Last month, I attended the second annual End Well Symposium in San Francisco–a multidisciplinary event focused on reframing end-of-life care and conversations through the lens of design, health care, language, spirit, community activism, and policy. I caught up with founder Shoshana Ungerleider just before the conference to explore these themes and the long-term outlook of how to live well through…
When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer at age 34, I was fortunate to be surrounded by many loving friends and family who were ready to support me in whatever ways I needed. Apparently, I didn’t think I needed much. I was already a student of Buddhism and a yogi with a very healthy self-care routine. I was also…
Frank Ostaseski and Roshi Joan Halifax, pioneers in the field of contemplative end-of-life care, who have trained thousands of healthcare clinicians and caregivers, recently led a retreat at the Institute on the compassionate care of the dying. Being with those who are dying can be an intense, intimate, and deeply alive experience. It often challenges old patterns, reveals our deepest…
Along with the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (NYZCCC), the Garrison Institute is hosting the fourth biennial Contemplative Care Symposium on November 8-11, 2018. The heart of the symposium is exploring ways to transform the culture of care through contemplative practice, meeting illness, aging, and death with compassion and wisdom. In the above video, Frank Ostaseski delivers a…
When I recognize the need to serve someone who is suffering, I usually take an in-breath to get grounded and settle the body on the exhalation. Then I might ask myself as I encounter this person’s suffering, How can I keep an open mind and not jump to conclusions or actions? I also can ask, Why, really, do I want…
No one alive really understands death. But as one woman who was close to death once told me, “I see the exit signs much clearer than you do.” In a way, nothing can prepare you for death. Yet everything that you have done in your life, everything that has been done to you, and what you have learned from it…
Death is inevitable. And may arrive even sooner than we dread. A truth is revealed in the precariousness of the human condition, in the body’s vulnerability to infection, disease, and injury: mortality is not the result of fortune or a world gone awry, but a consequence of life itself. While it has been established that we are living in the safest…
A recent piece in The New York Times Magazine, “One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die,” featured the life and work of B.J. Miller, a hospice and palliative medicine physician. In the video above, Dr. Miller and Dr. Justin Burke explore the aesthetic dimension of end-of-life care at the 2014 Buddhist Contemplative Care Symposium, co-presented by the Garrison Institute…