The Longevity Compass
Medicine, Mind, and Meaning
How do we live longer—and make those years' worth living?
Modern medicine has become remarkably good at extending life. But longevity is about more than adding years. The more important question is whether we can live those years with health, independence, clarity, connection, and purpose.
In The Longevity Compass, Gabriel Lasala, MD, draws on more than four decades in cardiology, regenerative medicine, functional medicine, and longevity to explore the science of aging and the choices that influence how we age. The book examines nutrition, exercise, sleep, metabolic health, hormones, inflammation, cardiovascular disease, cognitive health, stress, and other forces that shape both lifespan and healthspan.
But the book moves beyond biology.
Years of caring for patients taught Dr. Lasala that health alone does not guarantee a meaningful life. Human connection matters. Purpose matters. Our ability to adapt to change matters. So does the way we think about aging itself.
The result is not a promise of immortality or a search for a single anti-aging solution. It is a practical and deeply human approach to longevity—one that brings together contemporary science with lessons learned from patients, medicine, and life.
A compass does not determine the destination. It helps us choose a direction. The Longevity Compass offers that direction: toward a life in which physical health, emotional well-being, relationships, purpose, and meaning remain important parts of the journey. Because ultimately, the goal is not simply to live longer. It is to remain fully alive for as long as we are here.
Death
Medicine, Meaning, and Mystery Beyond
If life must end, how do we face mortality—and what can death teach us about living?
For more than four decades as a cardiologist, Gabriel Lasala, MD, has stood at the boundary between life and death. He has resuscitated patients whose hearts stopped, spoken with families facing impossible decisions, cared for people approaching the end of life, and witnessed the different ways human beings confront the knowledge that their time is limited.
Medicine taught him how fiercely we fight death. His patients taught him something more complicated: that death is not only a medical event.
Death: Mind, Meaning, and Mystery Beyond explores mortality through the perspectives of medicine, science, philosophy, spirituality, and, above all, human experience. Through stories from decades at the bedside, Dr. Lasala examines the questions that emerge when medicine can no longer promise a cure: When should we continue fighting? When is it time to let go? What does dignity mean near the end of life? How do families live with grief? And why do questions of meaning and transcendence often become more urgent as death approaches?
The book also ventures beyond what medicine can measure. It considers consciousness, the physical nature of reality, philosophical traditions, spiritual experiences, and the enduring human question of whether death represents an ending—or a boundary beyond which our knowledge simply fails.
It does not attempt to prove what lies beyond death. Nor does it ask the reader to accept a particular belief. Instead, it invites us to approach mortality with curiosity, humility, and less fear. Because perhaps learning to look at death more openly can change not only how we die, but how we choose to live before it arrives.
COMING SOON
After the Ego
After the Ego: Who Are We When We Stop Defending Who We Think We Are?
Living Mortality Identity
From childhood onward, we build an image of who we are. We become the successful professional, the devoted parent, the desirable partner, the person of faith, the respected physician, the independent individual, the one who has everything under control.
These identities help us navigate the world. But they can also become cages. In After the Ego, Gabriel Lasala, MD, explores how the self is constructed—and what happens when we become so attached to our image that much of life is spent protecting it. Drawing on four decades of observing patients and families, along with insights from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, contemplative traditions, and his own experience, he examines our hunger for achievement, status, validation, security, belonging, and control.
Illness often exposes the fragility of these constructions. The executive becomes dependent. The athlete loses the body that defined him. The physician becomes the patient. Aging changes appearance. Retirement removes titles. Relationships end. Beliefs are challenged. And eventually, every identity encounters something it cannot control.
Yet the weakening of identity does not necessarily leave emptiness behind. It may reveal another possibility: a life requiring less comparison, less defensiveness, less fear, and less need to prove who we are.
After the Ego is not an argument against identity, ambition, achievement, or individuality. It invites us to hold them more lightly. To recognize that the roles we play are part of us without becoming all of us. And perhaps, by loosening our attachment to the image, to discover what remains when we no longer need to defend who we think we are.
CURRENTLY IN DEVELOPMENT
