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Like Fred, those who are very ill and their loved ones frequently begin the journey toward death with an egoic hope for a miracle—for example, a full recovery from their cancer or the return of all their physical and mental capacities. What we are calling hope in these circumstances is really just an expression of our fear. We do not generate reliable solutions in this state because they emerge from our confusion.

Hope is an innate human quality that can positively contribute to a sense of wellness. Tossing hope away doesn’t seem helpful. Maybe we need to rework our understanding and application of hope.

I have found that with compassionate support, this hope can shift. It stops being about managing the symptoms we did not choose and cannot avoid, and instead turns toward discovering the value in living fully given our current conditions. Often it transforms into what I have come to call mature hope, a hope that takes us inside ourselves and toward finding the good in the experience.

Mature hope requires both a clear intention and a simultaneous letting go. This hope is not dependent upon outcome. In fact, hope is tied to uncertainty because we never know what is going to happen next. The hope is in the potential for our awakened response, not in things turning out a particular way. It is an orientation of the heart, 

grounded in value and trust in our basic human goodness, not in what we might achieve. That fundamental trust guides our actions and allows us to cooperate with others and to persevere, without attachment to a specific result. In illness, mature hope helps us come to a place of wholeness, even if a cure is unavailable.

When we relax our single-minded vision of the future—the idea that “this is the only way for things to happen”—we are no longer trapped by our conventional view of hope. We leave room for surprise. As Fred found, with flexibility and kindness, we can re-imagine hope even in a situation that appears hopeless. The energizing quality of mature hope helps us to remain open to the possibility that while life may not turn out the way we first thought, opportunities we never imagined may also arise."

 

Stories of people meeting impossible conditions with grace uplift us and inspire hope in the basic goodness and altruism of human beings.

Most of us choose comfort over truth. But when you think about it, we don’t grow and transform in our comfort zones. We grow when we realize we are no longer able to control all the conditions of our lives, and are therefore challenged to change ourselves. When we release our clinging to what used to be and our craving for what we

think should be, we are free to embrace the truth of what is in this moment.

Mature hope embraces the truth that no matter what we do or don’t do, things will change. Change is constant and inevitable. Hope for an unchanging world quickly becomes discouragement. Instead, we need to trust in ourselves and each other, in right action and perseverance without despair."

In our culture, we like to nurture a story of what it means to have a “good death.” We treasure the romantic hope that when people pass away, everything will be tied up neatly. All problems will have been resolved, and they will be utterly at peace.

But this fantasy is rarely the reality. The “good death” is a myth. Dying is messy. People who are dying often leave skid marks, dragging their heels as they go. Some people turn away from others and never look back. For many, the habits of a lifetime go unquestioned, and they fight fearfully to keep those habits in place. For others, their fight is like a badge of honor; they want to go down swinging. Very few people walk toward the immense challenge of dying and find peace and beauty there. But who are we to say how another should die?

In my experience, the romantic expectation of a good death places an immense and unnecessary burden on the dying. We may view it as a failure when people don’t go calmly into the night. “Oh, my mother didn’t see tunnels of light. She died terrified. It was an awful death,” I once heard a man complain. Many people feel like failures simply for dying in the first place because our culture is so steeped in the language of “fighting until the end.” Why should we further weigh the dying person down by judging 

how they go? As Crystal discovered, allowing our loved ones to have the experiences they need as they die is tremendously freeing for them and for us.

When I sit at the bedsides of people who are dying, my primary goal is to keep my heart open. I feel that I have a responsibility to support them wherever they are in their journey. I point to their internal resources. I try to illuminate capacities that they already have but may not recognize. Sometimes, people are able to see kindness in my eyes. This reflects back to them their own kindness, and suddenly, they are able to see themselves in a new way."

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There was enormous suffering in that room. Ruth was in shock. She was living her worst nightmare. It was gut-wrenching that Emily’s last words were so harsh.

It is difficult to keep our hearts open in that kind of hell. Yet when we do, we may see beyond the immediate anguish and become aware of another possibility. Emily 

was finally able to tell her mother what was true, what she had been afraid to say all her life. It was horrible, but it was real. Truth-telling seems necessary for a future based on healing and mature hope.

Was Emily’s a “bad death”? Many people would say so. I’ve stopped judging. One person’s “good death” is another’s worst nightmare. Some want death to come suddenly, while others hope they will die slowly. Some people hope to be surrounded by loving family members, while some fear the interference of well-meaning others.

In the months after Emily’s death, I worked with Ruth to support her through her grief. It was a tough road. Yet taking responsibility for her past actions and facing the seemingly impossible truth of Emily’s hatred proved essential in her finding self-forgiveness. It was critical in healing the wounds and reconciling herself to her long-troubled relationship with her daughter that she not hope for a different past. Knowing that she could not alter conditions, that she could not change what had happened at Emily’s deathbed or go back and be a different sort of mother, Ruth was able, eventually, to accept what was so and make peace with it."

 

 

In death and in life, should we “hope for the best” or “expect the worst”? What if instead, we cultivated a non-judgmental attention and commitment to being with the truth of whatever is present? Suppose rather than choosing sides, we developed the mental clarity, emotional stability, and embodied presence to not be swept away by the cycle of ups and downs, of hopes and fears? Balanced equanimity gives rise to a resilience that is fluid and not fixed, trusting, adaptable, and responsive. Perhaps we might accept our past, ourselves, others, and the continu

ally changing conditions of our lives “as is”—neither good nor bad, but workable.

It’s helpful here to take refuge in impermanence. Not in the expectation that things will turn out as we hope or fear, but in the fact that things will change whether we want them to or not."

 

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This is where the energy of hope has a place—not as a wish to be fulfilled or a plan to be formulated and executed, but in how we meet the ever-changing moment. The present moment includes all time; it is the all-inclusive now. The present moment could best be described as the flow of life. We are continually being shaped by it, and we are shaping it through the way we meet and respond to it.

Don’t wait is an encouragement to step fully into life. Don’t miss this moment waiting for the next one to arrive. Don’t wait to act on what is most important. Don’t get stuck in the hope for a better past or future; be present."

Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.

—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

 

"Forgiveness shakes loose the calcification that accumulates around our hearts. Then love can flow more freely. "

 

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Loving and letting go are inseparable. You can’t love and cling at the same time. Too often we mistake attachment for love.

In Buddhism, loving kindness, or metta, is considered a sublime state of being. A heavenly realm. It’s expansive, allowing, caring, and connective. Attachment masquerades as love. It looks and smells like love, but it’s a cheap imitation. You can feel how attachment grasps and is driven by need and fear. Love is selfless; attachment is self-centered. Love is freeing; attachment is possessive. When we love, we relax, we don’t hold on so tightly, and we naturally let go more easily.

Blaze understood something about letting go. In forgiving Travis, it wasn’t that Blaze had forgotten what had happened to her. Nor was she condoning anything her brother had done. Basically, she was saying to him, “Look, if you want to carry this pain around for the rest of your life, be my guest. But I’m done.” Approaching death, she had reached a point where she wanted to release herself from all the resentment and angst that had been her companions for decades. The past didn’t define her anymore. She didn’t want to die full of argument. She wanted to be free, full of love, and she understood that the only way she could do that was to forgive her brother completely. No questions asked.

Two days later, Blaze died."

Forgiveness is critical for two reasons. It heals us by allowing us to set down old pain, and it helps open us to love.

In order to be free, we have to forgive. When I speak of freedom in this context, I don’t mean some sort of ultimate enlightenment, but something far more practical and immediate: freedom from the indictments, recriminations, and judgments that cause us so much suffering. Holding on to our pain is, quite simply, not in our best interests.

The refusal to forgive is a way we resist life. We can be very loyal to our suffering. Yet when we cling tightly to our past, we hold on to not just the memories, but also the tension and the emotional states that go along with them. Resisting forgiveness is like grasping a hot coal and saying, “I’m not going to let go until you apologize and pay for what you’ve done to me.” In our effort to punish, we are the ones who get burned.

Forgiveness allows us to let go of pain not by sugarcoating it with positive thoughts, but by allowing our experience to come forward so that we can touch our pain with mercy. We don’t have to let old hurts continue to define who we are in the here and now. We can let the past dissolve. We can leave it behind. We can say good-bye to old wounds. By forgiving, we can release ourselves from suffering that has been confining us ever since the event took place.

In forgiving, we get to know our pain more intimately. This is what Travis did when he told me the story of his past. For the first time in his life, Travis took that old hurt out of his back pocket, dusted it off, and gave it a closer look. Only then was he able to receive Blaze’s forgiveness.

Forgiveness has the power to overcome what divides us. It can melt the armor of fear and resentment around our hearts that keeps us separate from others, from ourselves, and from life itself. I once asked a young woman with cancer who had been abandoned by her family and had to live on the streets if she thought forgiveness took courage. “Yes,” she said, “but for me it was a way to find out if I was capable of loving again.” Forgiveness releases our hearts from the rubble of anger and other negative feelings, and clears the way to love."

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I would say that 99 percent of the people I have worked with benefited from the practice of forgiveness, and they each came to it in their own way. Often, it is a long, difficult process. Usually, people are waylaid by the circumstances surrounding the wound, their relationship to the perpetrator, a lack of motivation, or simply the passage of time.

We all agree that forgiveness has many benefits. Why, then, do we resist it?

Forgiveness is a fierce practice. It takes real strength, a willingness to be with what is difficult. It asks us to face our demons. It requires absolute honesty. We must be willing to see things as they are, bearing witness to painful 

acts that happened to us or the harm we may have done to others. Sometimes we need to rage. Sometimes we need to grapple with our guilt. Sometimes we need to fall into a deep sorrow. Forgiveness isn’t about squelching any of these emotions. It is about facing them with kindness, paying close attention to what is getting in the way of our letting go.

In my experience, people typically arrive at a place of forgiveness when they realize, “I don’t want this to interfere with my capacity to love. I don’t want this to be a legacy that I leave behind or with my children.” We forgive because there is no point in waiting to unburden ourselves, no point in wasting time by holding ourselves back with old resentments. We forgive because we don’t want to reach the end of our lives filled with sighs and regret. We forgive not because it is “bad” not to, but because holding on to our pain hurts too much and keeps us from loving fully."

"Sometimes, I would find myself clinging to my resentment and bitterness. The illusion would arise that the world someday would confirm my self-righteous point of view. But I also knew that that day would likely never come—the colonel would never pay a price for letting the Mayan boy die.

It is common for people to willingly carry around resentment. Some people would rather die than forgive. Every part of us might scream, “No! I don’t want to forgive!” At the same time, many of us can’t even remember what happened to cause us such fury in the first place. What we do remember, what we hold on to, it turns out, is not the story or even the hurt so much as the resentment we have built up as a result."

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Many insist that there must be remorse, an apology by the perpetrator, justice, or even punishment before there can be forgiveness. This is a subject of much debate. The problem with this strategy is that in some cases, we may need to wait a long time for justice to arrive, if indeed it ever comes. In my mind, forgiveness isn’t about justice—unless we speak of restorative justice, which aims at fairness and the healing of relationships. Forgiveness is about the release of the contraction of bitterness in our hearts and a rediscovery of inner peace.

Outrage can indeed fuel change, but wanton anger is an act of ego, a knee-jerk reaction and a cheap substitute for true strength. When we access the strength hidden in our anger, we have the capacity to take dynamic action and the resolve to stand powerfully against injustice when needed."

 

"Our identification with old pain can feed an absence of forgiveness. After carrying pain for so long, we wonder, who would we be without it? Our resentment, our self-righteousness, seeing ourselves only as casualties—these feelings, in spite of being a burden, become familiar. We know, This is how it feels. This is who I am. We would rather stay with what is known than unburden ourselves of the negativity. This urge to cling to our sense of having been wronged in the past can last a lifetime."

We can’t depend on other people taking those courageous steps toward vulnerability and love. Sometimes they don’t want to. Sometimes it is too late, and they already are gone from our lives for good. Fortunately, forgiveness only takes one person: you. It is a beneficial practice for letting go of your own pain. We can forgive someone without ever having a conversation with her. She can be dead, and still it isn’t too late to forgive her.

Forgiveness does not ask us to welcome people back into our lives. We can still say to our abuser, “No, I don’t ever want to see you again.” But forgiveness empowers us to let ourselves off the hook: “I don’t need to continue to carry all this tightness, rage, anger, and pain within me.”

 

Forgiveness asks us to move closer to our suffering, and, in so doing, discover a larger, more compassionate part of ourselves that can touch our wounds with kindness and understanding. Gradually, we shift away from being someone who is only afraid of pain to becoming one who is capable of embracing it. As such, the practice of forgiveness opens the mind to the natural compassion of the heart.

In the process, we not only liberate ourselves from that particular moment in time when we suffered our wounds, but we also begin to recognize ourselves as something more than our pain. We free ourselves to be more of who we really are. Unconfined. Able to grow and re-imagine ourselves. Paradoxically, we become more of who we are, more than ever before.

"'Finally, I saw that my lack of forgiveness was acting as a defense against my feelings of failure. I was scared that if I forgave the colonel, I would be abandoning this boy again. But in reality, I had fought that battle—and I had lost. Buried far, far underneath the rage, like an ancient barnacle-crusted ship lost at sea, I found the hidden treasure, the crux of the issue: I had to forgive myself. I blamed the colonel for the boy’s death, but I felt that I had failed the child, as well. This self-loathing was getting in the way of my letting go. I had to accept that I was human and had done all that I could. Circumstances were beyond my control."

 

"It took another year for me to forgive myself for wanting to kill the colonel.

Perpetrator and victim live within each of us. If I could forgive the colonel for his ignorance, then surely I could forgive myself. Over time, this practice led me to the understanding that forgiveness is always for our own benefit. We might extend our forgiveness to others or ask for forgiveness from them, but primarily it is an act of self-interest, not about changing the other person. When we forgive, we give ourselves the medicine that is most helpful, touching ourselves with radical self-acceptance.

Forgiveness is not an intellectual exercise. We must fully engage the heart until it is felt in our bones. Working our way through hatred teaches us to love more deeply."

 

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And that had happened in no small part because Travis had been ready to receive his sister’s forgiveness. In telling his story in the courtyard of the Zen Center, in sharing every painful detail, he had finally found the courage to meet with mercy what he had been hiding from for most of his life. Without a doubt, Blaze’s act of forgiveness had been very generous, and it had set her free before her death. But Travis’s true healing had come from his ability to forgive himself.

All forgiveness is self-forgiveness. It is a remarkable form of self-acceptance that allows us to release unbelievable pain. It’s about realizing that as long as you hold on to 

the hot coal of your anger, resentment, and sense of having been wronged, you are only hurting yourself. Unless you release that burden, you will carry it with you for the rest of your life. You will never be free.

Don’t wait. Don’t wait until you find yourself on your deathbed to begin the process of forgiving those who have hurt you or those you have wronged. Allow the fragile nature of life to show you what’s most important … then take action. It hurts too much to keep others or ourselves out of our hearts."

"Now Lorenzo could relate more skillfully to his illness and imminent death. He could hold it and, in some sense, befriend it. No longer a victim of his condition, or shut down to it, he was free to experience and embrace his life directly, immediately, and fully.

Welcome everything, push away nothing is first and foremost an invitation to openness. In the Buddhist way of thinking, openness is one of the key characteristics of an awake and curious mind. It does not determine reality, it discovers it. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the charismatic Tibetan Buddhist teacher, spoke of the heart of Buddhist practice as that of “complete openness.” He described this openness as “a willingness to look into whatever arises, to work with it, and to relate to it as part of the overall process … It is a larger way of thinking, a greater way of viewing things, as opposed to being petty, finicky.”

Openness doesn’t reject or get attached to a particular experience or view. It is a spacious, undefended, non-biased allowing. A total acceptance. Openness is the nature of awareness itself, and that nature allows experience to unfold.

This openness welcomes paradox and contradiction. It permits whatever emerges to emerge. Openness means keeping our minds and hearts available to new information, experiences, and opportunities for growth. It means having tolerance for the unknown. It means welcoming the bad times and the good times as equally valid experiences."

 

"Welcome everything, push away nothing is the opposite of rejecting. Denial breeds ignorance and fear. I cannot be free if I am rejecting any part of my experience. The rejected experience will keep showing up like a bad penny. It will come back again and again, finding new ways to express itself. Until I know it and see through it, it always will be the bane of my existence. It always will be a cause of my suffering. We must let go of our opposition to the experiences we are trying to avoid, whatever they may be—thoughts, feelings, and events included.

"Suffering will only be removed by wisdom, not by drenching it in sunshine or attempting to bury it in a dark basement."

"In Buddhism, the old Pali word for suffering is dukkha, which is sometimes translated as “anguish” or more simply 

as “unsatisfactoriness” or even “stress.” Dukkha arises from ignorance, from not understanding that everything is impermanent, unreliable, and ungraspable—and wanting it to be otherwise. We wish to claim our possessions, our relationships, and even our identities as unchanging, but we can’t. All are constantly transforming and slipping right through our fingers.

We think we need the conditions of our lives to reliably give us what we want. We want to construct an ideal future or nostalgically relive a perfect past. We mistakenly believe this will make us happy. But we all can see that even those people who realize extraordinary conditions in life still suffer. Even if we are rich, beautiful, smart, in perfect health, and blessed with wonderful families and friendships, in time these will break down, be destroyed, and change … or we will simply lose interest. On some level, we know this is the case, yet we can’t seem to stop grasping for those “perfect” conditions."

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My reaction to pain, even to the thought of pain, changes everything. It can increase or decrease my suffering. I have always liked the formula:

Pain + Resistance = Suffering

If we attempt to push away our pain, whether it is physical or emotional, we almost always find ourselves suffering even more. When we open to suffering, inquiring into it instead of trying to deny it, we see how we might make use of it in our lives."

'Helping can be egotistically or altruistically motivated. The social psychologist Dr. Daniel Batson identified two distinct emotions that motivate people to help others. The first is what he called “empathetic concern,” which he proposed could be considered altruistic in that it focuses on the other person. It is the tenderness and care that are evoked in us when we see another person suffering.

He called the second motivation “personal distress” and posited that this could be considered egoistic in that it is self-focused. Here, the motivation to help comes from the desire for personal gain, like improved self-esteem, or because we are trying to avoid the pain of guilt, self-criticism, or other unpleasant feelings. It is the opposite of empathy in that instead of fostering connection, it can lead to self-protection, withdrawal, or doing more, whether or not the extra interventions are wanted or have any real value."

It’s not uncommon in health care for physicians to fend off their own feelings of fear, futility, or helplessness by prescribing a treatment program, drug, or procedure that is unnecessary, ineffective, or unwanted.

The attachment to the role of helper goes deep for most of us. If we’re not careful, if we become wedded to this role, it will imprison us and those we serve. Because let’s face it: if I am going to be a helper, then somebody has to be helpless.

 

The staff tried to manage their anxiety through well-constructed professional scripts and coping strategies that were meant to create a buffer, keeping my suffering at arm’s length. It rarely worked. Their anxiety simply got passed on to me.

I don’t heal because my problems are being solved. I heal by reconnecting with what I feel I lost in the fear and contraction. I heal by connecting to my innate capacity to heal. This is felt as loving self-acceptance, a quality of openness to my condition that is expanded and strengthened through the dynamic companionship of compassion. It breeds courage and allows us to go toward and learn from the suffering. When we reflect this intrinsic wholeness in others, we can be a portal to a larger possibility. As caregivers, as friends, our work is to be portals, not just problem solvers.

 

Sit with another person without a solution to their problem, without playing a role. No analyzing, no fixing, no meddling, no mending. Listen generously, as if the other person has all of the resources that they need inside of them. Just respect and receive what is being offered. It’s not even important that you understand. Imagine your listening presence is enough, exactly what is needed. Often a receptive silence heals more than all the well-meaning words."

I nodded. “It’s true, the critic can offer praise. And that tone is far stickier because we like it; we crave approval. However, not all praise is equal. We should question the critic’s motives. Upon closer examination, we find that we only receive praise for gaining a narrow set of outcomes or displaying the few qualities approved of by the critic.”

 

"Looking closer we see that the mechanism of the critic is pretty simple and unsophisticated; after all, it was formed when we were children."

 

"People often imagine that the negative, grating voice in their heads is helping them. But it’s not. The critic doesn’t believe in our basic human goodness. It only believes in rules and moral codes. "

 

 

"Just then, I recalled the statue of Manjushri, an iconic, archetypical form of Buddha that is often found in Zen meditation halls. He wields a sword in his right hand. It is known as the sword of discriminating wisdom. The sword is said to be able to cut through ignorance and the entanglements of deluded views.

In that moment, I realized that wisdom was true power. Within the hatred I was experiencing, there was a flavor, a fragrance of that wisdom, but it had been distorted. When I could see more clearly, I understood that my hatred was only impersonating power; it was a counterfeit version of power.

With the emerging wisdom, I saw that while my anger at the rejection had seemed to be only outwardly focused, it had been eating at me inwardly for years in the form of obsessive self-hatred. I had this inner narrative going about what I should have done years ago. My critic had been on my back for over two decades, wanting me to change what had happened or to get over it, to stop being such a baby. It became clear how my drive toward self-improvement, as with so many other people on the spiritual path, had a religious zeal to it. I never left myself alone. I was constantly comparing myself to others. I was never good enough.

I thought of the American Buddhist nun and bestselling author Pema Chödrön, who wrote, “The problem is that the desire to change yourself is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.” That doesn’t mean that we ought to condone wrongdoing, abandon plans and goals, or resign ourselves to being stuck in our old stories. It means that we should do our best to hold our imperfections with kindness. We can bring self-acceptance forward,befriend ourselves, and get curious about the twists in our innate qualities rather than trying to beat them into submission."

 

When someone we love dies, we keep on losing that person over and over again, especially at holidays, in times of difficult decisions, and in those little personal moments we long to share.

During this period, we realize most clearly the roles that the other person has played in our lives, and we grieve the loss of those also. We don’t just lose a wife when she dies. If she was the person who worked out all the battles with our kids, or earned the money, or touched our bodies with love and tenderness, we lose all those things, as well. One man told me that his wife did the banking and that every time he went to make a deposit he would cry. “Whenever I go there I feel like I lose her again,” he said. If our parents die, we may find ourselves feeling really fragile. They were the buffer standing between us and death, and suddenly, we become much more aware of our own mortality."

 

it is critical that we allow ourselves to feel the pain. Some say time heals. That is a danSome begin this process by writing letters to the person who has died, speaking what was left unsaid, or repeating whatever they feel needs to be said again. Others make scrapbooks or photo albums. Rituals can help. I usually recommend that people find some place in their house to create an altar. Place on that altar a photo and some special objects of the person who has died. Spend some time there each day. Talk to the person, tell them how you’re feeling, maybe spend some time in meditation or in prayer. Use this moment to extend your wish to the person who has passed that they may be free of suffering, that they may be touched by compassion."

For many years, I led an annual retreat for people living with HIV. On a certain night, we would gather round the

campfire and introduce ourselves to each other by relating the losses of our lives. For some, this was the loss of hope or the loss of faith. For others, it was the loss of identities. For many, it was the numbing, multiple deaths that they had experienced when their ten or twenty or thirty close friends had died of AIDS.

As we listened, we would bear witness to one another. And we would discover that it is possible to open to and even heal such devastating grief. We would find that our grief was workable.

It is not the pain that awakens us; it is our attention to the pain. Our willingness to experience and investigate our suffering gives rise to compassion and kindness. Consistent, loving attention melts our well-constructed defenses and unleashes old holdings. We begin to invite the pain into our hearts. The thoughts, the physical sensations, the emotional turmoil that we have so long rejected and had so little room for … they begin to be held in the comfort of our awareness.

Loosening is the period in which the knot of our grief is untied. It is a time of renewal. You can’t go back to life as it was before because you are a different person now, changed by your journey through grief. But you can begin to embrace life again, to feel alive again. The intensity of emotions has subsided somewhat. You can remember the loss without being caught up in a stranglehold of grief. You can move forward without abandoning the one you love.