is included here.
But I can tell you, the fear can be palpable.
I've met people who have a very difficult time expressing their feelings.
There's a notion that an idea or a misstep here can undo your entire life.
You'll be tried and found wanting.
What's at the root of this?
In a way, it's a deep recognition of the story that we tell about ourselves, to ourselves.
It's a lie.
And so, of course, it's a very complicated lie.
So if we have to go out in public and discuss it openly, we're afraid we'll lose track of where we stand.
We live in concert with everything.
We don't ever want to be seen as an instrument that's out of tune or unplayably broken.
But when we do that, we miss being heard.
We miss the subtle contributions that our actions have, and we're able to uplift with our speech.
We're able to call out things that need to change.
And we're able to rally others to the defense and support of those who are marginalized.
I'm not talking about just speaking as much as just calling to action and uplifting.
Show your courage in your expression.
Admit your frailty.
But whatever you do, join the song for sure.
Don't hide behind that idea that you call yourself.
All of these fears are relegated around that, right?
These fears point to the things in our past that we use to create a vision of self.
And then this narrative gets so complex that it takes over.
And we begin to identify with it.
So we use these fears to guide our practice.
Does that make sense to you?
What happens if we use these fears to guide our practice?
All those regrets that we pointed out on the first line.
Ego wants to hold.
To have.
To not let go.
It wants to be substantial.
It doesn't want to be a story.
So as long as we have the story, we think, at least I have this.
Better to hold on to this than to let go and take my chances.
That road predictably ends.
That's why these top five fears are so commonly shared.
Because the ego that we think makes us so unique really winds up making us all the same persuasion of delusion in the end.
If we don't open to our lives, truly open to our lives, if we don't really cultivate our intentions, I can already tell you folks how the story ends.
Fears are a practice.
And when those practices are more consistent than our meditation practice, we're going to have some regret.
So in order to break free, we have to resolve to do what you've all done today:
To show up with some courage.
But we need to stop.
Even within our practice, you'll notice that you'll only get to a certain point before you seek harmony with the small self.
“Well, I'll go this far out, but I'm going to stop here.”
You say, “Well, I just don't have the time to do that.”
You don't have the time to do anything else.
If you don't really surrender to this practice, then every day that you're ticking away these habits of the small self, spending all your time and attention on it, one day you'll notice you have nothing left to spend.
It's time to be genuine.
To face our fears.
To start today.
Get up.
Practice.
Recognize your actions are your continuance.
Take on new responsibilities.
Stretch your boundaries.
Encourage other people.
If you predictably spend more time being entertained than you spend meditating, if you have more Netflix hours in than you have time contemplating the suffering of your neighbors, I can tell you what way this is going to go.
I want to encourage you all to not squander your life.
You all have such a very special practice energy that you bring to this Sangha.
Stop making excuses.
I'm not telling you to do something self-serving here.
I'm telling you to do something that will actually inspire you to live.
And to live a life that matters.
And to live a life beyond.