Ep. 611 – Dying to Live with Andy Chaleff, Author and Speaker
Mindrolling with Raghu Markus
Be Here Now Network
4.7 • 542 Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Author Andy Chaleff speaks to personal and collective grief, teaching listeners that embracing loss can help us live a more fulfilling life.
Get your copy of Andy’s book, Dying to Live: Finding Life’s Meaning Through Death
This week on Mindrolling, Raghu and Andy have a conversation on:
- Andy’s early experiences with fear, existential dread, and childhood loss
- Andy’s emotional and intellectual process of writing
- Childhood grief, losing a parent, and losing a pet
- Breaking free from a victimhood identity by reframing life’s challenges
- Shifting perspective to see the world with gratitude and compassion
- Processing collective grief in the face of global crises, politics, and inequality
- How to live in love instead of living in fear
- Finding the blessings in difficult circumstances
- The wisdom of Stoicism and learning to “live with death on the shoulder”
- Laughing at the dance between life’s seriousness and absurdity
- Finding the heart-mind in ourselves and providing service to others
About Andy Chaleff:
Andy Chaleff is an author, mentor, and speaker whose life and work are grounded in radical emotional honesty. At eighteen, Andy’s mother was killed by a drunk driver just hours after receiving a deeply personal letter he had written — a soul-baring message he never imagined would be his last to her. That moment became the start of a lifelong inquiry into grief, love, and what it means to live without holding back.
Today, Andy works privately with a select group of clients, from cultural icons to global leaders, offering mentorship rooted in vulnerability, clarity, and deep presence. His work invites people to reconnect with themselves and embrace the parts of life we’re taught to avoid. His books, often called spiritual memoirs, blend raw personal storytelling with existential insight. His newest, Dying to Live, explores how coming to peace with death can open us to the full beauty of life. Originally from California, Andy now lives in Amsterdam, where he directs Amsterdam's Welvaren, a center for coaching and leadership. Check out Andy’s website HERE.
“It’s the recognition of fear that is a prime ingredient. It always goes back to fear of death, or, you can say it a different way, impermanence.” –Andy Chaleff
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everyone, it is Ragu, and I am back with Andy Chalif. |
| 0:22.2 | See, we haven't even gone through. |
| 0:24.1 | Wait, what's the pronunciation? |
| 0:26.3 | Chalph works. |
| 0:27.4 | Chalph works. |
| 0:28.2 | Oh, that's good. |
| 0:30.4 | And he has, when you hear what I'm going to kind of report to everybody, Andy, |
| 0:37.7 | you'll see why it's a very propitious time for me to bump into your book. |
| 0:44.4 | Dying to Live is the name of the book, |
| 0:46.7 | Finding Life's Meeting Through Death. |
| 0:49.7 | And so at Love Serve Remember Foundation, |
| 0:58.5 | we are doing a course centered, of course, around Ram Dass's talks, and we just select some beautiful moments in these talks that always refer to a specific |
| 1:08.2 | theme, which is walking each other home. |
| 1:11.6 | Are you familiar with that book that was put out a number of years ago? |
| 1:15.6 | Yeah, I'm familiar with it. |
| 1:17.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:18.6 | So it's based on that concept. |
| 1:21.6 | And so when I saw your book, I thought, okay, there's a lot of parallels as to what we are investigating and what you have investigated in this book. |
| 1:31.6 | And, yeah, we can talk about them. |
| 1:33.4 | But first is, you know, a little bit about how you even came to understand there was a new way to perceive and relate with the concept of death, death, death, death. |
| 1:47.7 | Yeah, exactly, the D word. |
| 1:50.9 | I, it was funny, if I looked at life through that lens, I'd get stuck. |
... |
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