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This episode is dedicated to our dear friend, Ben Manilla, who passed away a few weeks ago. Ben's lively spirit and creativity laid the foundation for so much of what we do at the Science of Happiness. Almost a decade ago, he led the production of our award-winning radio special on the Science of Gratitude, which planted the seeds for this very podcast. Ben was kind, witty, sharp, and always radiated joy.

He brought a sense of adventure to every project, celebrating stories, culture, and music at every turn. His enthusiasm was infectious, drawing us in and inspiring us to do our best work. Ben's spirit continues to inspire and shape our work. We're deeply grateful for the time we had with him, and we will carry his presence through the stories we tell. For me, Dia de los Muertos wasn't something that I necessarily grew up with.

30, 40 years ago, when my mother migrated from our small town, Tomatlan High School, to Southern California, she didn't necessarily bring some of the traditions she had in the Pueblo. And so we didn't grow up with the Adolos Muertos. When my father passed away suddenly when I was young, 20 years old, I realized that I needed to find a way to stay connected to his memory.

Because I think in this culture in the U.S., we don't talk about grief, we don't talk about death. There's fear attached to it. So I learned about the tradition through community members and started learning about how to build an altar, what all the pieces of the altar signified. And I was trying to be really thoughtful about it.

It's a reminder for me of making that balance between the mourning, the grief, and the celebration, and continuously processing it every year. Hey everyone, I'm Dacher Keltner. This week on the Science of Happiness, we're exploring Dia de los Muertos, a 3,000-year-old tradition that honors those we've lost and brings communities together through rituals that help us process grief and joy.

I'm joined by Dr. Michelle Tellez, a scholar of Mexican-American studies at the University of Arizona, whose family hails from Jalisco, Mexico, the same place I was born. She shares how the tradition reconnected her with her cultural roots while strengthening bonds with family and those around her. We also hear about the power of rituals from Dr. Matthew Sandoval, aka Dr. Muerte.

The cultural roots of Dia de los Muertos are anchored, of course, in ancient Native American traditions and rituals in Latin America. But there are cultural roots that come from European Catholicism, from European paganism, from North African Islamic culture. And then there are roots that come from West African animist traditions. So I tend to think of Day of the Dead as like a global phenomenon that...

that is becoming even more global now in the 21st century. More about Day of the Dead after this break. How much awe and wonder do you experience in your life?

From the John Templeton Foundation, our sponsors at the Science of Happiness, the Templeton Ideas podcast explores the most awe-inspiring ideas in our world with the people who investigate them. Host Tom Burnett sits down with inspiring thinkers like Alison Gopnik, David Brooks, Tyler Cowens, and Gretchen Rubin to discuss how their investigations have transformed their lives and how they may transform yours.

Learn more at templeton.org slash podcast. Welcome back to the Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. We're joined by Dr. Michelle Tellez, who's going to share with us how Dia de los Muertos creates space for healing by holding both joy and sorrow through communal ritual, and also how rituals can shape one's understanding of identity, loss, and life. Michelle, thanks so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here.

In our lab here at Berkeley, we've studied all over the world, including in Mexico. And, you know, a couple of the central themes in people's narratives of awe is just sharing collective feeling, what we call collective effervescence. And then

end-of-life stuff, you know, just the life cycle and so forth. And we know rituals are important in that. Can you tell us about your own personal relationship to Dia de los Muertos? It's almost like the preparations for the ceremony and for these sacred days that come allow you to re-invite all these people you love back into your life, right? So,

For me, Dia de los Muertos is not just about the actual day. It's about the preparation. It's about the creative outlet, the celebration, the memories.

One thing my daughter and I like to do is to remember the foods that people liked and, you know, we'll start adding those to the altar. And it's always a continual sense of like spiritual and evolutionary growth, right? With this whole ritual itself, right? Because you find something new every year and the process brings you something new every year.

I would love, Michelle, for you just to walk us through what the basic elements of the ritual are and also what an ofrenda is and just give us a picture of what Dia de los Muertos rituals are. An ofrenda is an offering. It's what you put out, you know, sort of materially into the spiritual world as a way to connect yourself to this other realm. And of course, it was syncretized with the Catholic tradition with All Saints Day.

And I think that in every region it's markedly different, but the central elements are to bring in photos of those that have passed or their name, like a symbol just written out. Then I bring in the four elements, you know, earth, wind, fire, water. And so I make sure that we have papel picado, for example, to represent the wind, a candle,

some sort of incense. Copal is a tradition that we have in Mexico. We like to bring in the favorite fruits of those who have passed. Typically, I like to make like topea soup. I invite family or close friends over. And whatever we're eating, we also offer it to the altar as a way to recognize that we're exchanging this moment together. It's also a way for my daughter and my family and my community to see the big community that I form part of.

And, you know, I was taught that you want to make sure that your intentions are in the ofrenda. So it doesn't have to be something specific. It's about how you think about the ofrenda as you're placing it on, you know, your altar. The Western European view of death is just, it's all anxiety and loss and panic. And we just forget how love persists. And I remember thinking,

You know, the ways in which I ritualized my brother's passing, you know, of visiting trees that reminded me of him, going to places in the mountains he and I went to, it just brought back all the love and the sense of his generosity. And I think we just don't do a good job of grappling with the complexity of end of life, how there's a lot of joy and love. How has doing this ritual added layers of meaning to your grief about your father and mother? And what has it done for you?

I think grief is a universal experience and finding ways to cope and be in community following the loss of a loved one is important. Grief is something that lives in our bodies always and we don't always have a place to put it.

And I don't think that this ritual is only about grief. It's about the celebration of a life. It's about the honoring. It's about a welcoming. It's about an exchange. But I can't ignore that grief is central to loss. Because we live in a society where we're not allowed to really face death directly,

Really delving into this ritual and tradition and making it a part of our everyday family custom has allowed us to be able to have a conversation about grief, acknowledging its existence in our everyday lives, acknowledging our own mortality, right? Without feeling like it's an end. My daughter has a connection to my father despite never having met him because we honor him in this way.

And I think that in that way, we actually don't cease to exist because we are continuously reminded of how we came to be today from the people that have shaped us and guided us. Instead of running away from grief, instead of

not acknowledging that we loved deeply, that we were shaped and guided by members of our loved ones that are no longer here. And instead of just ignoring all that, we bring them to being through this ritual and practice. And I think what's beautiful, too, is that it's not a singular practice. It's not an individual practice. It's a collective practice that connects us. And that is really powerful, actually, you know? Profound.

I want to get your sense of the social feeling that you described that's associated with the ritual for you. And you've talked about how you've done this with your daughter and friends. And it's so hard, I think, for Western science to describe that collective feeling or sense of humanity that you refer to. How would you describe it? And can you talk about a specific moment when doing the ritual gave you this higher feeling, if you will, of just being connected?

So I live in Arizona and I was three months pregnant when I moved to Arizona and I moved here alone. I was going to be a lone parent, not by choice initially. And so I say all that because I arrived to a place where I knew nobody. I didn't have a sense of community. And so fast forward, my daughter's born in February of that next year. And I decided that I was going to

invite the community members that I had met in that first year to bring something to share for the altar I was building. And this sort of began that tradition in community. I invited some of my colleagues and this is a group of people who hadn't really known about the tradition

I had a good maybe 30 people that first year, I remember. And I had built my altar and I had invited them to bring a photo or flowers or candle. And I had made food. And then I asked us all to form a circle around the altar.

and I asked everybody to share, you know? And everybody came from different spiritual practices, right? But I think in that moment, there's a vulnerability of this shared experience and the vulnerability to be able to talk about this person or about a memory that you otherwise don't have. And I think it's beautiful, you know? It brings me joy, actually.

because in that commonality, we can then express and come together and be in community. You know, you've spoken a lot about the cultural richness and the sense of community in the Dia de los Muertos ritual. And I have to ask, you know, having raised a couple of daughters, how did participating in the ritual shape your daughter's sense of community and culture and identity?

My daughter recognized from a young age that we did things a little differently. And I think initially that for her was, she didn't want to be different, you know? For her, that difference really, like, she was sort of like pitted herself against it, you know? Like, I just want to go to the mall or I just want to, you know, like, hang out with my friends in this other way and

But I think now, you know, this is really when the fruits of all the energy we put into our children really start revealing themselves. And I think she has a kind of appreciation for her sort of wacky life. Beautiful, wacky, ancestrally guided life, right? She's 18 now. She's a first year college student. She's a freshman. She's only been gone for a month and a half.

As she got older, though, I think the significance sort of revealed itself. And I think that for her, it allowed her to retain or create a relationship with her bia and her bio, my parents, in a way that if we just never thought about them, she wouldn't have. However, I think she's in this interesting moment of questioning, right? And I think it's a great question to ask her because she's

Being 18, being 19, being 20 years old, right? It's the first time she's away from home. She's six hours away and she is wondering about world religion and how other religions process death. And she's interested in reading about other philosophies and cosmologies. And I think that's fantastic. So maybe she is sort of not quite landed where this ritual is going to take her next because it's like marked her journey for 18 years.

But she did say a week ago that she just realized that she wasn't going to be with me for muertos. And it made her really sad. And I said, well, now it's your turn to start that ritual in the place that you are. And that's okay. You've given her just a platform to think about these big questions about spirit and life.

Michelle Tellez, thanks so much for this interview. You've made us think more broadly about grief and joy and how we all need rituals to grapple with these universal tendencies we have. So thanks so much for being on our show. It was wonderful to meet you. Up next, Dr. Matthew Sandoval, or Dr. Muerte as he's known, shares his knowledge of the deep history of Dia de los Muertos and its cultural significance today across the world.

It's really about honoring one's ancestors, so not just the recently deceased, and not even just your grandmother and your great-grandmother, but truly like the deep ancestors who you've never known, the ancestors who exist only in ghostly traces in our DNA. We'll be back with more in just a moment.

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Welcome back to the Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner, and we're exploring how rituals like Dia de los Muertos help us navigate grief, build community, and honor loved ones. Joining us is Dr. Matthew Sandoval, a leading expert on Day of the Dead. Matthew, thanks so much for joining us. It is absolutely my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm really interested in, and this is just a raw truth about cultural rituals, which is their transformation and their evolution. And Dia de los Muertos started as a kind of an ancient ritual, and now it's celebrated all over the world in many different ways. How do you think about the cultural evolution of Dia de los Muertos?

The cultural roots of Dia de los Muertos, or what we call Day of the Dead, are anchored, of course, in ancient Native American traditions and rituals in Mesoamerica, or Mexico, Latin America.

But there are cultural roots that come from European Catholicism, from European paganism, from North African Islamic culture. And then there are roots that come from West African animist traditions. And all of these cultural roots really started to fuse and mix in a very hybrid way during the

Mexico's colonial period. So in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, as Spain is conquering and colonizing Mexico and the rest of Latin America. So I tend to think of Day of the Dead as like a global phenomenon that is becoming even more global now in the 21st century. Day of the Dead, as it's celebrated in Mexico and celebrated in the United States among Latinos and Chicanos,

It's really about honoring one's ancestors. So not just the recently deceased, and not even just your grandmother and your great-grandmother, but truly the deep ancestors who you've never known, the ancestors who exist only in ghostly traces in our DNA. It's a matter of honoring them on this holiday as well. I also think that's in part why Dia de los Muertos is becoming more popular for so many people because

Just the interest in ancestry is becoming so much more profound, especially in the United States with, you know, all of these like Ancestry.com or just trying to find your lineage and your roots. And I think that these two things are tied together. The American search for one's ancestral roots is being tied now to Dia de los Muertos in a profound way. That's fascinating. I know you've written about this in your books and probably will feature it in your forthcoming documentary about, you know, just the explosion of interest in Dia de los Muertos. Yeah.

Yeah, I gather Mattel has a Dia de los Muertos Barbie of all things. And you just see it in different corners of the world. And how do you think about that? If I'm being 100% honest, I'm of at least two minds of it. Because of course, the global popularity of it has also meant that it's become commercialized in very crass ways, that it's been appropriated in ways that are like hurtful and problematic. There's no doubt about that. On the other hand, I have seen...

people who are not Latino, not Chicano, not Mexican, etc., who've approached Dia de los Muertos and started to incorporate it as a kind of cultural tradition for themselves. And it served real purpose for them, right? Because I think of Dia de los Muertos as medicine. In that regard, more and more people are starting to understand its medicinal nature. But Day of the Dead as a tradition is becoming fundamentally transformed by virtue of its global popularity.

And so traditions that have existed in Mexico for several centuries are now becoming brand new traditions. And I'm thinking specifically of like, you know, everybody at this point, more than a billion people have seen the movie Coco, Disney's movie Coco, right? And so that tends to be the way many people know Dia de los Muertos now.

But in Mexico, I'm thinking specifically of like Oaxaca in southern Mexico, watching Coco on Day of the Dead is now a Day of the Dead tradition even in Mexico. That's how profound it's becoming. Or the Great Parade that takes place in Mexico City is a new phenomenon that was a recreation of the Great Parade that was seen in the James Bond movie Spectre from 2016. Yeah.

That was just a Day of the Dead parade that existed for the purposes of cinema. But Mexico City and Mexican government officials thought, "Oh wow, that's going to attract a lot of people." And so now there's an annual Dia de los Muertos parade in Mexico City that attracts more than 2 million people out into the streets.

And this is now a Day of the Dead tradition. And I've spent a lot of time being critical of the way that Day of the Dead is becoming this large spectacle event as opposed to like a more quiet ritual or even like a more fun community festival. But I think the flip side of that coin is the idea that maybe we want to see this traditional ritual blown up to the size of

millions of people experiencing it, millions of people dressed in kalakas with their faces painted like sugar skulls because we want to engage with that level of collective awe around death almost as a deep transformative experience.

And so as much as Day of the Dead celebrations are starting to become almost versions of like a cultural Burning Man, it could also be serving these other ends which are deeply profound and tie us into a sense of awe. I hear you. How do you describe what the ritual of Dia de los Muertos, practicing it with others, what does it give to you socially? Based on the interviews that I've done with people who celebrate Dia de los Muertos, both in Mexico and in the United States,

I would say that is one of the fundamental things that brings them out to celebrate, is that sense of connection to a larger community. So that Dia de los Muertos becomes a way to carry collective grief,

Because grief can be heavy. Grief can be very heavy. And I would say that grief can also be a very lonely process. And anybody who's lost people that are close to them and people who they love will know that the road of the grieving process can be a very difficult, long, challenging and lonely road.

And Dia de los Muertos, by virtue of it being celebrated collectively, allows the burden and the heaviness of that grief to be carried by a larger community so that you don't feel like you have to carry it alone.

which in some sense I think is also why Dia de los Muertos celebrations tend to be filled with so much joy, because that grief is being transformed by virtue of community connections. And even if this community is temporary, i.e. gathering of thousands of people in the plaza, I think that the effects of having one's grief unburdened for a day or for several hours really does do healing work.

I think if it didn't offer that medicine that this holiday, that this tradition would have died out long ago, its staying power has everything to do with the fact that it continues to offer people an opportunity to heal in ways that don't feel so burdensome, don't feel so lonesome, and can actually make you feel connected to a larger sense of community and truly a larger sense of humanity.

So a lot of your work looks at how rituals help us cope with life transitions and changes. And I'm curious how Dia de los Muertos

helps children cope with grief and loss and change. Yeah, I have a daughter right now who's 14 months old and I will be of course sharing the tradition of Dia de los Muertos with her. And so as I get older and start to teach her more about this ancestral tradition, I'm also preparing, really truly preparing myself to be an ancestor who's remembered on an altar and simultaneously I'm preparing her

to be able to manage, to handle and deal with her father's death, right? So that it hopefully is something that is an easier transition for her because she will associate it not with finality, but with a kind of eternal remembrance. So that although losing me at some point in the future is going to be hard for my daughter, hopefully by giving her these tools that it will ease the transition.

It's so fascinating how impoverished we are in talking about the end of life to our children and thinking about it ourselves. Within these cultural traditions, what does this practice of your daughter starting to understand that you, as a dad, will pass away at some time, what's it give them? What kind of understanding? An understanding of death that isn't grounded in fear.

I would love it to offer something like my daughter. I would love it to offer her the ability to deal squarely with death. That's my fundamental hope for her in teaching her this cultural tradition, that it would offer her a way to manage the reality that she will pass, that I will pass, that everything that we know and everybody who we love is impermanent.

It's a deep and profound acknowledgement of impermanence. I think that can only help somebody like my daughter or only help any younger generation to start to approach death not as a finality but as part of a life process, a significant and meaningful component of a life process.

And I know there's new research, you know, that is showing that this appreciation of the cyclical nature of life really helps people in terms of keeping perspective on stress and understanding the purposes of their lives. Matthew Sandoval, thanks so much for the conversation and opening our minds to this remarkable cultural tradition and ritual. And thank you for your work and for being here. Absolutely. My pleasure. 100%. It covers 71% of the earth and makes up about 75% of our bodies.

But how often do we really think about water? The experience of gentle water is very different from the experience of crashing waves. It's very different from the experience of a powerful waterfall. They're all so different, but they all bring me a profound sense of wellness. All of these things make me feel better, make me feel good. We explore our interconnectedness with water through our five senses.

Thanks for joining us on the Science of Happiness. Our producer is Dasha Zerboni. Our research assistant is Selina Bilal. Sound design from Jenny Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Shuka Kalantari is our executive producer. I'm Dacher Keltner. Have a great day.