The Five Invitations
Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
~ Frank Ostaseski
The Transformative Power of Death
Life and death are a package deal. You cannot pull them apart.
We cannot be truly alive without maintaining an awareness of death. Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. She helps us to discover what matters most. And the good news is we don't have to wait until the end of out lives to realize the wisdom the death has to offer.
To imagine that at the time of our dying we will have the physical strength, emotional stability, and mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime is a ridiculous gamble. This book is an invitation - five invitations, actually - to sit down with death, to have a cup of tea with her, to let her guide you toward living a more meaningful and loving life. Reflecting on death can have a profound and positive impact not just on how we die, but on how we live.In the light of dying, it's easy to distinguish between the tendencies that lead us toward wholeness, and those that incline us toward separation and suffering. The word wholeness is related to "holy" and "health," but is not a vague. homogeneous oneness. It is better expressed as interconnectedness. Each cell in out bodies is part of an organic, interdependent whole that must work in harmony to maintain good health. Similarly, everybody and everything exists in a system, affecting all the other parts. When we take action that ignores this basic truth, we suffer and create suffering When we live mindfully of it we support and are supported by the wholeness of life. The habits of our lives have a powerful momentum that propels us toward the moment of our death. The obvious question arises: What habits do we want to create? Our thoughts are not harmless. Thoughts manifest as actions, which in turn develop into habits, and our habits ultimately harden into character. Our unconscious relationship to thoughts can shape our perceptions, trigger reactions, and predetermine our relationship to the events of our loves. We can overcome the inertia of these patters by becoming mindful of our views and beliefs, and by doing so, we make a conscious choice to question those habitual tendencies.
The confrontation with death - and the reprove from it - makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has never looked so beautiful... Death, and its ever-present possibility, makes love, passionate love, more possible (Abraham Maslow).
None of us get out of here alive.
One rainy night after a particularly difficult day, I was so shaken as I walked back to my room that I collapsed to my knees in a mud puddle and started to week. My attempts at taking away the participants heartache were just a self-defense strategy, a way of trying to protect myself from suffering. Just then, Elisabeth came along and picked me up. She brought me back to her room for a coffee and a cigarette. "You have to open yourself up and let the pain move through you," Elisabeth said. " it's not yours to hols." Without this lesson, I don't think I could have stayed present, in a healthy way, with the suffering I would witness in the decades to come
I learned that the activities of caregiving are themselves quite ordinary. [...] Yet I soon discovered that these everyday activities, when taken as a practice of awareness, can help awaken us from our fixed views and habits of avoidances. [...], we have to confront the uncertain nature of this life. We become aware of the fundamental truth that everything comes and goes: every thought, every lovemaking, every life. We see that dying is in the life of everything. Resisting this truth leads to pain.
Five Initations:
- Don't wait.
- Welcome everything, push away nothing.
- Bring your whole self to the experience.
- Find a place of rest in the middle of things.
- Cultivate don't know mind.