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Posts Tagged ‘dying’

Our Suffering

Posted in Mindfulness & Buddhism, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 11, 2012 | 8 Comments »

The subtle suffering in our lives may seem unimportant. But if we attend to the small ways that we suffer, we create a context of greater ease, peace, and responsibility, which can make it easier to deal with the bigger difficulties when they arise.

- Gil Fronsdal, “Living Two Traditions”

Have you ever listened to your thoughts?

I mean really listened?

Take 5 minutes right now and open Pages or Word and just type whatever comes to mind.

Or scroll through your wall on facebook.

Really pay attention to what’s there.

Do you see (hear) your thinking?

Do you see (hear) the suffering there?

Listen carefully. . . I’m such an idiot (because your computer and ipad weren’t on the same network and wouldn’t sync).

I’m such a loser (because I’m tired at work and bored with what I do because it seems so meaningless).

You’re welcome! (when the person you let go through the stop sign and they don’t wave to you in thanks or acknowledgment).

What the hell’s wrong with you? (when the person in the right lane moves ahead of you in your lane and never uses a signal light AND slows down).

I’m such a slacker (spending one weekend in pain from a root canal and the next two weekends out flat with a migraine).

Do you hear it?  Does it sound familiar?

Whining about the weather being too hot, too cold.

Not having enough money and wanting stuff that can really wait.

I keep crying, I’m such a baby (or one that bugs me. . . for you guys. . . when you say or think I’m crying like a little girl). . . because someone you love has died.

We bombard ourselves with stuff like this all day, all night, every day.

Would you talk to your kids this way?  Your best friend?  Would you let others talk to you this way?

There is a lot of talk today about bullying. . . and we need to talk about it.

And I think we need to first be aware of our own thinking and our own speech.

We can be pretty cruel and cause ourselves so much unnecessary suffering.

Life can be filled with pain, heartache, injustice, loss, and other tragedies. . . why do we add to all of this?

Stephen Levine, in The Grief Process, talks about the little injuries and losses that we sustain throughout our lives that we overlook and let chip away at us.

He questions, at one point, if we were able to have mercy for ourselves and acknowledge these little losses, would the losses of those we love be as big and hurt so much.

A new wound is most likely going to hurt more if it is at the point of a reopened wound.

So mindfulness helps us learn to acknowledge and bring into our full consciousness that which is usually below the surface, despite how much it can impact us.

With practice, we practice having compassion for these thoughts, feelings, and sensations.  Even if it feels rote or fake, we go through the process until our barriers begin to melt and we can hold our pain, our grief, our illness in our conscious awareness and experience patience, compassion, and equanimity.

This isn’t an easy practice but it is a life saving one.  And our very practice helps us to strengthen this life saving tool.

Listen to how you talk to yourself about your practice. . . do you make excuses for not getting on the cushion.  Do you beat up on yourself when you have a “bad session”?

Great moments to practice patience.

Maybe it will be easier to practice compassion for yourself in these moment than when you are in the midst of intense emotions or safer than situations (or people) that are really hurtful.

Life is filled with pain, danger, illness, discomfort, and other difficulties.  But it is vital to learn the difference between what is inherent because of the human condition of fragility and what is our own creation . . . our own layer of additional suffering.

And then of course, as those start to become clearer, mindfulness and lovingkindness give us the tools to transform suffering into peace.

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The Nine Contemplations of Atisha – Six

Posted in End-of-Life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 9, 2012 | 3 Comments »

English: Thumbnail portrait of Atisha based on...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your body is fragile and vulnerable.

The Sixth of the Nine Contemplations of Atisha. . . your body is fragile and vulnerable.

Think about how easily we can be overcome by something microscopic like a germ cell.  We don’t need a tiger to kill us, a few cells can do the trick.

It’s been over 90 in the Midwest for a couple of weeks and it’s been several days with temperatures above 100, without the heat index and on the news last night we heard that two elderly people in the area had died because they had stayed in their homes without air conditioning.  So even something that cannot be seen under a microscope can take these very lives of ours.

Our own bodies can turn on us, as when we have an autoimmune disease.

We grow up in this country to believe that we are rugged individualists, that we have boundless freedom and are invincible when we get good grades, get a job, marry, and raise the perfect family.  And most people can probably name at least a handful of people for whom this narrative isn’t the case.

Your body is fragile and vulnerable.

Our teeth decay.

Our muscles grow weak.

Our cells multiple, sometimes out of control and cancer grows.

Sometimes our bones break.

Our sleep gets disturbed.

We “catch” the flu.

Our muscles spasm and our arches fall.

It doesn’t take much water or ice on the floor to bring us to our knees or drop us on our heads.

Think about your mindful breathing. . .

Don’t you take for granted that as you focus on your in-breath that an out-breath will follow and then another in breath?

Would you if you had asthma?

Your body is fragile and vulnerable.

And what about our minds?  We often forget that there is interconnection between our minds and bodies and think of them as separate entities.

It doesn’t take a lot for our minds to “betray” us too.

We have afflictive emotions.  We have perceptions, sensations, feelings, emotions, and thoughts.

We can have hallucinations, dreams, and forgetfulness.

We take little pills to change our thinking and feelings.

Some of us will be born and develop depression, schizophrenia, autism, or dementia and although we see the effects of these diseases, we can only conjecture what really happens, despite our collective belief in levels of serotonin, problems with synapses, etc.

Your body is fragile and vulnerable.

Illness, like death, is an edge for us.  It is a mindfulness bell.  We usually don’t appreciate good health until we have lost it much in the same way that our love grows fonder and deeper when the object of our love has died.

A sore tooth or an aching back remind me of how fragile my physical life is.

I appreciate the rest of the teeth I have while I am sitting with the discomfort of a root canal.

When I have a migraine, I am painfully aware of the week I have had without the pain, sensitivity, nausea, etc. but that does not mean that I have been mindful to the lack of pain during that week.

So, can we use our physical presence and bodies in our meditations?

Definitely!

We cultivate awareness with meditations like body scans and progressive muscle relaxations.

Or focus on attention by practicing Yoga Nidra.

We allow our awareness to the sensation of our abdomen rise and fall with our inhalation and exhalation.

I remember a story from my first philosophy teacher. . . she was the one who introduced me to Buddhism and meditation.  I remember her telling me that her friend, during meditation, knew that there was something wrong with her kidneys and was able to get hydrated and get to the doctor before it was too late.

Our bodies may be weak, vulnerable, and fragile and we will ultimately die from something.  Not even the Buddha himself was able to avoid it.

But our cultivated aware and attention can be powerful as we practice meditation.

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I’d love to tell you. . .

Posted in Grief Theories, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 13, 2012 | 3 Comments »

 
“Don’t grieve.
Anything you lose comes
round in another form.”
Rumi
 

 I would SO love to tell you, “Yeah, don’t grieve.  It’s not spiritually necessary or enlightened.  We are transcendent beings. . . “

Whatever!

Most of us are not there and many give lip service to those kinds of messages if we are honest with ourselves.

We hurt when we lose something.

We really hurt when we lose someone.

We have deep connections with the person we loved who died.

They co-create our world with us.

Sometimes they gave life to us (or we to them) and then we created a history, a storyline, a relationship, a family, a network of friends, etc.

We derive meaning and pleasure from our connection.

We sometimes sustain wounds and hardships in those relationships as well.

But they (the person and our experiences with them) are as much a part of us as our arm or leg and there is pain when someone dies as there is when we sustain a physical injury.

What I have come to learn, through my experience and the experience of those around me, is when we acknowledge the presence of the pain, (the upheaval, and the sense of being distraught) and can hold it in our awareness, even if for moments, healing occurs.

We do more harm, expend more energy, and suffer longer when we disavow the pain.

I think we can get to a place of understanding that others really “never leave us” because we get in touch with our interconnectedness with them.  But when we don’t touch the pain and allow it to be, it is harder to connect with more transcendent concepts.

This is one of the reasons why practices like mindfulness are beneficial to our “grief work.”  The practice teaches us to be present, moment to moment, and to accept rather than to fight off.

We then have the energy to live with what “is” and to have compassion for the situation as it presents itself.

So, I don’t think we need to throw ideas like Rumi’s out altogether.  I think we just need to practice a lot of compassion on the way to having a lived-bodily experience of what it truly means.

And without that experience, those words can be hurtful and harmful to someone who is still defending from their pain.

~~As a side note, today is my dad’s birthday!  I can’t be with him today but I am NEVER far away from my thoughts and heart.  Happy Birthday Daddy!  Thank you for all of these decades of love, support, and lessons.

 

~~~~~~~

For more information about learning to allow pain and sorrow, check out Stephen Levine‘s work Unattended Sorrow or The Grief Process CD/Audio.

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Five Precepts: “Cultivate Don’t Know Mind”

Posted in End-of-Life, Mindfulness & Buddhism, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2012 | 6 Comments »

Have you started at the beginning?  Have you read any of my other posts on the 5 precepts of being a compassionate companion?  If you haven’t seen the my introduction, take a few minutes to read about the other precepts before moving on (see the links below this post).

. . .

The 5th precept of being a compassionate companion is, Cultivate Don’t Know Mind, taught by Frank Ostaseski, co-founder of Zen Hospice Project and founder of Metta Institute.

I think most people who know something about mindfulness, Buddhism, or Zen have heard Shunryu Suzuki‘s famous saying from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:  In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.  And this is exactly what Frank is teaching about in the 5th Precept, Cultivate Don’t Know Mind.

There is something so comfortable in thinking we know something or thinking we’ve had some mastery over something.  It’s not only about self-importance but also about the need to feel in control to squelch our anxieties.  And where might we have more anxiety than sitting by the bedside of someone who is dying.

When we are saturated in expert mind, we have all the answers.  There is no room for growth, creativity, or newness.  We might find ourselves thinking I’ve been through this before or I’ve dealt with this diagnosis before (whether medical or psychological) and we immediately cut ourselves off from the present experience.

Cultivate Don’t Know Mind.

One of the things I have learned in my training as a humanistic/existential/phenomenological clinician and researcher is to be open to what’s in front of me.  To let unfold what is before me.  It’s about being non-directive and truly honoring what another person’s experience is and learning to bracket all of the “stuff” that I bring to my experience.  Having learned this way of being has helped in being by the bedside of a dying person or in the consultation room or group room with the bereft.

There is something so wonderful about a situation being new to us.  We are open and receptive and have a sense of anticipation and limitless possibilities.  When we encounter a situation we think we know, there is a deadness or closed-ness to our relationship with it.  It’s easy to go in with an agenda (I’m going to teach this family how to grieve properly.  I’ve seen this kind of cancer before and I can tell them what it will be like and what they need to do.  This person is [add a religion or ethnicity] and they will act like this or that).

With this closed-ness, there are no rooms for miracles, no room for people intimately sharing the experience of being alive.  Frank describes “not knowing” as being intimate.  Do you remember when you first started to date someone and you hung on their every word?  Or the first time you saw your child?  Everything was amazing, new, and fresh.  Everything, every word, every gesture made you fall in love with that person or your child.  Surely, we can be as open to those who are grieving and dying, no?

Imagine another person with you, a companion.  Not a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, or a psychotherapist but someone who was there to hold space for you.  They didn’t have all the answers.  Didn’t rely on techniques, slogans, or theories.  Imagine that the starting point of the relationship was that they were there to listen to you, learn about you, and their whole reason for being was to be a witness to your unfolding.  Imagine if we could have such open hearts to someone who was laying dying the way we do with that newborn baby or with that first date.

There is room for possibilities when you can stay flexible and receptive.

Cultivate Don’t Know Mind.

Note:  Thank you all for reading these posts on the 5 Precepts from Frank.  He is an amazing teacher and it is teachers like Frank, Roshi Joann Halifax, The Levines, John Welshons, Sameet Kumar, Ram Dass, Sogyal Rinpoche, etc. that have informed my passion for continuing the lineage of Buddhist practices not only at the deathbed but also in the presence of those grieving.

Thanks for taking this journey with me.  I honor you, a buddha to be.

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Five Precepts: “Find a place of rest in the middle of things”

Posted in End-of-Life, Mindfulness & Buddhism, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 6, 2012 | 3 Comments »

The 4th precept of being a compassionate companion is:  Find a place of rest in the middle of things.

These 5 precepts are taught by Frank Ostaseski, co-founder of Zen Hospice Project and founder of Metta Institute.

If you haven’t read my introduction or the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Precepts, please check them out — see related articles below this post.

I have so enjoyed going back over Frank’s tapes while writing these posts.  The last time I really spent any time with them, any time really meditating on them as a practice in and of themselves was on a trip to San Francisco for school a few years ago.  I remember taking pictures of them on the wall of a nursing home where they were posted.

I already had listened to the tapes, knew about ZHP, and was reading all of the literature I could on Upaya Zen Center‘s program for Being With Dying.  I was thrilled to see them on a wall in a building and not just in a book.  Being so far from some of the major centers for Buddhism and End-of-Life, my work with and adaptation of Buddhist practices for counseling has been a lonely journey.  I was “doing” hospice in a very stoic part of the Midwest and I was really trying to find the essence of the teachings to make them less threatening for the area.

But now, as I finish the series and am spending time meditating on them, I am passing them off to my dad who still has a few weeks to go before starting his own hospice volunteer training and I wonder what he will think of them when he starts to listen to them.

Find a place of rest in the middle of things.

In his training, Frank talks about the rest in the middle of things as spaciousness in the midst of chaos.  This place to rest is our settling into the moment.  It is cultivating our mindfulness of what is in front of us.

When we practice breathing meditation, we focus on the in breath and the out breathe but we often don’t focus the moments that come just before we move from exhale to inhale.  It is that spaciousness, that calm that can feel elusive in our rushing around in daily life.  Take a moment now and follow your breath.  Don’t try to change it, just notice it.

And sometimes this takes practice.  It seems so silly to think that we need to practice attending to our breath and yet thousands of times a day, it goes disregarded.  Can you sense the space?  Can you let your attention light on that moment before your lungs begin to expand again?  As you practice your breathing over the next few days, set your intention that it will be this in-between state that you allow yourself to be in as it arises.

Find a place to rest in the middle of things.

Frank reminds us that this tranquility is always available to us and we just have to tap into it.  I guess a more appropriate way of stating it would be that we need  to allow ourselves to be free enough to have an appreciation and awareness of this still point.

In this moment of stillness, there is no trying to fix, no manipulating, no being different, just acceptance.  There is an ease that comes as we allow ourselves to sink down into the non doing and relax into being.

As we foster this time to be more and more aware of our inherent pause for stillness, we open our hearts more deeply, and we can allow for more to come into our awareness.  We foster this gentleness and it softens our hearts and helps us get more in touch with our buddha nature.

Don’t wait for tomorrow or for your own deathbed.  Find a place to rest in the middle of things here and now.

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Five Precepts: “Don’t Wait.”

Posted in End-of-Life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2012 | 10 Comments »

In 1987, Frank Ostaseski helped form the Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice in America. In 2004, he created Metta Institute to broaden this work and seed the culture with innovative approaches to end-of-life care that reaffirm the spiritual dimensions of dying.

Being a Compassionate Companion is a 3 cd set of teachings that are based on volunteer caregiver training first used at the Zen Hospice Project.  It has so much heart and he conveys the teachings of the Buddhist Path and the hospice experience in such a natural, gentle way.

In these three cds, Frank gives guidance and explains these important teachings for cultivating a compassionate presence at the bedside:

So far, I have posted an introduction to these teachings — Attention, Attention.  I have also already posted on the first and second precepts

Now, it’s time for number three:  Don’t wait.

Two small words that have a lot of meaning attached to them.

One essence of these tiny words can be summed up by what I heard Ram Dass once say in a talk. . . You can wait.  You can be patience.  You cannot wait patiently.  There is a difference.  In waiting, we have a sense of expectancy and we are focused on what’s to come next rather than what’s going on in the present moment.  What’s so big about the present moment?  When you are at the bedside of a dying person, a moment can drastically change someone for a lifetime.

And you can be patient.  You can dwell in the present, attending to what is, rather than what might be.  I know that in meditation, there is a lot of talk about watching our breath and it may seem silly.  But imagine you are in ICU tonight, on oxygen and still unable to talk because you cannot catch your breath enough.  The breath becomes amazingly important then, doesn’t it?  So why would we want to wait until we are struggling to breathe to realize that breathing is the most important thing we do — maybe second only to loving.

But what else do these two words mean?  Don’t wait.

Because from moment to moment life changes, we don’t have control over what unfolds, no matter how much we like to kid ourselves into believing that with calendars, smartphones, and to do lists.  If something comes up for you, why are you going to wait?  Why do we take for granted that there will be another inhale after this exhale?  Let’s not wait until we are at the bedside or sitting in a grief support group.

People, including me, wait for the right time to live, the perfect situation to say what they want to say and we miss so much in the process.  For the last few years before Ida died, she kept telling someone close to me that he needed to get in touch with his sister.  He fought it for a long time, always thinking, “sure, at some point, I will do that for her.”  Ida died this year and it was when he went home for the funeral that he finally got in touch with his sister.

A few months since then, on Christmas, that sister is laying in the hospital.  Don’t wait.  Ida didn’t get to see that he had taken her advice and tried to mend the family and I know that is a regret for this friend.  But, he was able to make peace with his sister which was a blessing and relief to some in that family.  Who knows what will happen to his sister next, but he can sleep knowing that he kept his promise to his beloved aunt.

It’s an illusion to believe that there will always be time.  We numb ourselves out to that reality all of the time.  Think of all the situations in which you hesitated.  How many of them do you still regret?  How long have you tortured yourself with that regret?  How much energy have you sunk into feeding that regret or that procrastination of what you want to do or say.

When we are born, we come into this world with one specific agreement already made for us — we will either see those we love die (experience the loss of them) or they will see us die.  It’s a given that we don’t think about.  We don’t live forever and those whom we care about are just as fragile as we are.

I know I feel so much more at peace with the loss of my mentor, my brother, or some of my former AIDS clients than I probably ever will my grandfather who died suddenly when I was 16 years old or our family friend Harris who also died suddenly a few years after I moved away from home.  Did they know how much I loved them?  Did they know how much they touched my life?  How much psychic energy do we continue to pour into these heartfelt questions when we don’t make every day count and let those we love know how deep our love is?

Don’t waste time wondering, say what you need to, be where you need to, do what you need to do.

Don’t wait.

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Five Precepts: “Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience”

Posted in End-of-Life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 4, 2012 | 12 Comments »

Have you started at the beginning?

Have you read my first two posts on the 5 precepts of being a compassionate companion?

If you haven’t seen the my introduction or the First precept, please click these links before you read about Frank Ostaseski’s Second Precept.

. . .

Now that you are up to speed, let’s take a look at the Second Precept:  Bring your whole self to the experience.

I don’t want to sound redundant, especially if you just read my introduction and what I wrote about the first precept, but suffice it to say, that I will.  .  . There is nothing simple about this precept and yet, if healing is to occur, bringing our whole self is vital.

My training is in humanistic/existential therapy and I have had some amazing teachers along the way.  I had a teacher my first year in college in NY tell us a story about a client that used to come to therapy every week, dressed to the 9s.  It was as if her clothing was her protective mask, the image she wanted to portray and to use as camouflage from letting her true self come to the relationship.

He told us that every week he wore jeans and a sweatshirt on the day he saw her.  It wasn’t like it was a mission but he just “came as he was”.  He said over time she experienced him as genuine and heartfelt and well, real.  She connected with him and as she did, that protective mask started to chip away.  When she could come into the consultation room, “just as she was”, with mascara running down her face, or scuffed sneakers, or cheeks inflamed from anger, her healing could begin.

Bringing your whole self to the experience means not relying on technique, distance, or feeling like you have some magic that the other person doesn’t.  It’s not about you fixing your family, the person whose home you are volunteering in, your elderly grandmother who is living with dementia.  It’s about being present and being genuine and congruent.  It’s about understanding that in any relationship there are two people who create the space.

There is no time when faced with dying to stand on ceremony.  There’s no time for platitudes like, “I know just how you feel.”  When we use nothing but techniques and hide behind our title (whatever it might be – daughter, therapist, best friend, lover, etc) we stay in the realm of false pity rather than being able to be truly open to one’s pain with genuine empathy.

Our head nurse at hospice used to say leave your baggage at the door (before going in to be with a family) and while that was true, you didn’t want to let your frustration about traffic distract you from your encounter, we can’t leave the important parts of ourselves by the welcome mat.

Bringing your whole self to the experience.  Frank suggests, in his training, that it is in our exploring our own suffering that helps us to create an empathetic bridge with the other.  I love that idea and believe it is because of this very thing that healing takes place.  And I think we have to be honest and face facts. . . whether you are a therapist or a companion to the dying, when you are together you are both touched, both changed forever, both healed.

Not too long ago, someone complimented me on my “skills” when talking to someone who was in the midst of grieving.  Although I knew the compliment was being truly offered in a sincere way, I chuckled to myself.  There was no pretense on my part, no thinking in my head, “what would Roshi Joan say” or “what task would Teresa Rando say this person is on in their grief process.”

It was about opening the heart, extending one’s self to a person whose heart might be hurting.  It’s about every so lightly, touching the memory of my own grief experiences and allowing that to be close to me.  It was about a genuine care and concern for another individual, even though it was someone I do not know very well.

And with that came curiosity, not rubbernecking, morbid curiosity but wanting someone to know that I wouldn’t side step her grief just because we were at work.  I wanted that person to know that I was open to listening if she wanted to tell her story.

To me, bringing your whole self to the experience is about not sitting with a desk between you and your client.  It’s not about wearing a white jacket.  It’s none of that professional coldness that gets drilled into us.  It’s not about never touching a patient who is struggling to talk and having difficulty breathing from the intensity of their anxiety about death approaching.

It is about being vulnerable and at the same time not letting the situation be all about me.  It’s about meeting a situation and being okay to see where it takes you, or more appropriately, allowing yourself to be led instead of trying to fix the other person.

Can you have enough compassion for yourself and the person you are with so that you can be open to the reciprocal gifts of the moment?

Bring your whole self to the experience.

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Five Precepts: “Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing”

Posted in End-of-Life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 3, 2012 | 21 Comments »

The other night I started a blog about the work of Frank Ostaseski who co-founded Zen Hospice Project and founded Metta Institute.

Over the next few nights, I will be writing about each of the 5 Precepts or teachings that Frank created in his years of working with dying people and training volunteers and caregivers.

The first precept is simply:  Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing.

And there is nothing and everything simple about this first precept.

I almost wanted to write about this teaching last because it is so all-encompassing and I chuckled to myself every time I had that thought.  If I have learned nothing else about Buddhism (and dying) it is that everything is interconnected and the beautiful tapestry of life is in the weaving of all the threads to make the whole.  And yet we are linear thinkers and you have to start somewhere so why not with a welcome?

Frank describes the essence of this precept as receptivity.  With receptivity to another, we cultivate a non-judgmental attitude and I can think of no better time to practice being non-judgmental than as we accompany someone who is living their dying.

Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing

As a hospice volunteer, caregiver, family member, etc we learn to let go of our need to control and allow the person who is dying to call the shots, to do it his/her way.  What a compassionate practice!  I wonder how many times in our lives we experience this kind of receptivity and acceptance in our own mind or in the presence of another person?  Sadly, I think it is few times for most of us.

Caregiving for the dying is messy. . . I don’t only mean the mess of changing bedding and dressings or spilled soup.  I also mean all of the stuff that I as the caregiver and “you” as the dying person bring to the encounter.  We each bring our judgments, ideas, values, histories, loves, prejudices, beliefs, and experiences.  We bring old wounds. . . thinking we aren’t good enough, we should be alone, I should be in pain to atone for my life, I’m no body, etc, etc, etc.

But cultivating the ability to welcome everything and push away nothing is like breathing in deeply when one has been trying to catch the breath.  It opens the spaces around us and in us.  It allows for lightness and mercy to be present.  We practice being open to all that is around us in the environment but also within us — like our how we hold our body, how we listen, and how we touch the person who we are with.

Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing

When we sit on the meditation cushion, we sit with our backs straight but not rigid.  We allow our hearts to be open and our lungs the space to breathe in and out deeply.  We hold our hands on our laps lightly.  When I first started to meditate I loved using the image that Thich Nhat Hanh described. . . to hold our hands as if we were holding the baby buddha in them.  And with our presence at the bedside, we do just that.  We hold the person we are with enough support and enough tenderness.

It’s not easy to let go of control, to allow someone freedom to do what they think they should.  And many of us have very strong feelings of right and wrong or even how one should think, feel, behave, and yes, die.  But in that letting go of control, we meet each other together in an ocean of healing.  We allow the space for each person in the relationship to be present to the other and we allow the ground for the nakedness that comes with being wholeheartedly present.

Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing

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Introduction to the Five Precepts: Attention, Attention

Posted in End-of-Life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2012 | 18 Comments »

“You cannot go into the room where someone is dying

and not pay attention.  Everything is

pulling you into the moment.”  ~~ Frank Ostaseki

In 1987, Frank Ostaseski helped form the Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice in America. In 2004, he created Metta Institute to broaden this work and seed the culture with innovative approaches to end-of-life care that reaffirm the spiritual dimensions of dying.

I love listening to his 3 tape series entitled, Being a Compassionate Companion.  It has so much heart and he conveys the teachings of the Buddhist Path and the hospice experience in such a natural, gentle way.

In these three tapes, Frank gives guidance and explains these important teachings for cultivating a compassionate presence at the bedside:

Over the next few days, I will be sharing more about each of these precepts (teachings).

I hope that I can share what I learned from Frank and from working at hospice.  Most importantly, I hope that when you encounter another person, you learn to take a deep breath and settle in and truly open yourself to the experience.

More to come.

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The Nine Contemplations of Atisha – Four

Posted in End-of-Life, Personal Thoughts..., tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 30, 2012 | 5 Comments »

Atisha with Twenty-eight of the Eighty-four Ma...

Atisha with Twenty-eight of the Eighty-four Mahasiddhas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your life span, like that of all living beings, is not fixed

I find what our assumptions are about death fascinating.

We assume we will die in our sleep at a ripe old age.

We think we will die of illness, never an accident, murder, suicide, etc.

We believe that a long life is a better life.

We take for granted that our kids will live longer than we do.

And I am not passing judgment on whether these things are right or wrong.

They are just things we believe.

We hold fixed ideas from what we are told, what we have experienced, what we hope, and what we fear to be the truth.

And we believe certain things about our own death and the deaths of others.

Your life span, like that of all living beings, is not fixed

Yet death is still a great mystery, not what happens when the valve in your heart explodes during a heart attack.

Not when someone has a relatively “normal” trajectory of an illness like cancer, ALS, etc.

We have books that tell us what happens, like Ira Byock’s Dying Well or Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die.

We have spiritual texts that teach us about things like the dissolution of the body, as in the Bardo Thodol.

And I am not even sure if the mystery lies in what happens to us after death — is there anything else, is there something better, etc?

I think the mystery lies in the space between what we believe to be true and what happens. . . when it happens and how it happens.

Your life span, like that of all living beings, is not fixed

I had a client that had major complications after a surgery that was supposed to be “routine”.  Multiple systems shutting down and getting restored which shut down other systems, etc.  It was like a negative feedback loop for a while.

We were sure that she was going to die.  I was totally convinced.  I was the hospice expert, I knew these things.

Well, not really.

I just am more okay with dying taken place when it may be the ultimate healing experience for that person.

But with today’s medical technology, we can sometimes sustain someone well beyond what nature may have had in mind and give them a chance they would have never had before now.

That, however, is not my experience, but it does happen.

My “for sure” was no match for crazy (or what I thought was crazy) medical and scientific intervention.  And she lived on.

Your life span, like that of all living beings, is not fixed

Yet, I remember someone I knew telling me that his mother had gone into the hospital for something acute and the family was told that she was riddled with cancer.

There was an emergency that sent her to the hospital.

She was diagnosed.

The family was trying to make sense out of what was happening that night; trying to wrap their minds around it.

She died the next morning… not from the cancer and not from the acute crisis.

As one of the other Contemplations states, we do not have control over when and how our death will ultimately come.

How many times have you heard, “She was the picture of health”?  That was the case with my mentor who died.  Running 5 miles every morning, yoga, healthy eating, great relationships, ideal jobs for her, etc.

Or how many times have you heard, “He smoked cigars since the age of 12 and his mom fed him lard” and he died when he was 97?

We have no fixed time or fixed amount of breaths that we will take.

We do not know if it will be right now, tonight, tomorrow, or in ten years.

And yet, we live like it we have been granted this fragile life forever.

Everyone we have ever known to die, whether a beloved grandfather or a teen idol, has not lived forever and has had that unexpected time come.

Why do we think that we are exempt and will be the one person to make it out of life alive?

And how many of us take so much for granted because deep down inside, we really believe that we’ll be that one?

How long will you suffer with what is before you create the life you want before it’s too late?

How many times will you walk away angry and not say I love you before you are left with the guilt of having not done that very thing?

I ask these questions, not just of you, but of myself?

Will I learn this time?

Will I be more present, more proactive, more loving, more compassionate, etc?

Your life span, (and my life span) like that of all living beings, is not fixed.

With that knowledge, can we learn to embrace it, in a lived, total way, and create the life that we want because we became active agents during the moments we do have here on earth?

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