Shedding Anything Other Than the Sacred

Tami Simon: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guest is Stephen Levine. Stephen is a poet and a meditation teacher who has worked counseling the dying and their loved ones for the past 40 years. He’s the author of the bestselling books Who Dies? and A Year to Live. With Sounds True, Stephen has turned his groundbreaking work from A Year to Live into an audio learning program. Sounds True has also published other audio titles with Stephen Levine, including In the Heart Lies the Deathless, The Grief Process, and a program recorded along with his wife, Andrea, To Love and Be Loved.

In this episode, Stephen and I spoke about the power of softening to our suffering, and living mindfully as a preparation for death. Stephen also introduced us to the practice of soft belly. Here’s my conversation with Stephen Levine.

Stephen, when I first started Sounds True back in 1985, you were one of the first authors that I worked with! Some of your first recordings were some of the first recordings to come through Sounds True. I’m wondering what it’s like for you now—it’s 25 years since Sounds True began, and I think it’s been over a decade since you’ve no longer been teaching publicly, been on the circuit, out there shaking it at workshops and conference centers. What it’s like for you to be in this different phase of your life, one might say semi-obscurity, in the mountains of New Mexico? What’s that been like for you?

Stephen Levine: Obscurity—this is a good thing! [Laughs] It allows us some quiet. It allows us to practice what we’ve been preaching for 40 years. Also, it suits aging very well, because aging is a shedding time, and an opening time at the same time, and so it’s kind of what has organically happened in our work. For so many years, we sat bedside, or we were doing in-services in hospitals or universities, and there’s a lot of energy going out. It’s nice to be quiet. It’s nice to live—there’s nothing like the forest to bring you to your senses, as it were.

TS: Now, you said something interesting, that it’s given you a chance to really live what you have been teaching for 40 years. What are the key ideas when you say that? What are the key teachings that you’re exploring directly in your life now?

SL: Surrender. I think all spiritual work is, at one level or another, or at many progressive levels, a matter of shedding, a matter of kind of getting reborn, letting go. Really, the letting go—the process that happens in meditation when the mind slides away from the awareness of the breath and goes out in its fairy-tale thinking—instead of that letting go, we’re doing more and more the letting go of what is not whole, what is not clear minded, what is not compassionate.

Of course, this letting go itself has to be done with so much compassion, because as soon as we see that letting go is the appropriate measure or move, we tend then to have judgment come in. So awareness, very clear awareness of what is happening, while it’s happening, what the sensations are, watching what’s going on within—it’s the same as any meditation or any practice. Now we’re sitting bedside with ourselves, so to speak.

TS: Hmm. Well, I want to talk more about that, but I want to just be clear. When you say “shedding,” that you’re in that phase of life, what specifically are you shedding?

SL: Well, we’re shedding, as you said, a lot of attention from traveling so much and having such large groups, but I think really the shedding is the shedding of anything other than the sacred. That’s a mouthful. That’s quite—that borders on being hyperbolic, but I think the whole process of spirituality is the letting go of what we have acquired, to find out what we have been all along.

TS: That’s beautiful.

SL: It’s really looking for the heart of the matter. Of course, it’s much easier for us in a way. I have to say that, because it’s so easy for people to say, “Well, I’ll just jump in and do what they’re doing!” Absolutely! But when you have a partner like I have, and like Andrea has (as Andrea would say), it makes it easier, because you know somebody can say, “You’re sliding! You’re a little too far off the mark! The trail is over to the left. You went to pee in the bushes, and you just got lost somewhere!” [Laughs] That’s very, very helpful, to have somebody tap you on the shoulder and say, “Remember the dharma.”

TS: Yes, well, it does seem that your relationship with Andrea, that relationship has truly been—would you say it’s been your central path? Central to your path? How would you put it?

SL: Well, before I met her, relationship was not central to my path. When we met, relationship not only became central to our path, but we heard so many people in the course of the process of their letting go of their body, of them shedding their body and all of the relationships they have in their life, that it really brought our attention to the fact that the difficulty in relationship is also the grace of relationship, because it brings our relationship to where we’re holding.

When we say “holding,” we generally mean “holding back,” but there’s another kind of holding. There’s the kind of holding where we’re attached to the negative. We think that when people talk about being attached, they’re attached to their new car, or their new boyfriend, or their new carpet. We’re talking about attachment to our suffering. We’ve built a conditioned attachment to our suffering, so much so that when we define ourselves, suffering is part of it.

When we define ourselves, unfortunately—because we’re so unkind to ourselves, we’re so merciless—we forget that this grasping of the mind is just a given, and that mercy is called for. As mercy gets called forward, it makes you see what you aren’t. I mean, really learning loving-kindness comes from watching how unloving we are sometimes.

TS: Now, I love the way you use the word “mercy.” I think you’re someone who really introduced that, at least into my vocabulary. Why do you use that word? What does that mean to you?

SL: Actually, I looked for a word. “Compassion” is an excellent word. A little bit confusing in most people’s minds, because it’s not a word they were brought up with, perhaps, or a word that they learned early on, like before they were seven, before they were ten. I looked for a word in our, in the Western vocabulary, and the problem with all of the words is that they have a certain drawback, a certain cultural judgment, negativity. “Mercy” has that too, because so many people think like, “Have mercy on me, because I’ve done something wrong!” But when we talk about mercy, we’re talking about turning to one’s self with kindness and with care, and starting to treat one’s self like you’d treat another.

Most of us have learned to live, or have been encouraged to live, in a manner where we get love. We want to be loved, and we think that being loved is the highest point. But actually, loving is the highest point. When you love someone, even theoretically—and we’ve seen it actually, too—you can love someone that hates you!

A woman told us once—she was one of three daughters of a mother who was very coldhearted, so much so that the other two daughters refused to be with the mother while she way dying. They said, “I’m not going to sit in there and just be hassled for eight days or ten day or eight months or whatever it’s going to be! I’m not going to just sit there and have her abuse me! I’m not going to go!”

So the one daughter who had been practicing dharma for some time, practicing meditation, said, “I’ll go. I’ll do it.” And she sat with her mother, and it took a while for her to die. It was weeks, of course, naturally. And her mother, every time she would get really sick, would feel really poorly—dizzy, nauseous, all of the things that come along with medication and with the shedding of the body. And of course, because she was such an angry person, it was a difficult time for her. She wasn’t really shedding. Her mother was getting rope burns from holding on.

During this period, her mother just upbraided her in the most horrific manner, calling her names that you wouldn’t call your worst enemy. Just terrible! Saying what a terrible daughter she was, and how she should have been aborted! Just the kind of things that only would come to a mind that was full of hatred.

And this woman, who had been practicing dharma for a few years—this doesn’t come easy, this kind of response that she had—she just sat there and loved her mom. Just loved her, and loved her, and loved her. And her mom just screamed and yelled and pulled back from her touch. And her mom, who was full of hatred, died surrounded by love.

Now her mother probably got next to nothing from that, although you don’t know—she might have gotten quite an insight. But the woman who gave this love, the woman who experienced loving, not being loved—in fact, being unloved—but by being loving, she grew so much! She gained, and she became a person who people that were dying called for.

TS: Now, Stephen, you said something very interesting, which is that in our relationships, we can discover where we’re holding on in this relationship, that we see where we’re holding on, that we might actually be holding on to our suffering, that often people are. And then you said this is where we need to have mercy, and we then start talking about the word, “mercy,” with this beautiful example and the power of loving. But the question I have is: If we see in ourselves that we’re holding on to our suffering in some way, how do we really soften to that? I mean, you’re using some words to describe it, but the actual experience can be really hard.

SL: Well, you know, we work with all our patients, and with all our practitioners, and with all our—what you could call students, with a practice called soft belly. See, when we start to soften the musculature of the abdomen—even the people who are listening now, if you will notice that just trying to understand what’s being said, even in trying to appreciate, maybe even make a mental note of things, your belly tightens. Whenever we are reaching for something, whenever we’re grasping something, whenever wanting is strong, our fear—which is one of our greatest, our strongest wants, is fear—when that happens, our belly tightens. Our abdomen tightens.

But look what happens now—and I’m talking to the people listening)—if you just soften your belly! (Sighs) So much holding. I mean, we hold all day long. No wonder we’re so exhausted at the end of the day! Just let your belly go now. You may not even know what that means. It just shows how habituated we have become to our suffering. Just let go. Let go! It’s so painful!

How can we do this to ourselves? How long are we going to do this? If we saw someone in a restaurant treating the person they were with in the kind of language we call ourselves, and the kind of labels we use, we would be so disgusted, we wouldn’t be able to eat! But we forget; we forget that we’re a human being. We forget that Buddha said you could look the whole world over and never find anyone more deserving of love than yourself. That’s shocking to our system. We have become habituated to our suffering so profoundly.

Just soften the belly! (Sighs) Just let it go. Breathing in, let it go all the way down into the belly. Breathing out, just let it go. Breathing in . . . a kind of quiet, a kind of fullness of the spirit. And breathing out, just letting go of all of that mercilessness with ourselves.

How is it that we get so angry at the person we love most, or that we get so frightened of the person we love most? Why is it that we live standing on one foot? Soften the belly! Put the other foot down on the ground! Have mercy on yourself! Why live a life where only half of you is present? You know, we live our life as though it were a fever dream. We’re always hiding. We’re half present, and we’re half thinking; we’re half hoping, and we’re half fearing. We’re never whole! It’s all there for us to be whole. It’s not like wholeness is some hidden abstraction. It’s present right now; it’s just hidden under our fear, it’s just hidden under our self-doubt. It’s hidden behind the screen of the hard belly. In soft belly, there is exactly what we’re looking for: We’re looking for someone to love and to be loved by, and it’s right there, right there in the belly.

You know, if this were your child coming to you, if this were your sister coming to you, if this were your lover coming to you, and they said, “I’ve got a terrible problem: I can’t get into myself. As soon as I start to get into myself, I ricochet off. I keep getting lost in who I’m afraid I am. I never get to find out who I really am.” you would just put your arms around them, and you would let your deepest intuition—which is getting real close to your true self, when you’re in deep intuition—and you would let your deep intuition, you would say anything, no matter how crazy it sounded, even “Soften your belly. Maybe it’ll make you feel better”!

It sounds crazy, but when people soften their belly, people find out they’re getting along with their children better, and they find out that, when judgment comes up, they can note, “Oh, judgment. Judgment. Big surprise; same old thing. After everything I say, the shadow of judgment lurks just offstage.” It’s so debilitating. We’re so fatigued; we’re fatigued from all of this judgment. You know, Jesus said, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” but nobody told us that the judging mind doesn’t know the difference between ourselves and the person sitting next to us. So when we’re judging anyone, we’re actually judging ourselves. It just is getting boring!

TS: Now Stephen, I love this soft belly practice! It’s something that has made a really big impact on me from your work, from two decades ago, when I first heard you say it. I’m curious, how did this phrase “soft belly” first occur to you?

SL: [Laughs] To be perfectly truthful . . .

TS: Yes!

SL: I’m still hesitant to say this! There is another practice, a very, very excellent practice, but it talks about tightening the belly. It talks about tightening, holding the belly to keep concentration, to keep awake. We have a dentist that says, “OK now, this might hurt! Tighten your foot! Tighten your jaw!” The worst possible advice you could give anybody is to tighten in the middle of pain. That was very noticeable: the idea that this tightening the belly—tightening the hara, as it’s called in Zen—although that’s an excellent idea within its context, in a larger context it may not be as useful. In a larger context, it may be that we could be softening our belly moment to moment, day to day, and we would be astonished at what the level of being able to participate in our own life would be.

That’s what I found. As I started to soften the belly, I just noticed there was more room for the heart, more room for mercy, more room. Also, there is a trigger. In softening the belly, one of the things that people who are doing things like vipassana meditation, where they’re watching the breath, and if the breath goes away, they sail away into laundry lists, or what they want to do for their birthday party, or whatever it is, and then they come back to the breath. We have found that softening is a trigger for letting go, and that everything we’re talking about in this conversation really becomes more and more integrated, because that’s the thing! You can understand something, but not have integrated it, not have been able to make it a normal, effortless outpouring of your true nature. So we found out how powerful this softening is, that it is the key to letting go. When you’re caught anywhere, soften the belly, and you’ll find that you can come right back to wholeness, or you can approach wholeness.

I find softening the belly, besides being very functional for meditation and for relationship, it’s crucial for people who are in a tight, hard place, like people dying. When we were with people dying, we talked to them about softening: “Just soften. Just be with what it. This isn’t what you want, but this is what is. Just feel the love that is your life, that is your inborn being, that is your birthright.”

And when people start to treasure themselves a little bit, death is so much easier, because for most people, death is “I didn’t finish, I’m not done! I’m not done on a lot of levels, and I may not even be done on the level where I’m concerned that I’m leaving other people in pain!” I think that the softness is a gift; it’s a natural gift to us. It is inborn in the body; anyone can do it. In fact, it’s nonreligious. You could even say it’s not spiritual! Although it gives access to the spirit, to the nameless vastness of being that is our birthright, in a sense it still could be said not to be spiritual because it’s not separate from anything.

TS: Now interestingly, when you were introducing us to this soft belly practice, you said, “You may have one foot on the ground. Put your other foot on the ground.” What did you mean by that?

SL: That most people live— It’s the same thing as I was saying with “We live our half life. We live as though we’re in a fever dream.” Most people don’t have balance. In fact, if people start to do the walking meditation, where you’re just taking a walk, a step, and you’re feeling your foot lift, and you’re feeling your foot go forward, and you’re feeling your foot go back down on the ground, you’re noticing your mind say, “OK, now next step,” in the doing of that, there is a lot of letting go, and a profound sense of what is our internal gift, that this is so available to us.

You soften your belly even in the midst of dying, even in the midst of fear. It’s grace, and grace isn’t always present, but it always brings us closer to our true nature. I think, as we walk, we learn we’re lifting up a foot and we’re putting down a foot, and all of a sudden, you realize “I have never learned how to walk!” It’s just like when people are doing the breathing meditation, and they realize, “I never learned how to breathe; I don’t even know what my breath is. I think I own my breath, but what happens if I let go of my breath? What happens if I let my breath breathe itself? What happens if I let thoughts think themselves, feelings feel themselves, love just love for its own perfect grace in being?”

I think that these things, you putting the other foot down on the ground, means you’re stable. It has to do with wholeness. Now, I think an excellent meditation is to just stand. Just stand for let’s say 10 minutes, and watch how your energy shifts from foot to foot. We can’t be still even when we want to be still!

I remember being in a meditation hall. We’re in a meditation hall, and it’s like two in the morning. Most of us are sitting on benches. A few of us are sitting on zafus, on meditation cushions. It’s dead silent in the room. You’d think that everybody in that room was in some kind of extraordinary, both-foot-down samadhi. In the room, all of a sudden, there is a creak! These old benches that we’re sitting on, people have been sitting on for a long time, and they’re a little wobbly. You hear “Creak! Creak! Creak!” and then you hear “Crash! Oh, shit!” And the whole group breaks up in laughter, because that “Oh shit!” was the other foot coming down on the ground, and everybody was experiencing it!

It was an extraordinary moment, a moment that nobody in the room, I’m sure, has forgotten, because in that creaking, creaking, that was us all, at two o’clock in the morning, trying to get free of— Maybe it was something we learned when we were three months old, when we were pre-linguistic. Who knows? But we’re trying to shed, our bellies are getting softer, our hearts are getting more open, the room is less dark and more like black satin, it’s a perfect space for quietude. And then this thing comes up, and this thing is us! It’s the mind. It’s the one foot dangling in the air before it puts itself down. That’s as close as I can get to answering that question!

TS: Stephen, I want to talk to you about something that has been an ongoing question to me, and something I’ve talked to a lot of people about. So here you wrote the book, Who Dies? and you’ve sat at the bedsides of innumerable people through the dying process. And of course, we know a lot, I think, about the dying process and even people’s near-death experiences, but I want to know what you know about what actually happens when we die, after we die. What can we know about that?

SL: Well, my sense is, if you’re mindful now, you’ll be mindful then. And if you’re not mindful now, and you just think, “Well, maybe I’ll die on a lucky day,” that could happen! Once in a while we’ve seen people in terrible shape have excellent deaths—“excellent” meaning they were loving the people that they had been so angry at, and they were holding children they hadn’t touched in a long time, that kind of thing. But I wouldn’t count on luck in something like that. I think the more presence, the more we build presence, which means awareness, the more we’ll know where we are no matter what is happening and no matter where we are.

I think that the preparation for death is living mindfully. I mean, I can say what I think death is, and I can say why I think death is, but that’s me and that’s my hallucination. I have a very powerful sense of the preservation of that which took birth in the first place, and that death is perfectly safe. And that the more we don’t hold on, the more we trust mercy, the more we trust soft belly, the more we trust loving-kindness, we don’t need a schematic for death. Self-forgiveness is very powerful, but try practicing it now, not on your deathbed. Because the problem is, people read books like Who Dies? and they say, ‘That’s what I’m going to do on my deathbed.” But there’s a problem there, because on our deathbed, our concentration might be quite weak, for any number of reasons, from illness to the medications they give us that sometimes really weaken us, make us nauseous and dizzy and just crazy-minded, sometimes from exhaustion.

Really, the preparation for death is knowing what the blockages to the heart are. You and I were just talking about that, and how relationship can give you an insight into the blockages to the heart, just as it can give an insight into the qualities that open the heart, and even more important the qualities that maintain the heart.

What I know about death is that I don’t know nothin’, but I do trust it. You know, we can know things are true without understanding them. We could be wrong, but it seems to be that there is in death a chance for phenomenal insight into what it was that took birth in the first place. You know, we talk about the healing we took birth for, and I think that sometimes, dying can give us insight into the healing we took birth for.

I think one of the best practices to prepare not for death but for dying, is to work with your pain a little bit. When you stub your toe, what do we do in the middle of the night when we’re walking across the room, we’re going to the bathroom, and we stub our toe? What is our automatic, before we can get to our shield, the shield of mindfulness as some people use it, until it gets a little deeper—before we go to our shield, what do we do? We send hatred into our pain! We send hatred into our stubbed toe! That’s not what the stubbed toe needs.

You can watch this. This is really an object lesson. You can watch what happens. Send hatred into your toe. Send it, send it, send it, ah! Stop. Now soften. Soften that toe. Soften that judgment. Soften that sending. Just be. Just start to rest in being. Let the throbbing be. It’s just sensation. If you watch it closely, it’s just movement. If you watch it even closer, it’s just momentary micro-changes.

And I think that the more we see that even pain is workable— You work on your little pains! You don’t wait until you have a 500-pound pain. You work with a five-pound pain. You work with a ten-pound pain, and you start to soften around it. Again, softening.

There is almost no time I can think of when softening is inappropriate, but there are times when softening is not appropriate. If you’re being attacked, do not soften! Run! Do not think, “Oh, this is a perfect chance to be a saint.” No, this is a perfect chance to get out of there! Let the other person’s karma be their karma.

You know that story we used to tell about Sharon Salzberg? When Sharon was in India, and she and a friend were in town, and they were trying to get a train back to, I think they were going to Munindra’s at the time. And they were late, and they were on the other side of town, and they usually walked. They never took rickshaws, they didn’t like that, but this was a special situation and they had to take a rickshaw.

So this guy is taking them, and they said, “Get us to the train station, please! We’ll tip you extra! We’re sorry, but please, we need to go.” So the fella is taking a shortcut down a dark street that they would never have walked down. A drunken man comes stumbling out of a bar and jumps up on top of Sharon in the rickshaw. The fellow that Sharon was with had the presence of mind to put his hand and his foot out and push the guy out of the rickshaw, and tell the rickshaw driver, “Just keep going! Just keep going!”

They get back to Munindra, they get back to their teacher, and they ask him, “What should we have done when this fellow came up to us and he jumped up on the thing? We don’t want to be violent or anything. What should we have done?”

And Munindra said, “You know, when that fellow jumped up, you should have, with all the loving-kindness in your heart, you should have beat him over the head with your umbrella!” [Laughs] A perfect time not to have a soft belly!

But then afterward, much soft belly! Much sharing with other people, much laughter, and in one person’s experience, a communication to others. And when Munindra said that, Munindra was saying, “Be simple; don’t be a simpleton! If somebody attacks you, do not surrender! Get the hell out of there!”

Now, we’ve heard people say they’ve surrendered and it maybe saved their life. More often, though, it does not. My suggestion is: get the hell out of there. Do whatever you can to free yourself from an approaching danger. As you know, we’ve worked with a lot of women who have had very, very bad times because of being seen as sexual objects. We would say to any of them, “You know, you can do your forgiveness later on! You can be your Buddhist self later on, but get yourself out of there! If there’s any option to get yourself out of there, do it!”

TS: Mm-hmm. Well, I think that’s very clear, yes.

SL: We’re getting onto a little bit of a— This is my schtick! [Laughs] This is an issue for me, because as you know, in the work we’ve done, we’ve seen such suffering come down out of this terrible, terrible sexual confusion.

TS: Yes, and it sounds like you say, “This is a little bit of a schtick,” because you want to be clear to people that there’s a time to fight the good fight and get out, as well as a time to soften and forgive, and to know what time you’re in.

SL: Absolutely! And that same person, the same mind, just a different time and a different place. You can do all of your softening. I mean it’s like we shouldn’t— I don’t want to get into this, because this is a long, long subject, and as you know, we’ve done a lot of work with this, a lot of writing about this, but I would just say: have mercy on yourself. If you have mercy on yourself now, if you build the capacity to be kind to yourself now, to soften when something is hard now, that quality will be available to you at another moment. It may not be completely available to you—it may not be available to you at all—but it will be available to you eventually.

TS: Now Stephen, I want to circle back to the death question that I asked you, because it’s an obsession of mine, and also you have sat bedside with so many different people. I hear you say that you now know death is safe. What I’m curious about is, you said we can know things even if we don’t understand them fully. What has given you that knowing? Is it your experience sitting at the bedside and seeing the experience that people go through? Your own inner sense of knowing? What?

SL: Actually, meditation. When you go beyond what we call mind, you see something else. That something else you see is the deathless, and when you see the deathless, when you experience the deathless, when the deathless is no longer— Well, you have to be able to go through your fear of death in order to see the deathless, even though those moments may only be a second there and a second here, they accumulate. And one of the ways they accumulate is they accumulate in a trust in something you don’t even know fully. And I don’t mean faith; I mean trust because of direct experience.

The direct experience of the deathless is available to us as we build concentration, as we build a willingness to go beyond who we’ve been, and also as we come to a place where we no longer own our meditation, but that we just open to it, and we open further and further, we open past who we know we are. I’ve even seen people come out of meditation and say, “I’ve just got to sit for a moment to come back to who I was, to come back to who I am, because I’ve gone so far past it for a moment.” Not that it’s scary or anything. Of course it’s scary in the first confrontation with not being who you thought you were, but then there is this enormous release, this enormous release of all of the holding of a lifetime. And with that, with that feeling of the deathless, comes a feeling that death is not—a feeling that the deathless is something that is always with us, and that when we think from the deathless, those are the thoughts you might say we’re the most proud of. Those are the thoughts that most enable the heart its natural speech, its natural walk, its natural thoughts.

So what I know, I know from experiencing. Not to get into this too far, but there are experiences available to us where we actually see what happens at death, a second after death, what seems to happen for a little bit, and then what seems to happen after that. Now, it could easily be a hallucination, but I must say it’s a very consistent hallucination, and people all over the world have had it throughout time, so it may not be a hallucination. We may well just be tapping into who we are!

It sounds very specialized and all, but it isn’t. Once you start to meditate, once you start to feel other levels yourself, feeling “Oooh! Look at that!” And not only other levels of available gifts, but other levels of “Ooh! Did I miss the boat on that one! I didn’t even realize that that might have caused somebody difficulty.” And so you start cleaning up. So forgiveness comes in. What it is, is if we can die whole, if we can die heartfully, with forgiveness for the people in our lives, with mercy on ourselves for our own tomfoolery.

The thing is, let’s say it’s none of this. What difference does it make? Does it change the value of love one iota? No. Does it change the power of fear one iota? No. But when you start to bring those two together, fear and love, love being the highest form of awareness before you go past the individual awareness, the more you feel that, the less death is a threat.

Now I notice this—this is going back to how our conversation started—we notice this more as we get older. Part of our shedding is that, in the old days, Andrea and I might have said, “Oh, let’s get in the car and go to somewhere and do something, and we’ll stay there a week.” Not anymore! Andrea has leukemia, I’ve got neurological problems, so those things are not a given. But it’s very interesting to watch the thought arise of those things, stay for a minute, and then just disappear, because that isn’t what’s happening now. This is what’s happening now! And this is as good sightseeing as we’re ever going to see anywhere.

TS: Stephen, you mentioned Andrea’s leukemia and that you’ve been having neurological challenges of some kind, and I know you both have suffered quite a number of physical illnesses and challenges. I think I was on LevineTalks.com, your new website—which I’d like to talk to you about in just a bit—when I saw this quote, “Illness as an apprenticeship,” that you’ve been living your lives with illness as an apprenticeship. I was wondering if you could explain what you mean by that. How is illness an apprenticeship?

SL: How is illness an apprenticeship? Well, it confronts us with everything that life has to offer: expectation, hope—hope being generally based on fear. The apprenticeship to life is really you see everything that life has to offer. You see expectation. Expectation is probably the state of mind that gave us birth in the first place. If you are interested in or investigate reincarnative ideas, it’s desire, it’s intention that causes us to grasp, to hold, to embrace, or even to push away, and therefore to take birth in another body. Because some bodies we may take birth in are bodies we did not find attractive, lives that we did not find attractive, but teachings that something in our heart calls out for.

You know, life is an apprenticeship for who we really can be. When we meet somebody who becomes actualized, so to speak, it is instantly recognizable. Instantly recognizable! I remember somebody who came up to me and said, “Oh! You’re just so enlightened! You’re just so wise!” or whatever it was. Rick Fields, an old friend, was standing next to me. The guy walked away, and Rick said, “Well, it’s good you’re here. This way, they can find out what the real thing would be!” [Laughs]

And that’s it. We mistake a lot of people who are just interesting to be more enlightened than they are. I think that we also, we forget that enlightenment is right in us. Enlightenment is a momentary experience of who we really are, and this thing about forever enlightenment? Don’t be cruel to yourself like that! Have mercy on yourself! Lightening, just “lightenment,” as we talk about it.

I think one of the things we learn from illness is how soft belly and how lightenment can open a space. It’s as if you went into a room, and there was a blazing fire in the middle of the room. Now you can’t put out that fire. That fire is—we’ll call it fear, or we’ll call it pain, or we’ll call it death, and you can’t get close to it, because it just is there. It’s burning. It’s got its own fuel. It’s just burning. But you can step back from it. Let it have its own nature. You can step back from it and back from it, until you can get a comfortable relationship with the heat, that heat being the fear of death. That heat being the pain. But you can find a space that might be quite a ways away at first, and you take one step at a time closer to the heat, and you’re able to start using that heat to warm yourself. You start using that heat to recognize the field of sensation. You start using that heat to recognize all of the things you’ve been ducking, all of the things you’ve been fearful of. And it’s an apprenticeship in the sense that you’re learning to become a whole human being by watching yourself a piece at a time.

TS: Mm-hmm. Now I mentioned that I saw this quote, “Illness as an apprenticeship” at a new site, LevineTalks.com. This is a new, subscription-oriented site where you and Andrea are giving new video teachings on a regular basis, each month. I’m curious what the motivation is for you to be doing this LevineTalks.com.

SL: Well, I haven’t traveled—we haven’t traveled—in 10 years! I just noticed at a certain point that my energy was flagging, and it’s way too important, the work we did. If I had been just teaching meditation, and I could have just been bringing people back to things and answering meditation questions, that’s one thing. That would have been good. But when you’re working with people who are in very tricky situations—dying, confronting sexual abuse—if my concentration was flagging, if my energy was flagging, I felt that I wasn’t giving all that I could give. A single missed word could cause such difficulty for someone! So I stopped teaching.

The writing and the Internet site allow us to teach without leaving home, and that’s very nice, because traveling isn’t good for us physically, really. This has been really nice. This has been very interesting. Young friends of ours—I mean young friends of ours, in their twenties—approached us and said, “Can we do this? Will you let us make a site for you?” We had never considered doing it. He said, “Let me do LevineTalks!” And we said, “Sure!”

I’ve given him unpublished manuscripts that are going to start filtering their way in. There’s also now a column where Andrea’s answering people’s questions, some of them very difficult, because now on the site, we’re talking about illness, we’re talking about death, we’re talking about healing, we’re talking about relationship, we’re talking about cultivating various states of mind: mercy, loving-kindness, clarity—clarity, particularly, trying to give practices and encourage energies for one to free one’s self up some. It’s very nice to do it that way.

At a certain point, I noticed we would be walking into the room, and there would be say 700 people there. It would be really lovely to walk in and to work with them, but then it got to be like we were walking into hell! There was so much pain in that room! The pain of dying was very little next to the pain that people were experiencing in their lives from other people’s inconsiderate action. And that is an understatement that universes could pass through! So it wasn’t for me, and it wasn’t for Andrea, what it was once. It was like a descent into people’s burning hearts. And people were also coming up and saying, a woman who was an authority on the subject said, “Do you know that you guys are suffering from secondary post-traumatic stress syndrome from working with all of these sexually abused people?”

And I said, “No. I hadn’t noticed that.”

She said, “Well, you should look at it.”

Other therapists have come up to us and said that, too, so we thought, “It’s time to take care of ourselves.”

TS: Yes.

SL: And it’s very hard to stop! It’s very hard not to be the person we’ve built ourselves up to be. People rely on us, and it’s quite a shedding to trust that what you’ve left will be enough, and that people will get what they need.

TS: Now, Stephen, I just have one final question for you.

SL: Yes.

TS: You said that one of the most common experiences when people are on their deathbed, the reason that they’re afraid of dying, is because of some sense of unfinished business, some feeling, “I’m not done! I don’t want to die! I’m not done yet!” I’m curious—in the beginning of our conversation, you said that you’re sitting at your own bedside, in a certain sense, being in this final phase of your life. Do you feel done? Do you feel that you’re carrying unfinished business with you, or not?

SL: Absolutely! Absolutely I carry unfinished business with me! I think we all have unfinished business, and sometimes you can just say, “Oh, I’ve got to tell this person I’m sorry! I should have been more skillful!” And you’ll see them 20 years later, and you’ll say, “You know, when that happened? I’m sorry . . .”

And they’ll say, “Are you kidding? That thing moved me ahead eight squares!” You never know what’s happening in somebody else’s heart when you say something to them, or how they work through something.

I think that all of us should remember that of course we’ve got that. Have mercy! Big surprise: we’ve got unfinished business. Big surprise: forgiveness works. You want to test whether you have unfinished business or not? Do the forgiveness meditation. See what comes up to block it. When you turn toward yourself and say, “I forgive you for everything you have ever done in word, in thought, in speech, in intention. I forgive you,” and you’re talking to yourself and you say, “I forgive me,” you watch what comes up to block that. All the stuff that says, “Oh, no! That’s self-indulgent!” “Oh, no! You’re too nasty for that!” “Oh, no, you’ve got too much unfinished business for that!”

How merciless are we going to be? All of the teaching, all of the teaching of Jesus, all of the teaching of Mohammed, of Sarada Devi, of Mary: That’s all right in us! All you have to do is look at the mind. Look how it pulls back when someone is calling for you to move forward. Just watch how unloving we are, and you will see the cause of our taking birth and the reason that this unfinished business is not a tragedy. It’s just what is there. It just is, and everyone has unfinished business. Everyone! I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t in grief. Everyone is in grief! Everyone has unfinished business, and as I’ve said, they may be even incorrect in what they think that the unfinished business’s effect was. Nonetheless, we hold, they hold, I and you hold, something that feels unfinished. All I can say to that is for us to get a little bit more of a sense of humor about how unfinished we are, how confused we are. Of course we’re like that. Big surprise! That’s all I can really say.

TS: That’s very good!

SL: Big surprise: we have unfinished business! Have mercy on yourself.

TS: Wonderful, Stephen. Wonderful to talk with you after so many years!

Stephen Levine has been the author of many audio programs with Sounds True, including To Love and Be Loved, an audio program about the depths and challenges of relationship; A Year to Live, which is an audio of Stephen’s bestselling book A Year to Live; a program called In the Heart Lies the Deathless; as well as a program on The Grief Process. Stephen also has a new subscription website that features monthly video talks, questions and answers. It’s all available at LevineTalks.com.

SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.

>
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap