RESOURCES AND RECAP
Led by:
Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD, and Frank Ostaseski
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*Real-time captioning is provided for the Making-Visible webinar series.
At a time of intense anxiety and uncertainty, Making-Visible deeply bows to Roshi Joan Halifax and Frank Ostaseski for making the time to guide us through this very special webinar.
Many of us are struggling right now with our fears about what could happen to our loved ones or ourselves. During the last several weeks, we have been prevented from coming together to share our grief. Many of us have lost a loved one or fear that inevitability even more than usual. Even before the current situation, every one of us has experienced loss and we know we will not escape more losses in the future.
Do not miss this webinar. Our facilitators are two of the most renowned leaders in the fields of grief and loss and what is more exciting is that their wisdom and teaching stems from their own deep practice of the dharma and their experiences with dying people and their loved ones. This is not a teaching based on theory.
Roshi Joan was a dharma teacher in the Thich Nhat Hanh lineage before being ordained and in the Zen Peacemaker Order with Roshi Bernie Glassman. She is the author of Being With Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death, and many other great books. For many decades she has been both sitting at the bedsides of dying people and training our healthcare workers in compassionate ways to be with the dying.
She writes: The sorrow of all our human losses, great and small, anticipatory or contemporary, feeds into a river that runs beneath our lives. When that dark water breaks through the surface, at first we feel totally alone. We may truly believe, “No one but me has ever felt this kind of pain.” And that is half the truth, for grieving spreads across a landscape so vast and varied that we can only really discover it through our own intimate experience.
Frank Osteseski, the author of The Five Invitations: What Death can Teach us about Living Fully, writes beautifully about the process of dying. He writes (full article here):
How do we move toward the light of absolute truth and still accept our very human and relative nature? Certainly not by suppressing our grief. Nor by attempting a spiritual by-pass around the difficult and sometimes dark emotions that normally follow the great losses of our lives. We might wish to transcend grief by reaching for the truth of impermanence. “Just let go,” says our spiritual superego. But, there is no letting go until there is letting in. A wiser and more compassionate approach might be to trust the process of grief and to recognize it as a path to wholeness. Allowing the grief, allows us to pass through to non-grieving. Listening helps us to feel and move toward the suffering which is where the healing is almost always found.
In grief we access parts of ourselves that were somehow unavailable to us in the past. The journey through grief can lead us to a profound understanding that reaches beyond our individual loss. It can open us to the most essential truths of our lives: the truth of impermanence, the causes of suffering, and the illusion of separateness. With awareness we begin to appreciate that we are more than the grief. We are what the grief is moving through. In the end, we may still fear death, but we don’t fear living nearly as much. In surrendering to our grief, we have learned to give ourselves more fully to life.
Her books include: The Human Encounter with Death (with Stanislav Grof); The Fruitful Darkness, A Journey Through Buddhist Practice; Simplicity in the Complex: A Buddhist Life in America; Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Wisdom in the Presence of Death; and Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet which was released on May 1, 2018.
During our 90-minute session with Roshi Joan and Frank, we will have a guided meditation by Frank and listen to a talk by Roshi Joan. There will be plenty of time for Q&A about your own loss and grief.
More about Frank & Roshi:
Frank Ostaseski is an internationally respected Buddhist teacher and visionary cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project, and founder of the Metta Institute. Frank has trained countless healthcare clinicians and caregivers in mindful and compassionate approaches to end of life care. He has lectured in such diverse environments as Harvard Medical School, the Mayo Clinic, Google, and he teaches at major spiritual centers around the globe. Frank is the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Humanities Award from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. His groundbreaking work has been featured on the Bill Moyers PBS series On Our Own Terms, highlighted on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and honored by H.H. the Dalai Lama. He is the author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully.
Roshi Joan Halifax, Ph.D., is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and pioneer in the field of end-of-life care. She is Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in medical anthropology in 1973 and has lectured on the subject of death and dying at many academic institutions and medical centers around the world. She received a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Visual Anthropology, was an Honorary Research Fellow in Medical Ethnobotany at Harvard University, and was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress.
A Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order and founder of Prajna Mountain Buddhist Order, her work and practice for more than four decades has focused on engaged Buddhism.
We are looking forward to seeing you for this incredible opportunity to practice with Frank and Roshi.