The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

by Frank Ostaseski

We imagine that if we are good and careful, stay positive, play by the rules, and ignore what’s on the news every night, then it won’t happen to us. We think suffering is somewhere else. But suffering is everywhere. This is one of the most difficult truths of existence.

Thinking that life is moving by too fast or too slow. Not getting what you want, getting what you don’t want, or getting what you want but fearing you will lose it—all of this is suffering. Sickness is suffering, old age is suffering, and so is dying.

What is an alternative way to handle life’s inevitable dukkha? The first step is to realize that pain and suffering actually are two intimately related yet different experiences. The familiar adage says, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” That about sums it up.

Suffering is about perception and interpretation. It is our mental and emotional relationship to what is first perceived as an unpleasant or undesirable experience. Our stories and beliefs about what is happening or did happen shape our interpretation of it.

I have always liked the formula: Pain + Resistance = Suffering If we attempt to push away our pain, whether it is physical or emotional, we almost always find ourselves suffering even more. When we open to suffering, inquiring into it instead of trying to deny it, we see how we might make use of it in our lives.

After my heart attack and a triple bypass surgery a few years ago, a famous Tibetan Buddhist teacher kindly called to wish me well. I knew he had heart problems himself, so I asked him how he dealt with it all—the drama, the confusion, the precariousness, and the beauty. I half expected him to offer me some esoteric meditation practice. Instead there was a pause, after which he said, “Well, I thought to myself, it’s good to have a heart. And if we have one, then we should expect it will have problems!” The teacher giggled in his very Tibetan way, reminded me to get plenty of rest, and hung up the phone.

The Thai meditation master Ajahn Chah once motioned to a glass at his side. “Do you see this glass?” he asked. “I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”

When we take off our armor, our hearts are more available to love, and the mind is free to see the fundamental causes of suffering. We not only come to terms with our deepest fears, but also connect with others who have similar wounds. We are motivated to find ways to reduce suffering—our own and other people’s. “A good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor’s examining himself,” wrote Carl Jung. “It is his own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal.”

But even as the word No! left my mouth, I knew that Stephen was right. It was a moment of sudden awareness, a recognition of the meaning that was to be found in my suffering. I had to do it. Stephen was sending me straight into hell to face my demons. In a flash, it became clear that the victim, rescuer, and perpetrator all lived within me.

Turning toward our suffering is a critical part of welcoming everything and pushing away nothing. This invitation means that no part of ourselves or our experience can be left out: not the joy and wonder, nor the pain and anguish. All are woven throughout the very fabric of our lives. When we embrace that truth, we step more fully into life.

I think of the words of the late John O’Donohue, who wrote, “We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.”

Once we have found this treasure, there is no point in keeping it to ourselves. The ground of love is limitless. We don’t have to be stingy about it. We get caught up in scarcity about it, but it’s not a commodity to be traded. There is an endless supply of love, and so we can endlessly give it away. One way to tap into this bountiful harvest of expressive love is through the Buddhist practice of metta. Metta is a practice in which we consciously evoke a boundless warmhearted feeling. Through the recitation of phrases such as “May all beings everywhere be happy and free,” we gradually establish benevolence, friendliness, and love in our own hearts, and then we extend the wish for well-being and happiness to all beings in every direction.

Attachment likes to impersonate love. It says, “I will love you if you give me what I need.” Love is focused on generosity; attachment is obsessed with getting needs met. Love is an expression of our most essential nature; attachment is an expression of the personality. Love engenders faithfulness, aligning with our values, moving with purpose; attachment clings in fear and grasps tightly to a particular end result. Love is selfless and encourages freedom; attachment is self-centered and engenders possessiveness. Attachment leaves scars. Love inclines us to gratefulness.

As people come closer to death, I have found that only two questions really matter to them: “Am I loved?” and “Did I love well?”

To be whole, we need to include, accept, and connect all parts of ourselves. We need acceptance of our conflicting qualities and the seeming incongruity of our inner and outer worlds. Wholeness does not mean perfection. It means no part left out.

Don’t sell your soul to buy peanuts for the monkeys. —DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS

Too often, caregivers tend to amplify the patient’s fear or exacerbate the condition of confusion by focusing exclusively on problem solving. In so doing, they may intensify the contraction. Soon, just as I had, the patient loses contact with their innate resourcefulness.

My friend Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., says this better than anyone I know when she writes, “Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.”

There is an excerpt I love from John O’Donohue. He asks, “What have you done with your wildness?”

I was often guided by the good counsel of George Washington Carver, the African-American author who was born into slavery and later became a leading scientist, botanist, and educator. He said, “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also—if you love them enough.”

The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice. —PEGGY O’MARA

Instead of telling you what might appear to be true, as the critic does, wisdom teaches us how to discover what is really true.

Pema Chödrön, who wrote, “The problem is that the desire to change yourself is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.”

THIS IS HUGE

Karen Horney, the German psychoanalyst credited with founding feminist psychology, wrote about three human coping strategies for dealing with basic anxiety. They are applicable both to how we reacted to criticism as children and to how we continue to respond to the inner critic today: • Some of us move away by withdrawing, hiding, collapsing, keeping secrets, and silencing ourselves. We avoid conflict. Maybe you went to your room, perhaps you quietly watched TV as you tried to absorb the judgment or simply endure it. • Some of us move toward by seeking to please and accommodate, negotiate, persuade, and explain. Maybe you did extra schoolwork, tried to be helpful around the house, or always were well behaved in order to earn approval. • Some us move against by trying to gain power over others. We rebel or fight back. Maybe you talked back, yelled, acted with hostility, slammed doors, or snuck out the window and did what you wanted. Here is the problem with all of these strategies: they still give the inner critic all the power. We remain caught up in reacting to authority instead of creatively choosing our own path. To undo this old habit, we need strength.

Telling the emotional truth, expressing disinterest in the critic’s advice, using humor, staying connected to your physical center, harnessing your strength—all these strategies are meant to restore our contact with the dynamic expansiveness that is our essential nature.

With acceptance, what emerges is a deep trust in what is. We release ourselves completely from the comparison, assessment, and rejection of the inner critic. We stop blaming ourselves for having desires and wants, and instead accept these desires as a flavor of love, one that expresses our hearts’ deepest longing for what is true and real. True acceptance begins an alchemical process. The undesirable can be changed into the desirable by mindfully embracing our flaws, shortcomings, warts, and all those rejected, painful, and scary aspects of ourselves. Even the seemingly unlovable pieces are loved because they are seen as part of the whole. We expose our imagined imperfections to the fierce fires of wisdom, strength, and love, and in so doing, we learn to turn lead into gold. Confusion dissolves into clarity. We discover courage in our vulnerability. We melt internal enemies and transform them into friends. This process reveals the real treasure, which is the pure potential that exists in everything, the glimmering properties of our essential nature.

What is to give light must endure burning. —VIKTOR FRANKL

I asked if there was any part of her that could be with her sadness. I could see her searching, eventually finding a more spacious part of herself. I asked her to place attention on the relationship between the sadness and the newfound openness. Gina said, “Wow, the relationship between the two is like a third thing.” “Great,” I said. “Let them mingle with one another and get to know each other really well.” Gradually, her crush on the boy faded, and her relationship with herself became far more interesting.

Repression generates mental reactivity and skews our perceptions. It leads to what in Buddhism we call papanca mind, which refers to a proliferation of thoughts and reactions.

At Zen Hospice Project, our volunteer coordinator Eric Poché came up with a simple formulation that we often used to describe grieving. We speak of loss, losing, and loosening.

Grief is disorienting. We forget our keys, arrive at places and can’t remember why we went there. This is the state of grief that at Zen Hospice Project we called losing. We can’t concentrate. We live in a confused reality. And this goes on for a while after the death of someone you love.

In this period of losing, it is critical that we allow ourselves to feel the pain. Some say time heals. That is a dangerous half-truth. Time alone doesn’t heal. Time and loving attention heal.

Loosening is the period in which the knot of our grief is untied. It is a time of renewal. You can’t go back to life as it was before because you are a different person now, changed by your journey through grief. But you can begin to embrace life again, to feel alive again. The intensity of emotions has subsided somewhat. You can remember the loss without being caught up in a stranglehold of grief. You can move forward without abandoning the one you love.

To accompany a dying person, to make the journey through grief ourselves—these may be the greatest challenges we will ever face in our lives. But don’t turn away. Bring your whole self to the experience. When we take care of someone we love and do it with great integrity and impeccability, when we feel that we have given ourselves fully and completely to our grief and didn’t hold anything back, then we will surely feel great sorrow. But also we will feel gratitude and the possibility of opening to a reservoir of joy and love that we may have never known before. I call this undying love.

In the end, we may still fear death, but we don’t fear living nearly as much. In surrendering to our grief, we have learned to give ourselves to life.

Silently repeat a few phrases to emphasize your common ground with the other person and feel the connection of simple human kindness: This person has a body, heart, and mind, just like me. This person worries and gets frightened, just like me. This person is trying their best to navigate life, just like me. This person is a fellow human being, just like me. Now, allow some benevolent wishes for well-being to arise: May this person have the strength and support to face the difficulties in life. May this person be free from suffering and its causes. May this person be peaceful and happy. May this person be loved.

Yet we need to balance and regulate the initial empathetic response in order not to confuse ourselves with the other person. This is particularly important for those who face continued exposure to suffering, such as nurses, teachers, counselors, therapists, and first responders. Otherwise, empathetic concern can easily slip into empathetic overload, which can have a negative impact on our health and well-being, leading to exhaustion, isolation, burnout, and even selfish behaviors such as acting out on others to relieve our personal empathetic distress.

KEY!

All spiritual traditions point to universal compassion as an innate and essential aspect of existence. In Buddhist thought, it is vast and boundless, the dynamic quality of reality that contributes to harmony.

Then there is everyday compassion. This is the compassion that gets expressed in daily life, when we help someone, feed the hungry, stand against injustice, change soiled sheets, give a foot rub, listen generously to a friend’s broken heart, or contribute to an earthquake recovery fund. We may be effective or ineffectual in our efforts, but we do the best we can. These two facets of compassion rely on each other. Everyday compassion can be exhausting. We get weary and worn out from our repeated efforts to care for our families, help others, or reduce the world’s suffering. This is why everyday compassion must be sourced in the abundance of universal compassion. But it’s a two-way street. Universal compassion also needs everyday compassion. Without everyday compassion, universal compassion is just an abstract idea, a big prayer. And if prayers alone were enough to heal the world, we could have ended suffering a long time ago.

“Oh, Michael, that fear will never go away. The part of you that is scared will always be scared.” At first Michael looked a bit stunned. But after letting the words touch his heart, he said, “Wow, that’s the most comforting thing anybody has told me about this whole situation.” It wasn’t resignation; it was an understanding that while the fear was there, he was aware of the fear, and he could access that dimension of himself that was not scared. Awareness could be with the fear. Fear was no longer the only thing in the room. Now compassion was also present. It provided the necessary breathing space to see that the fear was workable. For a moment, Michael was the one who was not sick.

The great naturalist John Muir once said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

Wisdom shows us that the small, bounded sense of separate self we have taken ourselves to be is no more than a limiting story. When separation falls away, we recognize that we are everything. Being everything, compassion is simply an appropriate response, the natural way to serve and love what is really our whole selves, and to express its freedom.

The Fourth Invitation teaches us that, like Adele, we can find a place of rest within us, without having to alter the conditions of our lives.

Angeles Arrien, was fond of saying, “Nature’s rhythm is medium to slow. Many of us live in the fast lane, out of nature’s rhythm. There are two things we can never do in the fast lane: we can neither deepen our experience nor integrate it.” She would often encourage our students to spend an hour outdoors each day and at least a half an hour in silence every day. She said, “When we lose touch with the rhythms of nature, we become unbalanced. To be fully present within our nature, we must be in balance with the land around us.”

In the Buddhist tradition, there is an image known as the wheel of samsara. Samsara means the cycle of death and rebirth to which the material world is inextricably bound. The wheel as metaphor illustrates the continuous cycle of conditions that cause us to spin round and round. The engine that drives the wheel is sometimes referred to as the three poisons. These are the root causes of our suffering: craving (greed), aversion (hatred), and ignorance (delusion).

Still, I prefer a more contemporary and visceral way of naming these universal obstacles, which Martin Aylward, the resident Buddhist teacher at Moulin de Chaves retreat center in France, shared with me in a conversation. He called them demand, defense, and distract.

The antidote to all three poisons is mindfulness.

Once the blinders come off, we are no longer fooled. We see our conditioning, our identification with the poisons, with clear awareness. Then we wake up to the fact that our suffering was fueled by a drive to ignore the truth all along.

But when you’re on the surface of your mind, all you can do is react. You’re at the total mercy of the storm, being tossed about like a tiny rowboat in a wild sea. When you travel into the calm depths, you can act from a place of wisdom and compassion.

There is one form of seeking that I find useful. I call it wholesome desire. This is the desire to be free, to know what is true and be completely ourselves.