A Year to Live (Stephen Levine)
When I created my initial mortality reading list, I read each book excerpt and tried to weed out anything overly religious, pseudoscientific, etc. You know, woo-wooness. A Year to Live turned out to be a whoopsie. I am interested in secular Buddhism and meditation, but I appreciate how easily this space slants into mysticism. If you too are familiar with Buddhist mysticism, you will easily recognize the themes of reincarnation, after-death experiences, the concept of ‘deathless being,’ etc. Still, I found a lot to appreciate. From here on though, only the secular nuggets (note: if you’re on the fence about meditation, think of it simply as performing “thought experiments.” It’s nothing fancy or woo-woo)
OVERVIEW
Stephen Levine was an author, poet, and meditation teacher and most famous for his work on death and dying. In the 1990s Levine and his wife (Ondrea) decided to live one full year as if it were their last. A Year to Live is not a retelling of that year, or a memoir, simply a collection of short chapters that draw loosely from that year-long experience; I’ll admit I was a bit disappointed in the lack of storytelling.
In A Year to Live, Levine suggests a number of meditation practices, and strongly recommends developing the qualities of mindfulness, detachment (letting go), nonattachment (letting be), gratitude, forgiveness, and compassion/sympathetic joy. He suggests dedicating time to journaling, meditating on fear, and performing a ‘life review.’ In preparing for death, Levine also urges us to closely examine our relation to helplessness, impermanence, and what (to us) would constitute fulfilling our life’s ambitions.
Important but perhaps hard truths include:
· Your last year could begin anytime; it could have already begun
· Don’t assume that dying will prepare you for death. “When the time actually comes, what is found then will be what is found now.” If you feel fear or regret now, expect to feel it then
· Preparing for death will mean exploring and making friends with fear, pain, and loss of control
WHAT NOW (actions for mortal atheists)
Do these meditations/exercises
I won’t describe the practices in detail here, although maybe I’ll do them myself and talk about them in another post at some time. These are not just one-time exercises, they are meant to be re-visited over and over. Here’s the high-level summary:
· Soft-belly – breathe deeply and focus on the feeling of your belly softening. Expand this feeling to encompass your muscles, your face, any place there is tension. Use this practice to start from a grounded, relaxed place when completing the other meditations.
· Vipassana – Levine does not reference Vipassana, but the practice is close enough. Sweep your attention through your body and attend to all the sensations that arise with an open equanimity. Equanimity with physical sensations will make it easier to deal with difficult emotions that may arise in the other meditations (e.g. the unpleasant physical sensations of fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, etc.)
· Gratitude – bring to mind things you are grateful for, one by one. Let yourself be overcome with love and appreciation for all that you have experienced.
· Forgiveness – imagine the people toward whom you feel resentment. Practice sending them forgiveness, even exploring what pain they must have been feeling when they caused you pain. Next, imagine receiving forgiveness from people whom you have wronged. Lastly, practice forgiving yourself.
· Helplessness – practice helplessness. Have someone feed you without moving your arms. Have someone lead you while blindfolded. Spend a day doing nothing (no speaking, no TV, no music, etc). Note the thoughts and physical sensations that accompany fear, distrust, restlessness. Practice co-existence with these feelings.
· Fear – same as above, spend time attending to the thoughts and physical sensations of fear. Levine relates that “fear of fear is ignorance of fear.” Explore your fear. Get curious. Is there a way to soften into fear?
· Death contemplation – write your own euology and read it aloud. Envision your funeral. Imagine your coffin being lowered into the ground and covered with dirt. Levine suggests that these type of exercises help.
· Preparation to die – in the chapter “Dying Contemplation” Levine introduces this practice: “Take each breath as though it were the last. Experience each inhalation as though it is not going to be followed by another. Don’t try to conserve your breath to stay in the body. Let it come and let it go. Each breath the last.” His purposes for this meditation may be woo-woo, but I’m nonetheless interested in this ‘practicing dying.’
· Dead for a day – this is a daylong contemplation. Imagine you have died yesterday. Walk the streets as if you were not there, and see the world in your absence. Act as though you have died and this is your last change to visit the world. As Levine says, “something essential is drawn to the surface when we recognize that this day may be the last day of the rest of our life.”
Complete a life review – the good bits
The wandering narrative of A Year to Live makes in difficult to formulate what this life review actually is before you get to it, but there is a full description in the Life Review chapter. It can’t be done in a day. Begin now and end “some time before [you] die.” Begin with bringing to mind people from your past “whose kindness touched your heart.” Send them your gratitude, thank them, and say goodbye as if you’ll never meet them again, even in memory. Eventually move on to moments that you are grateful for. Replay them in detail. Again, bid farewell to the memory as if it’s the last time you may ever revisit it. The life review and forgiveness/gratitude practice grow together.
Complete a life review – the bad bits
Move on to bringing to mind someone who has caused you pain (start small). Contemplate how much suffering they must have been in to cause you suffering. Recognize their fear. Experiment with sending forgiveness. As difficult emotions arise, practice dissolving them with the soft-belly meditation. As above, bid farewell to the memory with kindness. Maybe you feel a little lighter. Move on to unpleasant moments. Meet them with the same loving kindness. Eventually, it may become clear that you can be grateful for (what seemed to be) the bad bits too.
Levine notes “[…] the life review is more than revisiting hard times. It is also a feast for the heart. It is an opportunity to embrace those whose embrace you always treasured, to continue conversations begun years before that still resonate in your marrow. […] It takes a thousand moments of remembering for us to stay open long enough to relate wholeheartedly to our past instead of from it.” In reading the rest of the meditation, Levine theorizes that this life review (in addition to allowing space for more forgiveness and gratitude) helps us take our life less personally, allowing us to let go more easily (with appreciation instead of terror). You’ll have to be somewhat onboard with the Buddhist principles of detachment and nonattachment to jive with the rest.
IN SUM
Is this book entirely secular? No. Persistent themes of mysticism, afterworlds, immortal spirits, etc. In Levine’s own words: “my understanding that awareness survives the body is not a belief system, it’s just the way it is.” (page 132)
If you had to describe the book in one sentence? A book you think will be a storytelling of living a ‘last year,’ but isn’t, rather an exploration of Levine’s belief that the best way to live a last year is to live like a Buddhist.
Who should read this book? People already exploring Buddhist practices that don’t mind a little woo-woo
18th century epitaph
Remember, friends, as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I,
As I am now, so you must be.
Prepare yourself to follow me.