At The Heart Of Healing

An Interview With Stephen Levine

A new subscriber wrote recently to lament The Sun’s seeming focus on death and dying. He wanted to know whether, in future issues, future issues, he could expect some humor and a lighter touch.

I assured him I wasn’t against humor; I love it when we make people laugh. But I don’t shy away from challenging our readers, either — or from making them cry — with words that speak truthfully, sometimes painfully, to our innermost heart.

Death and dying is a subject most magazines avoid. To devote much of an issue to it, as we did recently, may seem excessive — evidence of some morbid preoccupation.  Yet isn’t the unconscious fear of death at the root of much of our suffering? Isn’t it odd that those willing to face death, to recognize and acknowledge death, to turn it into an ally, are also able to radiate a joyously felt reverence for life?

As long as we deny death, Stephen Levine suggests, we deny life: our essence, our source, the deathless core of our being. Thus, we stay confused about the true nature of healing. For there is a healing possible, he says, that can take us beyond our greatest suffering — even beyond our concepts of “life” and “death.”

Originally a Buddhist meditation teacher, Levine became associated in the early Seventies with the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, with whom he co-authored Grist For The Mill. At Ram Doss’s invitation, Levine joined the Hanuman Foundation’s Dying Project, which he co-directed with his wife Ondrea for seven years, helping hundreds of people bring more consciousness into their dying process. His books based on these experiences are classics in their field: Who Dies?, Meetings At The Edge, and, most recent, Healing Into Life And Death.

Levine was in North Carolina recently to give a two-day workshop on “Conscious Living, Conscious Dying.” Ralph Earle reports:

“Levine sits cross-legged on a pillow at the center of a rambling, L-shaped room whose windows face a wooded hillside. He begins by asking his audience to relax, breathe softly, and be aware of their bellies. lf your belly is soft, Levine explains persuasively, your mind is more likely to stay gentle and open. In this condition, compassion is possible. Only when he feels the audience is soft-bellied, receptive, and compassionate does he begin his formal talk.

“At his side, in silent meditation, sits Ondrea, with whom he jointly conducts workshops. She seems to radiate a calming, grounding influence. Levine tells the audience that she is communicating precisely the same message as he is, except that she ‘sends’ it out instead of speaking it.

“Later in the morning, when her husband leaves the room for a few minutes, Ondrea fields questions in a pragmatic, down-to-earth style that comes as a surprise after the other-worldly impression she has made. The continuity between her answers and his discussion supports his assertion that the two of them differ mainly in their style of presentation.

“A smallish, wiry, bearded man of fifty, Levine is earnest and compassionate, and not without humor. Even though (and perhaps because) he believes that a statement such as I create my reality’ would take several lifetimes to comprehend, he finds it necessary sometimes to take healing and soul-searching lightly. ‘Just think of this as a Woody Allen movie,’ he says.”

— Ed.

Earle: In the introduction to your book Who Dies?, Ram Dass talks about the days when people believed the Earth was flat, and says that the first people who suspected it was round had incredible courage to risk sailing over the edge. He makes the analogy to your pioneering work with the dying. I wonder whether there was a time in your own life when you were afraid of dying.

Levine: Let’s see, I was flying on Friday.... [Laughs.] Your question makes me recognize that my experience of getting into this work was not one of courage, but gratitude.

Earle: How so?

Levine: There’s nothing more intimate than being at the bedside of someone who’s dying. It’s intimate at many levels, because of the life review that goes on. But more than that, dying people play at their very edge, and not just the edge of their fears, but the edge of their growth, at a place where they see that many of the ways of escape that used to help them cope no longer apply. Death is no time to be coping; it is time to fly, and coping is too dense. What an intimate sharing! I would always leave a bedside feeling that I had been honored, and had been let into someone’s heart. I don’t know that courage was the quality required of me.

Earle: Did you find, as you entered more deeply into the work, that courage ever became a major issue?

Levine: If you met a great teacher, it would take some courage to speak, because you would feel self-conscious. But that would be minor next to the immensity of what was going on. As the teacher spoke to you, courage would no longer be an issue.

Courage might be the first step in approaching a dying person, but it’s a minor step when the momentum’s so enormous — as it is when someone’s in physical pain. Also, when you’re working with one person who’s dying, there are a dozen others around the bed who are in profound grief.

For me, I think it took more courage to approach my own grief than it did to approach death. Once, I was with a child, a blond, blue-eyed little girl who was dying, and she looked and spoke like and had the coloration and tonality of my own daughter, who was about the same age. There’s also just the grief we all have, that we carry from day to day, the fear of our fear, the anger at our anger, the doubt about our doubt.

But you have to realize that I came to this work through being a Buddhist meditation teacher, so I had viewed and approached a lot of this material — and to some degree resolved it — in sitting. If I had come to the work with the dying before I came to the meditation work, I’m sure it would have been much different. I think it takes more courage to sit with your suffering, your self-interest and your greed and your distrust — and to let those melt into God — than it does to be with someone who’s dying.

Earle: Have you been at the bedsides of people who were close to you?

Levine: When my mother died, she was eighty-three. Anything that had separated us had long since dissolved. We were very loving, with lots of touching and many —- ad nauseam to her, probably — conversations about the dying process, and the deaths in her life. After she died, I just felt pleased to have shared a part of our lives together. I think gratitude, again, was my predominant experience of her passing.

My father is still alive; we have wonderful conversations. He’s eighty-nine.

Earle: How does he feel about having death so close to him now?

Levine: It’s interesting — when I would talk to my mother about dying, we’d talk about it on all kinds of levels. She’d be interested about how people worked with pain, and what happens after death. We’d be talking, and I’d look over at my father, who would be smoking his cigar, with The Wall Street Journal in front of him, and every once in a while, at a particularly cogent moment, you’d see a puff of smoke come up from behind the paper.

He is a man who never spoke of God, except to say “God damn” or “Oh, Jesus.” He was in a coma a couple of years ago, and when he came out of it he said to me, “The Lord runs the place, but I’m sure we can do business.” It was the first time I ever heard him express any piety at all. He had probably had a near-death experience. But as we talked about it two days later, he was very strict. He’s a scientist, and a Bostonian. There are various forms of deeply conditioned blocking there, but his dignity demands that he not talk about it. So it’s not for me to put it on him.

You know, if somebody doesn’t ask about something, and you give them information, you really have to wonder what you are up to. What’s my motivation? What is this fascism in me to think they have to change to be ok?

Earle: So only if people ask, then, do you explain your insights into the dying process and your methods for working through it?

Levine: Only if they ask. Otherwise, I just tell them everything’s going to be ok. My father’s attitude is, “I’m so old now I don’t care what’s going on.”

Earle: The focus of your most recent book is the healing process rather than the dying process. Does this represent a change in direction for you?

Levine: Well, not really. What’s happened, I think, is that as Ondrea and I have become more profoundly involved in people’s processes, we have experienced that, spiritually, there isn’t the separation between life and death that there seems to be in the world of the body and of material things.

What we’ve really come to see is that healing is not limited to the body. The body may live or die, but the healing we took birth for occurs in the heart; if that quality of heart is not there, no matter what happens to the body, healing is absent. So in that sense, our work has not changed at all, since our work has always been to learn to open our hearts in hell, to become one with pain, so that it does not turn into suffering and separation from God. I think that the only service one can do, in a very real sense, whether in serving the dying or those who are healing themselves, is to remind people of their true nature — the uninjured, the deathless — which is the very source of healing.

In the sense of what we do from day to day, our work is always changing. If there isn’t change in one’s work or one’s life, then probably growth is not occurring, since growth occurs at the edge, at the limit of our exploration. One always meets fear in growth. The exploration of fear at that edge is what allows us to go beyond. So I don’t know that our work is really changing so much as it’s evolving naturally, into greater open-heartedness and deeper participation in the process we all share.

Earle: How would you describe the relationship between dying and healing?

Levine: Well, in a very real sense, you could say there’s no relationship: healing is the work of a lifetime and dying is a moment in that work. If we’ve lived our life in a healing way, letting go of judgment and entering more mercifully and mindfully into the moment, then dying will be as natural a part of the continuum as waking up in the morning or going to sleep at night. Our relationship to life is our relationship to healing, although many ironically see their relationship to life in terms of dying. I think we’re missing the boat if we look at the continuum as something that will end. We survive our death. We receive the opportunity to look back on it as another part of our healing: our recognition of who we have always been, or, as the Zen tradition says, our face before we were born.

Healing, in a very real sense, is a relating to that “face before we were born,” our underlying essence or “suchness,” out of which personality, thought, and feeling arise and into which they dissolve. lf our dying is a dying into God, then it’s a healing. If our dying is a dying out of separation, then it’s a healing. But I think that most people die as they’ve lived, with some degree of confusion at times, with fear or distress. But in that dying moment is a potential for healing unparalleled in our experience. It is the ultimate act of letting go — of face, of body, of reputation, of confusion, of doubt — and entering into the sacred heart of the moment, in which all the healing we have ever sought is always to be found.

Earle: In your most recent book, you stress that healing in its early stages is disorienting. Could you explain why?

Levine: I think that healing is disorienting at first because it causes us to review — to observe again as well as to recall — that which separated us from healing in the past: our unhealed and unhealing ways, you might say. True healing means that at last we come to look at pain directly, which is very unusual, since our conditioning is to escape from pain. When we walk across the floor and stub our toe, the energy that we send into that throbbing toe is not an embrace of mercy and healing kindness, but rather hatred and aversion.

In healing, one starts to relate differently to pain, to touch with mercy and loving-kindness that which we have withdrawn from in judgment and anger. Healing is a whole new way of looking at life. Healing means coming to see that pain is not automatically suffering, but rather sensations in the physical sense or stimuli in the mental sense. Pain is a given of life, and arises out of our desire system. If you want something, you’re not always going to get it, and even if you do, it might not quite be what you thought it would be. So there’s always the potential for pain in life, as long as we have desire, or anything to protect — and most of us do.

To see pain simply. as a fact is to be able to meet it with mercy and loving-kindness. But to experience pain in the mind or the body as “the enemy” is to go to war with our healing. To try to force the pain away is to suffer. Perhaps the difference between relating directly to pain and allowing it, through the mind’s ancient conditioning, to flip over into suffering is the difference between healing and continued injury.

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