Daniel Shaw on Clubhouse

Bio

I was invited to join the then yet-to-be-created Virtual Death Doula Network by Andrea Sugar at the start of the pandemic. Just days before I had opened to the Universe to receive guidance about how to doula during lockdown and I recognized that working together on the VDDN was what I was meant to be doing. I transitioned my doula work from my private practice to the VDDN and started the amazing work of building this non-profit to serve anyone and everyone we can.

I gained first-hand experience with death when I lost my mother to cancer while still in high school (1992). Five years later, I lost my younger brother in a car accident. I was confused and angry and didn't understand my own feelings about what was happening. Part of my motivation is to be the guide that I needed in my time of crisis.

My mother’s multi-year battle with cancer made organized religion difficult for me. I struggled with the difference between religion and spirituality. I wasn’t able to understand what spirituality was or what it might mean to me and eventually became a staunch atheist and materialist.

I said goodbye to my mother and my brother and pushed down the pain. Not surprisingly, I became ill. My illness didn't overtake me all at once. Instead, it wore me down over the next two decades and brought me close to death more than once.

Through a commitment to therapy and spiritual practices, I was able to acknowledge, accept, and act on beliefs that I’ve had my entire life that I had pushed down and repressed. My real beliefs about death are positive, warm and compassionate. Death is a natural part of life and, while loss is a huge component of dying, the process is a transition rather than an end.

Most people are scared of dying. That’s understandable. It is a very big unknown that every one of us will experience. The difficulty, at least in our society, is that people are often reluctant to discuss it. As a result, when death does arrive, people are unprepared and the dying process becomes more of a crisis than it needs to be. I research, meditate on, and talk about death. 

I look back at my mother’s death and at all the information (and compassion) I didn’t receive when it was happening. I can’t change my experience but I can aid others in ways that no one was able to do for me. I can help anyone who is dying or knows someone who is dying to transform the process of dying from a frightening and stressful event into an experience centered around love and growth.