Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 171: Frank Ostaseski, What Death Can Teach Us About Living

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

Frank Ostaseski experienced death at a young age, losing his mother as a teenager and his father just a few years later. In his search for healing, he found meditation. With this as his foundation, Ostaseski would go on to become a pioneer in end-of-life care. He co-founded the Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice in America, establishing a model for mindful and compassionate care and he founded the Metta Institute training countless healthcare clinicians and caregivers treating those facing life-threatening illness. He explains what he's come to learn about death, and life, through his experiences. Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail at 646-883-8326. The Plug Zone Bio: https://fiveinvitations.com/about-frank-ostaseski/ Author, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully https://fiveinvitations.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

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It's an incredible life story. Lots of useful takeaways for the rest of us as well. We'll get to Frank Stasseski coming up first though a few pieces of housekeeping. Three actually. The first is just to point out that the meditation challenge that we've been running at 10% happier is really well subscribed. Thank you guys for signing up 30,000 people participating in the New Year's meditation challenge. Second is that there are some new meditations up on the 10% happier app. If you want to go check them out, one of them is about

gratitude from Seven A. Celacii former guest on this show. The other is called Is Worrying Useful by a guy named Dan Harris. And the third item of business is that we're making a little bit of a structural change to the show. As close listeners will recall, we did a big survey, a listener survey a few months ago, hundreds and hundreds of you took time to fill this survey out. And I think it took a not insignificant amount of time for which I am profoundly and genuinely grateful. And one of the changes we're making and we're going to make several as a consequence of all of this feedback is that we're going to move the voicemails to the end

of the show. So we get right to our guest every week and that at the end of the show we'll be taking questions from anybody who wants to call and leave us a question on the voicemail number that we've set up, which is available in the show notes. And actually another thing we're going to do not starting this week but starting reasonably soon is I won't be the only person answering the questions we're actually going to bring in meditation teachers to answer some of the questions and scientists and actual experts coming up. So we're improving based on your feedback and I really appreciate it. So guess this week the aforementioned Frank Ostosesky. This guy, as I said, has had a really interesting life characterized by some real pain when he was younger.

Some you'll hear him discuss some of what it was like in his home when he was younger, went on to lead a life of, as he describes it, drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And then discovered Buddhism, ended up over in Asia, and came home and started to, unlike many of us, we meditated or we do a little bit of Buddhism or whatever, and it's for us, it's a private thing. This guy lived it out in a big way. He was involved in caring for the homeless, serving on the front lines at the AIDS epidemic, lobbying Congress, and I think where he's made his most notable mark is that in 1987 he co-founded the Zen hospice project, which was the first Buddhist hospice in America.

As listeners, some listeners may remember, I'm also a volunteer in a hospice. I'll be going later today as a matter of fact to visit my friend, Ronnie. And I think it's incredibly meaningful work. I suspect I get a lot more out of it than as a volunteer than than the residents do But it's it is incredibly important work now a lot of not enough people are doing it and there's certainly no shortage of people who need it so Frank is pioneer in this space and he's written a book just out in paperback called the five invitations, the five invitations and he takes, he widdles down decades of experience sitting at the bedside with people on the cusp and what he's learned

about, what he's learned in those moments that can be used for the rest of us to live happier healthier lives right now, hopefully well before we die. And he's got these five really excellent lessons that he's learned as a consequence of all this time spent at the bedside, so that hence the title, the five invitations. All right, time for me to stop yammering and let's bring in Frank. Here we go. Great to meet you. Nice to be with you. So how did you get into meditation in the first place? Oh, you know, I think I could give you all kinds of elevator speeches for that,

but the truth is I was trying to avoid my own pain. And I tried everything, six drugs and rock and roll, and none of it worked. And I think at some juncture, you turn toward your suffering, and that becomes the ground of compassion. And meditation was that craft that helped me to do that. What was going on in your life at the time when you first made that decision? Oh I came up in a family that

had trouble. Two parents who were alcoholics. My mom died when I was a teenager. My dad a few years later. So really advanced. Yeah, where was this? I'm the Ellen here. The Ellen. Yeah. So, you know, me and death, we were early companions. We got to know each other quite, and a young age of my life. That's kind of being incredibly painful to your teenager at this time.

Yeah, a teenager. And like all teenagers, I thought I was invulnerable and most other people were too. So death came as a big shock. And I, is that at the time, is that the time when you started getting into Buddhism and meditation or was that much later? Came a few years later. I tried a lot of other things first. And then, you know, a trip to Asia.

I was one of those Dartmouth Bums who was traveling around Asia in the 70s and late 60s and early 70s. So that's where I got my introduction. And then back here in the States with Joseph and Jack. Joseph and Joseph Goldstein and Jack Cornfield. Yeah. Old friends, good teachers and old friends. Yeah. So, but I'm curious, so you grew up in this family that had, as you described, trouble.

And then you found yourself in your 20s, bumming around India and investigating Buddhism and meditation and things like that. What happened in between? Why did that become your root, as opposed to, I mean, there could have been much less wholesome decisions that would have changed the trajectory of your life? Absolutely. And in the case of my own family, my younger brother,

for example, chose a different route. He chose alcohol and drugs. And he died at age 48. Wow. So, you know, I think sometimes, you know, it's hard to know exactly how our lives progress. Sometimes they go forward in a linear path, but sometimes they meander a bit, you know, like a long creek or a river. Mine meanders for a bit.

And but eventually, because I had good mentors, good examples, I turned toward what most other people want to run away from. And you eventually got into hospice work. Was that an outgrowth of your interest in Buddhism and meditation? I think so. In Buddhism, you know, you know better than I that one of its central teachings is impermanence, that all things come and go, all things change. And we like to think of ourselves as a solid thing going through a changing world, but

actually we are also that change. So one of the central practices is the reflection on death. So Buddhism was a big influence on that, but so was my own parents dying. I worked in refugee camps in southern Mexico and Guatemala for a while where I saw a lot of horrible dying, you know, unredeemable suffering, actually. Now when I came back to San Francisco, the AIDS epidemic was just beginning and I was on the early front lines of the AIDS epidemic, where none of us knew what we were doing, you know, we were doing our very best to care for our friends and and And those people who we were meeting for the first time sometimes in incredibly intimate conditions

but also very very horrible conditions You so you were working refugee camps and then on the front lines of the AIDS crisis under what what eges? Or we just out there on your own? Well, I went to Mexico with my son and his mother, a sensible way to have a holiday, but then we were in southern Mexico and Jopas, and there there was hundreds, tens of thousands of refugees flooding in from Central America. And so we got involved. You know, we first we donated some money, then we donated some blood

next to you. And now we were flying in small airplanes into jungle camps and working with people there. When it came back to San Francisco and the AIDS epidemic, you know, at the beginning, we didn't know what we were dealing with, you know, we forget that about the AIDS epidemic. And also, in those days, in the very early days, not so many people wanted to be around this experience. And so those of us who are willing to be there had an awful lot of access. So I have absolutely no degrees. The only degree I have, only certificate I have is a

bread cross, life-saving certificate, which I got at age 16, which I think is now expired. Yeah. No college degree? No. No. The people who are really my teachers were folks who were dying, you know, um, these were folks coming from cultures. I didn't know speaking languages. Sometimes I couldn't understand and um, you know, sometimes they had great faith that pulled them through their experience and other time states one or four religion years ago. Some of them blossomed and found deep acceptance and kindness. And other people turned toward the wall and withdrawal and hopelessness and depression, and they never turned back again. All of those people were my teachers, yeah.

Did you have a conventional career that you left to do this type of work? No, I used to produce rock and roll shows. Really? Yeah. I worked here and on the West Coast. shows. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I worked here and on the West Coast. Yeah. So that was an effort to try and be somebody. Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about that phase in your life? Because I want to get into the more germane topic for this podcast, but I'm, I can't restrain my curiosity. Yeah, I don't know that it's that important, but You know, I used to work in a school for disabled kids on the island and every time I wanted to do something with those kids They said well, we don't have the money. So I said well if I get you the money can we do it? so we still we started producing some rock shows sort of raise some money for those kids and next thing I knew I was swept up and that and became a producer and

Started working with all kinds of groups, you know everybody Who is everybody in the day? Jefferson airplane and slion of a producer and started working with all kinds of groups. You know, everybody was everybody in the day. Jefferson Airplane and Slian family stone and all the, you know, enormous stars of those days. So this was in the 60s and 70s? Yeah, late mid 70s. Did this pre or post date your time in India predated it? Predated it.

Okay, so you this after being in rock and roll india look really appealing you must have seen a lot of people kind of become casualties of the party in that in that era yeah yeah I mean you know it was beautiful in some ways and it was really wild and fun but also there was a lot of destruction that was part of that time as well. It's interesting to me, just to try to get a beat on what, you know, you had siblings who didn't survive the experience of childhood. You had friends who didn't survive the experience of rock and roll. And yet something in you was, I don't know.

So what happened with you the first time you sat down on a meditation cushion? Probably there was some resistance, yeah. Right? That would be an understatement. Okay, but then there was some junction which maybe it made sense to you. Yes, right.

And what was that moment like? You know, it's fun. They were, it was the same moment. So for me, I had I, I had resistance. This is crazy. This is impossible. And yet I also saw, I had done enough reading before I've had my first meditation session to know it was going to be hard. And I also saw, oh, this could be useful. This seeing of how crazy you are and using that seeing and familiarity with the insanity to not be so owned by it. Oh, yeah. Okay. That makes sense. It doesn't seem easy, but it makes sense.

Exactly. So that idea that it makes sense, right, it's not just a cognitive sense either. You have this feeling like, oh, this fits, you know, this fits. And I don't have to believe in anything in order to know this practice of mindfulness, right? I have to trust my own direct experience of it. And that's what happened for me. When I came to practice, it made sense, you know, it fit and it became the lens through which I could begin to understand my life and also how to help other people through their lives, through their troubles and their lives. How did you even know mindfulness was a meditation was a thing? in my life and also how to help other people through their lives, through their troubles in their lives. How did you even know mindfulness was a meditation was a thing?

I mean, you were not from what I can gather, you weren't obviously in that world. Who knows what brings us to a particular juncture in our life? You know, I mean, you see something, you know, faith comes from inspiration first, right? You read something or you meet a teacher that you really admire or, you know, have some chance encounter with someone, right? That's the first quality of faith. And then out of that comes your direct experience and we have some kind of abiding faith. Then we have some capacity because we have some experience. We know we can trust this practice.

And eventually that comes to something much deeper, a much deeper quality of faith. Not blind faith, but real trust. Trust that not only in the practice and the craft of the practice, but trust in our humanity. What drew you to the work that you ended up doing? You described it a little bit of what you're going to get much deeper into than the work you've done. Starting in Mexico, or at least from what I can gather, starting in Mexico and then continuing through the AIDS crisis, you said before, not a lot of people wanted access to this experience. What about you wanted to be there for that? You know, Dan, I think that if we're really honest about this stuff, you know, And I think that if we're really honest about this stuff, you know, sometimes our own self-interest drives us.

Sometimes. So for me, I actually, and I think it's just two of a lot of people working in healthcare. I think there's an effort or a belief that if you're with someone else's pain that's worse than yours, yours might not seem so bad. Now, that doesn't work. At some juncture, you've got to turn toward this experience and find out what it has to teach you. I was talking about this moving towards suffering with a retreat I was teaching in the northwest. And this guy said to me, that's like telephone poles.

I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. He said, what do you mean? He said, telephone poles. I used to install telephone poles. He said you put them in the ground They're 30 40 feet high and they start to shake and move and they can fall on them and break his back He said so the first day I was on the job. I saw that pole and I said to my partner if that pole falls I'm running like hell that way and his partner who is an old-timer, you know He said, oh, you don't want to do that. He said, if that pole starts to fall, you want to go right up to it. I'm going to put your hands right on it.

He said, it's the only safe place to be. Yeah. We're always running away from our suffering. And it smacks us in the back of the head. And I think the only safe place we can ever be with it is to go right up to it, you know. Put our hands gently, mercifully on it. That's where the healing begins. And so for me, that was about going toward first, going to it, you know, put our hands gently, mercifully on it. That's where the healing begins. And so for me, that was about going toward first,

going toward other people's suffering, and then that helping me to really embrace my own. But you know, I think a lot of people listening to this podcast, or meditators, or meditation curious, and they know enough to know that the whole game in meditation is we're not running away from our difficult emotions. We're investigating

them with some non-judgmental, maybe even some warmth. That doesn't mean we want to go sit and change diapers of dying people. That to me seems like an extra leap that you made. I mean, a great one, but not an obvious one necessarily. But you've done some of this work. You know what it's like to be at the bedside? It's a really honest place to be. Yes, it is. And you know, when you grow up around a lot of,

well, let's call it fake life, yeah? It's really refreshing actually to be with people who are honest and genuine. I mean, when folks who are dying, what matters most gets really clear, really fast. People ask me this all the time, well, what does matter? What are people's great regrets? I don't care about people's great regrets. I'm not so interested in that. I'm interested in the transformations that happen for them. The two questions I come up for people that I'm interested in the transformations that happen for them. And the two questions I come up for people that I'm with are basically, am I loved? And did I love well?

And everything else is extra, you know? So to have those kinds of conversations to be with people in those kinds of, in that direct way, in that intimate way, that's what drew me to being the folks who are dying, yeah. Can you just, so you found at a center in San Francisco, can you tell us about that, please? Yeah, we started a program called the Zen Hospice Project. It was the first Buddhist hospice in America and started out of the San Francisco Zen Center,

which was founded by Suzuki Rishi. And we didn't have much of a plan, honestly. We just thought there was a natural match between people who were cultivating what we might call the listening mind and meditation or the listening heart and people who needed to be heard, folks who were dying. And we started working with mostly with people who were living on the streets or in SRR hotels, folks that nobody else was looking after or very few people were looking after. And we just began, it was a kind of fusion of spiritual insight and practical social action.

And we started by working with people on the streets and then we created a hospice residence, and then we created a 40-bed palliative care unit, and the nation's largest long-term care facility in San Francisco. And I guided that for almost 20 years and got to sit bedside with years, and got to sit bedside with maybe a few thousand people. And they were remarkable. People like you and me, regular folks, who found some way of meeting what they thought was unbearable or unimaginable, and yet finding some way to go toward it. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, emerge as something larger than the separate self they'd taken themselves to be.

Well, how does that happen? What you're describing? Can you deal with more concrete? So there was a guy who was referred to our hospice. He was in the psychiatric unit at San Francisco General. And he was there because he tried to take his life. And he tried to take his life because he had terminal lung cancer and he couldn't imagine any future with any dignity.

So I went to see him. And he was in this stark psychiatric unit. And I went in and I sat down beside him. He was turned toward this green institutional wall. And I just sat for a while. And after some time he turned to me and he said, who are you? Nobody's ever sat this long with me in silence

in this room before. And I told him who I was and I was from the Zant hospice. And I said, what do you want? And he said, spaghetti. And I said, well, we make really great spaghetti. Why don't you come live with us? And he said, okay. And that was the end

of the admissions interview. So this guy comes to our residence the next day and we have a big bowl of spaghetti waiting for him because you understand spaghetti meant home and nurturance and familiarity. Now, he didn't stop wanting to kill himself just because we gave him spaghetti. I mean, it was good spaghetti, but it wasn't that good, right?

So this was many years ago before the assisted physicians, the death laws were in place. So we still wanted to investigate taking his life. Sometimes we have to go to the darkest places to find what he is. So we got this book, it was talked about how to take your life for your terminal illness. And I read him a chapter every night, you know, because I was really convinced that the willingness to go toward this experience that you've helped us understand a moment ago is where the healing is always found. Anyway, he didn't take his life.

And a few days before he died, he said, Frank, I want to thank you. I'm happier now than I've ever been. Wow. And I said, come on. A few days ago, I want to thank you. I'm happier now than I've ever been." Wow. And I said, come on. A few days ago, you wanted to kill yourself because you couldn't walk in the park and write in your diaries. I said, what was that all about?

And then he said to me, well, that was just chasing desire. And I said, what do you mean? You mean those activities aren't important to you anymore? And he said, no, no, it's not the activities that bring me joy. It's the attention to the activities. He said, now my pleasure comes from the coolness of the breeze and the softness of the sheets. I thought this was a remarkable turnaround for a guy a minute of psychiatric unit.

We lived on the streets of San Francisco before that. He had no Buddhist training, and we never told him to meditate. We created an atmosphere. It was mindful, it was compassionate, that allowed whatever needed to happen to happen. So, yeah, we brought mindfulness, we brought Buddhist practice into that, into the activity of giving care. We never wore it on our short sleeves. People we took care of, they lived on the streets, they didn't care beans about Buddhism or meditation. But they were highly motivated to be free of suffering. And that's what gets most of us to sit down on meditation

cushioning the first place, right? It's interesting the approach you took with them was not one that I think much of us would reflexively have taken, which would have been to do everything to make them feel better and to talk them out of trying to take his own life. Why? I mean, that's just, I think, what we would do habitually. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's because we have a lot of fear of suffering. And so we wanted to go away, you know.

A lot of what happens in healthcare today. People are naturally empathetic and we naturally reach out to each other out of concern and care and wanting to relieve people suffering. That's beautiful. But there's another motivation that arises for us. And it's personal self-interest or an effort to try and avoid our own discomfort. And then we start doing things to other people to relieve our own personal distress. So I think we have to really watch that line there where we start trying to make something happen

for another person so that we won't be so upset. I mean, an example is early on in the hospice, a woman was dying and she was a little depressed, a little blue and she was natural. She was dying. And the nurse came to visit and said, you know, I think we should start some anti-depressants. And I said, that's curious. I said, why do you think that? These anti-depressants take six weeks to get a benefit.

And she said, well, the woman's so uncomfortable and it's so hard to watch her be so uncomfortable. And very tongue in cheek, I said, well, maybe you should take the antidepressants, you know? So I think there has to be room in our hearts and our lives for suffering. We have to recognize even that there's a value to it, and I don't mean some kind of martyrdom, but that suffering helps us, actually. It helps us feel compassion for other people. It helps us appreciate this life of ours. It helps us to recognize that our common ground with one another. So imagine if you're sick and everybody around you has no room for your sickness,

has no room for your pain. That's a hard environment to be in. Yeah, but I do want them to give me pain relief. Yeah, me too. I want the best of pain relief. You know, we used to, we had more pain by the 55 gallon drum there. You know, I'm being facetious, but I need to say, yes, we need to manage people's pain, address their symptoms adequately. But that's not all that's happening

in a dying process. It's not just about physical pain or even mental anguish. What happens in dying is too profound for any one model. So I think we need to bring the best of what medicine has to offer. But dying is not solely a medically event. It's more an issue of relationships. solely a medically event. It's more an issue of relationships. My relationship with myself, with those I love, with my caregivers, with God or whatever image of ultimate kindness I hold. And so our work sometimes in being with folks who are dying is to address those relationships. And for me, that relationship is best addressed with some degree of mastery. I want my pain controlled, but mastery is not enough, right? So then we need someone who is comfortable with me in a territory of meaning.

Help me figure out what the purpose and value of this life has been. But even that fades away after a while. Then we need someone who is comfortable in a territory of mystery. The land of unanswerable questions, you know. We're sometimes the best we can do is stay in the room, yeah. I think all of that is facilitated by mindfulness. Do you think most people in our culture get a death that's infused with meaning and mystery or do they just get a medicalized death? I think we've so over-professionalized and made dying a technological experience.

That we deal with it like we're just making the best of a bad situation. And so yes, I think people are dying with a great deal of fear and distress, but I also think there's something we can do about that. I think when we only see dying as making the best of a bad situation, we devalue dying. We rob it of its holy significance. And we underestimate the kind of transitions that are possible. I mean, the folks that I work with that we've been

talking about here, sometimes they make remarkable turnarounds in the final months of life or days of life or sometimes minutes of life. And we might say, too late. And I would agree, it's too late to do that in the last few minutes of your life. But here's the thing, if that possibility exists then, well, that exists now. And we don't have to wait until the time of our dying to make that kind of transformation in our life.

Okay. So say more about that. How would that, what's the mechanism by which that would work? Well, let's look at it. You know, let's see what happens if we turn toward the experience of constant change. Let's just take that really simply, right?

We rely on impermanence, don't we? I mean, that cold you have is going to eventually go to go away. That really boring dinner party you're going to go to tonight will come to an end, you know? Presidential terms and, you know. We rely on impermanence. I was just in Japan for cherry blossom season, you know.

Beautiful delicate flowers covering the hillsides. There's this cabin where I teach in Idaho, and outside the cabin there are these little tiny blue flax flowers that last for a single day. So tell me, why are those joy blossoms? Those blue-flax flowers so much more beautiful than plastic flowers. I mean, isn't it that their brevity invites us into their beauty and to gratitude? I think it's true with our lives, too.

I think the fact that this life is precarious helps us to appreciate how precious it is. And then we don't want to waste a moment. They want to jump into our life and use it in a responsible way. We want to tell the people we love that we love them. And we don't want to miss this life. How do we operationalize that advice and make it? Because it's inspiring to sit with you and hear you say that and we've had previous guests on the show who said similar thing. And I, you know, I say this is somebody who, as you mentioned, I do volunteer in a hospice. I'll be going there later today with my son and my wife. And yet I often find myself walking out of the hospice, checking my phone and getting

back into the stream of stuff I got to do and the power of forgetting is overwhelming. Yeah, I think, you know, I like to swim in the ocean. I like it a lot. You know, I sometimes swim for three or four hours way out into the ocean, you know. But I respect the ocean. I know it can sweep me away in a moment. Habits are like that.

I respect habit. They can sweep me away in a moment. Habits are like that. I respect habit. They can sweep me away. As you say, you're in this incredibly insightful moment, sitting bedside with someone, and then you go out and check your smartphone, right? I think that we have to cultivate that habit of paying attention. And I don't think it's morbid to reflect on dying. In fact, I think it's very life affirming. So here's a simple way to operationalize it. I was teaching, I was at a dinner for folks from Silicon Valley recently. And I said, by the way, the Silicon Valley folks

are trying to engineer it so that we don't. Exactly, exactly. No, these guys, I'm at dinner and these guys say, I say to these guys, death is inevitable. Immediately, this guy's hand goes up and he says, well, we're working on that. And I said, great, please let me know when you get it, not knocked.

But I said, let's take the word death out of the sentence. Let's just talk about endings. How do you meet endings? The ending of sentence, the ending of a relationship, the ending of a meal, the ending of the day. How do you meet endings? Yeah. You know, when an event finishes, are you the first one out the door, or maybe you were

thinking about getting out the door before the event was over? Or maybe the last one, the parking lot waving, goodbye to everybody. I don't have a moral judgment about how you should meet endings. I just want us to be conscious of our habits around endings. The way we meet an ending shapes the way the next thing begins. So that's a way to operationalize it. My wife and I, when we go to sleep at night, we often ask each other three or four questions before we go to sleep. One of the questions we ask is, what inspired you today? That helps us to know the leading edge of our life.

But the next question we ask is, what challenged you today? Because know that helps us to know the leading edge of our life But the next question we ask is what challenged you today? Because we don't grow in our comfort zones, right? And then we ask the third one which is what surprised you today. That's a good one, you know Surprise shows us where we're exercising too much control, you know Like you know my granddaughter and I love to play peekaboo. I can do peekaboo with her 10,000 times when she surprised every single time, but you know you throw an adult a surprise party and they say something like who's responsible for this You know, and then the fourth question is What you learn about love today

So that those are really simple reflections that we do to close our day, but also to set up the next day. So I think we can just go through our life, you know, happy miserably, or we can go through it consciously. We can cultivate habits which incline us toward paying attention. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this. Is it still a struggle to get that good night's sleep, then maybe it's time to try the purple mattress?

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To 474747. Message and data rates may apply. This seems like a good point to start talking a little bit about your book. It's called the five invitations, and it really, as I understand it, distills five things that you've learned from, as you said before, sitting bedside with thousands of people as they make this transition. Can we walk through the, would you be game to walk through the invitation?

Sure. All right, so what's number one? Well, you know, first of all, these are principles. We'll say there were guides that we used to take care of folks who were dying. And then we found out, well, boy, they're not only useful in attending to people who are dying, but for the rest of us,

and living a life of integrity. So the first one is don't wait. Don't wait. Waiting is full of expectation. Waiting for the next moment to arrive, we missed this one. I can't tell you how many times I was a family member who said, you know, when is mom gonna die and Waiting for that moment we miss all the moments in between

so Don't wait as a kind of encouragement to live very present right here and now in the immediacy of this moment, you know, and to really step fully into it. Don't wait. So could it also apply to things like, you know, I know, I've got a, for lack of a less cheesy word, a dream, a career ambition, or a romantic a romantic ambition or whatever things that I think hey I'm Arisha and I'm Brooke and we're the hosts of Wonder East podcast even the rich where we bring you Absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father,

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Would you argue for those people who have something like that cook and sitting around and pining is probably not the best move, but maybe, you know, making, you know, acting on these impulses would be. I think it's useful to think about our taking, you know, having some agency in our life. Um, but I don't, I think it's most superficial to just think, how do we satisfy our bucket list, you know, that's one way to think about this.

Let's do all the things that we want to do. But, you know, those of us with the most toys aren't necessarily the happiest. So don't wait. Don't wait to tell someone you love that you love them. I had a guy on my board and his mom was dying. He was in San Francisco. She was in Toronto. And he said, you know, the doc says she has six weeks to live. When should I go? And I said, well, I don't know. Let's talk about it. He came over and we visited it. And he told me what the doc said to him. And as he, and then I asked him about his mom. And as he spoke about his mother, I could watch his face really closely. You know, when I saw his color in his cheeks change and I saw a little trembling in his chin, you know,

and I said, you know, I think you should go tonight. And he said, I can't have business tomorrow. I said, no, go tonight, take the red eye. And so he did. He flew to Toronto, arrived at 10 in the morning at one o'clock in the afternoon. And he was there when his mother died. Don't wait. To imagine that we, at the time of our dying, we will have the physical strength, the emotional

stability, the mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime is a ridiculous gamble. Don't wait for that. So if I'm hearing you correctly, it's like you're saying the mental state of waiting, which is inherently not where you are, you're just, you're in a state of anticipation, wanting, that is what you're arguing again. Yeah. So a better word might be constancy, continuous contact with our experience. That's what mindfulness practices all about, isn't it? So even patience is a kind of a wrong word in a way because you're still we're waiting still but a little bit more calmly Well, that's pretty good, you know, but constancy might be a better way to think about it. Right. The waiting that you're talking about

Some of it is more akin to sort of a sleepwalking. Yeah, yeah, it's living life tossed into the future, into living life in expectation. Yeah. What's invitation number two? Welcome everything. Push away nothing. Easier said than done. Yeah, make a great bumper sticker, right? Welcome everything.

Push away nothing means does make any sense, you know? I don't think it means that we have to like everything that comes. I just think we have to be willing to meet it You know, and I think what it does is it it challenges our whole notion it puts Our notion of judgment temporarily aside to be willing to open to our experience and see what it has to show us It's at our front door. What does it have to teach us? It was a guy that I knew he was the head of the California Psychiatric Association. And he developed Alzheimer's. And so he had a hard time remembering things in people's faces. And some friends went to his house for dinner and they rang the bell and he opened the door.

And he stared at them for a while and he said, I'm sorry, I just don't remember faces very well. And I can't recall your names. But I know this is my house. And I know that my house has always been a place where people were welcome. So if you're standing in my front stoop, I know my job is to invite you in.

Please come in. Here it is, let's meet it. James Baldwin, a great African American writer, said, there are lots of things in this world that we must face that we cannot change But nothing can be changed until we're willing to face it But that's what I mean by welcome everything push away nothing Do you ever find yourself pushing way stuff sure? That's why I have to remind myself with this with this invitation this is kind of principle We don't need to be perfect at the even the guy was telling us to do this is not perfect

You know Well the third invitation is bring your whole self to the experience Now how do you do that? What is your whole self? Is it your perfected idea of you? I don't think wholeness is perfection. I think it means no part left out So what's that one the third one bring your whole self to the experience. I think, you know, when we think about helping other people, for example, we imagine it's our strength, our expertise, our knowledge that will help, and they do help. Those are fantastic, right? But you know, you've sat at the bedside with people, you know, that sometimes the meeting place with other people is not your expertise, it's your fear,

or it's your helplessness. You know, that's what enables you, your understanding of those things, enables you to build an empathetic bridge to that other person. You know, if you, if someone says to you, I'm afraid, and you don't know what it's like to be afraid, you haven't really examined it in your life, you don't know what happens in your mind or your body. If you say, I understand, they will know you're just guessing and they'll sniff out your sentimentality and your instant serenity and you won't be a reliable refuge for them. So to bring your whole self means bring the whole package, everything, and understand

that all of it has some value. I mean, for me, the parts of my life that I was most embarrassed about, that I was most ashamed of, the most undesirable parts of me, or oftentimes the very thing that allowed me to create a meeting place, a relationship with the people that I work with. How is that? You know, I want to push away a whole lot of my experience too. I know what it's like to have anger and rage. I know what it's like to have anger and rage. I know what it's like to have hatred. Oh, so those things became, here's an example.

There was a guy in our hospice, and he was dying, and he was really grumpy. You know, people have this idea of when people are dying, they're kind and wise and open, and that's not true. Well, sometimes they are. Yeah, sometimes they are right But sometimes they're just human beings, right and they they following their whatever their personality habits are So whenever anybody would go into this guy's room and yell at them

And so they can't to me and he said you got to go talk to this guy this guy Larry, you know He's she's yelling at everybody So I said not me. I'm scared of him. I'm gonna stay down here, you know But eventually because I was the boss. I had to go do it. So I walk across the threshold to Larry's room and he screams at me, I can't breathe in this damn place. Too many do-goaters around here. So I realized I was afraid. So I learned a really great intervention a few years ago about being afraid. Sit down, You know, sit down. You're less likely to run away if you sit down, right? It's harder to run away when you get your button the chair.

So sitting there in the chair, Larry's screaming at me and I realized, boy, my breath is really tight. So I relaxed my breathing a little bit and I said, hey, Larry, take a breath. Breathe in, breathe in deep. So he does and I noticed as he breathes in deep, he's not screaming so much, we're making progress. So I said, don't forget the exhale. So he did that. And then, you know, we're breathing in and out a little bit and I feel my feet on the ground.

I'm always checking myself in order to know how to work with somebody else. Feeling my feet on the ground, I thought, that feels pretty good. I feel more stable now. And I reached under the blankets and began to hold his feet. And as I did that, I felt the kind of fondness for him. And I said to him, Larry, you know, so many people around here really like you, you know, people really love you, Larry. And he said, who? And I took a risk and I said your mother, because you know, that's the archetypical love we're all looking for in a certain way. And he said, I hope so. And I said, yeah, me too. And we're going to a whole nother conversation now, you know. All it took was the willingness for me to not run away from my fear, to go toward the experience

that was happening in me and use that as a bridge to working with him. Yeah, I mean, it is, it's basically taking the meditative technique of being aware of what's happening in your mind and your body and putting it into a situation that is pretty close to an emergency. Yeah. and putting it into a situation that is pretty close to an emergency. Yeah, I'm a kind of spiritual pragmatist, Dan. If it doesn't work for me in everyday life, I'm not interested in it.

I'm interested in, how can I be a full human being? How can I be as free as possible? And how can I be a real sum service to other people? And I think, when you do this work for a while or you do mindfulness practice for a while, you begin to see your common ground with each other. There was another guy, he, and then it was Bo, he was from New Orleans, and he was a tough cookie, you know. First night he was in the hospice, he, His roommate was having an argument with his daughter and Bo got in there and started

hollering and yelling at him. And I came into the scene and I said, Bo, you gotta let him go. That's not your business. That's their family. And he says, well, I'm out of take care of him. He pulls up his pant legs and he's got a bayonet and his boot. And I said, Bo, you to give me the bayonet. You know, I said, I promise I'll give it back to you. Now, this is the guy who lived on the streets,

right? That's a big act of trust for him to give me his bayonet. But he did. Bo used to sleep with his boots on every night. And his bed he slept with his boots on. One day he got up and he fell through this kind of surgery screen. And that roommate, I came running into the room and see what happened. And that roommate was holding bow in his lap, the other patient, saying to him, why won't you let us help you? Why won't you let us help you? And then for the next three days, the only one that he would let help him was the other patient, yeah? Because this guy understood something about him. We became really close friends, Bo and I. And shortly before he was done, he got very paranoid. He got really scared. You know, we talk about this

symbolic language of people wanting to go home, you know, we'll bow just one to get out of his skin, run the climb out of his skin. And he talked a newbie volunteer and to taking him out of the hospice into the coffee, the cafe on the corner. And when he got to the cafe, he called 911 and claimed that the hospice and the people in the hospice were trying to kill him. And so the paramedics came and in that situation, what has to happen is the paramedics have to take him to the hospital, to the psych unit. So I arrive on the scene, bows in the ambulance, he's screaming and yelling, the paramedics are ready to take him away. And I said, just give me a few minutes with him, okay?

They were hesitant, but they agreed. And I went into the ambulance and I sat with Bo and he was screaming at me. He's like, he's the one trying to kill me. He's the guy, you know? This is the stuff I encounter all the time, yeah. He's screaming at the top of his lungs, you know? This is the stuff I encounter all the time, dear. He's screaming at the top of his lungs, you know? And I had to find my breath and body. And I also had to find my affection for him,

and my compassion for him. And as he's screaming at me, I just looked him right in the eye, and I talked to his soul, and I said, you know, oh, you know I love you you and I would never hurt you. He keeps screaming and I'd say, oh, you know that I love you and I would never hurt you. And he keeps screaming. I say it one more time, but you know, you know, I love you.

And I would never hurt you. And he said, I know Frank, that's why I trust you. He just popped out of the delusion for a moment and then he went back to screaming again. But the paramedic saw it. And the paramedic say, this guy's got to stay with you. I said, yeah. So we gave him a set of different, we brought him upstairs

and he died peacefully, day later, yeah. That paranoia around, and then this sort of twitchiness, restlessness, I've seen that at least in one case at the hospice where it was this woman, she was a former ballet teacher. She just couldn't get comfortable. She kept trying to get out of the bed, kept having me move the, you know, move to one side of the bed to the next or just the way she was the position of the bed over and over hours and hours and hours. And as I understand it, that's actually a not uncommon thing that happens when people are dying. There's this kind of anxiety

that sets in. And she was on high doses of sedative. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the healthcare folks would call it terminal anxiety. That's what they call it. Yeah. Which is just kind of an umbrella term to say, I don't know what's going on here, you know. My body is, you know, changing really fast. My sense of self is really being altered right now. I don't know what to do with this.

You know, I'm facing something I've never faced before in my life. I'm unprepared for this in a way. Yeah. and sometimes the right thing to do there is to medicate the person, give them some reduction to their anxiety. But I'm always interested in making the least intrusive intervention first. I'm totally willing to make all the interventions that are necessary, including what they call terminal sedation, which is to sedate somebody. So they're not acting out the kind of anxiety you're describing. But, you know, there was this woman that came to us and she came on high levels of adivant anti-anxiety drug.

And I said, well, let's just see what happens if we put someone at her bedside. She would wake up in the middle of the night with all these nightmares. And so the first night I was there with her about three in the morning, she wakes up, she starts screaming and I reach through the bed rails of the hospital bed and I hold her hand and I say, it's okay, you're just in between worlds. That's what's going on. You're just in between worlds. You're coming out of a dream, you know. I say, here, you can feel my hand. I just made that physical contact with her. And it didn't work the first night, you know.

But after about seven nights of doing it, we didn't need the out of hand anymore. Now, we had the resources to provide that kind of human companionship. One of the challenges in our culture is that we chemically restrain people sometimes when it's not needed. There were times when it's really appropriate to make that kind of intervention. But let's try something as simple as simple human kindness first and see how we can see

if that can have a positive effect. After years of doing this work, what would you say, what's your attitude about your own death? Are you afraid of it? Yeah, I don't like pain. I don't want to have pain. I'm a little suspicious of people who say they have no fear of their dying, you know. You know, my experience, Danny, and you probably saw this in your own meditation practices, you know, this sense of self, my personality, you know, it's always afraid. It's not body of fear that we sit in here. And I recognize that that's not going to grow up. It's always going to be afraid, in a way. So I have to find something

that's bigger than that. Like when you're afraid, let me ask you, do you know you're afraid? Yeah, how do you know? I don't know. It's a good question. Can you sense it in your body? Yeah, for sure. Okay, so what happens? Your chest gets tight. Yes, chest gets tight. I have a bunch of self-oriented or well, if it's something having in my kid, his or my wife or whatever or a bunch of anxious thoughts Yeah, the body's tight right so the body's tight the mind strategizing maybe or it's inter survival mode in some way, right? Beautiful so you know that really well. It seems like the Part of it that knows you're afraid it's not afraid Right and and it's not just Buddhist rhetoric, you know, it's not

just mindfulness, you know, language. You can orient to that awareness. You can orient to that part of you that knows you're afraid and you can function from that or you can function from the fear. You got a choice. Our default is to keep functioning from the fear. That's our habit. But when we cultivate the capacity to respond from someplace else, then we can really, you know, we can have fear. It doesn't go away, but it doesn't take up all the space in the room. And that's the real beauty of contemplative practices is they give us that capacity. And for me, it's really practical.

And it's highly operational, you know? So I think, yeah, I might be afraid, but I'm dying. But I don't think it will be all of me. So we talked about the fear you said, you didn't like pain, but what about fear around, you know, what's gonna happen next? I think people have, and I probably will succumb to these two people, have three big fears. The first is that it's going to hurt.

So we can do something about that. We can manage people's pains really well in about 95% of the cases. That's great. Second fear is that I'm going to be emotionally abandoned because there's no future in a relationship with me. Well, we can address that too. We can be a compassionate companion to someone. We can say, I'm here. I'm not going to leave, you know. The third fear is

a little more difficult. Third fear is, all the ways I've defined myself, all my identities, you know, your journalists, the news anchor, I'm a Buddhist teacher. All of these identities, these roles that we've played in our life, they're all either stripped away by illness or they're gracefully given up. And then we come down to something more fundamental, we have to ask the question, now who am I? Now that's a much more difficult fear to deal with. You know, it's not just existential, you know, it's real. One of my mentors was Elizabeth Kubla Ross. Five stages. Five stages, right? The final one was acceptance, if you remember, right?

And people have kind of bastardized these, you know, five stages over the years. I don't think Elizabeth meant them in quite that same way. But my experience in working with folks is that acceptance is not a final stage. Acceptance is just the beginning. You know, if your marriage breaks up, you might accept it, but you're not happy about it. My experience is after acceptance comes something different, and it's more like chaos. The whole sense of self, the ways of define myself. All that starts breaking down.

And it's frightening for many people, and it's chaotic, and it gives rise to the kind of restlessness you were talking about earlier. And then out of that comes something infinitely deeper than acceptance, and I think it's surrender. And I'm not even sure we can choose surrender anymore. It's not my experience that it's more like it chooses me. And it feels more like a undertow or like something, giving myself over a ceasing of any kind

of battle or fight against this experience. Out of that comes a much more deeper possibility, which is, we could say, transformation, the possibility of knowing ourselves to be more than what we've previously taken ourselves to be. So the transformation is not like we turn into a butterfly. It's more like we stop being so identified, tightly identified with our small self and a little bit more part of the larger system. Actually reminds me of a guy who I met in the hospice who said something to me that he

was not, he didn't, I don't think, had any real spiritual background or anything like that. He, although he was a professor, so he's very smart, but he said, I was talking to him above fear. And you know, are you scared going into this? And he said, you know, I just started to think of myself as part of a larger system. Yeah. Yeah, something people, well, Waston have this experience where they feel themselves to

be part of something larger than themselves that also includes themself. That's the easiest way to talk about it. And it doesn't have to be religious. It's not religious for people. Could be as simple as nature. Yeah, oftentimes, people's spiritual lives, if you will, are interlives, maybe a better way to say it. Often, much more about their relationships, or their time in nature than they are about some philosophical belief, or something that they learned in church, or in synagogue when they were seven years old. There was a guy who we worked with.

He was a heroin addict for 30 years. African American guy, he was Jackie. And at the hospice, I always ask people, what do you think's gonna happen after you die? Because I think whatever story we have about what happens after we die, and I don't know what happens. But my experience is that it shapes the way

in which we die. Our idea is about it. So I said, Jackie, here you are at this Zen hospice. I said, you think you're gonna get born again? And he said, yep. I said, well, what you are at this Zen hospice. I said, you think you're going to get born again? And he said, yep. I said, uh, well, what are you going to come back at? You said, Jackie, I said, wait, when would be Jackie? You've already been Jackie. Why you, you know, you could be a king or a queen or a news anchor.

And he said, uh, nope. Coming back is Jackie. I said, how come it's, of course course next time I'm going to get it right. And you see, we were in a hole into a whole nother conversation now. Exploring something really different. So I don't know what happens after we die. And I, you know, if one idea I find out I'll write and tell you, you know, but, but I do know that it shapes the way in which people meet the experience. There was a woman I worked with.

She was a Christian scientist, you know? And she was 92, 93 years old. And she said to me, I just want to put my head in a lap of Jesus. She was really ready to die. She was comfortable. She was satisfied with her life. She had a deep faith. And then her granddaughter came to visit.

And her granddaughter said, Grandma, I read a book. And in that book, it said, when you die, everybody who's died before you will be there to meet you. And Grandma became terrified. Because the story that was true for her that she never told anyone, she finally told me was that her husband Edgar had been beating her most of her life and he died five years before and the idea of spending eternity with him was terrifying. So I don't impose my ideas on other people. I'm not interested in that. It doesn't matter

what I think about it. What matters is what do they think about it? And how is it shaping the way in which they're meeting their experience? Fourth, invitation. Find a place of rest in the middle of things. You know, we're always thinking we'll do rest later, you know, like when our list gets checked off, or we go on vacation, or we're going to retreat of some kind. But I don't know about you, but my list is never checked off. If I wait for that to rest, I'm in trouble. So I have to find a way of resting right in the middle of what I'm doing. And that's the heart of mindfulness practice, isn't it? Really learning to rest into your experience, just as it is. Clear

mind, rest in that. Confuse mind, rest in that. There was this gout, her name was Adele, and she was this ferocious 86-year-old Russian Jewish lady. And the night she was dying, they called me up, and I went into a room. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and her dressing gown, feet dangling off the bed. And I went in and sat in the corner, because that's my way. Before we jump into help, look and see if anything really needed. And sitting on the bed was a home health aide

with her, a very nice woman. And Adele was this tough cookie, you know. And the home health aide said, Adele, you know, you don't have to be frightened. We'll write here with you. And Adele turned around and she said, honey, if this was happening to you, you'd be frightened. So I stayed in the corner, you know, and then a little while later,

this very well-meaning attendant said, there, you look a little cold, you know, would you like a shawl or blanket around your shoulders and Adele shot back? Of course, I'm cold, I'm almost dead. And I thought, wow, I wish I had half the tenacity of this woman, you know, and if I die, you know, when I thought, wow, I wish I had half the tenacity of this woman. You know, and if I die, you know, when I die, rather, I hope I have some of that kind of energy. But I noticed a couple of things sitting there. One is that there was struggle. There's always a struggle or often a struggle in dying. And in this case, it was manifesting in the breath.

Every in-breath of struggle, every out- out breath of struggle, this despite the fact that we've made all the correct interventions, right? I've walked you in and morph you. But there's a labor to die, just like there's a labor to getting born, you know? And the second thing was that she didn't want any nonsense. She didn't want to talk about tunnels of light, or barbedo's, or... She just wanted honest human relationship, yeah? Something reliable. So I pulled my chair up really close to her like you and I are sitting here and I said,

a day, would you like to struggle a little less? And she said, yes. And I said, okay, I noticed something right there, you know, at the end of the exhale, before the next inhale, does that little gap? I said, one more to be like if you could put your attention there for just a few minutes. I'll do it with you. Now, this is an 86 year old Russian Jewish lady. She doesn't care beans about Buddhism or meditation or any of these things, but she's highly motivated in this moment to be free of suffering. So I said,

come on, I'll do it with you. I didn't guide her. I just breathed with her. She would breathe in. I would breathe in. She would breathe out. I would breathe out. And I noticed that over some time her attention got drawn into that gap, you know. That's an amazing place, that gap at the end of the exhale. You know, it's a moment to be the fear of faith. You know, do you have confidence? The next breath is going to come where you start micromanaging it in some way. Well, she relaxed and I saw the fear in her face just drain away, you know.

She never meditated before in her life, Dan. But after a while, she said, Frank, I think I'm just going to rest now. And I said, okay. And she laid back on her pillow and sometime later she died. I think she found a place of rest in the middle of things. You see, all the conditions were the same. She was still dying. There was still struggle with the breath. All those things, all the conditions of our life that we're always trying to manage. They were still there. But she found a new way to be

in the midst of all those conditions, right? She found a place to rest in the middle of things. I mean, do we have to die before we rest in peace, you know? That's a good question. I hope not. So how do we find it the way? I mean, because as you said, the checklist is never done. I think if we just depend upon the conditions, we're in trouble. I think we have to find a way of resting in the middle of whatever it is we're doing. You do it all the time. I'm sure in your work, you have to bring your attention fully

and completely to whatever it is you're doing. And when you do that, at least in my experience, that's a lot more restful, you know, my mind isn't split, you know, this notion of, you know, multitasking is just that, a ridiculous notion. That's not actually happening. We're just doing a lot of things, paying very little attention. So bringing my attention fully in complete to whatever it is I'm doing. And it doesn't matter is I'm doing. And it doesn't matter if I'm reading a book, being with my granddaughter or sitting at the bedside of someone who's dying, that comes a state of ease and restfulness. Invitation five. Invitation five is cultivate, don't know mind. I felt obliged since I was founder of the Zen hospice to put something Zen like in this

list, you know, Zen's full of these paradoxical statements, right? Cultivate, don't know mind. What does that mean? I mean, it's not encouragement to be ignorant. I mean, don't know, isn't ignorance. Ignorance is, I know something, but it's the wrong thing and I insist on it. You know, there's a lot of that going on in the world right now. So the cultivate don't know mine is to cultivate a mind that's open, that's receptive,

that's curious, that's full of wonder. Yeah. That's willing to explore. It isn't so fixed by our knowing. There's room for something else to emerge. I had a heart attack a few years ago. I was teaching a retreat for doctors and nurses on compassion and in a middle of emerge. I had a heart attack a few years ago. I was teaching a retreat for doctors and nurses on compassion and in the middle of it, I had a heart attack. And

it was humbling. I used to think I knew a lot about dying, you know, until I had a heart attack. And then I realized I didn't know so much. And that was actually a really good thing. The view from the other side of the sheets is really different. And night before my surgery, I was talking to my son, he came to visit me, he was about 29 at the time. And you know, great guy, I love him dearly. And he brought some videos to watch. One of the videos was a bucket list.

I said, I was not watching that one tonight. But we're having this ordinary conversation like you and I are having. And in the middle of it, he said, Dad, are you going to live through this? And I love my son, and I wanted to reassure him immediately. And so I started to say, don't worry about it, it's going to be fine. But out of my mouth, I heard myself say, I'm not taking sides. And I wasn't taking sides between life and death.

And I wasn't trying to be sage or Buddhist or any of those things, Dan. It totally surprised me. But it came out of my mouth and the both of us were shocked by it. But then we both relaxed because it was true. And when the truth's in the room, we can relax. I wasn't taking sides with life and death. The cultivate don't know mind is to cultivate curiosity. When I came out of that surgery, I was in the recovery room. I was still intubated. And a friend of mine was there.

He was a meditation teacher. And my son. And into the room comes a respiratory therapist and says, let's pull out that tube and see if you can breathe. He said to me, and I waved my arms, you know, and fear. Like, I wasn't ready to have this happen, and it scared me. And my friend, the meditation teacher, he said,

Frank, find your breath. Well, I couldn't find my breath. The machine was breathing for me, and I couldn't tell what was the machine and what was me. So I shook my head now, and he said, well, then sense your body. Well, I tried to sense my body, but it was so full of narcotics from the anesthesia that I really couldn't sense very much of my body. And then right then, Dan, your teachers are really important to you.

And I remembered Suzuki Rochi, the great Suzuki Roshi, you know, this extraordinary Japanese man who in ten years changed the whole way we think about meditation. And when Suzuki Roshi was dying, the night before he died, he wanted to take a bath and get cleaned and his wife said no, but he insisted. And so his son, although he had carried him, carried his wife said no, but he insisted, and so his son, O Tohira, carried him, carried his father into the bath, and lowered him into the bathtub. And as he lowered the great Suzuki Roshi into the bathtub, Suzuki Roshi got scared. He was really scared.

He was going to drown. And his son said to him, father, calm yourself, find your breath. I'll do it with you. And Suzuki Roshi was able to stabilize. In this moment, when I'm in this frightened condition, I remembered this. And I took my friend and I pulled him close to me, my meditation teacher friend, and I put my ear right next to his mouth, and I borrowed his breath, the rhythm of his breath until I could find my own until it could stabilize me.

Then I could signal to the guy to take out the tube and see if I could breathe. Let me in our closing moments here try two questions that may not work. Will we have two more in case those don't. No, that's it. One is I was asked by men's health. I've been writing a column for men's health. Yeah. And they want, they have an issue coming up,

maybe out by the time this post. I don't know about being fit in any age And they asked me to write something about aging gracefully. Hmm. I feel utterly unqualified to write But does that term aging gracefully resonate with you in light of everything we've just discussed? Basically, I'm asking you to write my column for me. Yeah You know, I think I can imagine a write my column for me. Yeah, you know, I think I can imagine a couple of things about this. One is that, you know, one of the ideas we have about aging in this country is that we should continue to be youthful in our aging, you know, that that's what aging gracefully looks like. I think, you know, one of the things that we're

beginning to understand about aging is that to be a true elder, it's not just about getting older, right? And to be a true elder, these days, I don't think it's just about one directional mentoring, you know, the wise old sage, mentoring the young person. I think it's about mutual benefit. I think it's about that kind of exchange. That's my experience anyway when I'm working with younger people. So I'm always learning from them and I hope they're learning something from me. So that's the first thing that eldering has not to

do with isn't just about getting older, but also Ramdas, a friend of mine, you know of. Great meditation. Great teacher, remarkable guy, you know. He wrote a book some years ago called Still Here. After his beat here now, books. And it was about just that aging. And I was at his house one day, we're having breakfast. And he said, so what did you think of that book, Frank? And I said, you want the truth? And he said, yeah, I said, well, it was okay. You see, yeah, me too. He said, I wrote it in my 70s. What did I know about aging in my 70s? He said, now I'm 86. I understand something about aging.

So I think that sometimes we maybe prematurely mature into the fullness of our life and into the fullness of our acceptance. That might include disability, it might include confusion, it might include the losses that come with aging too, not just our own physical or mental losses, but the losses of those are due to us. I think when we can embrace all of that, then I think we are aging gracefully. I like all of that, especially the last one. But what you're not talking about as far as I understand it is some sort of resignation around, look, this body's impermanence, I'm not gonna take care of it.

No, that's nonsense. This body's important, and it's my vehicle for knowing the world. It's my sensing tools to know the world. I wanna take as good a care of it as I possibly can, because it's what allows me to interact with the world, to know the world, to be fully engaged in my relationships.

I think that's a misunderstanding of, I think Buddhism has had a misunderstanding of that that we shouldn't care for the body. The body is extremely important, and I love my body. After my heart attacks, it was hard. I mean, I was humbling to have a heart attack. I was depressed. I was dependent on others. I was weak.

But as I paid attention to that, man, what started to happen was that stripping away became a kind of transparency. And I began to feel myself totally differently than I'd known myself to be before. Something I was familiar with, but I became more intimate with. And after that experience, I thought, I loved this heart of mine. I wouldn't trade it for any other one. It was a famous Tibetan teacher that called me after my heart attacks. And he'd had a heart problem.

And so I said, how'd you deal with that? You know, with a pain, depression, all of it. I thought maybe he'd give me some esoteric practice. There was a hesitation on the other end of the phone. And then he said, well, I think it's good to have a heart. And he said, if you have a heart, you should expect that we'll have problems. And then he told me to rest and he hung up the phone. That was it. No, it's a third practice. When I got off the phone and then I thought, you know, he's right. If we have a heart,

if we have a human body, we should expect that we'll have problems. I mean, who told us otherwise? I mean, who told us otherwise? So it's not resignation. It's a willingness to include the truth of our aging, the truth of our impermanence. But it isn't morbid, and it's not about giving up or just resigning yourself. I think I want to live this life as fully as I can every minute I have right

up to and including my dying process. I don't want to sleep through my dying. I want to be awake for it as possible. My old question. You said, if I heard you correctly, back when I said, how do we operationalize the sort of, it's often said that we can live more fully if we do it in the light of death. And I said, well, how do you, it's easy to forget that when you're folding laundry or dealing with a tantraoming toddler

or whatever it is we do. I'm referencing two things that I did yesterday. So, one of the pieces of advice you said was investigate how you are around ending. And the thing that came to mind for me is discussion of my wife and I have been having recently about eating. Because you said, how are you at the end of meal?

And we both have noticed that we have this habit. We do a little bit of irrational, probably emotional eating, both of us. We're both slim. We both exercise quite a bit. but just sometimes we find ourselves eating. We're not hungry, and then afterwards we kind of hate ourselves. We don't hate each other, but we hate ourselves as a consequence of the eating or whatever. Anyway, we're kind of puzzling over this, no resolution has been reached.

And I just wonder whether there's something around for both of us, or at least for me, maybe about not accepting the ending of the meal, and that I, some reason, wanna keep eating, even though I'm really done eating, my body is sated. This could be a question that doesn't work. I'm just wondering why? You know, I'm not gonna psychoanalyze you around that one,

but I, you know, I think you can sort of see, what point were you associated? When was it, what's enough? That's always a really good question. What's enough? David White, the great poet, he's got a good poem. He says, enough, enough. These words are enough.

If not these words, they're sitting here. This breath is opening to life again, again, which I refused again and again, until now, until now. So I think, yeah, what's enough?ness is a really great way of understanding what's enough to really practice expressing my gratitude, feeling my gratitude, appreciating this life and everything I've gotten it. I mean, all the people we know that are dear to us are going to die someday. Now, that can be the depressed the hell out of us, or it can inspire us to really take care of them, and to love them with

every bit as hard as we can, you know, our whole beings. You know, that vase on the shelf that your mother gave you, it's going to fall off the shelf one day. You can be sure of it, yeah. Question is, how will you take care of it now? How will you appreciate it now? Knowing that all things will come to an end. How do we care for this life? That's a pretty good place to end this. Before we really say goodbye, can you give us again the name of the book where we can find out about you on the internet. Anything you want people to know if they want to investigate you more fully. Well the book is called the five invitations. Discovering what death can teach us about living fully.

So it's not just about death, it's about how to step fully into our lives. People can find me at fiveimitations.com. And there they can see a series of my events and where I'm teaching and that kind of thing. I also run an organization called Now called the Meta Institute. Meta is an old polyward, means loving kindness. And it's all about training clinicians and caregivers about how to do mindful and compassionate care of people who are dying, how to be a compassionate companion to them. So they can find me there at the Metta Institute, dot org as well. But I want to thank you, actually, for the willingness to have this conversation. And you know, the whole world is running in the other direction down, away from this subject.

And for one reason or another, you chose to come toward it. And I really want to thank you for doing that and thank you for the volunteer work that you do. I think the world, I think when we are at the bedside of someone, when we're in the press office of death, we learn things that the world needs. I don't think our job is just to be caregivers. I think it's also to carry that wisdom that we learn there into the world. So I want to thank you for having a conversation. I want to thank you right back. Okay. Great job.

Thanks. I really want to amplify that point Frank was making at the end there that there is an incredible amount to learn sitting at the bedside with people who are dying. You live our lives, I think understandably, in some levels just totally caught up. Most of us, I'll just speak for myself. I live my life mostly caught up in my to-do list, my anxieties, whatever. And you can lose perspective that this thing is temporary. And you get a big dose of that by sitting at the bedside, which is why I try to do it on the regular.

And I also agree that there's some... It's incumbent upon those of us who do this work to talk about it, hopefully in a way that won't come off as preachy, but will in fact just be useful. So I'm at the moment endeavoring to write about it, and as I work on my next book, which is taking up all of my time and bandwidth. So thank you to Frank for that. That was a great interview.

As mentioned at the top of the show, we're now moving the voicemail section here to the bottom of the show. And also as mentioned, we're going to start bringing in some ringers to answer the questions for now though you're stuck with me so here's voicemail number one. Hey Dan thank you so much for having this podcast it's definitely a highlight of my week and it's really helped me a lot with my meditation. I just had a quick question I am very interested in a lot of different kinds of meditation so for example loving kindness or our focus to awareness meditation and I know that each of the different kinds of meditation. So for example, loving kindness or our focus to awareness meditation.

And I know that each of the different kinds of meditation also has different benefits. So I was just curious how you kind of structure your own meditation practice so that you're able to incorporate all of these different kinds of meditation into your own practice. That would be great because I would love to be able to have more of a focus and know how I can really get the benefits of

them all without being a bit too scattered. Thanks so much. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Totally reasonable question. I've struggled with this for a while. I'm not going to claim that I know for sure I've got it right, but I'll just give you my system.

So, right now, I've kind of committed, as I'm working on a book about kindness. I got to find a better word because it word sounds a little sappy, but whatever. I'm working on a book about kindness. And so I'm doing a lot of loving kindness meditation. That's an even worse word, loving kindness. Right now that's my primary practice. That being said, it's not all I do, depending on a number of variables. But my overall goal is to get that practice in.

If, however, I'm overtaken by a lot of physical discomfort or something like that, and it's hard to do that kind of practice, I switch to a more open awareness so that I can just be with whatever is happening and not worry about, you know, trying to get my love on. So for you, if you're interested, I'm guessing that you're, like most of us, your primary practice is just watching your breath or doing sort of basic mindfulness. One way to attack this would be to have your primary sit of the day be that and then try to add maybe a secondary sit right before bed where you're doing meta and ETTA or loving kindness meditation. So that's one idea. Another is depending on how long your primary sit of the day is to do a round of meta at the beginning, which is something that I've

done at various times. And another idea entirely would be maybe to do and every other day type of thing. So I've done all of those things with, you know, reasonably good results along the way. I would say one other thing, I don't know, this isn't, no gold stars are handed out here to my knowledge. So I don't know that you need to be feeling guilty about not

doing every kind of meditation. I think you should, I think there's some benefit in focusing on one kind of practice for a while, the way I'm trying to do with loving kindness. I think a better term is friendliness. Let's just call it friendliness meditation. So I don't think you're somehow a failing meditator if you're just doing one thing all the time. But if you're really interested in finding you're getting a lot of benefits from both flavors or a number of flavors, then I think an orderly system makes sense, because then you're not gonna have doubt

arising in the mind about like, wait, what should I be doing now? Then I'm not to do enough of that other thing. I think an orderly system, in my experience, is what has made sense. Great question. Good on you for being so ambitious. Just don't take it too far. Here's number two. Hi Dan.

I'm ringing from Melbourne, Australia. A couple of things. One, you're going to come down here sometime. Be quick to see you talk. Australia, a couple of things. One, you are going to come down here sometime. Be correct to see your talk. And two, I've been meditating for a number of years and believe I'm okay at it. But I'm wondering about whether I can engage in crossing over into my waking hours and non-meditating hours and how to gauge that. I'm just not sure whether it's having a having a peaceful benefit because I believe I still slipped into being a victim of the ego outside of meditating.

I hope that question isn't too simple. Keep up the great work and I'll keep on listening. Thanks, Mike. I suspect there was some sort of like something in the range of narcissism. Nepotism that motivated the selection of that voicemail. One of our new producers, Samuel is Australian, so he may have been some favoriteism there. Anyway, I really like both of your questions. I would love to go to Australia. I've been there before. It's a wonderful place. I have had at least one invitation to come. It didn't work out for a variety

of reasons, but yeah, I'd certainly be open to that. It's a long trip and finding time in my schedule might be a little tricky, but yeah, going to Australia does not sound like you would suck. The second question, more substantive, you still feel like you're a victim of the ego. Well, I mean, welcome to the human condition as far as I know, unless you're enlightened, the ego is still going to be around and often overtake you and make you do dumb stuff. I understand that the doubt you're feeling and I mean, like the only way to really resolve that doubt would be to stop meditating for a while and see what happens. I don't recommend that, but you might, I think, get some confirmatory data.

My sense is that yes, you are still overtaken by, or as you say, victimized by your ego regularly, but that it's not as bad as it used to be. In my own case, that is absolutely the case. How do I know that? Not only from my own lived experience, noticing, like, oh wow, this whatever stimuli are in front of me right now, I'll sometimes think, oh, this would have sent me over the edge before.

Now, I'm annoyed, but I'm not acting on it. So that's one way I know. It's just for my own lived experience. The other way I know is that my wife will often point out that I'm annoyed, but I'm not acting on it. So that's one way I know it, just for my own lived experience. The other way I know it is that my wife will often point out that I'm vastly less annoying than I used to be, and easier to live with. And so that's actually a really good measure to people around you.

That's probably a much more reliable measure. But I don't want to set up, and I think it's really important to understand. There's a reason why I somewhat jokingly entitled that first book, 10% happier. This perfection is not on offer here. The voice in your head, your ego, the monkey mind, is still going to hijack you regularly. It's not about never experiencing anger, irritation, fear, jealousy, whatever, all of these difficult emotions. It is about what my friend Sam Harris, host of the excellent, formerly known as Waking

Up Podcast. Now I believe it's called Making Sense Podcast. Excellent no matter what the name is. My friend Sam Harris has talked about cutting down on the half-life of anger and the fact that the amount of damage you can do in an hour of anger as opposed to two minutes of anger, that's incalculable. And so I, you know, reasonably regularly experience two minutes of anger, but it's pretty rare that it stretches into an hour and I have many, many, many more things to apologize for

later. So yeah, I mean, it sounds to me like things are going well in some way There's this weird paradox where It's been described that that once you start meditating It things hurt more, but you suffer less in other words you may the pain of your ego arising or some difficult emotion May it may hurt more because you're more self-aware ego arising or some difficult emotion, may it may hurt more because you're more self-aware, but you're suffering less because you're less likely

to act on it and create suffering for yourself and others. So that's my strong suspicion about what's going on with you. And then bottom line when people ask me, how do I know whether this meditation thing is working? My somewhat glib, but I mean it. Answer is, are you less of a, well, like the word I can't say on this podcast, because we're owned by Disney, but are you less of a word that starts with an A and ends with an E, then you used to be to yourself and others? So are you less of that to yourself and others? That is the metric I use in my own meditation practice,

because as the brilliant Sharon Salzburg has said, we're not meditating to become better meditators. We're meditating to become better at life. Great question, really appreciate it. And I hope you guys are okay with this new structural change of moving the voicemails to the end. I think based on the comments we got in our survey, this will go over well. That does it for another addition to the 10% happier podcast. If you like us, please take a minute to subscribe, to rate us, or to share this

podcast with a friend. I know that may sound sort of perf funcary, you hear podcasts post saying this kind of thing all the time but there's a reason because ratings and subscriptions and social shares really help us and help us grow the audience and get more highly ranked on the Apple Podcast app. And yeah, that just helps us grow. Also, if you want to suggest topics that you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, you can hit me up on Twitter, at Dan B. Harris, I don't really read Facebook, but I do mostly read Twitter.

And before I go, I really do want to thank the people who now produce this podcast. We've got a new team here, Samuel Johns and Ryan Kessler. I also want to thank the rest of the folks here at ABC News who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts at ABC. You can check them out on ABCNewsPodcast.com. Thanks again for listening this week. Really appreciate it. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery

Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey. and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.