Stephen Levine - Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 1991

Copyright 1991 by Stephen Levine

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levine, Stephen.
Guided meditations, explorations and healings / Stephen Levine.
p. cm.
1. Meditations. 2. Spiritual healing. I. Title.
BL624.2.L48 1991
291.43dc20 91-21504

eISBN: 978-0-307-75741-8

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

Also by Stephen Levine

Grist for the Mill (with Ram Dass)
A Gradual Awakening
Meetings at the Edge
Who Dies?
Healing into Life and Death

To my mother and my father, who lived long enough to see this work begin, and who died, after so many years of confusion and separation, in my arms.

This book is a product of the Collective Cortex and massive heart of our many teachers, students, and patients. To all those with whom we have worked these past twenty years, we bow 10,000 times in gratitude. And a special bow to Maggie Adkins for her labors on the manuscript and her great love of the work.

W hen our publishers first suggested that Ondrea and I collect into one volume the most widely used guided meditations and techniques for developing a healing awareness, which had been spread over the past twenty years through numerous articles and several books, we thought it was a good idea. So we put aside writing our manuscript on relationships as a path of awakening to undertake what seemed a simple enough task. But because the work is expanding so rapidly and many new guided meditations had been developed and much of the earlier material had evolved considerably, this became a much more extensive and intensive enterprise. A considerable amount of new material had arisen. And much of the earlier techniques had become distilled in the years of practice, counseling and workshops since their original publication. Indeed, the Opening the Heart of the Womb Meditation, which had begun as a single practice, has matured into three individual, progressive meditations. Also, new Loving Kindness, Mindfulness, Soft Belly, Pain, Grief, Healing, Eating, Resistance, and Dying meditations are offered here in print for the first time. And so, as it turns out, is most of the material in this book. Since it is our intention to offer something of a workbook of the techniques developed while teaching meditation and working with the healing and the dying, those acquainted with our previous booksA Gradual Awakening, Who Dies?, Meetings at the Edge, and Healing into Life and Deathwill find a few of these meditations, and many of these ideas, familiar but much evolved from their original incarnations. This book is meant to be a culmination and distillation of these technologies of the heart. We offer them as experiments in the healing we took birth for.

T here are many remarkable psychological and healing processes currently available, but none will do what a meditation practice can to lead you toward your deepest truth. And all could be enhanced by its deeper clarity and strength. As Freud said, The best I can do is exchange your neurotic misery for ordinary human unhappiness. That ordinary human unhappiness is our common everyday grief. But this healing work we have taken birth to complete is to meet that grief in mercy and loving kindness instead of fear and self-hatred. Indeed, we can work endlessly in the mind to undo the tangle of conditioning that so twists and turns our lives. And this has considerable value, but dont stop there. The mind is only a part of our enormity. The mind insists on resolution and suffers intense confusion. But the heart requires only an integration of our pain into the vastness of our true nature. Indeed the psychological dilemma that draws our attention by the suffering it produces can be healed more readily in the heart of mercy than in the mind of fear and judgment.

As the mind turns toward the heart, subtle whispers are heard. Subtler aspects of existence are experienced. And there arises in the mind the question, How do I go deeper?

This book is organized in such a manner that the Loving Kindness meditation is the first offered. This is not a random selection, but offers the foundation for inner, as well as outer, practice. In the development of this meditation considerable concentration is gathered by connecting a heart-whispered wish for well-being with the rhythm of the breath. The cultivation of this heartful concentration leads to a deepening, merciful awareness; the basis of a spiritual/healing practice.

Using this meditation is a skillful way to develop the concentration necessary for the exploration that liberates consciousness. It is this quality of concentration that takes the diffused light of the mind and focuses it to a brilliance capable of illuminating even the subtlest nuance of each mind-moment passing. Such concentration allows awareness to remain focused on the moment and the tasks at hand. It is the quality most refer to when we speak of mental strength.

At one point in my practice a teacher gave me a blue kasina (a meditation disc) to concentrate on for several hours a day in order to sharpen my capacity to focus. The object was not to see the circle but rather to become the blue unwaveringly. A few weeks into this practice I met an old healer friend and as we hugged she commented, When I hug you all I see is blue! I thought to myself, Why am I meditating on a blue kasina when my energies could be just as strongly concentrated by using a Loving Kindness meditation, and emanate an essential mercy so needed in the world, instead of a slight aberration in the mental decor?

As one begins to use the Loving Kindness meditation as a means of concentrating the mind in the heart, or perhaps more accurately the heart of the mind (the essence of being, pure awareness), the words are quite helpful. May I be happy. May I be free from suffering. May I be at peace. The words are a means of turning toward oneself with a care and well-being we seldom experience, particularly from ourselves. It is a whole new ball game. And the game is not as easy to play or as one-sided as we had hoped. There is much within us that arises to block that inner-directed mercy. Self-judgement. Fear. Doubt. Deep negations. And so the words find their track riding on the breath. The mind becomes focused by the words and sensitized by the moment-to-moment awareness of the breath. The breath and the words merge in the heart to draw the mind toward clarity and a healing kindness.