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The Five Invitation: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living-Frank Ostaseski
Introduction
Buy this book! There is so much wisdom below, but it’s only a tiny part of what I learned. The stories are absolutely amazing and beyond what I can capture here.
Introduction:
Life and death are a package deal. You cannot pull them apart.
Death is always with us, a secret teacher. Reflecting on death can have a profound and positive impact not just on how we die, but on how we live.
Our thoughts are not harmless. Our unconscious relationships to thoughts can shape our perceptions, trigger reactions, and predetermine our relationship to the events of our lives.
Without a reminder of death, we tend to take life for granted, often becoming lost in endless pursuits of self-gratification.
We can harness the awareness of death to appreciate the fact that we are alive, to encourage self-exploration, to clarify our values, to find meaning, and to generate positive action. It is the impermanence of life that gives us perspective.
None of us get out here alive.
No one alive really understands death.
My suffering was a sword that cut two ways. I grew up feeling ashamed, frightened, lonely, and unlovable. Yet that same suffering helped me to empathetically connect with others’ pain. Death is seen as a final stage of growth.
You have to open yourself up and let the pain me through you. It is not yours to hold.
Gather up the suffering and use it as a grist for the mill, and alchemically change it into the fuel for selfless service, all without making a big deal about it.
The Zen Hospice Project was the fist Buddhist hospice in America. A listening heart through meditation practice.
Meet ‘em where there’re at.
We rarely taught people to meditate
You make soup, give a back rub, change soiled sheets, help with medications, listen to a lifetime of stories lived and now ending, show up as a calm and loving presence. Nothing special. Just simple human kindness, really.
Confront the uncertain nature of life.
Metta Institute to foster mindful and compassionate end-of-life care.
Life and death will change me.
When you live a life illuminated by the fact of your death, it informs your choices.
Dying is inevitable and intimate. I have seen ordinary people at the end of their lives develop profound insights and engage in a powerful process of transformation that helped them to emerge as someone larger and more expansive.
Heart opening occurring in not only people near death, but also their caregivers. They found a depth of love within themselves.
The innate capacity for love, trust, forgiveness, and please lives in each of us.
Death awakens presence.
Being has certain attributes or essential qualities. Love, compassion, strength, peach, clarity, contentment, humility, and equanimity, to name a few.
Don’t wait. Welcome everything, push away nothing. Bring you whole self to the experience. Find a place of rest in the middle of things. Cultivate don’t know mind.
General Notes
The First Innovation: Don’t Wait.
Don’t wait for death to live, you can love early.
We say, “I love you” more often. We become kinder, more compassionate, and more forgiving.
Ch. 1: The doorway to Possibility:
Regret at never having reflected on his own mortality. Death is the elephant in the room.
Death only sneaks up on us because we haven’t noticed the clues she has hidden in plain sight.
Sights, tastes, smells, touch, feelings—they are all the same: impermanent, fleeting, and ephemeral.
Leaves that fall from the tree are very kind. They make room for little new ones to grow.
Just as there is constant dissolving, there is also constant becoming.
Each moment is born and dies.
Usually we seek happiness through trying to arrange the world in such a way that we meet things that are pleasant and avoid what is unpleasant.
The trust of life is that its one constant is change.
Abigail’s attitude changed when she was willing to meet the truth that was right in front of her to be honest, not balk at it or turn away.
Impermanence is humbling. We have little control. The gift of impermanence is that it places us squarely in the here and now. When we embrace impermanence, a certain grace enters our lives. We can treasure experiences, we can feel deeply, all without clinging.
Everything will come apart. That is true of our bodies, our relationships, all of life.
Our lives are not solid and fixed. Don’t wait.
Ch. 2: At Once Here and Disappearing:
Sadly, observed family members watching their loved ones’ deaths on a TV screen, rather than looking into their beloveds’ eyes.
The identities we have carried for so long are stripped away by illness and old age.
What do you do when your young children are sick?
The earth element fades. In the early stages of dying, people might complain that their legs or feet have gone numb. They might become difficult to arouse, unresponsive.
Earth dissolves into water. Inability to swallow fluids, urinary or bowel incontinence is common.
For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river.
Fire causes one’s body temperature to fluctuate. The skin becomes cool and moist and the feet and hands sometimes become cooler.
I thought I was losing him but he is everywhere.
There is something beyond the four elements---the spirit, soul, or animating presence.
The pattern of adaption, of seeking approval and avoiding disapproval, continues.
There is a freedom in no longer pushing down what we have been ashamed of or felt unworthy about.
Sometimes what we repress is not our raw sexual energy, our shame, or something we feel guilt about, but rather our innate goodness.
One at death often hopes to ask for help or show kindness to anyone.
With love sometimes one asks to leg go. We must love them.
There are seven gates to heaven. At each gate, one must surrender the symbol of power, until she is left bare. To identify is an inner action, a process we do to ourselves. We can identify with a job, a nationality, a sexual preference, a relationship, our spiritual progress, or a passing thought.
Han (at the entrance to many Zen meditation halls) there is a large, solid wooden block. “Be aware of the great matter of birth an death.” Life asses swiftly, wake up. Wake up! Do not waste this life.”
Over the years, the mallets that are banged at the entrance wear a hole where it hits the thick oak block. The words disappear and the block becomes the teaching.
We ought to hold ourselves more lightly. Taking ourselves too seriously is the cause of much suffering.
No matter the conditions of my life, I could not let go. I could change. I could find contentment. Luckily, we don’t have to wait until we are sick and dying to embrace our own impermanence. She was too attached to her identity as a career woman. Only when she can let go and embrace herself as a person who is bigger than the job she performed, as a human being with passions, interests, fears, and hurts that grow and evolve over time, can she begin to recover and forge a new path for herself.
Things around us change. Then we realize that we, ourselves, are ever changing our thoughts and feelings, our attitudes and beliefs, even our identities.
Ch. 3: The Maturation of Hope:
Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all the darkness. Experts differ on whether hope is an emotion, a belief, a conscious choice, or all three.
Hope takes us beyond the rational. Hope disguised as expectations. Hope gets conflated with the desire for a certain future result that is object focused.
Open to outcome, not attached to outcome.
Mature hope is not dependent upon outcome. In fact, hope is tied to uncertainty.
Most of us choose comfort over truth. We don’t grow and transform in our comfort zones.
We release our clinging to what used to be and our craving for what we think we should be, we are free to embrace the truth of what I in this moment.
Dying is messy. Very few people walk toward the immense challenge of dying and find peace and beauty there. But who are we to say how another should die?
My primary goal is to keep my heart open and cultivate a non-judgmental attention: take refuge in impermanence. Things will change whether we want them to or not.
Energy of hope: the present moment could be best described as the flow of life.
It’s like how, when we saw the earth from the moon for the first time, we could understand ourselves in the ways that weren’t possible before. When I’m not so full of the hope of expectation, I can see more of the picture. I see opportunities that I missed before. When I’m not so full of hope of expectations I can see more of the picture. I see opportunities that I missed before. In non-waiting, we allow objects, experiences, states of mind, and heart to unfold, to show themselves to us without our interference. Non-attachment simply means not holding
Ch. 4: The Heart of the Matter.
Forgiveness shakes loose the calcification that accumulates around our hearts. Then love can flow more freely.
Listening without judgment is probably the simplest, most profound way to connect. It is an act of love.
Love is what allows us to let go. You can’t love and cling at the same time. Loving kindness is metta. Attachment masquerades as love. IT is a cheap imitation. Love is selfless. Attachment is self-centered.
Holding onto our pain is, quite simply, not in our best interests. Forgiveness touches our pain with mercy. Forgiveness says good-bye to told wounds. Forgiveness has the power to overcome what divides us. Forgiveness release our hearts from the rubble of aner and other negative feelings and clears the way to love. Forgiveness is a fierce practice. It takes real strength and asks us to face our daemons. We should not let a lack of forgiveness interfere with our capacity to love and leave that as our legacy to our children.
Hatred can never cease by hatred in this world. By love alone does hatred cease.
When you go into the gym, don’t pick up the five-hundred-pound weight, start with the 20 lb weight.
How does resentment feel in your body, heart, and mind? Replaying arguments, causes anger, helplessness, hurt, and sadness. Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness does not release others for their responsibility for their actions; forgiveness is for the forgiver. Forgiveness takes only one person: you. Forgiveness does not require that we welcome people back in our lives. It allows us to move closer to our suffering and touch our wounds with kindness and understanding. I am human and have done all I could—circumstances were beyond my control. I forgive myself.
Forgiveness is always for our own benefit. Holding onto the hot coal of your anger, resentment, and sense of having been wronged only harms you.
People are less inclined to listen when you speak from a place of anger.
The Second Invitation: Welcome Everything: Push Away Nothing.
When we are open and receptive, we have options. We are free to discover, investigate, an learn how to skillfully respond. To welcome everything is an act of love.
Ch. 5: As Is:
Trust is built one day at a time, one interaction at a time. The attention to the activities, not the activities, brings joy. In a non-judgmental atmosphere of acceptance and respect, welcome everything and push nothing away is the first and foremost invitation. Openness is one of the key characteristics of an awake and curious mind. It does not determine reality, it discovers it.
Openness doesn’t reject or get attached; it is spacious, undefended, non-biased allowing. Keeping our minds and hearts available to new information, experiences, and opportunities for growth. It means having tolerance for the unknow. It is the opposite of rejecting. Denial breeds ignorance and fear. The rejected experience will keep showing up again and again.
I could not change the situation. If I railed against it, I would only cause myself more suffering. When we argue with reality, we lose every time. Until we come to accept life with all its madness and inspiration, we will feel cut off, separate, isolated. Acceptance is not resignation, openness is the basis for a skillful response to life. We tend to protect ourselves, but there is a sense of liberation and confidence that gets built up within us when we do the opposite. Accept yourself like the cardboard tag on an item being sold “as is.”
Awareness doesn’t need to push anything away. To be human is an invitation to feel everything. Some of us will make love while others make war.
Ch. 6: Turn Towards Your Suffering:
Our instinctive reaction is to run in the opposite direction, but we cannot escape suffering. Nothing is wrong with suffering. We have become a master of distraction, which leads to alcoholism, drug abuse, compulsive overeating, gambling, and shopping. We get some temporary relief this way, but long term it gets worse, our body carries suffering as undigested pain. The secret of healing lies in exploring our wounds in order to discover what is really there and accept it for what it is. Suffering is everywhere. Suffering or dukkha arises from ignorance, from not understanding that everything is impermanent, unreliable, and ungraspable and wanting it to be otherwise.
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. If you are alive you will experience pain, it’s the nervous system’s internal alarm.
Pain + Resistance = Suffering
Turn towards pain and get tot know it well and understand it has a role. Suffering is an attitude of the mind, and we can break this habit. People everywhere experience unbelievable hardships, and then they go on, recover, and live.
When I understand that this glass of life is already broken, every minute of it is precious. An integral part of healing is letting go. One cannot let go without first letting in. The victim, rescuer, and perpetrator are all alive within me. All are woven through the very fabric of our lives. When we embrace the truth, we step more fully into life.
Ch. 7: Love Heals:
“Life begins with love, is maintained with love, and ends with love.” Tsoknyi Rinpoche.
I was rescued when love came through me, not to me but from me. Love has been a mentor and taught me to love. At birth and death, love melts any division but love is always present. The love lives within us and is always available. Come back to the breath to stabilize. Loving awareness requires only a short journey from ego to heart. Loving awareness witnesses all without getting identified with any of it. Love is what helps us to accept ourselves, our lives, and other people as is. Loving awareness helps us embrace our sadness, loneliness, fear, depression, and physical pain. Love is not a gated community—no part is left out of love. Metta is a practice in which we consciously evoke a boundless warm hearted feeling. Loving kindness is the essential human quality most beneficial in the lives of those who are dying and their caregivers.
Traditionally in Asia, you start meditation by calling to mind your mother or your teacher.
Attachment likes to impersonate love. Love is generosity; attachment is obsessed with getting your needs met. Love engenders faithfulness and is selfless, encouraging freedom. Attachment is self-centered, possessive, and leaves scars.
Love inclines us to gratefulness.
As people come closer to death they care most about if they are loved and did they love well.
Rest in love. When people are sick or wounded just give them love until they can love themselves again. In love there is no separation. Love breeds love.
The Third Invitation: Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience:
Author found an undesirable aspect, which had kept hidden. To be whole, we need to include, accept, and connect all parts of our self. Wholeness does not mean perfection—it means no parts are left out.
Ch. 8: Don’t be a Role, Be a Soul:
We want to feel safe, so we cling to roles with their established rules and behaviors. Without roles some feel a sense of powerlessness.
Developmentally our roles change through life: accomplishment until mid-life; career and family; and then turn inward in the second half of our life where we explore the meaning of life, embracing mystery, cultivating wisdom, and relaxing a certain striving.
Roles are a choice, we choose them. Life asks us to adapt—roles are fluid. We we over-identify with a role, it defines us, confines us, and reduces our capacity for choice.
Don’t be a role, be a soul. We are first and foremost human beings. We don’t see people as they are but we project a story onto others. We want to be somebody who helps. It’s helpers disease if it focuses on the I. Helping can be egotistically or altruistically motivated.
Soul is about presence. When we get stuck in our roles, we stop caring. Our instinct with others is to try to fix then. We like our opinions and that’s a problem is we impose them on others. Ask others before offering guidance. Accept a no thanks.
I borrowed their confidence until I could let my own return. If I could touch my own suffering, my compassion would be a natural response. Care givers focus on problem solving. Care givers role is to be portals, not problem solvers. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Try it sometime.
Sit with another person without a solution. Just respect and receive what is being offered. It’s not even important that you understand.
Authenticity requires trust in a deep inner wisdom and the willingness to bring that wisdom into conscious action, finding our common ground with one another. I learned to see myself in each person that I serve, and I would try to see them in me.
Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Step out beyond her role and into her authentic self.
Ch. 9: Taming the Inner Critic:
No matter how hard you try, you cannot please the inner critical. When we would benefit from tenderness, we club ourselves with self-judgement which diminishes our life force. The pursuit of perfection is learned early and become a lifelong addiction, an ego quest. It impedes our ability to connect and empathize with other people. Chances are if you are critical of yourself, you are a harsh critic of others. When we were small, adults had all the power. The inner critical does not believe in our basic human goodness—it only believes in rules and moral codes. It does not trust you heart. Move from judgement to discernment. See obstacles as doorways. Hold our imperfection with kindness, befriend ourselves.
Three ways of dealing with anxiety: 1. Move away, withdraw, hide. 2. Move towards to please, accommodate. 3. Move against to gain power over others. All three given inner critic power. When our strength gets distorted, it becomes anger.
Suppose you brought awareness to a negative reaction, focusing on the visceral physical experience, channeling that energy honestly into protecting yourself.
Love is what helps set us free.
Acceptance, not approval. Approval is generally tied with judgement. We worry that acceptance means conformity and mediocrity. With acceptance what emerges is a deep trust in what is. We release ourselves from comparison, assessment, and rejection of the inner critic. Acceptance melts internal enemies and transforms them into friends.
Ch. 10: The Raging River:
The human experience is grounded, real, and alive. It is the utter simplicity of being ourselves. Mindfulness is a de-conditioning.
When you are resisting, you are resisting yourself. With difficult emotions we can repress them or express them.
Repressing them occurs because we see them as threatening, upsetting, or inappropriate. Repressing does not cause them to go away. Expression can be positive and healthy, or it can be out of proportion. The third option is to contain the emotion, a more balanced and creative choice. Hold in a caring way. We can re-evaluate our automatic negative response. Grief is normal, natural response to loss.
Recognizing that death comes to us all, she was freed from her isolation.
Grief has a unique rhythm and texture for each of us. It is a deep, slow process of the soul. It cannot be rushed.
We never speak of managing our joy or getting over it. We don’t get past our pain, we get through it and become transformed by it. In surrendering to our grief, we have learned to give ourselves to life.
Ch 11: Hearing the Cries of the World:
Wisdom and compassion are the two great wings of our practice.
Human beings want to be exquisitely unique and differentiated but not separate. We are part of the same vast ocean.
Keep in mind others have heart, body, and mind just like me; gets worried just like me. We are all human.
May this person be free from suffering, find peace and happiness and be love.
Our happiness is inextricably bound up with the happiness of others.
We need to balance and regulate the initial empathetic response in order not to confuse ourselves with others. Have a healthy empathy: sense the world as it is. Empathy helps us feel with the other person. Compassion feels for the other person.
Pain can show up to find the healing of loving kindness. Staying with pain and suffering, compassion allows a deeper truth to be revealed. The ego only wants to be protected from pain. Compassion opens to pain.
The Fourth Invitation: Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things:
Ch. 12: The Calm in the Storm:
No need to see the future, focus on the present. We get addicted to busy and confuse rest with non-productivity and laziness. Many people fear rest.
Rest comes when we become more by doing less. When we don’t allow the urgent to crowd out the important. Allow the mind to declutter. Nature’s rhythm is slow to medium. The mind layers are like the layers of the ocean.
The realization that we are in subjection beyond our control gives rise to empathy, compassion, and acceptance of both ourselves and others. If we drop below the surface of our minds, we encounter a vast, serene calmness. Rest in this open awareness. If one hopes to find true rest, must see the currents that disturb us.
Samsara is a cycle of death and rebirth. The root causes of our suffering are craving (greed), aversion (hatred), and ignorance (delusion). Aversion, whatever we push away, usually pulls back even harder. By trying to ignore something, we continually fall and trip further into our suffering.
Think of ourselves as caretakers, not owners. Everything in life is subject to impermanence.
Be the calm in the storm. Deeper we go within ourselves, the more expansive we become. Allow thoughts, feelings, ideas to come and go without being swept away by any of them. We often underestimate the comfort of silence and the value of simple human presence. Being a seeker causes one to be restless and feel agitated. Wholesome does not feel agitated. A truly open mind produces a deep restfulness, accepting and understanding desires.
Seeking doesn’t end by finding. Seeking just ends. It ends when our awareness comes to rest in the peaceful depths of our essential nature.
Ch. 13: Mind the Gap:
Breathing is like a microcosm of life. Breath comes before thoughts and words. I can only be experienced. Life can only be lived in the present, not in the past or in the future. The breath invites us into the body. Breathing consciously, we engage in exploration, a tender discovery of life. The breath invites us to rest, restore, and be revitalized. To nurture a different, more helpful response the next time we encounter a challenging situation, person, or thought. It helps us remain calm and grounded. There is a certain aggression in all this so-call self-improvement. Better to return to the true intention of meditation, which is to let go of striving, to embrace things as they are, with equanimity, to discover freedom. Mindfulness is not something to achieve, but something which results in a non-judgmental way of being. It can become an utter relief to not have to spend as much time judging everything (including yourself). Meditation is NOT a cure all—it does not solve any problems, it dissolves them. Allow it all. Meditation is about learning to be intimate with ourselves, others, and all aspects of the world with the healing power of loving awareness. The mind creates an abyss, the heart helps us cross it.
Idealism is an occupational hazard of the spiritual path. It can be the death of any practice. Mind the gap: the sacred can only be found in the ordinary, rest can be found in the middle of things.
Ch. 14: Courageous Presence:
When fear speaks, courage is the heart’s answer. The willingness to sit with fear is an act of courage. Fear does not require a basis in reality. Fear comes from the stories we tell ourselves where we don’t have faith in reality. Warrior courage is motivated by honor, service and commitment. The courage of a strong heart activates a fearlessness. Vulnerability, a type of courage, is the doorway to the deepest dimensions of our inner nature: it is not weakness, it is non-defensiveness.
Sit in silence and understand but don’t speak to someone struggling. Just say ‘yeah.’
Love transforms fear to courage. Love our fears.
The Fifth Invitation: Cultivate Don’t Know Mind:
Don’t know mind is characterized by curiosity, wonder, and surprise. It is receptive and ready to meet whatever shows up as it is. Ignorance is misperception. In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, not limited by agendas, roles, and expectations it is free to discover. We let go of control and enter life with fresh eyes, empty mines, and open hearts.
Ch. 15: The Story of Forgetfulness:
Calm presence with compassionate touch can provide order during the chaos. I strive to meet people with acceptance, listen from the heart, and withhold judgement via a don’t know mind. Take a few deep breaths, feel the body again.
Cultivating forgiveness and acceptance of ourselves allows us to extend it to others. When there is full acceptance of our not knowing, instead of fear, we stop insisting that reality should be otherwise, and we can relax with things as they are.
Telling our stories allows us to pull back and see the big picture. It opens our souls. Bodhisattvas come, do their work, and move on. Stories often have layers of meaning. The mind stream involves dimensions of the mind beyond conventional memories and as a thinking machine. Everything comes and goes in awareness. It is the ground of who we are. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors.
Ch. 16: Not Knowing is Most Intimate:
A good teacher does not tell you what to know, he or she shows you how to see. Intimate is synonymous with awakening, realization, and enlightenment. The path is right before your feet. Sometimes the answer just comes to you, you don’t need to figure it out. Surrender the mind and the heart leads the way.
When we attempt to pull ourselves out of the river of change, we wind up feeling increasingly alone, isolated, and afraid.
Pursuing security leaves us feeling even more insecure. Reality cannot be mapped. Life is not a single static truth but an endless, unfolding mystery. Forms are not permeant: they appear for a while, then they dissolve, they come and go. Just like everything in the universe. Things exist then they don’t.
Emptiness, on the other hand, is never ending. Emptiness makes everything possible. Form and emptiness are inseparable, indivisible, and non-dual.
When we take ourselves to be separate death threatens our form. But no individual exists separate from everything else.
Ch. 17: Surrender to the Sacred:
The sacred is not separate or different from all things, it is hidden in all things. One is all and all is one. The sacred is not separate. The sacred cannot be fully described.
Through silence we become aware of the majesty in the ordinary, the beauty, the unity, and the depth of the sacred that is always around us and within us.
Hospice attempts to provide intensive love, intensive compassion, and intensive presence.
Dying can help us discover the beauty in life. We cannot always explain or understand it but we can meet it with compassion. Dying occurs on both physical and spiritual levels.
There are no storage units in heaven. Letting go is how we prepare for dying. Let go of grudges and give yourself peace.
Let go of fixed views and give in to not knowing. Let go of clinging and give ourselves gratitude. Let go of control and give ourselves to surrender.
Surrender is more about expansion and freedom. Surrender happens when we stop fighting. Fighting proves ineffective.
The sacred is so magnetizing and compelling. Surrender is the end of two and the opening of one.
Epilogue: Dying into Life:
We need to be open to mystery. Death cannot be solved or fully known. We are mystery that lives through us.