The Five Invitations Quotes

“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.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Rest comes when we become more by doing less, when we don’t allow the urgent to crowd out the important”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“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. As we come in contact with life’s precarious nature, we also come to appreciate its preciousness. Then we don’t want to waste a minute. We want to enter our lives fully and use them in a responsible way. Death is a good companion on the road to living well and dying without regret.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“I am not romantic about dying. It is hard work. Maybe the hardest work we will ever do in this life. It doesn’t always turn out well. It can be sad, cruel, messy, beautiful, and mysterious. Most of all it is normal. We all go through it. None of us get out of here alive.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“The more permeable I became, the more I realized that we humans are just bundles of ever-changing conditions. We ought to hold ourselves more lightly. Taking ourselves too seriously is the cause of much suffering. We tell ourselves that we are in charge: “Buckle up! Get this done!” When in reality, we are quite helpless, subject to the events taking place around us. But that helplessness brings us into contact with our vulnerability, which can be a doorway to awakening, to a deeper intimacy with reality.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Spiritual practice helps us settle into the utter simplicity of being ourselves. The healing that it engenders happens when we bring awareness to the places that have hardened in us through the conditioned habits of grasping, resistance, and avoidance.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“When we disown parts of ourself, we tend to judge others who display those same qualities. We lay claim to moral superiority. This holding too tightly to a role can create a chasm between people that’s difficult to cross.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Love is what helps us accept ourselves, our lives and other people as is. When something unwanted--such as death, illness, loss of a job or relationship--approaches, it is natural for fear to arise. In such moments, we need to find some part of us that is not afraid.
When you are afraid, don't you know that you are afraid? That means some part of you, that part that is witnessing your fear, is not afraid. It is not caught by the fear. We can learn to relate to difficult thoughts, strong emotions, or challenging circumstances from the vantage point of the witness, of loving awareness.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“1. Don’t wait. 2. Welcome everything, push away nothing. 3. Bring your whole self to the experience. 4. Find a place of rest in the middle of things. 5. Cultivate don’t know mind.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“You have to open yourself up and let the pain move through you,” Elisabeth said. “It’s not yours to hold.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“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).”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“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 our lives to realize the wisdom that death has to offer.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“To welcome everything and push away nothing is an invitation to discover a deeper dimension of our humanity, to tap into something beyond our habitual selves. We can gain access to some part of us that includes, but is not driven by, our reactivity.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Before every session, I take a moment to remember my humanity. There is no experience that this man has that I cannot share with him, no fear that I cannot understand, no suffering that I cannot care about, because I too am human. No matter how deep his wound, he does not need to be ashamed in front of me. I too am vulnerable. And because of this, I am enough. Whatever his story, he no longer needs to be alone with it. This is what will allow his healing to begin.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“All tempest has, like a navel, a hole in its middle,
through which a gull can fly in silence.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Suffering is exacerbated by avoidance. The body carries with it any undigested pain. Our attempts at self-protection cause us to live in a small, dark, cramped corner of our lives. We accept a limited perspective of the situation and a restricted view of ourselves. We cling to what is familiar simply in order to reassert control, thinking we can fend off what we fear will be intolerable. When we push back, hoping to get rid of a difficult experience, we are actually encapsulating it. In short, what we resist persists.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“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.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“It is not our expertise, but rather the wisdom gained from our own suffering, vulnerability, and healing that enables us to be of real assistance to others. It is the exploration of our inner lives that facilitates us in forming an empathetic bridge from our experience to theirs. 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.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“The hope is in the potential for our awakened response, not in things turning out a particular way. It is an orientation of the heart,”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Apprentice yourself to the curve of your own disappearance.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“What he meant is the self is not a separate static thing but a process, or actually a network of interconnected processes. When we realize this, we see that there is always an opportunity to respond to a situation creatively. Nothing is holding us back from change and transformation—and nothing ever was.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“It seems this is what comes of being vulnerable. When we relax the clinging to our treasured beliefs and ideas, soften our resistance to the blows of life, stop trying to manage the uncertainty and hold ourselves more lightly, then we become a less solid thing. Less of a fixed identity.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“At the entrance to most Zen meditation halls, there is a han: a large, solid wooden block that the monks strike with a mallet to call students to the zendo for meditation. Written across the block in black sumi ink is the teaching: Be aware of the Great Matter of Birth and Death Life passes swiftly, Wake up, Wake up! Do not waste this life.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Our thoughts are not harmless. Thoughts manifest as actions, which in turn develop into habits, and our habits ultimately harden into character.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Which brings us back to the ocean, in which each of us are individual waves, unique yet inseparable from the whole.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“love, is intimate, and that intimacy is the condition of the deepest learning.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Loving and letting go are inseparable. You can't love and cling at the same time. Too often we mistake attachment for love...Attachment masquerades as love. It looks and smells like love, but it's a cheap imitation. You can feel how attachment grasps and is driven by need and fear. Love is selfless; attachment is self-centered. Love is freeing; attachment is possessive. When we love, we relax, we don't hold on so tight, and we naturally let go more easily.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Victor Frankl identified self-transcendence as an indispensable human capacity for meaningful living when he wrote, “Man is not destroyed by suffering; he is destroyed by suffering without meaning.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“Exploring our own hurt, in addition to contributing to our healing, helps us feel empathy for others who have suffered similar injuries.”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

“escorting”
― Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully