BW: “In the end, I did just reach a breaking point where I thought I can't live with this anymore. And I tried to write my farewell letter, which was really just to my mum in apology. And I was, I worked out this road I was going to drive off and I owned a van. So I was right at the windscreen, you know, you sit right at the front of a van. So I, I, I was all set to do it and in tears and trying to scribble this letter, but I was just so distraught that I couldn't write it properly. And then the phone rang and uh I don't know why I picked it up because I normally don't pick up unanswered like numbers I didn't know I'd let it go to the message bank. And it was just this really chirpy voice. Hello, is that Bronnie? And I'm like, Yeah. Who's this? I can't remember her name, and it was, she was from a health insurance thing offering me ambulance insurance and my number was silent. I hadn't given it out to anyone. I'd protected it for years. I'd always sort of been really private in my personal details and here's this woman just ringing out of the blue and reminding me that. Oh, I might not actually succeed in killing myself. I know I might actually need an ambulance and be even worse off. Then I just thought, okay. I don't want any ambulance insurance. I knew it was time to record my first album everything in me said, yep, go and do it. And I had all my musicians lined up and everything else, but I didn't have any money to do it. I had hardly any money to do it. It's certainly not enough to record it, but it was just such a strong guidance within me just like, yes, do it.”
[INTRODUCTION]
Hey friend, welcome back to The Light Watkins Show. I'm Light Watkins and I have conversations with ordinary folks just like you and me who've taken extraordinary leaps of faith in the direction of their path, their purpose, or what they've identified as their mission in life.
Today I have a bite-sized, Plot Twist episode for you. A Plot Twist is a shorter clip from a past episode where the guest shares the story of a pivotal moment in their life trajectory, and the idea behind sharing their plot twist is to inspire you to lean into those plot twists when they happen in your life. Because usually when you get turned around from what you thought was your path in life, what's actually happening is you're being detoured towards your actual path, and sometimes that looks like getting fired, or it could look like getting a divorce.
Or in the case of this week's guest, Bronnie Ware, it's running out of money. Brani had dreams of becoming a singer and to finance her dream, she took on a part time job in palliative care, which means she helped people who were dying and she would keep them comfortable while they made their transition.
Well, the clip opens up with one of Bronnie's many plot twists and throughout the clip, you'll see how experiences like working in palliative care, teaching songwriting in a jail, battling depression and going to a blog writing seminar led Bronnie to write an article called the top five regrets of the dying, which is what she ultimately became known for. Let's listen in.
[00:03:17] BW: So I just started getting organized and got everyone in place. And that included my producer, who was also my guitarist. And he was a married man with two kids. He had big financial responsibilities and time responsibilities. And then it got up to, I went away on a little singing camp for a couple of days in anticipation.
And we were due to start on the Monday. I was moving into a house, my favourite house sit, and I was house sitting a lot then into my favourite house sit that weekend, but on the Friday, before we were due to start, I still didn't have the money, and I was $5,000 short, which is a lot of money to come up with out of the blue. It had been building for about a week like, okay, I followed this, I've honored this, but I am getting really scared here because I've got to pay this guy, and I've got to pay all the other musicians and what am I going to do?
And so on the Friday evening, I went and sat on my meditation cushion in a panic, really just in such a panic, thinking what am I going to do? I was just really scared. Very scared. And and so I meditated and just said, you know, I'm really scared here. I don’t what to do. And I just got, let it go. Just let it go. Go out and have a… just forget about it for tonight. Go out and have a good night.
And so I went out with a mate and I had planned to go and see a band and I was going to do it on my own. And then a friend got in touch and said she wanted to go to this bookshop that has a cafe and how about we go there.
I said, yeah, sure. Let's do that. So it felt like a good distraction from my own head to be with someone else. And then she ran into another friend of hers. And while my mate was like our mutual friend was off looking at the at the books. I sat down with her friend and we just got chatting, and she said, you know, tell me about your life.
My life's really awful. It's crap at the moment. That's what she said. My life's crap. Tell me about your life right now.
And I said, well, actually my life's pretty crap too right now. I said, I'm waiting on a miracle and I'm right at the 11th hour and I'm really scared and I don't know what I'm going to do.
So tell me about your life instead.
And she said no, I want to hear about yours. Tell me what is all this about?
And so I just said, well, I'm due to start recording my album on Monday, and I don't have any money. I need at least $5,000 and I'm really scared and I don't know what to do, but I just felt my heart just said to do this and get on with it.
And she said, well, my life is crap because I'm going through a really shocking divorce, and I've wanted to support the arts for years and my husband wouldn't let me support the arts. So I'm going to use the money I'm getting from him to support the arts I'm gonna turn up on Monday morning at your house with $5,000 in cash.
And she did and I just burst into tears, of course. And I just thought to myself, how do we have a question it because we don't need it before we need it, and I got it when I needed it. But we always think we need it before that, and I'd had little leaps of faith prior to that time, and I'd always landed on my feet. There was always a solution presented at the last minute, but because this one was so large and involved so many other people, it just seemed huge. But it just taught me that we only think we need the money a month before or a week before or whatever, because it's for our own security, but life just knows that it'll come if you get out of the way, I'm trying to give it to you, but get out of the way.
And so, yeah, she turned up and she just said, I just want to have my name on the album cover as the executive producer. So I said, sure. And she just came in, didn't want to get involved. Just lay on the floor on the thick lash carpet of this house and just sat there while we started recording the album and came to the launch. And yeah, we didn't stay in touch or anything. She was just quite detached from the whole process. But was an angel.
[00:07:15] LW: Yeah. Was this when you were still doing the palliative care or did the album come out then? So how did it go?
[00:07:22] BW: It was okay. I wasn't really confident. It was the start of me trying to back myself and I'm really proud of what I put out there considering how vulnerable and broken I was at the time. It was well received. A couple of the songs got a little bit of airplay in Australia and I got into some folk festivals to play at, just small folk festivals, but I never really made it hugely in Australia. And my heart was just, I hated going to gigs at 10 o'clock at night and playing in pubs. And yeah, it was a hard road, but my music was such a joy to me besides that aspect of it.
[00:08:00] LW: You told this story in your book about where you just gave a kind of metaphor for the typical drunk Aussie guy who would come up in front of you on stage and pretend like he was God's gift to women, and you went through this whole thing. It was really funny. I just wanted to put that out there.
Did you feel like you were living your purpose at the time when you were doing the palliative care and the music and the trying to do the photography and all of that? How closely were you aligned with what you felt was your purpose?
[00:08:24] BW: I felt I was because I was honoring my creative talents and I was making a difference in the world in a way that wasn't selling insurance to people in the bank. As long as it wasn't anything to do with banking. I felt like I was on the right path. And I was meditating two hours a day, an hour morning and afternoon. And I was very connected to my inner guidance. But I had no idea that I would be called onto the author's path. And I am so grateful for that, that I could get my message out there in a way that's, much more suitable to my quiet nature than playing in really loud pubs.
[00:09:03] LW: And at the time, you kind of, I guess, saw yourself just, I'm going to be house sitting and nomading and taking up little jobs here and taking a little time off in between clients to reboot and trying to do some creative pursuits here and there. That's kind of what you saw for yourself for the next foreseeable future.
[00:09:19] BW: Yes. My cousin's friend who I used to play music with a bit, he said to me one night, well, you've got to settle down sometime, Bronnie.
And I said, Do I? Why? And he said, Well, everyone does. And I said, No, not everyone does.
And he said, okay, tell me then, where would you like to be when you're 50? 30 at the time, you know, where would you like to be? I said, I'd love to own a motorhome. But I did actually find a settled bone in my body years later, but yeah, that was where I was at back then, right? I was just drifting and letting life take me wherever it wanted to go.
[00:09:52] LW: Well, you eventually graduated yourself from the palliative care work and you've got yourself settled into a cottage. And that was another great story. We don't have to get into that because there are so many great stories. But you got all this secondhand furniture. It was timed perfectly without trying to time it, and it just all kind of came together. And that's right at the beginning of the sort of songwriting for the women's prisons endeavor for which you had zero experience teaching people. You had no budget. And how did that all come together?
[00:10:23] BW: I just got this really absurd idea one day when I was with a patient that I wanted to teach songwriting in a jail. And I think it was random. I know. I'd never been inside a jail in my life. I knew no one who'd been inside a jail. I have no idea what that was about.
The only thing I could put it down to was I wanted to work where there was some hope. And so at least if I was helping people in jail, They could have some hope to improve their life. I'm not sure. I really don't know. It was just a guided thing. And so through one of my patient's friends, I ended up finding some funding for a jail. It took about a year or so, but she had said to me because this patient was really hard work and a very authoritarian woman. And she'd been she was just really hard work and so her friend said to me, I've seen how you look after her. If you can do that, you can do anything. I'll help you find the funding. And I said, okay, great. Thank you.
So we had to find like an auspice organization, charity organization to fund the donations through the philanthropic grant that I got. So yeah, I taught in a jail. I went to a jail and said that I'd like to set up a songwriting program and that I was working on finding some funding. And they said, sure, that sounds fine. Because to them, I was a volunteer, so I was offering something for nothing to them. And I was supposed to have all this security training and everything else. I found out six months into the job that I hadn't. And one day someone said, how come you've got your handbag with you in the staff area?
And I said, well, I'm just going to put it in the locker. And they said, yeah, but you can't bring a handbag in.
And I said, why not? I have every week for the last six months?
And they said you have to empty your contents and put them in a plastic bag so we can, so they can be seen. And I said, oh, no one's ever stopped me.
And they said, oh, okay. So like there were all these loopholes that, the doors just opened for me which was sort of good because I had actually snuck in a couple of CDs for them, for the students. And you know, because I needed some music. Yeah, so I taught songwriting for healing to a beautiful group of women.
And it was then that I actually realized how much I needed to be looked after myself, because they gave me so much love. I thought I was there helping them. And I was in teaching them how to play the guitar and how to write basic songs. But I guess they were just sensitive, good-hearted women who got lost along the way. And I received so much love and genuine care from them that they were healing me as much as I was healing them. So it was a really unexpected time to be honest.
[00:13:09] LW: And you had a bit of a Dark Night of the Soul moment a little bit after that. Can you talk a little bit about that? Suicidal thoughts and depression?
[00:13:19] BW: Yeah. So I was once the funding ran out from the jail, my energy was just getting lower. And some new neighbors had moved in next door to the cottage I was living in, and they were fighting all the time. So it wasn't a nice home environment either. And so I just had this calling to move back to the country and I hadn't lived in a rural area for years, 27 years or something.
And so I rented this house on a cattle farm, a vegan on a cattle farm, and it was right by a creek and it was beautiful. And I just thought I'll just have a little break. I had a little bit of savings. I thought I'd have a break for a month or so, then I'll start looking for some sort of work. And during that time, I just, it was just like someone unplugged me from the wall and I just fell. into a dark pit. I just had no energy to do anything and ended up in a really huge time of suicidal depression where I just felt like all the work I'd done on myself and all the acts of courage I'd taken, and all the decisions I'd done that was honoring my heart was going to go to waste. And I felt like I hadn't got anywhere. I was like, okay, well, I'm still here. I'm still in pain, emotional pain. I'm still financially not strong. I'm still not knowing where I belong.
And so it got really bad, shockingly bad. But I found an amazing counsellor. And counseling in those days wasn't as big in Australia as it is in the States. And so it was quite something I wouldn't tell anyone I was having counseling. It was that sort of stigma in those days. And she was just brilliant.
She just said, what are you doing? You're trying to go for a gold medal in the carers Olympics. You got to look after yourself. And she just helped me amazingly. But In the end, I did just reach a breaking point where I thought I can't live with this anymore. And I tried to write my farewell letter, which was really just to my mum in apology. And I worked out this road I was going to drive off and I owned a van. So I was right at the windscreen, you know, you sit right at the front of a van. So I was all set to do it and in tears and trying to scribble this letter, but I was just so distraught that I couldn't write it properly. And then the phone rang and I don't know why I picked it up because I normally don't pick up unanswered like numbers I didn't know I'd let it go to the message bank. And it was just this really chirpy voice.
Hello, is that Bronnie?
And I'm like, Yeah. Who's this? I can't remember her name, and she was from a health insurance thing offering me ambulance insurance and my number was silent. I hadn't given it out to anyone. I'd protected it for years. I'd always sort of been really private in my personal details and here's this woman just ringing out of the blue and reminding me that. Oh, I might not actually succeed in killing myself. I know I might actually need an ambulance and be even worse off. Then I just thought, okay. I don't want any ambulance insurance. Thanks. I'm not going to need it
[00:16:24] LW: I have a question about this experience. So you also mentioned that there was a friend of yours that would call you and he'd say funny stuff like you better not be killing yourself right now.
Is there anything that anyone could have done to help you get through that period looking back on it now? Or maybe even thinking about where you were at the time.
I just had a friend commit suicide recently, and I was in touch with him, and I knew he was having suicidal thoughts. And I'm just curious from that vantage point when you're in it. Is it about people calling you more? Is there anything people can do to kind of help or is it just a lost cause? And obviously, there are exceptions and everyone thinks differently, but just I'm wondering what your experience was.
[00:17:10] BW: Well, you can't escape yourself. So it doesn't matter how much support you might get from externally. You still have to deal with the internals. But meditation is probably what saved me for during the day, I would still somehow sit and still have that sense of connection with divinity and think, okay, there's still love somewhere within me.
But I think that the greatest thing we can do for anyone with depression is accept where they're at and not try to fix them. Because that puts a lot of pressure on people, and we are naturally good people, humanity is naturally good and wants to support each other, and we do naturally care for each other. And underneath all the other fear and nonsense, but we are naturally good instinctively.
And it's so easy to just want to fix people, but I think that acceptance is probably the thing that actually was the greatest act of love that I received because it made me feel okay, I've got support there, but I've got support no matter what. And I don't have to pretend to be better today. And I don't have to take their advice.
A lot of friends dropped away because they just couldn't handle me. I was in that space for about six months. But those who stayed, they weren't trying to fix me. They were just like, well, how are you today? And I'd say, well, I'm, you know, I'd swear and say, you know, I'm not so good. But then they wouldn't say you've got to get out and meet more people or why don't you try this or try that? Because they knew me well enough to know. I was giving it my best shot to heal as it was. And I think I just had to be, and I think at some point all of us have to be cracked open. And that's how it came for me, that it cracked me open through depression after giving for so many years and not receiving. And if we're trying to distract people from that lesson, I mean, some people, like your friend, won't come back from it, and they will take their life, but there's a lot of people who would go through depression that if they were given acceptance, and the right environment to heal, eventually they would actually come through it and think, yeah, okay I'm starting to come through this life's feeling a little bit just you know, a millimeter lighter today and the next day, oh, okay, I'm feeling a little bit lighter and eventually... It's not an overnight thing, but you do, yeah, there is a turning point.
[00:19:41] LW: I got a sense from your book that the depression for you just kind of lifted. Was it more of a gradual process than what you articulated in the book?
[00:19:49] BW: No, I mean, it did lift. It lifted like the actual, like suicidal thoughts the doom, the heaviness that did lift for me, absolutely it lifted. But what I mean is like this, it was still a gradual process to get back into life, to find my way back into being capable of working. And so it was just like each day, like, okay, I'm feeling a little bit more capable today. Today I can do this, I could drive to town and have a conversation with a shop assistant or whatever.
But yeah, my life transformed really quickly, and that's when my blog took off straight almost immediately following that where I just said, okay, I'm coming through, I'm through the worst of it. The ambulance time was the turning point and I knew then, okay, I'm not going to kill myself. I've got to that point where I was that close to doing it. I want to value the gift of my life now, showed me how to live in a different way. And so that's how the cloud sort of lifted and my eyes were open to new colors. And it was like the whole farm was illuminated. Like I'd come off some really, like I'd been in a 20-day silent retreat or something and everything, all my senses were heightened and yeah, it was pretty phenomenal for me how it all happened.
[00:21:05] LW: So you'd already started Inspiration and Chai at that point?
[00:21:09] BW: Yes. I started that when I was teaching in the jail. So I've been writing it all the way through. A lot of those articles aren't on the blog anymore, but yeah, I was still writing at least every couple of weeks for it, but I wasn't writing about me going through depression. I was writing about beautiful things that were happening in nature and using that as a tool for teaching.
[00:21:30] LW: Yeah. And talk about writing the Top 5 Regrets. What inspired that article at the time that you actually sat down and wrote it? Why that day?
[00:21:43] BW: Yeah. It was while I was in the jail and I'd come back from a really awful gig and I just didn't want to do any more gigs. And a music magazine had asked me to write an article about teaching in the jail. So I did that and then I wrote that for them and then I thought, Why aren't I writing more? I love writing, not just songwriting, I love writing. I'll start a blog. And I'd just been to some seminar thing that, they were saying how to make money from being online. And one of those people was a blogger and I thought, oh, maybe I'll start a blog and I could make money from that somehow.
And yeah, so I just thought, what do I write about? I even Googled good blog topics, but instead, you know, my guidance inside just said, write what you know. And I thought, okay, well, I've just finished working with the dying people. Their regrets shape my life. I'm going to write about their regrets because that's what that was my biggest takeaway from all those years was how painful regrets are at the end. And so I just sat down and wrote it because I'd been. Mastering it and recognizing what the regrets were for eight years, and I put it on my blog while I was teaching in the jail.
Then, I went through this whole time of depression and suicidal thoughts. And then as I came out of that, as I was taking one step back and then the next step back, then the blog just took off and Then I was offered a deal with an agent to get the book published. And so, you know, she just said, do you want to write a book? And I said, yeah, everyone's got a book in them. I said I could only write this book if I wrote it as a memoir, because death is so unrelatable to living people. And so I knew that if I wrote it as a transformation of my own life, then people would connect with that. And death would become a bit more relatable through my exposure to it.
So I signed to her. Then it was rejected by 25 publishers. So I was released. So I put it out myself. By then I was in a new relationship and I was pregnant. And then in the same 24 hours as my daughter was born, my dream publishing house offered me a publishing deal and then it became their fastest foreign rights seller in history, in Hay House history.
So it's now in 32 languages with a movie in the pipeline. And so we don't know, we don't know the seeds that we sow when we sow them because that was in the cottage near the jail when I wrote that article, and I still had to go through that massive healing process and what that did was it cracked me open and helped me let go of so much nonsense that had been holding me back.
[00:24:22] LW: I have one question about your process when you were writing that article because as a writer, you've been writing for decades, right? Every time you sat down, you wrote in your gratitude journal, you wrote in your regular journal, you're telling these stories, you're remembering these things, there must not have been anything different about that particular day and that particular post. And maybe before that, you were only getting, I don't know, 30 people looking at your blog or something like that. When you were writing it out the five regrets, did it come out as five regrets or did it come out, you just kind of listed all of the regrets and you say, well, let me kind of consolidate these into five different things. Like, did you already have that narrative in your consciousness before? And you sat down and just wrote it out or did it just kind of, were you channeling it kind of like Neil Donald Walsh and his Conversations with God experience? Like, what was that process like?
[00:25:15] BW: Well, I'd just been to this seminar about blogging and they had said, make sure you have good titles, top 5, top 10, top whatever, right?
And so that's how that came about, though initially I didn't even call it the Top 5 Regrets of The Dying. I just called it Regrets of The Dying. And so it had been, I had already recognized five themes that had already happened naturally that there were five themes, but I hadn't identified them to myself that there were five. It was just like, oh, here's that. I wish I hadn't worked so hard conversation again. I've had this conversation before. Oh, here's this one. Because they came from different angles, I hadn't actually narrowed them down into five bullet points. But I also knew that there were these five common conversations, even though I hadn't numbered them.
And so it was just because of this seminar, which I hadn't enjoyed at all. It gave me the idea to put it into point form that I thought, okay, well let me sit and think about this properly. And I sat down and I wrote out, you know, what each of the regrets were. I thought, oh, okay, there's five. And then I looked at a couple of others. I thought, no that's the same as number one, but it's just said a bit differently. Oh, the same as number four, but said a bit differently. And that's when I got it down to five.
[END]
That was Bronnie Ware, author of the Top 5 Regrets of The Dying. And to listen to the rest of Bronnie's fascinating story and hear what happened after. After her article got millions of views, you want to go to Episode 102 in the archive.
And if you want to see what Bronnie has been up to these days, you can find her on the socials @bronnie.ware, that's B R O N N I E dot W A R E.
And if you know anyone who's been, and if you know anyone who's making the world a better place and they had an incredible plot twist in their life. Email me your guest suggestions at light@lightwatkins.com.
My other ask is that you take a few seconds to leave a rating or review for this show. You hear podcast hosts like me all the time asking listeners like you for ratings because that's how a lot of guests will determine whether or not they're going to come on to a podcast. So it does make a huge difference. And all you do is you look at your device, you click on the name of the show, You scroll down past the first five episodes, you'll see a space with five blank stars and just tap the star all the way on the right to leave a five star rating. And if you're feeling generous, leave a quick line about the show as well. And that will go a long way.
Also, don't forget you can watch these plot twist episodes on my YouTube channel if you prefer to see what Bronnie looks like as she's sharing her plot twist. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube as well. Okay. I'll see you next Wednesday with the next long form conversation about an ordinary person doing extraordinary things to leave the world a better place.
And until then, keep trusting your intuition, keep following your heart, and keep leaning into those plot twists in your life. And if no one's told you lately, that they believe in you, I believe in you. Thank you and have a fantastic weekend.
