Bring Your Whole Self

by Carol Russell
Adapted from a talk given at Tuesday night meditation on July 1, 2025

This talk is based on the third invitation in Frank Ostaseski’s book, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. This is the third talk in this exploration of the book in which I have been using each invitation as a stepping off point for an exploration of the Dhamma.

The invitation here is to bring your whole self to the experience of life. The author writes beautifully about how this applies to the processes of dying and death, whether yours or someone you love, and how it applies to grief. Most certainly, in light of the subtitle of the book, this invitation applies to bringing our whole self to each day of life, to each moment.  This is an encouragement to include the parts of ourselves that don’t look good, or reveal we don’t have it all together.

In a way you could think of the last talk I gave, Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing, as how we receive the circumstances of life, how we open to what is coming in. This talk is an exploration of what we bring to the circumstance arising in life. the invitation is to bring our whole selves to our experience.

Frank Ostaseski writes:
"…more than once I have found an undesirable aspect of myself, one about which I had previously felt ashamed and kept tucked away, to be the very quality that allowed me to meet another person’s suffering with compassion instead of fear or pity… It is not our expertise, but rather the wisdom gained from our own suffering, vulnerability, and healing that enables us to be of real assistance to others."

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