Stephen Levine - Meetings at the Edge: Dialogues with the Grieving and the Dying, the Healing and the Healed

Books by Stephen Levine

Embracing the Beloved

Gradual Awakening

Guided Meditations

Healing into Life and Death

Meetings at the Edge

Who Dies?

EMBRACING THE BELOVED
Relationship as a Path of Awakening
with Ondrea Levine

In this groundbreaking book, Stephen and Ondrea Levine demonstrate how to use a relationship as a means for profound inner growth and healing. Their insights and anecdotes will benefit all who are drawn to looking inward, and all who seek a relationship as a path for spiritual renewal and merciful awareness of life.

Spirituality/Self-Help/978-0-385-42527-8

GUIDED MEDITATIONS,
EXPLORATIONS, AND HEALINGS

Guided Meditations, Explorations, and Healings is the culmination and distillation of the Levines profound investigation into the process of human consciousness. These experiments in the healing we took birth for are offered for the benefit of all who are drawn to looking inward and all who seek the healing power of a merciful awareness.

Psychology/Religion/978-0-385-41737-2

HEALING INTO LIFE AND DEATH

In Healing Into Life and Death, Stephen Levine deals directly with the choice and application of treatment, offering original techniques for working with pain and grief, and discusses the development of a merciful awareness as a means of healing, as well as how to encourage others to do the same.

Psychology/Religion/978-0-385-26219-4

ALSO AVAILABLE
A Gradual Awakening, 978-0-385-26218-7
Who Dies?, 978-0-385-26221-7

ANCHOR BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com

STEPHEN LEVINE

Stephen Levine is the bestselling author of many books. With his wife, Ondrea, he has counseled terminally ill people and their love ones for more than three decades. His renowned work in grief counseling has, for the past twenty-five years, inspired radio segments and interviews as well as magazine articles, including pieces in O, The Oprah Magazine, Psychology Today, and the Utne Reader.

A N A NCHOR B OOK

PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.

A NCHOR B OOKS , D OUBLEDAY , and the portrayal of an anchor are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

While the case histories in this book are as accurate as memory and transcription allowthough condensed and editedthe patients names have been changed to honor their privacy as well as the privacy of their families and loved ones.

Acknowledgment is made to the following for their kind permission to reprint copyrighted material:

From Beautiful Boy by John Lennon. Copyright 1980 by Lenono Music. Reprinted by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levine, Stephen.
Meetings at the edge.
1. Terminally illPsychology. 2. Terminally illFamily relationships. 3. Terminally illCase studies. I. Title.
R726.8.L48 1984 362.1750922 [B] 82-45931

eISBN: 978-0-307-77368-5
Copyright 1984 by Stephen Levine
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

v3.1

In the Buddhist tradition, at the end of a period of meditation there is a practice called sharing the merit. One might silently in their heart say something to the effect of I share the merit of this meditation that it might aid all sentient beings on their path to perfect liberation. So rather than dedicate this book in the traditional sense, I would prefer to share whatever merit there may be with all sentient beings in general, and, in particular, with my wife and spiritual partner, Ondrea. While she never grew accustomed to recording her calls, she worked on the dying phone more than I, and her presence can be felt throughout this book. The we of these writings is not the royal we but the collaborative we.

We would also like to thank Jakki Walters, who transcribed the dying phone tapes and helped produce this manuscript.

Most live as though life was something yet to come. But as John Lennon pointed out, Life is what happens while we are busy making other plans.

For some this may not be an easy book to read. It explores the fear and doubt, the courage and determination which arise in turn to confront the uncontrollablethe unpleasant, the long-feared, the newly discovered.

This is a book of the unexpected and often unprepared for. This is a book of the growth that occurs as we come to the minds edge, past seemingly solid fears and long-conditioned doubt, and enter the heart of the mystery. Love is the bridge.

This is a high-wire act. To keep the heart open in hell, to maintain some loving balance in the face of all our pain and confusion. To allow life in. To heal past our fear of the unknown.

Some may feel unprepared to face this much suffering. We have so much doubt and so little confidence in our own natural greatness, in our original nature. But the suffering we experience while reading these stories is our own suffering. When reading these stories note the furrowed brow, the wincing about the eyes, the clenched jaw. This is our scramble for safe territory, this is our difficulty in dying, in living.

This is the suffering that connects us with all suffering. These are not isolated stories. This is the cosmic suffering that opens us into the universal and allows us to go beyond the separate self, to touch the deathless within us all.