How to Live This Year as if It Were Your Last

Stephen Levine, pioneer in grief, trauma and death counseling, wrote books that help readers learn to embrace life. His overall view was that unexpressed grief leads to a gradual hardening of the heart and diminished sense of life. His book, A Year to Live, is not simply about dying but about renewal, in particular the restoration of the heart, your spiritual-emotional self. He gives multiple ways to renew your consciousness and revitalize yourself. (Here's an interview of him regarding the book.)

Many people who are faced with a death prognosis wish for more time to prepare. With sudden attention to their lives, many feel like failures and are full of regrets. Levine gives us an opportunity to prepare by healing our disappointments, opening our hearts to what comes.

To keep readers from this experience, Levine collected ways to prepare and he practiced them himself over a year’s time. He says:

“I committed myself to living a year as though it were my last. To practice dying. To be fully alive, to investigate the dread of, and resistance to, life and death. To complete my birth before it’s over. To investigate tat part of myself that refuses to take birth fully, and hops about as though it still had one foot in the womb. To enter the healing I have seen so many times as miraculous growth during a final illness. To place both feet on the ground at last. To live with mercy and awareness in the midst of the consequences of love or the lack thereof. To explore this ground, the ground of being, out of which this impermanent body and every-changing mind originate. To cut through a lifetime of confusion and forgetfulness. To undertake a life review with gratitude and forgiveness. To explore that which holds to its suffering, and cultivate a heart that cannot be distracted even by death.” (p. 10)

So in the book, we practice dying alongside Levine. He writes in an easy to read conversational style. I’ll pull out several points.

First question, if you only had one year left to live, what would you do? People can feel sudden dread and lamentations or a deep freedom. Most cannot conceive of being dead and still make plans up to the last minute, even on death row. Others are transformed by responding to the question and change their work or family life to live more fully.

Practices when you are ill. When we are in pain, instead of embracing it we dissociate. Instead, when you are sick with a cold, open yourself to it. Soften around the discomfort. Meet the discomfort “with mercy, not fear.” “Soften, enter, and explore, and continue softening to make room for your life.” (p. 20). As you do this, imagine each breath is your last. How does your life pass by? Is there something left undone? Then plan to do it at the next opportunity.

Keep a journal. Rereading it later, you’ll notice that no state of mind is new, no matter how dark or oppressive. They recur. Insights often are new.

Practice letting go of fear with soft-belly meditation. “Softening melts the armoring over the heart, experienced as hardness in the belly. Each time we remember to be present, to be mindful, we soften into the moment. Softening becomes a call to hear that it’s safe to be alive in the body once again. Soft-belly brings an end to our fear of fear." (p. 33) (Levine's belly-softening meditation here).

Learn to know your life. Notice. Be mindful. “To know your life is to know intimately what you are feeling” Our life actually lasts only an instant (the “now”) before the next moment arises. What state of mind is predominating in consciousness in each moment? Watch the rising of emotions. Fear? Doubt? Compassion? Within a five-minute period of mindfulness, we learn to notice hundreds of shifting states, our liking or disliking, our attraction and aversion. We can learn to keep any state from gaining momentum.

Develop awareness. “When you speak and when you listen, stay mindful that the fear which limits greater openness also limits self-awareness and obstructs the completion of unfinished business.” (p. 40) When your mind is clouded with arguments, judgments and confusion, be compassionately aware, letting it come and go. Note it, but don’t judge it.

“Dying is the domain of the body. Death is the domain of the heart. Keep dying in its place—the body. Don’t let it affect death. Dying is to death as birth is to life. Each is preceded by what seemed to the only possible reality, and each is followed by the next remarkable scenario…Dying, like birth, is begun by the body and completed by the heart.” (pp. 48-49)

Fear Essential Reads

The Risk-Taker’s Edge

How I Conquered Fear When I Was Diagnosed With Terminal Cancer

When an inkling of fear arises, pay attention and acknowledge it. If your mind dwells on it, it is “fearing.”

“The difference between fear and fearing is the difference between freedom and bondage. Fear arises uninvited. At times it believes it’s protecting you, and occasionally it is. But far more often it is based on imagined tigers, or imagined selves to be devoured. It is a deeply conditioned, automatic reaction to any feelings of being physically or emotionally unsafe.” (p. 49)

Levine tells us to not pull back from fear but breathe into it, enter it to explore the patterns of mind and body that accompany it. Let it come and let it go.

He has an extensive chapter where he guides the reader through a life review. After this he has a guided exercise to forgive those toward whom we bear resentment, a well studied health-promoting practice. We move from the small easy cases to the large, more difficult ones. Then we can imagine those who bear resentments against us, feel their perspective and them offering forgiveness to us.

Select or create a song to guide you as a “death chant,” which in Native American traditions is found during a vision quest and used during difficult moments in life such as sickness. The song lays down a familiar path of support through difficulty.

Gratitude, a state of mind of thankfulness, is the highest form of acceptance. Studies by Robert Emmons suggest that practicing gratitude can influence metabolism in healthy ways. (More ideas on gratitude here.)