Frank Ostaseski

Ostaseski co-founded the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco in 1987, in the middle of the AIDS epidemic, one of the first Buddhist hospices in the country, and has since sat with well over a thousand people while they died. The Five Invitations sets out what that work taught him, beginning with the instruction to welcome everything and push away nothing. He later started the Metta Institute to train clinicians in end-of-life care. He had a heart attack and a series of strokes while writing the book, and put that into it rather than leaving it out.