Frank Ostaseki: “I’m Allergic to the Notion of a Good Death”

Frank Ostaseski: I’ve failed miserably at being with my own pain and the pain of others. I failed miserably, but I’ve, I’ve learned to come back, you know, just to come back.

Just begin again. Yeah. That in itself is the kindest, most extraordinary of meditation instructions, but it’s also the way to work with, ways in which we’ve been abandoned either by ourself or others.

Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, I am so pleased and honored that our guest is Frank Ostaseski. Frank is a pioneer in compassionate end of life care and a respected Buddhist teacher. He co-founded the Zen Hospice Project, America’s first Buddhist Hospice, and established the Meta Institute.

To train healthcare professionals and caregivers. He’s taught at Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic, and he’s the author of the book, The Five Invitations, Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. Frank, welcome, friend.

Frank Ostaseski: Nice to be with you and, and let me say, I wanna begin by thanking you for your own wisdom, but also how you gather wisdom and, and share it with the world. So thank you for doing that. Yeah.

Tami Simon: Thank you, Frank. And this is the first time we’ve ever had the chance to have a conversation like this and record it, a podcast conversation. And if it’s okay with you, I wanna jump right to my sense of the heart of the matter, which is as I was. Familiarizing myself with your work. What I learned is that you’ve distilled into these two questions.

What’s most alive for people as they face the end of their life? The question, not so much, you know, the regrets of the dying this or that. No, that’s not what you have distilled down to this core. It’s am I loved and have I loved well, and this was really meaningful to me. I started reflecting on these two questions deeply, and I thought, well, when it comes to loving, well I think I could do a lot more, and I have some ideas about that and I wanna know more about what you know about that.

But then when I thought, am I loved. I thought that’s a lot more mysterious. I don’t know. What can I even do about that? So that’s where I wanna start. I want to hear from you your insights on these two questions that are on our hearts when we face dying. I, I.

Frank Ostaseski: Yeah. Well, thank you. I, you know, first of all, let me just say that’s a kind of paraphrasing of my paraphrasing of what I’ve been learned from being with people. they’re not evaluative. They aren’t, you know, did I, did I do well, did I pass the test? But what’s my experience? You know, know, am I loved?

How do I, how do I even ascertain that? You know, you know, as you know, we worked with a lot of people living, had been living on the streets, folks who, you know, had complex lives, let’s say, really complex lives, and often they came to us they, they were just glad to be warm, dry, and inside, you know. And so then they came into this environment at Zen Hospice where they discovered a certain kind of kindness that they maybe didn’t know in their lives. so this question really came up for them. You know, am I loved? I feel loved by you guys. I don’t know if I was loved before this. I feel loved by you guys, meaning the Zen Hospice volunteers. So, yeah. Am I loved? Am I loved, you know, did I love, well, again, not evaluative, but I know my grandchildren love me. I know I’ve learned to love myself over the years, and I’ve done my very best to express that love in my case, mostly through service, through trying to be of some muse and value to people to this world. So those are just my first impressions to, in response to your question, do you feel loved? How about you?

Tami Simon: I, I think it’s an arena that I want to grow in, and I think some of it requires an increase in receptivity. But also, and I’d love to hear more what you have to say about this as well. What I notice is that when I focus on loving others, there’s like this interesting reciprocity. I suddenly feel more loved too because they mirror it back immediately.

It’s just, you know, it’s like you give it and it comes right back. It’s interesting.

Frank Ostaseski: You know, um, oh, I don’t know, a couple years ago I was in Mexico City for a holiday with a dear friend of mine, the very first night we were walking through the big, big, you know, plaza there in Mexico City, and I stepped off a very high curb, fell to the ground and. Met some very hard, um, concrete and I broke my femur and I couldn’t move. I was laying there in the rain in the street for almost two hours for an ambulance to come. what was extraordinary was the people who came around me, people who were just walking through the plaza, I didn’t know one, you know, they, of course everybody wanted to help me stand up. I knew I shouldn’t do that. So one placed a piece of cardboard under my head, you know, another took her shawl off and wrapped it over me. You know, this was really moved me, it really moved me later. I was in the hospital and I don’t like hospitals. I don’t trust them, honestly. I get scared and I feel helpless. And I called a buddy of mine, you know her Joan Halifax Roshi.

Joan Halifax. And she’d just come from being with his Holiness. And I said, what’d you learn? And he said to he, she said that he was teaching that. Altruism the balancing factor for helplessness. And I really got it. It landed for me. And so from that moment, I just started practicing altruism with everybody was taking care of me and not just saying thank you to them, but receiving their care. And it has something to do with what you were just saying. You know, this receptivity that we have. So, you know, some home health aide who maybe had two weeks of training probably made a couple of dollars an hour, I went, I said to her, you know, I’m so glad for your training because you’re positioning me in bed and now I can rest.

I’ll be able to sleep tonight. And she, you know, she got very proud and happy. But what I realized that it wasn’t just about saying thank you, it was about receiving someone’s care, receiving somebody’s love. Yeah. So, I don’t know. I’m, this is a never ending exploration for me, Tami. Actually.

Tami Simon: I am curious though, because you train and have historically trained caregivers, how this notion of helping people feel loved infuses the attitude and the behaviors of a caregiver potentially, what kind of training helps people with that?

Frank Ostaseski: I think to touch their own suffering, uh, with some degree of kindness, getting to know their own qua, the what’s difficult for them, you know, their own losses, their own fears, et cetera. And that enables them to build an empathetic bridge to the person that they’re caring for. then that individual feels mad, you know, and their heart opens and uh, uh, you know. We don’t have to teach them how to get out of that situation. We have to meet them there. Yeah. We have to meet them empathetically in that moment. And we can only do that if we’ve done our homework, we haven’t, know, we’re just guessing. Yeah.

Tami Simon: Now you yourself have been meeting your own difficult territory. I was reading in preparation for this conversation that you had a heart attack several years ago and said you found yourself on the other side of the sheets, so to speak. And just before, in preparing for our conversation together, you and I in discussion, you mentioned that you’ve had some strokes as well over the last few years.

And I’m curious how those experiences. Have perhaps furthered your understanding of what’s really needed in these kinds of situations now that you’ve been on the other side of the sheets.

Frank Ostaseski: Huh. You know, um, when I had, when I had heart challenges, I had a triple bypass surgery, big deal. You know, they you open and spread you like, uh, a crab. And, uh, when I came to the recovery unit, if you will, after the surgery, uh, dear friend of mine who’s a meditation teacher, was with me. And, uh, I couldn’t breathe well.

I was still intubated. And a respiratory therapist came into the room and said, let’s take out those tubes and see if you can breathe. Literally, that’s what he said. And I had a piece of paper and I wrote to my friend, I’m scared, I’m really scared. And he said, follow your breath. Well, I couldn’t follow my breath because I was intubated. Then he said, you know, sense your body. Sense your feet. I, well, I couldn’t sense my feet ’cause still, you know, anesthesia was still running through my body. So I grabbed him actually and I pulled him close to me dam. And I just put my ear on his cheek so I could listen to his breathing rhythm. And as he would breathe I would stabilize.

You know, I could stabilize my fear in a way. So I think being able to meet our own, but also not giving more fear to people as they find themselves in these scary situations is important. A, a very famous Tibetan teacher called me after my heart attacks. I won’t say his name. But, you know, I knew he’d had a heart attack. And so I thought, oh, he’ll know, he’ll know what to do. He’ll know how to deal with the depression and the fear and the, the that was part of that experience. so I asked him, you know, you know, what do you do? You know, and how do you do it? I thought he’d give me some practice or some esoteric teaching of some kind. And you know, there’s a pause on the phone. And then he said, well, I, think it’s good to have a heart. And if you have a heart, you should expect that we’ll have problems. And then he paused for a moment, then he hung up. That was it. No esoteric teaching, no great new practice, that. And afterwards I thought, you know, he is right. You know, if we have a heart, if we have a human life, we should expect that we’ll have problems. Who told us otherwise? So meeting this in myself, meeting this in other people, I think this is the way that, you know, we begin to understand something about our innate vulnerability, you know, which of course isn’t just weakness, you know, is for me, one of the most beautiful of our human qualities because it allows the beauty and horror of the world to impress itself on our souls. And honestly, that’s a lot of what happens for me when I’m with people at the end of life. I just hang out with them. I don’t have any solutions and I just try to be real. And that includes my giving, extending to them my own kindness and, and what I’ve, how I’ve experienced something like what they’re experiencing.

Yeah.

Tami Simon: There’s a couple things about that story that really impressed me, Frank. One of them is that here you are, you’re this very highly regarded Buddhist teacher, and you write on the little pad of paper, you know, I’m afraid.

Frank Ostaseski: Yeah.

Tami Simon: And I think we have some notion that, you know, when we become quote unquote, you know, deep spiritual practitioners or something like that, you know, we’ll be sitting up in full Lotus at the time of our death and gracefully, uh, eject through the top of our head.

We have like fantasies and of course, and we’re not gonna be afraid.

Frank Ostaseski: You know, Tami, I, there’s a beautiful story of Suzuki Brohi, you know, shortly before he died, you know, there’s beautiful stories of his great, you know, alertness and awakening. But one, his okan, his wife wanted him to take a bath, so his son helped him into the bathtub, and his son lowered him into the bathtub. Very slowly. This is a day or two before he is dying. And Suzuki RHI got scared. You know, Suzuki Rush couldn’t swim, and he was a little afraid of water. And as his son was bringing, dropping him into the water, he got scared. And his son said, father, find your breath. You know, he couldn’t, he was scared. And I thought, God, if Suzuki Roshi can be scared, I could be scared.

Yeah. I mean, it’s just human. And I don’t think our practice eliminates fear. I think it gives us a capacity to work with it. I don’t think it protects us from anything. Listen is, in my experience, it gives me the capacity to work with what’s difficult.

Tami Simon: How would you say your practice gave you the capacity to work with the fear you felt?

Frank Ostaseski: Well, first it gives me the pa the to acknowledge it. here. It’s here. And knowing, knowing that it’s here now what? what can I meet it with? What’s the attitude of mine that I might be able to discover that would be helpful. I’m not, you know, I’m not so interested in getting rid of anything anymore. I’m not interested in getting rid of my fear. don’t think it’s so possible, honestly, I’m interested in knowing what the attitude of mine is in relationship to it, and how that might support me in those, in those moments.

Tami Simon: Alright, so let’s talk more about fears that people have about their own death. In your work, I’ve heard you identify and talk about three fears, and I wanna talk about the third, but then I wanna bring forth a fourth if that’s okay. But the first one is, you know, I’m afraid of the pain. And you, uh, write and speak to the fact that medication of course, can be extraordinarily helpful and like, double thumbs up.

We can use medication effectively at the time of our dying and entering closer to that time, uh, I’m gonna be emotionally abandoned. That’s the second one. And here in your story, which is another point. When you were being taken off the breathing tube when your friend leaned in, what a beautiful gesture of you weren’t emotionally abandoned.

He was right there for you. And I wanna stop you for a moment and talk about other ways we can help people who are getting close to the dying process or in the dying process, not feel emotionally abandoned.

Frank Ostaseski: Yeah. Or, or support them when they do feel it.

Tami Simon: Better said, yes. Thank you.

Frank Ostaseski: So, I mean, Tami, isn’t that the most natural thing for us to do? I mean, yes, of course we wanna reach in and we wanna fix it and et cetera, but, you know, what do you do when you are with a friend and they, they’re scared. You know? What do you do when you’re with someone who,

Tami Simon: Tell them to buck up. No, I’m just kidding, Frank.

Frank Ostaseski: yeah, yeah,

Tami Simon: that’s not an uncommon response in our culture. Buck up, you know? Get it together. I’m not afraid of people falling apart. I’m not afraid of Pandora’s Box. I, you know, a way I speak about this is that’ve got a lot of tools, right? Things have developed over the years, all kinds of skill sets, let’s call ’em. But I don’t lead with those. You know, when I go into a room where someone’s dying, I lead with my humanity. You know, I, I, so I bring my own fear into the room.

Frank Ostaseski: I bring my own, you know, emotional abandonment into the room. It doesn’t mean I ask the patient to be my therapist and we’re not talking all about my stuff, I can bring what I’ve learned from those experiences into the room. I can know I have some sense of what it feels like so I can meet them again in, in this empathetic way. When people feel emotionally abandoned, just love them. You know? That’s what’s helped me just love them until they can love themselves again.

Tami Simon: Now, Frank, you mentioned that when you work with caregivers, you encourage, inspire, point them into doing their homework, their own inner work around whatever their fears may be that they might be bringing and clouding the situation with. And here you said, you know, I’m not afraid of my own Pandora’s box.

And I thought to myself, I wonder what Frank has been through himself, inside himself, such that, you know, there’s this sense of like, whatever it is I can face or meet it, or at least I’m willing to, or there’s a, an openness to something like that.

Frank Ostaseski: Yeah. I mean, you know, everybody’s got their share of pain and suffering, right? My, I don’t, I don’t know that mine is any so special in a way. Um,

Tami Simon: I.

Frank Ostaseski: I. And I’ve failed miserably at being with my own pain and the pain of others. I failed miserably, but I’ve, I’ve learned to come back, you know, just to come back. That’s the thing that has been most helpful. Just begin again. Yeah. That in itself is the kindest, most extraordinary of meditation instructions, but it’s also the way to work with, you know, the ways in which we’ve been abandoned either by ourself or others. You know, when I was a teenager, not unlike a lot of people, I went through a very bad sexual abuse situation, right? I, I don’t think mine was any worse than anyone else’s who have been through those kinds of experiences, but felt really alone in it, terribly alone. I, I didn’t tell anyone. I, didn’t get the support that a young boy would’ve benefited from. But I remember I was by a priest, and I remember outside the rectory where this priest lived, there was this big willow tree. I, I just thought of this now, Tami. And I would leave this situation where there’d been this abuse. And I would go out and I’d sit under this willow tree, this weeping willow, literally.

And I put my back against it it, I just felt the support of this big tree, you know? because of its name, I would just cry. I remember I just would be under this tree weeping, under the weeping willow weeping. And I felt the support of this tree. I didn’t feel the support of any human beings, but I felt that support. And I think, well in my life, I’ve been fortunate. There’s always something that can support me. Well, there’s always something. And um, and so I’ve learned to that. I had a, I’ve had lots of things I don’t wanna go on about my illnesses, but I’ve had, as you said, several strokes. And one of the last times I was sitting at my computer typing something and everything got pixelated, the screen, the walls, everything. And I called my wife at the time and said, I think I’m having a, another stroke.

And she called 9 1 1. And, um, we waited for them to come. I live on a houseboat, so we have to walk down this long dock to the parking lot where the ambulance would be. And um, so they would come with a gurney. And my wife encouraged me to sit still, but I said, I wanna walk, I just wanna walk down the dock.

I wanna feel my feet. And she said, you stupid old man. But I walked and as I walked down the dock, I felt very unstable. Um, I had to hang on to the railing into her, but internally I felt very stable. Not because I was doing anything, you know, I wasn’t doing some special Buddhist practice. There was just something there. And it, there was a great deal of love. And I don’t know where it came from or even why it came at that moment, but I, my whole being felt this. And we stopped about halfway down the dock and I looked over the railing and then everything dissolved, everything went away. Frank went away, the dock went away.

It all went away. And there was just this absolute absence awareness, but no qualities in that awareness, just absence. Anyway, she tugged me and we went on down to the ambulance and I had a grand mal seizure. As they were putting me into the ambulance, they gave me some medication. They took me to the hospital.

This was at the beginning of COVID so no one could come in the hospital with me. And it turned out that the medication they were giving me, I had very, um, uh, I had, um, it had side effects and one of those side effects was paranoia. And I’d never been paranoid in my life. I’ve been with lots of paranoid people, but never. And for a while I was in this hospital unit and I didn’t know where I was. And the only thing I could do, I couldn’t even, I didn’t even feel comfortable telling the healthcare professionals that I was paranoid. the only thing I kept doing was I just kept repeating this phrase right now it’s like this right now it’s like this. And I did it for two days, Tami, until finally something stabilized. And um, this paranoia diminished right now. It’s like this right now. It’s like this. And that was for me, in my own experience, really helpful.

Tami Simon: Thank you for sharing that story, Frank, and I’m going to track back to a moment in it. That is important to me, if that’s okay.

Frank Ostaseski: Please.

Tami Simon: is, you’re talking about how you’re walking down the dock and you have the railing and your wife on one side, and you felt this love atmosphere.

And when I was saying to you at the beginning of our conversation, you know, I know I can do more to love people, but what about being loved?

I actually did think of this, I don’t know how else to call it, but this essential quality that always is there, that is love, that is our nature. And I thought, well, I just, you know, keep deepening in that. Keep deepening that. Keep knowing it. Spend more time in it. So what I wanna ask you is, I wanna know what it felt like, like help me be there with you in some way if you could.

If you could give language to it.

Frank Ostaseski: Yeah. Well, you are And thank you for helping us all to recognize that it’s an innate quality in us. You know, that it’s, um, it’s not, um. Just a byproduct. It’s one of our most essential qualities. And of course we can cultivate it. Of course we can do various practices that help us with that. We can choose to lean into it at other points in our life, but then it’s just reliable. And it, it felt as if every cell in my body was filled with this. And uh, I suspect now was just a natural reaction to fear that I’ve have cultivated over time that when I’ve been afraid, um, that quality is something I turn toward. The quality of love is something I turn toward and it’s stable. It’s really stable. When I came home from the hospital after these strokes, the, uh, the caregivers, the professionals were very worried that I lived on a boat ’cause I just had a stroke and, you know, they thought for sure I would fall. And so I was very careful when I came home and I, um, would stand at the top of the stairs to go down to my bedroom and, uh, they were daunting. Uh, if I fell, I knew I would only hurt myself, but I would hurt a lot of other people, and particularly my son, who I loved beyond words. And so I’d stand at the top of the stairs and I would imagine my son at the bottom of the stairs, and I would think about how much I love him and how much it would hurt him if I fell. And that love Tami was so strong and stabilizing, more stable than the handrail taking me down the stairs. Um, it was so real. It wasn’t just an imagined experience, it was a stable, stable quality in me that could enable me to meet this very practical of walking down a flight of stairs. You know, we can do this. We can do this not only for ourselves, we can do this for one another. Sometimes we get lost and we can’t find our love, this love that we’re speaking of here. We just get lost. And then it’s really helpful. If there’s someone like you are doing for me, remind me of it. And sometimes that’s all that’s required. It’s just a reminder, know, you’re asking me to tell the story, but also, you’re also, uh, helping me see that this lives in me. So thank you for that.

Tami Simon: And I think part of the reason I wanted to go into it is that I think the more we can show it, the more I’ve been shown it by people. It’s a, it’s a type of, and I’m gonna use a, you know, technical Tibetan Buddhist term. And I don’t mean this in a technical way, just in an everyday way. It’s a type of pointing out of something that’s always present that we’re ignoring.

And so I, I want to receive that pointing out. As much as I can now, Frank, something, you know, I realize as we’re talking, I kind of went very quickly. Okay. There are four big fears. The first is pain. Well, okay, we’re gonna take a bunch of medicine. That’s gonna be fine. And I realized that I skipped over that kind of quickly, that someone might be listening and thinking to themselves, wait, wait, wait.

Hold on. The pain is my big, the physical pain of dying is the biggest fear I have. Before you, Tami, get into all your existential questions and stuff, let’s not skip over the physical pain of dying. And what is Frank’s view as someone who has been at the bedside of so many people, about upping the medication to the point where I’m not in pain anymore?

Is that okay? Or have I become like stupid and dying and that’s not okay.

Frank Ostaseski: I don’t know. I, I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s so helpful to leave people so merciful to help leave people in unrelenting pain. I mean, I, you know, I joke that we used to have, you know, morphine by the 50 gallon drums. It’s in hospice. You know, I, I think it’s really essential, the concern that those people who are in the spiritual world, let’s call it have, is that, oh, you’ll, will become unconscious, or I will become, you know, unable to stay present in some way. I don’t know that I agree with that. I think, and we can probably manage about 90% of people’s physical pain. and, um, sometimes people will get confused. No question about it. You know, Joan Halifax was with, um, his Holiness, she asked him this very same question you just asked me. And, uh, he, she said, what should we do in this situation? And, and his holiness paused for a moment. And then he had a really good answer. He said, mercy, it was a beautiful response, A simple one word answer, mercy. Mercy. And then he went on to speak about there’s a level of mindstream that’s not affected by this, and that we can access as well. But for the general, per the general public, let’s call it the folks, think to manage people’s pain is a merciful act. I, I, I, my experience has been even when people are, um. Affected by the side effects of that medication. It’s still easily, it’s very possible to meet them and it’s still very possible to communicate with them. So I, I’m for using, um, managing people’s symptoms and controlling their pain.

Tami Simon: Okay, I want to keep going down this mercy track for a moment and then we’re gonna get back. Don’t worry to fear number three, and my surprise, fear number four, which is one of the questions I’ve heard. Uh. From some of my spiritual practitioner friends has to do with taking our own life if we’re in an extraordinary amount of pain and suffering, and are we cutting short some type of evolutionary process, growth process that would happen if we, if we didn’t do that?

And the debate around that. And so I’ve, I’ve, I’ve known several people and I’m sure, uh, many of us have, who have decided that some version of taking their own life medically assisted help and dying was the way to go. And then people around them second guessing it. And I’m wondering what your view is of that.

Frank Ostaseski: Yeah. Well first of all, there’s a lot of ways to die and physician assisted death or medical aid in dying. This is just another way to die. You know, I, I, I’m a little allergic to the idea of a good death, to be honest with you, that that term worries me because, you know, it’s hard enough to die. It’s really hard work to die.

It’s the hardest work we may ever do. And, you know, someone else imposing their agenda on how we should do that. It feels, doesn’t feel merciful. It feels, it just makes things harder. Yeah. So I, I mean, I remember being with a very well-known Zen teacher and he was in a lot of pain and all his students around him were like, no, we can’t give him pain medication.

I said, please give him pain medication. He did. He relaxed and then he was able to work with other symptoms that he had. Um, no, I don’t think it cuts anything short. I think it’s a merciful act and people may make that choice often. I think what happens now and what happens in a time of dying may be very different for us. You know, we like having choice now. We like having agency, so I’m glad that medical aid and dying exists. It takes away people’s fear. It gives them some sense of agency or control Now. But what happens in the dying process might be very different. We are reconstituted by the dying process, and, um, I don’t, I don’t wanna impose any, any agenda on someone else’s dying. I,

Tami Simon: Can you tell me what you mean? We’re reconstituted in the dying process.

Frank Ostaseski: all of the ways we’ve defined ourself, Tami, you know, I’m a Buddhist teacher, you know, you are hosting this conversation. All the, all the various roles that we’ve carried in our life. They’re either gracefully given up in the dying process or they are stripped away in the dying process. And our, when our sense of identity is stripped away, our sense of small self, let’s call it, is stripped away. For the mo average person, it’s terrifying. I don’t know who I am, you know. And you know, those, those famous five stages that Elizabeth had, you know, Kubler Ross had, you know, about grief that got onto the dying process. And the last of which was acceptance, if you remember. And hospice workers can sometimes be overzealous about getting people to acceptance. I don’t think acceptance is a final stage. I think it’s the beginning. Uh, it’s still a choice. It’s still me making the choice to accept. I think as this that I just described occurs, there can be a kind of chaos. And this chaos, um, off often gives way to something infinitely deeper than acceptance, which is surrender. And personally, I’m not so sure we can choose to surrender. I think lots of things can contribute to it. Religious practice, conviction, faith, et cetera. Um. But I think also exhaustion can, and, and that’s what I’ve seen more than anything, is people just can’t keep up the fight anymore. And it happens who are dying and it happens to people who are doing long meditation retreats. It just surrender happens and then that opens the door to something far deeper. Um, kind of possibility for transformation. You know, when we let go of something, there’s this feeling of that we’re distancing ourself from something.

We’re putting something down, right? That’s a choice. Surrenders feels different. It doesn’t feel that way to me. It doesn’t feel like I’m distancing myself. It feels like I’m actually coming closer to something, something that I fundamentally know. And it feels more like expansion than. Distancing myself from anything, and I’ve watched this with regular people who had no spiritual practice, no so-called inner life, you know, but the dying process has, there are conditions in the dying process that helped them to discover that that helped them to see that there were more than the small, separate self they’ve taken themselves to be. And that was phenomenal to see I saw it, not just once in a while. I regularly saw it in people.

Tami Simon: And, and Frank, this is the third of the big fears that you say most of us have, that all my identities will either be stripped away or gracefully given up.

And, you know, this I think is actually something that a lot of us can relate to as, uh, a kind of metaphoric practice or we get a practice session in our life.

We get a practice session in our life. If there’s some big identity shift like a divorce or uh, life defining loss of some. And, you know, I went through something like this recently and so when you say, uh, not a divorce, but a, a, a life defining loss for me. And what I noticed is as much as people around me were like, be a spiritual practitioner and just let go, I was just like, f you leave me alone.

I’m in a process and I need to go through this process that it involves honoring and acknowledging a lot of what I’m letting go of, and it’s just not gonna be that simple. But at a certain point, and I do think it was a kind of exhaustion point, or just like my face had been in the dust of the ground for so long that I just finally heaved and said, okay, okay.

Like, okay. Reality’s bigger than me. I’m gonna go with this and I would love to hear from you and your own experience if you would be willing to share or if you would rather a story of someone that you’ve worked with, that surrender moment.

Frank Ostaseski: Well, first of all, I, I just wanna compliment you on the way in which you responded to people who wanted you to be the spiritual practitioner in the midst of your loss. Yeah, I, I,

Tami Simon: They thought I was difficult and, and perhaps not as evolved as I, as I had, you know, whatever they thought I was. But I didn’t care. I knew it was my integrity. So.

Frank Ostaseski: Yeah. Good for you. And you know, this happens a lot, right? We will, we have these maps about how we’re supposed to go through these experiences and we overlay them onto the direct experience. And I think we do harm to people when we do that. I think we do them great harm, you know, so I really you for staying with what was real for you. Yeah. So, yeah, there’s a story. I mean, there’s always a story in my life. You know, I, got,

Tami Simon: I wanna hear it. Tell me a story, Frank.

Frank Ostaseski: alright, so one of the places where Zen Hospice serves is at a big hospital called Laguna Honda Hospital. It’s a long-term care facility. It’s got 1100 beds. It’s when you’re poor and you don’t have any insurance.

It’s where you wind up in San Francisco and it has, it’s an old style hospital with these big wards that were 30 people to ward bed after bed after bed, like a gauntlet of beds. And one day I’m walking through down this gauntlet of beds, going to a meeting, and there’s this guy and I, I just, he gets my attention and I stop. I don’t go to my meeting. I go and sit next to him and he’s an older African American man, and he’s struggling, you know, I think he’s actively dying. He’s sweating, he’s breathing with great difficulty. He’s, know, he’s confused. He’s all over the place. And I, you know, I, I sat down next to him and I said, Hey, you look like you’re working really hard. And then he, he pointed toward the sky with his finger and he said, I just gotta get there. And I said, okay. Okay. Can I come along if I, if I promise to keep up,

Tami Simon: Okay.

Frank Ostaseski: this is how I, this is how I work with people. And he, he, he nodded his head and he grabbed my hand and I said, I forgot my glasses. I can’t see very far into the distance.

Can you see? And he described a, a kind of. Rising to a kind of plateau, you know? um, so we walked up this hill to this plateau. He was huffing and puffing. It was hard. And we clearly had reached this, this top of this hill. And I said, can you see there further into the distance? And he said, yeah. And he described for me this building, which was a one room red schoolhouse. Yeah. Right. He probably went to school in a, in a, he came out of Mississippi. He probably went to a schoolhouse like this when he was a kid. So I said, you wanna go? Yeah. And we walk up to this schoolhouse. I said, I said, there’s the door. You wanna go in? Yeah. I said, can I go with you? No. I said, okay. Then you go. And, um, he went up the three steps to the schoolhouse. He described to me, he went in the door and then he died. Then he died. I think this was a moment where he was understanding something. I mean, not understanding something. He was just going to his idea something that was familiar and real, that was transformative for him, that involved new learning for him. I mean, we could make up all kinds of things about it afterwards, but he just found home. And I think that’s what happens. This in the surrender and this transformation. know, it’s not so much that we have some big spiritual opening, it’s that we come home, we come home to ourselves, you know, to really to ourselves, to the fundamental self you were speaking of earlier when we were talking about love. That’s as, that’s as much as that’s as, that’s as a truth. That’s a way. In which surrender can occur. It’s a way I’ve witnessed it occur, and that might happen, you know, in the final weeks of life or the final days of life, or the final moments of life like it did for him. And we might say too late and I would agree, feels too late. You know, let’s not wait until that moment to, to discover what’s meaningful to us.

Tami Simon: Which is my next question, which is, you know, this whole notion of practicing dying. Uh, dying as a spiritual practice, we can do this in our life. So at the moment of our death, it’s easier for us to surrender. We’ve, we’ve to well-worn pathway. What would you suggest? Like how do we have our integrity when we’re fighting a situation?

But hey, wait, this is the time. Practice dying.

Frank Ostaseski: Yeah. Well, as you well know, in, in the Buddhist tradition, there is an importance about the moment of death. You know, it’s considered great moment. It has conditions that are conducive to our awakening. And I was in a retreat with a well-known Buddhist teacher who, you know, and, uh, he was sharing this with the Retreatants and I, I went up to him afterwards, I said, you know, I love you and I have a deep respect for you, but please stop telling people that. And he was like, what? But it says it in the Suttas. I said, yeah, I know. But it just leaves people feeling guilty when they don’t get to do it when their mother was on morphine and she wasn’t able to be clear in that moment. You know, just let people die the way they die, you know, and let’s not sit in judgment of it. So how do we do that in our day-to-day life? I’m just, I’m

Tami Simon: Yes.

Frank Ostaseski: pragmatist, you know? Here’s what I do. Watch endings, watch the way in which you meet endings, you know? Yes. The ending of the breath, the ending of the excel. All those things we learn in practice, but also the end of a meal or the end of a conversation, or the way you leave a, conference. you know, how do you meet endings? know, where did you learn to meet them that way? Are you satisfied with meeting endings in that way? Do you wanna change it in any way? You know, um, I think that helps us. We wanna know what happens, how we meet the moment of dying. It has a lot to do with our habits of the way in which we meet endings.

You know? You know, do we think, do you say goodbye to the, you know, people you were just in this conference with? You know, when I was at the hospice, I made a point of going around and saying goodbye to everybody in the hospice before I went home for the night, because I didn’t know if I’d see them in the morning. So I watch endings.

Tami Simon: That’s a really terrific instruction. You know, I’m a reminded of a conference that I was at recently, and when it came time to end, I just felt so overwhelmed and I was there with my partner and I, and she was like, wow, you, you, you’re, hello, are you there? She’s like, let’s go over and sit over here by ourselves so that you can kind of collect yourself.

And we didn’t say goodbye to most of the people who were there, but yet I didn’t feel I also was present enough to do that. So I can see how watching endings. Is very helpful and instructive. I am curious, besides the example you gave of saying goodbye to everybody in the hospice when you left, what have you learned about how you want to handle the everyday endings in your life?

How are you doing it? Now

Frank Ostaseski: first of all, I would, I might reflect back to you that you took extraordinary care of yourself. And that’s how you met the ending of this. You took extraordinary care of yourself. And yes, maybe you didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to everybody, all those things that we might like to do, but you took care of yourself, and I applaud you for doing that. a beautiful lesson you learned about how to meet endings. So thank you for sharing that example with me. Um, you know, I teach in Italy a lot. You know, you would never think about a gathering in someone’s house without saying goodbye. Here. We ghost, ghost people all the time. You know, we’re ready to leave the party.

We leave, you know, we, we, we end relationships on post-Its for goodness sakes in our culture. So, how do I, how do I meet endings?

Tami Simon: What have you learned about that so that you’re more congruent within yourself around it or whatever you aspire to in relationship to endings?

Frank Ostaseski: You know, after I had one of those strokes, RDAs called me. He said, what’d you see? What’d you see? You know, anything? And I said, oh, it was total failure. It was total failure. I didn’t see anything, you know, he said, me too. When it happened for me, all I saw was the pipes as they were rolling me down the hole on the gurney.

I don’t imagine endless time. You know, I, uh, when we hold the truth of our ultimate ending, our, our dying, I’m not even sure that’s the ultimate ending, but when we hold the truth of dying in our hands, I think that we, you know, we let go a little more easily. I think we’re more kind to one another. I think when we recognize that this is our common ground, we can be, um, these things come forward.

We don’t take ourselves so seriously. We don’t hold onto our ideas with such a tight grasp. Yeah. And so this is what I notice, um, in my life that I don’t hold on quite so tightly anymore. Um. You know, we’re so driven by our expectations about how it should go and how things should turn out, and we’re outcome driven.

Yeah. And so, um, I’m more interested in the transitions. You know, I’m interested in not just when I get to that person’s house, but how I get to that person’s house. You, what’s the walk like or the drive like I, I, I’m more interested in transitions these days than I am in outcomes. So endings are all about that.

They’re all about not just that moment at the end of the our lives or at the end of the breath, but everything that gets us there.

Tami Simon: Mm-hmm. All right, so I have promised this quote unquote cliffhanger, which is a bit of a pun. Uh. Big fears around dying. Here’s the fourth one, I wanna bring forward the fear of non-existence, the big fat zero, but nothing, absolutely nothing. And it’s interesting, when you were describing your mini stroke experience after the loved, you used the word absence.

Frank Ostaseski: Yeah,

Tami Simon: I think for me, I’ve historically, I, I’ve, I’ve gone through a process and I could share just very briefly about it, about non-existence that I’ve, ’cause I’ve had to work this out ’cause that was my big fear.

Frank Ostaseski: yeah, yeah. You know, know than I probably Tami, and you know, when you look into anything closely enough, right? Put something under electron microscope. You look into any solid thing, you see a lot of space, you see a lot of emptiness, looking emptiness long enough, you see form coming out of it. So that’s, you know, basic Buddhist teaching, right?

But. This experience I described to you of looking over in this absence, what was interesting about it’s, it didn’t have any qualities. It didn’t have some loving quality, it didn’t have compassion, it wasn’t intelligence, it wasn’t strength. None of those essential qualities were present in that moment. It was just absent. And what I understood, least for myself was that’s, the ground from which everything emerges. And instead of it being frightening, it gave me great confidence actually that I could know this. Yeah. That I could know it.

Tami Simon: I’m, I’m just reflecting for myself on imagining that at the time of our dying, we’re gonna have the physical strength, the emotional stability, the mental clarity due to the work of a lifetime is an absurd gamble. And to wait for that moment is foolish. So I wanna know those other moments, and it’s not even, it may be that I do particular practices that engender them, but we have moments like this all the time. You know, it wasn’t just because of having a stroke. We have moments where we touch something real and essential that’s empty. Without form. And, uh, I think it’s important that we turn toward those moments and, and, uh, watch their impact on the rest of our lives. mind. That

Well, part of what you, uh, said that was powerful was that the experience that you had of being in this absence or as this absence, whatever words you want to use, gave you confidence, gave you a kind of confidence, and is it fair to say it gave you more, I’m gonna put words in your mouth now, but tell me if it’s not true.

More confidence in dying.

Frank Ostaseski: Yeah. And living and dying. You know, I, I shared this, these experiences that I shared with you with a teacher of mine. And I, I said, you know, suppose that was the moment of my dying. You know, I felt all this love. Then I felt this absence, and then there was this paranoia, you know? And, uh, I said, suppose that was the moment of my dying.

He said, and he said to me, that’d be okay. I said, what do you mean it would be okay? And he said, well, when you died, your brain would stop and the paranoia would go away and awareness would return. doesn’t surprise me that you had this love as you were walking down the dock. You’ve been cultivating it all your life. And then when you stopped, you could see you, you felt this absence is what he called absolute absence. Yeah. I hadn’t heard that term before, but I, I knew the experience. And so at, at first I thought, oh, this is a spiritual bypass. What’s he telling me? And then, but then I felt was right. I felt confidence. And yeah, I have more confidence, kind of faith we could say, um, not only in the dying process, but my life will prepare me for. You know,

Tami Simon: Frank. One thing I wanna pull out a little more about, because it’s a powerful statement and I’ve never heard anybody else say it when you said, I’m allergic at this point to the notion of quote unquote, a good death, because I think this notion of a good death is something that I’ve heard a lot in spiritual circles.

This is sort of the fruition of all this work we’re doing is a good death. And here’s Frank Ozeki, the one who has sat at the bedside of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, I don’t know how many hundreds of people, and trained hundreds of people to do so, who’s saying he’s allergic to the notion of a good death.

So I wanna make sure we’re clear about why that’s so.

Frank Ostaseski: well, what concerns me is the imposition of. I mean you, if you ask me what’s my great fear when dying, it’s that somebody will come and pose their ideas on my dying, you know, that they’ll have some idea about how I should do it, and they’ll start taking actions that will, you know, based on their belief. You know, one of the things that I think about is how do we deal with our own dying or the grief and loss of others? How do we move toward the light of absolute truth and still accept and honor our very human nature? And I don’t think it’s by suppressing our grief, for example, or, you know, by attempting some spiritual bypass around it or around our dying process. As you said earlier, your friends tell you to let go, you know? But you know, Steven Levine was a dear friend of mine and teacher for a while. He said, you know, there’s no letting go until there’s letting in. So I think a wiser, more compassionate approach is to trust the process of dying, to trust the process of grieving as a process that brings, or path we could say that brings us to a greater wholeness. You know, there’s a long description around the Buddhist death and know, there are venerable monks around and then there are sitting in great serenity, and then there is other monks who are rolling around on the ground and tearing their hair out. I, I always drawn to this particular image, and I would like to have been one of the monks who would be sitting in serenity, but I think more likely if someone I love died, would be one of the monks rolling around on the ground and tearing my hair out. I might be swept away by this this anguish. And in that story, you know, there are venerable monks who are, you know, telling them, telling the others that, you know, the blessed one told us that this is how it is, that everything that is born comes to death. But I don’t think I would’ve found it very helpful. Maybe like your friends, you know, it, it would’ve been more helpful to me if there was somebody sitting beside me who wasn’t trying to give me advice, who was just there, you know, and, and could listen or not impose something on me.

Tami Simon: Frank, first of all, I want to thank you for the trueness, the honesty of our conversation. I’ve heard you say that one thing that happens when you’re sitting at the bedside of people is it increases that quality of honesty in the space. Like, you know, no bullshit, no bullshit here. And as we conclude our conversation.

I wanna ask you, as you look at however many years you have left, is there anything in your heart that’s like, okay, this is what I wanna say, this is what matters most? No, it’s not like some bucket list and it’s not, you know, I’m not doing longevity practices or whatever. What is, what is it that is actually alive there for you at this point?

Frank Ostaseski: Oh, gosh, this may not sound deep or spiritual, but in a way I just wanna be a kind old uncle, you know, to people in this life. You know, I, I, I have, I have more, um, interest in my life in just allowing, just allowing people to be just as they are and allowing myself to be just as we are. Um, this is the heart of my practice these days.

My dharma practice and my going through life practice. Learn to allow things to be just as they are, know, without running in the other direction from them or trying to change everything around. You know, I’m scared of dying, Tami. I get scared of those, these things that we’ve been talking about. Of course I do, but it’s not, the fear isn’t the only thing in the room. So I, I wanna practice with what else, what, what else is in the room here besides that fear? In addition to that fear And how can I, how can that enable me to be with these things that we’ve been talking about that scare the hell out of us? You know, whenever we can give space to, can move, can change? And so these days, I, I spend a lot of, of my time working with that. How can I be kind? How can I allow there to be some degree of space with whatever contraction is happening for me in that moment? I don’t know what the hell happens when we die. You know, some people claim they do. I, maybe they do. I don’t know. I got enough that I’m facing here in this life, you know? And, um, so. These days, that’s what interests me. You know, the, the two wings, as the Buddha talked about, the wings of wisdom and compassion. That’s a more extraordinary way to talk about it. But all I know is that my efforts to cultivate wisdom without compassion, it gets kind of cold and heady. And my idea is to cultivate without any wisdom. Well, they get a little mushy and sentimental. So I want those two dimensions of my life as much as possible to inter interweave with each other, you know? And, um, I’m not so interested in transcendence anymore. I’m interested in being here, right now. And, um, hopefully that’s what will influence my in the process of dying. But if it doesn’t, it’s okay.

Tami Simon: Frank Ozeki, author of The Five Invitations, discovering What Death Can Teach Us about Living fully. You have been a kind and wise old uncle, older brother to me right here in this conversation. Uh, I feel so connected and seen and uplifted by you and the warm heart that you’ve brought. Thank you so, so, so, so much and many, many blessings.

Frank Ostaseski: Thank you for the conversation, a real conversation.

Tami Simon: Thanks friends. Thanks for being with us.