5 Key Teachings: THE FIVE INVITATIONS, by Frank Ostaseski

TRANSCRIPT:

So my editor told me that I would love this book. She’s very wise, and she was not wrong. So Frank was a co-founder of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, where my dear friend B.J. Miller also worked (you can listen to our podcast interview here). And this book is essentially about being with change, transitions. There’s certainly a lot about end of life, but why wait, don’t wait, for end of life. The Five Invitations, which he scribbled on a list and became the foundation of this book are:

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.

And the book is full of beautiful stories and nuggets of wisdom. This is in the context of “Don’t wait,” for example. He writes. He’s quoting Zen Master Suzuki Roshi, “The problem with the word patience is that it implies we are waiting for something to get better, we are waiting for something good that will come. A more accurate word for this quality is constancy, the capacity to be with what is true, moment by moment.” This is such a beautiful idea, and this is so true, right? Rather than being where we are, we’re constantly looking to the other side.

“Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly, they are passed on unopened.” –Rainer Maria Rilke

5 KEY TEACHINGS:

1. Death and its processes are a beautiful opportunity to get bigger, rather than contract. It seems counterintuitive, but Ostaseski maintains that he sees this again and again.

As he writes, “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 something larger, more expansive, and much more real than the small, separate selves they had previously taken themselves to be. This is not a fairy-tale happy ending that contradicts the suffering that came before, but rather a transcendence of tragedy. The discovery of this capacity regularly occurs for many people in the final months, days, or sometimes even minutes of life….Lessons from death are available to all those who choose to move toward it. I have witnessed a heart-opening occurring in not only people near death, but also their caregivers. They found a depth of love within themselves that they didn’t know they had access to. They discovered a profound trust in the universe and the reliable goodness of humanity that never abandoned them, regardless of the suffering they encountered.”

2. Hope has a place in healing—but not in the way we’ve been conditioned to believe. Instead, hope is an opening toward whatever may unfold rather than what one would like to unfold.