Lean In to Love with Frank Ostaseski (Part 2)
Stephanie Domet: Hello and welcome to Real Mindful. This is where we speak mindfully about things that matter.
We meet here twice a month to introduce you to some of the teachers, thinkers, writers, researchers who are engaged in the mindfulness movement. You’ll hear all kinds of conversations here about the science of mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness, and the heart of mindfulness.
I’m Stephanie Domet. I’m the managing editor at Mindful Magazine and Mindful.org. And this is Real Mindful.
On this edition of Real Mindful, we pick up the thread of conversation between our founding editor, Barry Boyce, and his longtime friend and colleague Frank Ostaseski.
Frank is a well-known and much-loved teacher of meditation, mindfulness, and compassionate service. He is an author, a healer, and a great friend of Mindful Magazine. In July 2019, a serious stroke affected his brain’s capacity and in the months to come, he had four more strokes and many aspects of daily life became more difficult for him.
Frank found strength and refuge in love, compassion, and curiosity. He also found his practice very much alive through the whole experience and his ability to communicate the nuance of what we discover when our ability to welcome everything remains intact. And he shared some of that with Barry and with us.
So we pick up this remarkable conversation between old friends as Frank talks about the nature of our minds and how a useful comparison can be the ocean and its waves.
Frank Ostaseski: OK. So, in many schools, there’s a simple metaphor that’s given all the time. “Of the ocean and the wave. It’s often used to describe a sense of oneness that we have with other things or lack of separation. But another way to understand it is at the surface wind is creating wave. Wave isn’t innately different than the ocean, it’s still wet and salty, etc. But conditions are making it into a wave. There’s no inherent wave. It’s just the ocean taking that shape. But any scuba diver, which I was for a period of time when I loved it, will tell you that if you dove down deep, you’ll find calmness.
That is also true is that’s true of our minds. The surface of our minds and the conventional, ordinary mind, as we could call it—the ordinary, everyday mind—is constantly being windswept by conditions, past history, trauma, etc. However, there is a dimension of mind which is always calm. Always calm and will not abandon us. We can rely on it. It will not abandon us, and it doesn’t require being somebody special or being enlightened or any of these things. It simply is naturally there. It’s just that we’re so caught up, so preoccupied with what’s at the surface that we don’t recognize it. We don’t see it. Training is required in order to see it. Just as you were going to go become a scuba diver. It’s good that you take a few lessons before you dove down, you know, 40 or 50 meters down.
Barry Boyce: Well, I think ‘see’, it’s also perhaps Frank more than see; it’s to have a more total experience of that.
FO: Yeah, but what I’m trying to get at is it isn’t something special. It isn’t the domain of enlightened beings, it’s available to everybody. Just like anybody can learn to scuba dive. We can learn to do this.
BB: So, we all have that, and I appreciate that. That’s it’s innately there and available. To explore this imagery a little bit further, it seems at times we’re drawn to the notion that we could live down there at the bottom of the ocean and that we set up this kind of dichotomy that the surface is this problem that we need to escape from. But we need we always need to navigate the surface, right? Even though we have that depth available. Am I not making sense or…
FO: You are making sense; I’m just trying to find the way I would frame it.
I don’t know when, but maybe early in our life, we tend to bifurcate our personality. What we call the personality here—I’m not going to use any fancy psychological words—and this quality of what I would call, ‘deep mind.’ And when we choose, we wind splitting them apart and living in one; we live in the personality. That doesn’t mean the other is gone. That just means we forgot to access it. We don’t live in that territory enough, and we’re preoccupied with what’s at the surface, the wind is blowing on the surface of the water. So, no, they’re not different, actually. They’re not different. Everything comes out of that depth, including all the stuff that’s happening on the surface, all the drama.
A friend of mine showed me a cartoon the other day. And the first panel is a person carrying a lot of bags on their back and they said childhood trauma, relationship issues, work stress, covid. And then they come to a curb at the side of the sidewalk and on the curb, it’s written life’s minor inconveniences. And then the next panel is this person weeping into a puddle, having encountered one of life’s minor inconveniences because we’re carrying all that stuff with us. And then we encounter something, and we think, oh, the damn curb, you know, but we’ve actually been carrying along all along. So that’s why I say understanding is necessary. It’s not just transcendent. We have to understand something about our psychology, our emotional life, etc., so that we aren’t only looking through those lenses.
BB: Well, I think that’s very clear. I’d like to come back to baggage a little bit later on, but I want to touch on something that you talked to me about not long after your first stroke when we had probably lunch together.
FO: Yeah, usually we eat
BB: And it was about sequencing. That this kind of basic function of, “OK, the socks are here, and the shirt is there,” say a little bit of that. That is that must have been very disorienting and practically quite challenging.
FO: Well, honestly, I feel fortunate that the impact that the strokes had on me weren’t more severe. I wasn’t paralyzed; for example, I had no physical paralysis, just balance issues. So, again, the part of my brain that was damaged time, space, direction, and sequencing. So, when we would say, “Let’s go to the supermarket,” and on the way we’ll stop for a coffee and maybe on