…embracing the healing that I took birth for
Excellent interview with Stephen Levine
What prompted you to live as if you had one year to live, imagining that you would die at the end of the year?
Stephen Levine: I was fifty-eight-years-old when I began the year long experiment. When the Dalai Lama was fifty-eight-years-old, a reporter asked him what he was going to do next with his life. He answered that he was going to prepare for death. The interviewer inquired about his health, and the Dalai Lama replied that he wasn’t sick, but that his body was impermanent. When I heard about that conversation, I thought that preparing for death was the natural thing to do.
How did the one-year-to-live experiment impact your life?
The year-to-live offered extraordinary insights into the places where I had been numb, and into the still small voice within, which became more pronounced. But the most profound influence was an increase in courage. When you have one year left, fear makes you too small. You better live that life that you’re going to be so unhappy to think you are leaving. In twenty years of being with people dying, my wife Andrea and I have seen miraculous things happen. Relationships untouched for twenty-five years blossom into something you wonder how that person could have lived without. What happens when we find out we only have one year to live? When we know we can’t be hurt anymore, that we might die, we feel safe. Why should knowing that we are going to die make us feel safe? It makes us feel unsafe too, but there is this place inside of us that feels safe, that allows us to see what holds back from life, yet says it hates to lose life. How much life we trade off. We trade off more life after we are born than we do after we die.
MORE: http://www.personaltransformation.com/Levine.html
http://www.awakentheheart.org/yeartolive
http://www.tricycle.com/insights/living-life-you-wish-live-0
Selected quotes from A YEAR TO LIVE (by Stephen Levine)
http://kaykeys.net/spirit/love/gratitude.html
A Year to Live Practice Blog (NYC Village Zendo)
http://lastyeartolive.wordpress.com/about/
praktis isanghamahal 
Posted on June 13, 2010
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