Tara Brach - Heavenly Messengers

Episode Date: April 10, 2013

2013-04-10 - Heavenly Messengers - Tara interviews Frank Ostaseski, founder of Zen Hospice, on a contemplative approach to death and dying. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

It's a very exciting special night for me. The last time Frank was here, I wasn't here, so I get to be here with you. Frank Osteskiske, we're on first name basis, so it's Frank from here on in because I don't say the last name well. But when I first heard about Frank, he's the founder of the Zen Hospice. I remember thinking to myself that if I was doing a parallel life, I would love to train in and go that route, the depth of being the mystery at the edge of life, that would be a route I'd want. And I didn't, so I dip in from different directions. Frank is a pioneer in bringing really contemplative caregiving to the dying and training caregivers

in being with the dying. And also in more recent incarnation with the Meta Institute, that he founded, I don't know how many years back was that about... In 2005. 2005, doing a tremendous number of trainings and workshops for people that are interested in caregiving. And he'll tell you about the most exciting, most recent offering towards the end of the evening. But I just want to, on behalf of all of us, thank you for being here. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm very happy to be with you.

So our format tonight is that Frank's going to basically share about some of what he's into. I'm just going to ask a few leading questions, but take it wherever you want to go, okay? All right. We'll have fun together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was kind of interested myself, if you wouldn't mind starting on a more personal note with how it happened that you took this track in life, that this became your passion. Well, there's a kind of elevator speech for that, but we're not in an elevator. Tagore actually had a beautiful short story that I remember reading about children who walked from village to village.

And when they walked barefoot, the paths were always curving and meandering. And then they got shoes and the paths became very straight. I meandered for a long time. I think my own parents dying young was probably a big impact. And honestly, you know, my own pain. You know, there comes a point in our lives, as you know, so well, that, you know, we stop and we turn toward our pain, and that becomes the ground for compassion.

And then that's the only thing that makes sense anymore, yeah? So I worked in refugee camps a lot. And then in San Francisco, it was ground zero for the AIDS epidemic. And none of us really know what we were doing. We were making it up as we went along, really. But it was an honest time. You know, the eyes of a dying patient, they're the clearest mirrors I've ever looked into.

And in their gaze, there's no place to hide. And so being with dying has shown me myself in ways that I couldn't have imagined before, actually. So I feel very grateful that my life took this turn. I don't exactly know why I took this turn, but I'm very grateful that it did. I've been reading just recently some of the things that you put out,

and one of the things that most seemed to kind of wrap around the teachings of how you talk about being with the dying, the precepts you give felt like a really beautiful, that could be like 10 Darmatoxone. But if there's any way just to kind of bring us all in on that, maybe? Well, first of all, when I started Zen Hospice, it started with a very simple idea.

And that was that there seemed to me to be a natural match between people who were cultivating, what we might call the listening mind or the listening heart and meditation practice, and those people that needed to be heard really well, at least once in their lives. People who are dying. In our case, mostly people who were living on the streets of San Francisco. So I didn't really have much of an idea beyond that, to be honest. We just started taking people in and caring for them. I changed diapers on park

benches behind City Hall and taught prostitutes and desk clerks how to take care of the people in their SRO hotels, you know. And along the way, dying people showed me what was most important. So I give them all the credit, first of all, because they're my teachers. It's good to have your teachers in the room with you. It keeps you honest, yeah. So, yeah, a while back,

I was flying out to be with Bill Moyers, who was doing a big show. And he asked me if I could help train his staff, cameramen and producers, etc., And so on the airplane, I tried to write down five salient things the dying people had told me. You know how that goes? You've done that. And the first was welcome everything, push away nothing.

How do we do that? I don't think that means we have to like everything that comes. We just have to be willing to meet it. But we can't just meet it as a personality either. So we have to discover in ourselves something that's capable of that kind of welcoming. And the second was bring your whole self to the experience. You know, we often think that what will serve is our expertise or our strength or something along these lines. But really what serves often as a meeting place is our weakness, our helplessness, you know, our fear.

When we bring our whole self to the experience, we bring our whole self to the experience, we bring not just our strength, but also all of these other qualities of being human. The third precept is my favorite. It says, don't wait. Waiting is full of expectation. Waiting for the next moment to arrive, we miss this one. Can I tell you how many people I've been with families of dying people who say to me, when is he going to die?

And waiting for the moment of dying, they miss everything that's here. So waiting is full of expectation. And I'm not suggesting some kind of urgency here. I just mean, Suzuki-Roshi spoke about it beautifully. He spoke about it not as patience, but as constancy. A constant contact with our experience. And the fourth precept was find a place of rest right in the middle of things. We often think that rest will come when, oh, we go on a retreat or we go on a holiday or when

our lists get checked off, you know, but my list never gets checked off, especially with my email account, you know. So I have to find a way of resting right in the middle of what I'm doing, like right now. And I find that that rest comes from bringing my attention carefully and heartfully to what's actually happening. You know, it is when you do that when you're absorbed in a book you're reading and you feel refreshed by it. So find a place of rest right in the middle of things. And the final one is

cultivate don't know mind. I felt the blogged to put something kind of zen like in the list. So to cultivate don't know mind is to really cultivate a mind that's full of wonder and awe and curiosity. Yes? Like, can you really be that curious?

about your next breath? Or is it boring, you know? Is it boring just because that's the attitude you're bringing to it? So can we really have an open mind? Suzuki-Roshi famously spoke of beginner's mind, you know? There's a corollary teaching in Zen, Dogen said,

not knowing is nearest, or it's often translated, not knowing is most intimate. And he was speaking actually about awakening, but we could also. understand this that when we don't know something we have to stay very close to it in order to understand it you know like you go into a room where you don't have a light you know you feel your way along the wall you know one of my teachers

used to say yeah we use the braille method you know we find our way along through life that way feel our way through life yeah so to cultivate not knowing is to bring this kind of openness and wonder I think to to our lives and to our encounters, our relationships. So this is what dying people told me. They showed me that this was what was most important. I'm not being humble. I mean it quite honestly that I didn't have a clue

about what I was doing when we started. We didn't know. I trained about 12 people, you know, and there were Zen students who were kind of anxious to be around dying people because they heard that was really important to do. But then I would find someone on the street or in San Francisco General Hospital and I would bring them home to Zen Center and move them into one of the students' rooms and we would just

figure it out. And they showed us what to do. So even to this day, you know, when someone says, well, what should I do and my mother's dying? I say, I don't know. But your mother knows, you know. And if you trust her, she'll show you the way, you know. So, you know, I feel very grateful that I'm...

have had such good teachers in my life. Such extraordinary teachers, yeah. I'll say one more thing, that is that I don't think it's any more important than anything else. I don't think caring for the dying is any more important than taking care of your children or working in your gardens

or practicing the Dharma. It just is what, you know, called me. Now, it is very difficult to walk into a room where someone is dying and not pay attention. I mean, it galvanizes, your attention into this present moment, yeah? But, you know, we can bring that kind of attention to anything we do.

It's just what called to me, and I'm glad it did. You know, as I listen to those precepts, they're a path for everything. I mean, that's for living and dying, and that every part of living has loss and change, so it goes for everything. And as you were speaking, I was thinking, I was, thinking of the don't know mind and realizing how it sounds so good, wonder. I mean, I love the idea of wonder. And yet I know for myself, as soon as stress hits,

and the bigger the stress, the more there's a kind of controlling and wanting to figure out and tighten, so the valve kind of closes, I definitely watched that when I got really sick, and I didn't know what was going to happen and everything in me wanted to control and figure out and so on. And you just not so far, in the far past, went through a major one. And I was wondering if you could talk about what you learned and what was challenging

and what came through with your heart attacks. Yes, Tara is referring to the fact that I had a very serious heart attack and then triple bypass surgery, urgent, triple bypass surgery. I was actually in the middle of teaching a retreat on compassion for a bunch of doctors and nurses. That heart stuff gets you in trouble, doesn't it? And actually, I'll tell you the truth, the morning of the heart attacks, I began to feel pain in my chest, and I completely denied it. I had, my assistant happens to be a hospice nurse, and she said, Frank, you should pay attention to this. I said, no, I think it's just,

it feels a bit like indigestion. Just give me some antacets, I'll be fine. And then I was sitting in practice as we were just doing, and I could feel this wave of pain coming through. I thought, oh, sensation, sensation, you know. Twice. The third time I was walking down the road to this room where I was having a video conference with Ram Dass, actually. And again, this pain came. And I was like Peter and Christ, you know, denying Christ three times, you know.

So arrogant. We can be so arrogant, I can be so arrogant. But in the middle of a dialogue with Randas, I began to get irritable. and it reminded me of my son's mother when she was giving birth and I made a suggestion to her and she snapped at me and I said under my breath to Ram Dass you're talking too much

you're going on and on you know just shut up you know and I thought oh something must be happening so I said Rundas please excuse me I have to go now and they took me to the hospital and in the emergency room I had a heart attack it was very humbling it was so humbling. I mean, I used to think I knew something about dying,

and now I don't know very much about it at all. I was very lucky. I had people around me who loved me, soul friends, you know. And they took exquisite care of me. I was not able to take care of myself. And there was a tremendous vulnerability, as you probably understand through your own. illness. And at first this vulnerability for me at least was experienced as

dependency and helplessness and absence of control. But gradually over the weeks of healing and months of healing it became something more like porousness or transparency, yeah, where there weren't so many veils between myself and the others. I was very fortunate to be well-loved. I had people around me and I had very kind of people all over the country who were putting my names on altars and doing practice for me. And this was stunning. And it was so powerful that I couldn't deny that it was true.

But it wasn't the most extraordinary thing. The most extraordinary thing was discovering the love of my own being for me. It was of course a love I was familiar with but I became much more intimate with it. And that love opened me to a certain kind of trust, not a trust in others' behavior, although I had trustworthy people around me. It was really a kind of trusting in the unfolding of things, all the things that we imagined were in charge of. And that trust became an abiding trust.

And even though I had practiced for 30 years, I'd never know. known trust quite like that. And that trust opened to something else. And it was a deep rest, a real true rest, mind at rest, heart at rest, consciousness at rest, the whole being at rest. And a certain kind of seeking, even a very subtle seeking, just stopped. And so this was what was incredibly remarkable about this experience was the humility that it brought forward, the love, the trust, and the rest that it opened in my life. You know, the night before my surgery, my son came to be with me. I love him beyond words.

And cheering me up, he decided to get a film that he thought it would be a good idea for us. watch a video. So he got the bucket list, which we watched for about 15 minutes and then put it away. And we fell into a very beautiful conversation together. And as I say, I really love him. And in the middle of this very heartfelt conversation, he turned to me and he said, Dad, are you going to live through this? And, you know, a lot of your parents in the room, I'm sure. And, of course, we want to reassure our children. And so I started to do that. And I started to say, oh, don't worry, it'll be fine. But out of my mouth, I heard myself say, I'm not taking sides.

And it was so surprising to me, actually, but also absolutely truthful. I wasn't trying to be a good Buddhist, you know. It wasn't a great thing to say. But it was absolutely truthful. And partly because it was so truthful, it was reassuring to both him and I, both of us, both of us. And I wasn't taking sides. and I really give all the credit for that to my teachers, to the people who have allowed me

a great honor of being with them in their most vulnerable moments. And so they were with me all through the surgery and the months and months of healing. I'd have dreams every night, you know. Sometimes it was just remembering something. Other times I felt like I was being visited. you know, sometimes people I'd work with, I'd work with a thousand people or more, you know. They'd come and give me advice, you know, or they'd just come keep me company, you know.

Turn my life upside down. Upside down. Like, it's like going to India, getting a heart attack, you know? It's a beautiful, horrible thing, going to India or having a heart attack, yeah. I'll tell you a funny story. Jack, where I was teaching this retreat was at a Catholic retreat center, all of us Buddhists go to Catholic retreat, sinister retreats. And it's called the Santa Sabina Center. You know it. And seven months later, I went back to the Santa Sabina Center to do a personal retreat. And so I went, and I was sitting doing my retreat for a few days by myself.

And I began to have heart pain again. And I thought, oh, God. So I called my colleague, who's a therapist, and I said, I think it's in my mind. Don't you think it's in my mind? She said, yeah, it could be, but it could also be in your heart. go to the hospital. So I did. And I came home, and I was due to go to Italy to teach with karate.

And Jack called me, Jack Quintra called me. And he said, Franco, you've got to take it easy. And I said, Jack, I do take it easy. The only time I have heart attacks is when I'm in Catholic retreat centers. Teaching meditation. Yeah. So he said, for God's sake, don't go to Italy. It'll kill you.

So I didn't go. I canceled the trip. This is such a precarious world. It's absolutely precarious. God, nothing will teach us like that like aging or confronting our own illness. But, you know, the breath is showing us out every moment, isn't it? How precarious it is. Absolutely precarious.

And because it's precarious, It's precious. And, you know, because it's, when we really keep death close at hand, you know, we don't hold on so tightly. We don't take ourselves so seriously and our views are not so important, you know. And I think this engenders in us a certain kind of kindness toward ourselves and each other, you know. And so that's part of the beauty of the vicariousness of this life. It's so precious, you know, you don't want to want to want to want to want to work.

You don't want to waste a moment. You want to jump into your life with both feet, you know. And when there's somebody you love, you tell them, you love them, you don't wait. You talk for a while. Well, I love what you're saying about love. That the heart attack, I mean, I use the words true refuge. You found true refuge in love. And I get that the spiritual path is that don't wait

and don't wait for a heart attack to discover the possibility of truly loving, this life right here and letting in love. And I think my inquiry, and I think it's for all of us, is that sometimes the place where we hit a wall is really sensing that we can let in love. And I think for many of us, when we get sick or when we need to be taken care of,

it's very hard to feel like people really do care. And there's some very old kind of armoring that makes it hard to trust. So you came out the other side with more trust, this kind of resting, the peace, and the feeling of holding yourself. And I'm wondering if you want to speak a little to how in our daily life, when we're not hitting the major wake-ups, we can explore letting it in more.

And also knowing that as caretakers, those who are taking care of may have a hard time letting it in and how to be aware of that. Yeah, beautiful. Oh, I don't know. I can talk for a while, but I'm not sure I have any really good answers. You know, honestly, my heart attacks almost destroyed my relationship with Vanda, my partner. It was really hard because I was so in survival mode that I had no room for anything else. You know, it's a narcissistic vacuum when you're sick.

And it's important for us to realize that when we're taking care of other people. I needed to be taken care of in a particular way. I was fortunate. I chose two people to take care of me. One was my assistant who's a hospice nurse who I knew understood this. And the second was a guy who I'd helped counsel through his lymphoma. And I knew he understood what it was like to be sick. And they were my primary caregivers.

But in our day-to-day life, you know, we don't have to go very far or look very deeply to find constant change. You know, get up in the morning, look in the mirror. I used to be blonde, you know, turn around for the people you love and see that they're in the midst of constant change. You know, one of the things that helped me. mentioned, called it beautifully the refuge of love. You know, for me, love is one of its many characteristics is receptivity.

It doesn't pick and choose what it loves. Whatever it comes in contact with it loves. Yeah? So that great receptivity of love, it allows, it allows for all of it to be included. Our fear and our confusion and our demands that life be different than it is. All of that's held, really, in the embrace the receptivity of love. We don't talk enough about love in our Buddhist communities. We speak about loving kindness, and I understand why we do that,

because it's easy for love and attachment to get confused. But love isn't all that we are as human beings, but it is fundamentally essentially an aspect of who we are. And it has this capacity to meet whatever shows up, whatever shows up. And that's, you know, that's, I think, how I go about it. I basically say, I don't know what's going to show up today. But I rest in love. Can I share a story? I had a fellow at the hospice that I loved very much.

He was like a grandpa to me. I still have his old black cardigan sweater with leather buttons. Yeah? But one day he asked me if I would teach him meditation for his very severe abdominal cancer, for which he had a lot of pain. And he had a morphine pump, you know? And so I said, well, why do you want to learn meditation, you know? He said, oh, I think it's going to help me.

I said, okay. So I tried to guide his attention, as we might, to the specificity of his experience, to the sensations. And as he started to do that, he just started to scream and pain. He said, oh, it's too much, I can't do it. And I said, okay, let's try something else. I said, let me just put my hands here on your stomach. How's that?

And he said, oh, it hurts so much. And I said, okay, let me pull my hands back a little bit. my hands back a little bit. How's that? Oh, it still hurts. I said, okay, how if I do this? How's that? He said, oh, that's good. I said, oh, okay. Now, I wasn't doing any California woo-woo stuff, you know, it wasn't no energy healing or anything. It was just suddenly there was room for the pain, yeah, the space around it. Whenever we give space to, it can move, yeah? And I said, well, can you just rest there? And he said, out of his mouth, he said, rest in love.

Rest in love. Yeah? And whenever he get into trouble from then on, he pushes morphine pump, you know, when he get in pain, he pushes morphine pump, and he would repeat to himself, rest in love, rest in love. I remember the day he was dying, actually. His wife came, and she was very anxious, you know, and he just turned out his side, and he just turned to her, and he whispered to her, and he said, rest in love. So maybe that should just be our primary practice sometimes, you know.

Rest there. You couldn't find a more stable place to rest. So maybe I'll share a love story because what you made me think of is Mary Oliver's line, let the soft animal of your body love what you love. And it seems like so much suffering comes when because we're afraid of uncertainty and because we've been hurt, we block and resist the very thing and the very place that is freedom. And that happened with a dear one in our community who had an idea about what it meant to be spiritual and die in a spiritual way.

And she was feeling incredibly ornery and mundane and just hating how everything felt and so unspiritual. and she had a very hard time sharing that since she became increasingly kind of isolated in some way because she was trying to present a spiritual front. And at one point after her friend had brought some food over, she heard the door close, and she was curled up in her bed and she started weeping. And she didn't know that the friend was still there,

so her friend Anna kind of curled around her and held her while she was weeping. and that began to soften it. But for her, the pathway was when we would explore together what was going on in the fear is that she just found that if she just said, please love me, please love me. And she'd think of her mother who had died. She'd imagine her mother loving her, and then she'd asked the trees to love her,

and then she'd ask her friend Anna, and then she'd asked me, but just the prayer, please love me, was, it's almost like that was the voice of longing that created that porousness, but she needed a way. So it could have been rest in love, but for her it was a calling on love. And I think there's a way in which in the Buddhist tradition we often don't talk about prayer either. And yet we're always praying. You know, all of us, in addition to craving and grasping, we're praying.

we all have that deep part of us that's longing to be to realize the fullness of what we are and it's a prayer until we are completely inhabiting that freedom it's a yearning and to so i found that when i'm working with people who are on an edge of any sort um in some way helping them to embody and express their prayer starts to let that homecoming happen. Please love me. I actually practice it now. You know, when I'm caught, I'll just say the words, please love me. And at first it feels like a very stuck child place. And then it feels like just innocent, pure yearning. And then there's no longer a please love me from some outside. It's just calling on my own loving presence. But I say often that John O'Donohue put it that prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging.

And there is some way in which when we create a space that invites that, makes that possible for people, everybody has completely their own way. Wouldn't even call it prayer sometimes. It's really beautifully hearing. So what was your prayer through your illness? Was that it? Or was it something else? Please Love Me was one of the.

them, but my deep prayer was, may I love this life no matter what? That was when I first hit a place where I had no way of knowing whether I'd ever get better, and I was losing, I have a connective tissue disease. And about eight years ago, my life started falling apart. I started losing mobility in all sorts of ways. And so I went from being very athletic. to not being able to run and not being able to swim and not being able to do much of anything

including walking on sand. So I couldn't, I love the ocean. And so it was, I just remember this time of enormous just cracking apart grieving. And that was the prayer. It's just, may I love this life no matter what, which is still the prayer in a way, just may I be in love with what is, you know.

But at that moment it was, may I embrace this, may I embrace this, may embrace if this body dies, may embrace that, may embrace every living, dying part of this universe. And so it was a prayer for refuge in that way to realize something large enough that could hold everything. Beautiful. You know, the organization that I lead now

is called the Meta Institute. Meta usually translated as loving kindness or friendliness, benevolence. And I named it that because I couldn't imagine a quality which was more useful at the bedside, both for the person who was the caregiver and the person in the bed, than the quality of love. But when we're training caregivers, I borrow from my friend Joan Halifax,

who has a beautiful phrase that caregivers need to learn, I think. And it says, may I offer my love whether it is accepted, rejected, or met with indifference. May I offer my love whether it is accepted, rejected, or met with indifference? It's beautiful, you know. It's like there's kind of steadiness in that, isn't there? stability in that, that we can, no matter what, we can meet it. I mean, I'm not romantic about dying. This is hard work, and it's not easy.

There's a labor to dying, and it's hard labor. And, you know, it's not sweetness. Rarely is it sweetness. It's messy. It's really messy. And so it doesn't just call on this quality of embracing love, it calls up compassion. And thank God it does, because to meet the kind of suffering that we encounter in these situations, you know, it needs a strong ally. That suffering needs a strong ally, and that ally is compassion, you know?

You know, I'm aware when we use the words love, kindness, and compassion, that so huge percentage of the time it's mental or abstract that you have to be very, very embodied to have it be that visceral tenderness and poignancy. And one of the kind of prayers or reflections that helps me that I've been doing every morning recently is just to say, teach me about kindness. To not act as if I know, like to really, like we don't,

What is love? I mean, it's like the only way we can realize it is to start absolutely fresh like we've never had any notion of it in our whole lives in this moment say, what does it mean this moment to love this life right here? So when I do this prayer of just please teach me about kindness, it has that kind of innocence that I just, I really don't know. And then fresh in each situation, which leads me to.

a question I want to ask you about kindness and compassion in a particular situation is I have know many many people right now whose parents have Alzheimer's and there and it brings up when you say messy not pretty it's so difficult for them and I'm wondering if you might speak a little to how to find their way to that kindness and compassion. This is a big challenge for us now. It's a culture. There's a world. I mean, just this year, Alzheimer's, well, there are about 35 million people in the world with Alzheimer's.

There are about 34 million people in the world with HIV and AIDS. Those of us that are 60 years old, one percent of us has Alzheimer's at least. One percent of us will have Alzheimer's at least. By the time we turn 70, 10% of us will. By the time we turn 80, 20% of us will. That number is expected to double in the next decade, and double again after that. Here's the thing that we forget about Alzheimer's,

is that it's a disease of the brain. And so, you know, if our spleens weren't working, it wouldn't be nearly as difficult for us. But we tend to identify with our thinking. and we tend to identify others with their thinking. So that when someone is confused, we become confused often. At least that's what I find to be so. We expect people to make sense.

And so it's very difficult, but absolutely necessary, to continue to see this person as a whole human being, recognizing that this organ is functioning differently now. And that actually helps me a great deal to understand that. It's not just a cognitive understanding. You really see, oh, this is not all that they are. This is this organ malfunctioning. When my aunt had Alzheimer's, which was complicated by a stroke, and I'd go to see her, she

was always very confused, didn't know who I was. She'd take her dress and throw it up over her head, call me by all kinds of names. And one day I got a little sassy. And she lived 89 years old, never been married. And I said, Mimi, all these years never been married. Not even a sweetheart? Just like that. Into this Alzheimer's vacuous.

And she sat up in her chair and she folded her arms and she said, some questions are too personal to ask. And it really reminded me that there's always a whole human being. there, even if we can't always make contact in the ways that we're accustomed to making contact. So for me, one of the things that is important when we're caregivers of people is, first of all, to recognize our own limitations. I think that's most important, you know, not to think that we can do it all. It's not possible. Yeah? So you're not anything less if you can't do it all. So to take care of ourselves is essential. Then, you're not anything less if you can't do it all.

is essential, then we have what's needed to take care of others. And then to keep reminding yourself that there's a whole human being here. I think this is essential. The nature of the disease is that it moves through areas of the brain that control different activities. And depending on where that, what area of the brain that's been affected, we'll have totally different manifestations of the disease. I like the practice. practice of saying just like me.

You know the practice? So I say, oh, just like me, this person wants to be happy. Well, just like me, this person suffers. Oh, just like me, this person wants to awaken. And that is actually a helpful practice in working with someone with Alzheimer's. Oh, just like me, this person is confused. Well, just like me, this person is suffering. Just like me, this person wants to be happy. And then I find a way in.

Then I find a meeting place. And anything can be a meeting place. Anything. Anger can be a meeting place. Yeah? But we do have to sometimes relinquish our notion about how it's supposed to go. Look, this is why we have four flavors of love. This is why we have loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity.

one's not enough. I was working with a young woman who was dying in her early 30s. And her mother and her had had a terrible, terrible relationship. Her mother had been very abusive to her. Horribly so. In all kinds of ways. And the young woman had slipped into a kind of somulent state

where she wasn't speaking. Semi-coma. And in that time, her mother came to visit. And her mother pulled up a chair next to the bed and said to her somalant daughter, I'm so sorry, please forgive me. And in dozens of different ways, she repeated basically the same thing. I'm so sorry, please forgive me. And you couldn't help but feel for this mom.

And then this young woman, she sat up like a rocket. like a rocket. She hadn't spoken or moved in days. And she sat up like a rocket straight up in bed. And she looked at her mother and she said, I hate you. I've always hated you. And then she died. There was tremendous suffering in that room. Everybody was suffering, you see, the mom, the young woman, all of us that were bearing witness to this. How do you keep your heart open in that kind of hell, you know? You can't do it as a little personality. You have to feel the strength, the balance of compassion. Compassion isn't about taking away people's pain.

That's a misunderstanding, at least in my experience. Compassion is that capacity which allows us to stay with what we would otherwise love to get away from until the truth, the real causes of that suffering show themselves. that the presence of compassion is such that it allows the defenses to fall down and when the defenses fall down we can see the true causes of the suffering

and then we can be of some help you know I heard when I told the story of a sigh in the room and it's every parent's worst nightmare right but there was something else there too and that was the truth it might have been a hard truth but I was really glad for this young daughter

that she could tell her mother this truth as hard as it was and as violent as I felt in that moment this was also true so equanimity and compassion would allow us to stay present for what we would otherwise rather turn away from whether that's in our own life

small little things you know or these big challenges that sometimes come into our lives. Franklin, I was just remembering one friend I had who was dying of cancer and said that he didn't want people to relate to him as a guy who's dying of cancer. So what you said about Alzheimer's and how to see the whole person or to see past the mask of whatever we're fixating on the brain that's going, or it's more than just Alzheimer's with aging. And this is a constant conversation how we,

there's some sort of an offense or embarrassment or not okayness about aging. And so to not see somebody as, oh, you're an aged person. It's like respect goes down the tube so often when we become a category. and so it feels like an incredibly beautiful reminder that just like me reminder because it goes ultimately just like me who you really are is this presence this awakeness this tender field of loving that's behind it all

and then to not make either good or bad it's not good or bad that she said I'll never for you know I've hated you all my life to not assign extra meaning because who she is is beyond any of that. Not taking sides. Not taking, thank you, not taking sides. I rest my case. It's beautiful.

I want to make sure you can share with this because I feel like this leads so beautifully into the Heavenly Messenger program because that feels so much what we're going towards here. Well, first of all, I'm very grateful to you for, including me tonight. I want to say that sincerely. You're more than welcome. Thank you.

It's nice to feel welcome, doesn't it? You know, my partner, Van da, she's British. And they don't use the word welcome. It's not part of the culture. So I had to teach her this. I had to teach you this word. You're welcome. You're really welcome.

And it's a great thing to be able to do that and to feel on the receiving end of that. You're welcome. You're really welcome. Tar is referencing a program that we're beginning at Spirit Rock in California. And the title is the heavenly messengers, awakening through illness, aging, and death.

And you know, most of you, I think, know the story of the Buddha. He was a young prince, Sid Arthur, and snuck out of the palace one night and encountered three heavenly messengers, they're often called. They were an aging person, a sick person and a corpse. And also he encountered a fourth messenger, which was a monk, a renunciant,

who in part inspired the young Sid Arthur to follow his quest for enlightenment. So Jack, Coenfield and I have been talking about a program like this at Spear Rock for many years, and so we've created a multi-year program. It'll be two years, five seven-day retreats.

And in between there'll be pod groups, discussion groups with teachers, mentoring by teachers, homework, teleconferences, things that maintain continuity between those retreats, residential retreats. And the core teachers are myself and James Barras, a good friend of yours I know,

and Chardotre Rogel, and also Anna Douglas, who's been doing a lot of wonderful work around aging, Bob Stahl, a wonderful teacher, and really someone out in front on the secular mindfulness movement, and Andrew Stevens, who works with me at the Metta Institute, who's a, who with Ken Wilbur and Treo Wilbur, started the first cancer support communities in the country.

So that's the core faculty. And then joining us will be guest teachers, Jack, will be part of that. Ram Dass, Stephen Andrea Levine, who I saw just a few weeks ago, will be part of that. all kinds of wonderful people. But there's two parts to the practice,

the two parts of the retreat that I want to show, or the program I want to share with you. The first is, this was the fundamental teaching of the Buddha. Study, sickness, old age, and death as gateways, doorways to waking up. So the first is, how can we personally go into this exploration and use it, use this encounter? with these three messengers as a way to come to the deathless, as a way of coming to awakening.

And that's the first dimension of the program, if you will, important dimension. There's a second dimension to it, which I also want to include, which is that we really want to make sure that this exploration is grounded in everyday experience so it is not philosophical. So we're asking all the people in the program to be doing service during the the two years. That service might be that you're taking care of your mother, or it might be that you're a physician working in a hospice program, or you're going down to your local nursing home and volunteering some of your time. So that you don't, I don't want to create another

Buddhist ghetto. I really want this to be, show up in people's real everyday lives. So that's part of the program, is to do that service work. And then to see, okay, how are you integrating what what we're doing in the residential retreats and the other teachings with this experience and how is this affecting the way in which your own meeting, you're meeting your own death. What are dying people or aging people or sick people showing you? So I think of them as the really important teachers in the program. Finally there's one more piece to it. And that is that my great hope in starting this is that people from song is like this one,

A few people will come with the intention of coming back to this Sangha to create here a compassionate companioning group so that when somebody in this Sangha is dealing with issues of illness or facing the challenges of aging or perhaps entering active dying, that we have a response, we have a system in place where we can respond to each other, Now that's not to say we're going to provide all the care for that individual, but can you imagine how satisfying and supportive it would be to have someone from your own practice community,

come and be with you, sit at your bedside? Maybe especially if you have a family like mine where they would be a little crazy, you know, you might really welcome somebody from the Sangha coming, yeah? So that's my deep hope, is that in the Sanga is all over the country. People will come back. Not everybody who does the program will do this, but some people will come back.

and initiate such a development in your own Sanga. And I'm prepared to offer them a kind of training that will help them do that. They'll show them the step-by-step process. Okay, this is what you could do, and these are the pitfalls, and this is how you could create such a volunteer organization right within your own Sanga. We're hoping to do the same thing at Spirit Rock, and we're going to spearhead it in other large Songas like this one across the nation.

So I really want to welcome you to join us. And you don't have to be 60 or over. I really want young people to come and join us. It's easy for gray hairs to think that they should do this practice. Please understand, no one escapes these three messengers. So if you're young and you want to know about service, to know about service and you want to deepen your practice, please come. And we have some scholarships also that I really want to make it possible, especially for

younger people to come and people of color to come. I really want to make that essential part of this training so it just doesn't become an old white guy's training, you know? And I know in speaking to Tara that there might be some encouragement from this Sangha to support, help support people who might be willing to come. So if you're interested in that, I'll stick around a little bit after the talk tonight and be happy to visit with you and answer the few questions anyway. But, you know, the Buddha, there's a great teaching.

It says, you know, of all the footprints, the elephant's footprint is the greatest, right? That's the teaching. And it said that of all the teachings, the teaching on dying is the greatest. Yeah. So please come join us for those teachings and to share also what you've learned. We're really hoping that those of you who are perhaps working in health care or home health aides or positions, that you'll come play with us and help us learn. We really don't think that we know how to do this, actually.

We want to learn right alongside you. So please come play with us. Okay? So thank you for that little commercial. So if you're listening and feeling kind of inspired in that way, there's materials in the back, but also you can just email IMCW and Anne will get you more information. And we really want to work on this end. IMCW wants to support on this end, whatever working hand in hand with Frank to really develop

if there's a handful of people that want to form a kind of core here to help to nourish the caregiving that is possible here in our community, we definitely want to support you. Thank you. So, Frank, I'm wondering if maybe just to end a short little meta closing for us. It seems always most important to begin with ourselves. Often we have the most difficulty offering our love to ourselves, receiving our love for ourselves.

So please, for a moment, just take yourself into your own heart and mind, sensing into your chest, whole body, and regarding yourself with self-respect, turning to yourself, speaking from your own heart and mind, the most essential aspect of your being, saying phrases that I might offer or choosing your own, I like to use, may I be safe, free from all danger. May I be happy and peaceful. May I be filled with loving kindness. From head to toe, suffused in loving kindness.

And may I live with ease, free of struggle and procrastination. So briefly repeating those phrases to yourself, taking yourself into your own heart and mind. May I be safe. May I be happy and peaceful. May I be filled with loving kindness. May I live with ease. We'll do one more short round.

Choose somebody now who it's very easy for you to feel love for. It might be someone you know personally or perhaps someone you admire like His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Choose someone who's very easy for you to feel love.

So you can really practice this muscle of love. Calling that person into your own heart and mind. Calling them by name just as I wish to. to be safe. May you be safe. Just as I wish to be happy and peaceful. May you please be happy and peaceful. And just as I wish to be filled with loving kindness. May you also be filled with loving kindness. And just as I would love to live with ease. May you also live with ease free of all struggle. May all beings know their true nature.

by all beings be free of suffering and the causes of suffering. Again, thank you for being with us. Oh, thank you. Oh, very happy to be with you. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com,

our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.