Learning to Love Endings

By drawing our attention to endings and our developed habits about the way we meet endings, we can learn how to step fully into our lives with appreciation and gratitude.

Hi, I’m Frank Ostaseski, and I’m very glad to be with you today. I want to draw our attention to endings: the end of a day, the end of a meal, the end of something precious and rare, the end of this sentence. 

How do you meet endings? I mean, most of us have some developed habits about the way in which we meet endings. Are you aware of your habits? Without any judgment or criticality, let’s just take a look to see what our relationship to endings are. Like when you go to a party, or you go to a conference: Do you have a tendency to leave emotionally or mentally before the conference is over or before the party’s over? Or maybe you’re the one in the parking lot waving goodbye to everybody as they depart. Or maybe you find some way of cocooning yourself, isolating in some way, pulling back into a kind of protective stance. Or perhaps you become ambivalent or indifferent about endings—maybe endings are very emotional for you. Maybe you get sad or scared. Let’s just take a look. 

Most of us have some developed habits about the way in which we meet…

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About the author

Frank Ostaseski

Frank Ostaseski is a meditation teacher who cofounded the Zen Hospice Project. In 2004, he went on to create the Metta Institute to provide innovative educational programs and professional training to foster compassionate, mindfulness-based care.