"Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing..."

Looking for something this morning... I found it... a little bit of that life-death thing. Some kind of "in the bone" wisdom...

"The Five Invitations: Zen Hospice Project Co-Founder Frank Ostaseski on Love, Death and the Essential Habits of Mind for a Meaningful Life."

"In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.” There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen, a thin line that connects the two. We cannot be truly alive without maintaining an awareness of death. Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. She helps us to discover what matters most."

AND...

"In the horror of my own suffering, I always had held out the hope that one day someone would rescue me. I had imagined that I would be saved by love coming toward me. Just the opposite. I was rescued when love came through me."

The essential lessons:

Drawing on his work with the dying and on the healing of his own life, Ostaseski outlines the five central “invitations” — habits of mind, orientations of spirit — through which an untruculent acceptance of death can become a love-expanding, life-expanding force:


1. Don’t wait.

2. Welcome everything, push away nothing.

3. Bring your whole self to the experience.

4. Find a place of rest in the middle of things.

5. Cultivate don’t know mind.