Inviting Death

The cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project and pioneer behind the compassionate care movement shares an inspiring exploration of the lessons dying has to offer about living a fulfilling life. Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight, helping us to discover what matters most. Life and death are a package deal. They cannot be pulled apart and we cannot truly live unless we are aware of death. The Five Invitations is an exhilarating meditation on the meaning of life and how maintaining an ever-present consciousness of death can bring us closer to our truest selves. As a renowned teacher of compassionate caregiving and the cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project, Frank Ostaseski has sat on the precipice of death with more than a thousand people. In The Five Invitations, he distills the lessons gleaned over the course of his career, offering an evocative and stirring guide that points to a radical path to transformation. The Five Invitations: -Don’t Wait -Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing -Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience -Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things -Cultivate Don’t Know Mind These Five Invitations show us how to wake up fully to our lives. They can be understood as best practices for anyone coping with loss or navigating any sort of transition or crisis; they guide us toward appreciating life’s preciousness. Awareness of death can be a valuable companion on the road to living well, forging a rich and meaningful life, and letting go of regret. The Five Invitations is a powerful and inspiring exploration of the essential wisdom dying has to impart to all of us.

One of the foremost communities to have paid serious attention to death are the Jainas of India. Indeed, their preoccupation with it has been so intense that without understanding their philosophy of death, it is almost impossible to make out their notion of life. While commending death, however, they caution against throwing away life in a cavalier manner. They emphatically oppose suicide--a death-recourse prompted by emotion (raga) and violence (himsa)--and condemn it as a spiritual crime, a cowardly act resorted to by the immature and the ignorant. Jainism recognizes forty-eight types of deaths, grouped under three major heads called bala-marana (foolish death), pandita-marana (wise-death), and pandita-pandita-marana (the wisest of wise death). For them, sallekhana is an art of morti cation, which is completed without hurting the soul or harming the mind. The Jainas did not consider death a subject of intellectual exercise; they held it as a force that permeates the social, religious and philosophical sinews of life. The codifed rules of the art of inviting death, descriptive accounts of Puranic and historical personalities who embraced it, and an interesting body of epigraphical and archaeological remains, provide a rich corpus of information on those who voluntarily terminated their lives. Inviting Death presents this history spread over a millennium and half, on the Samadhibetta or the Sepulchral Hill at Sravana Belgola, the foremost of the Digambara Jaina centres in the world. "

For readers of Being Mortal and When Breath Becomes Air, the acclaimed founder of Death over Dinner offers a practical, inspiring guide to life's most difficult yet important conversation. Of the many critical conversations we will all have throughout our lifetime, few are as important as the ones discussing death—and not just the practical considerations, such as DNRs and wills, but what we fear, what we hope, and how we want to be remembered. Yet few of these conversations are actually happening. Inspired by his experience with his own father and countless stories from others who regret not having these conversations, Michael Hebb cofounded Death Over Dinner—an organization that encourages people to pull up a chair, break bread, and really talk about the one thing we all have in common. Death Over Dinner has been one of the most effective end-of-life awareness campaigns to date; in just three years, it has provided the framework and inspiration for more than a hundred thousand dinners focused on having these end-of-life conversations. As Arianna Huffington said, "We are such a fast-food culture, I love the idea of making the dinner last for hours. These are the conversations that will help us to evolve." Let's Talk About Death (over Dinner) offers keen practical advice on how to have these same conversations—not just at the dinner table, but anywhere. There's no one right way to talk about death, but Hebb shares time—and dinner—tested prompts to use as conversation starters, ranging from the spiritual to the practical, from analytical to downright funny and surprising. By transforming the most difficult conversations into an opportunity, they become celebratory and meaningful—ways that not only can change the way we die, but the way we live.

Pursuing Death widens the canvas of enquiry on the Jaina practices of voluntary termination of life, identified with terms such as Santāra, Sallekhanā, Samādhi, Sanyasana, Arādhanā, Bhaktapratyakhyana, Pañchapada, Prāyopagamana, Ingiņī, etc. This volume undertakes an in-depth study of both the philosophy and the practice of death, as revealed in a wide variety of texts written in Prakrit, Sanskrit, Kannada as well as a vast body of historical records, dated between the third century BCE and nineteenth century CE. The citation for the National Award of the Indian History Congress, conferred on this volume at the Fifty-fourth Annual Session (1993), states, 'Pursuing Death by Professor S. Settar presents the theory and practice of voluntary termination of life in historical perspective, it illumines the problems with the help of Jaina philosophical writings, historical archaeology, art history and socioeconomic history. The methodology is new and a whole new area has been opened up in Indian historical studies.'

When author Peddar Panga was young, his parents and grandparents shared animal stories with him. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, these entertaining fables always came with lessons illustrating the universal truths of life. Tales of the Mirrors gathers fifty such tales, rewritten with a modern audience in mind. Discover the dangers of living solely for your career in "The Royal Hyena Guard," where a hyena becomes so concerned with defending his pack's territory that he hurts those closest to him. Meet a raccoon carpenter on a campaign to cure work accidents-and a charismatic crab who fools a colony of ants. Similar in tone to Aesop's fables and the stories of Jean de La Fontaine, Panga's stories explore personal discipline, security, the pursuit of happiness, mastery of fear, and healing. Most of all, they celebrate the enduring power of love. Let Panga's tales sweep you away to a world where animals talk, feel, and act like humans. In doing so, they mirror the best and worst in ourselves, offering a chance to learn more about who we are and how we should act.

The Strange Death of Europe is the internationally bestselling account of a continent and a culture caught in the act of suicide, now updated with new material taking in developments since it was first published to huge acclaim. These include rapid changes in the dynamics of global politics, world leadership and terror attacks across Europe. Douglas Murray travels across Europe to examine first-hand how mass immigration, cultivated self-distrust and delusion have contributed to a continent in the grips of its own demise. From the shores of Lampedusa to migrant camps in Greece, from Cologne to London, he looks critically at the factors that have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their alteration as a society. Murray's "tremendous and shattering" book (The Times) addresses the disappointing failures of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel's U-turn on migration, the lack of repatriation and the Western fixation on guilt, uncovering the malaise at the very heart of the European culture. His conclusion is bleak, but the predictions not irrevocable. As Murray argues, this may be our last chance to change the outcome, before it's too late.

'Most people spend their whole lives asleep and then wake up a few days before they're about to die.' – Olivia Bareham, Sacred Crossings Death has a 100 per cent success rate. We can't escape its inevitability nor can we deny its existence. So, when someone close to us dies or we are confronted by our own mortality, why are we utterly unprepared? In Do Death, social activist Amanda Blainey seeks to transform our lives through our relationship with death. By inviting us to accept death as a natural part of life, she encourages us to think about what really matters – and live more consciously. With uplifting wisdom from leaders and visionaries, Do Death will: • Help us rediscover the power of human connection • Inspire us to think and talk about death more openly • Offer sage advice on how to navigate grief, and talk to children • Empower us to be better prepared, both practically and emotionally Death can be our greatest teacher. This book is a manual for living, at any stage in life.

In Inviting Happiness: Food Sharing in Post-Communist Mongolia Sandrine Ruhlmann offers a monograph on food practices of Mongolian families, which are linked to a conception of sharing food and obtaining happiness in relation with the good rebirth of the human soul.