A Year to Live

Rating:
Summary: Practical Perspectives on Death
Review: "Meditating on death in order to fully live " could be the sub-title of this book. In dealing with illness and approaching death in our family, I've read almost all of Kubler-Ross's books and while they have been inspirational and her work certainly groundbreaking, I found this book more helpful in terms of describing the experience of dying in a way that allows me to be more able to be at the bedside of our family memeber. Simply in reading it gives one a profound yet extremly practical perspective on dying and of one's own eventual death.

Rating:
Summary: Death is a good teacher.
Review: 250,000 people die each day, like "deciduous leaves piled at the foot of the great tree" (p. 110). This is a wise book about reclaiming "our lives one step at a time" (p. 5) through the practice of dying. "I offer an experiment that amplifies your potential for healing by living the next year as if it were your last" (p. 3), Stephen Levine writes, "a year to live as consciously as possible, a year to finish business, to catch up with our lives, to investigate and deal with our fear of death, to cultivate our true heart and find essential wisdom and joy" (p. 4).

Levine knows death. He is a Buddhist meditation teacher who works with terminal patients. He tells us that we should not wait for a terminal diagnosis, though, "before opening to the potential grace and wonder of this living moment" (p. 17). His book offers several guided meditations on embracing the mystery of death, including "soft-belly" (pp. 32-33), fear (pp. 49-50), "life review" (pp. 82-86), forgiveness (pp. 89-92), gratitude (pp. 96-97), body awareness (pp. 104-5) and "original face" (120-21) meditations. "Trust the process" (p. 63), Levine advises us. "No one can afford to put this work off any longer" (p. 17). In the end, as the book's title makes clear, this is not so much a book about death, but a book about conscious living.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Death is a good teacher.
Review: 250,000 people die each day, like "deciduous leaves piled at the foot of the great tree" (p. 110). This is a wise book about reclaiming "our lives one step at a time" (p. 5) through the practice of dying. "I offer an experiment that amplifies your potential for healing by living the next year as if it were your last" (p. 3), Stephen Levine writes, "a year to live as consciously as possible, a year to finish business, to catch up with our lives, to investigate and deal with our fear of death, to cultivate our true heart and find essential wisdom and joy" (p. 4).

Levine knows death. He is a Buddhist meditation teacher who works with terminal patients. He tells us that we should not wait for a terminal diagnosis, though, "before opening to the potential grace and wonder of this living moment" (p. 17). His book offers several guided meditations on embracing the mystery of death, including "soft-belly" (pp. 32-33), fear (pp. 49-50), "life review" (pp. 82-86), forgiveness (pp. 89-92), gratitude (pp. 96-97), body awareness (pp. 104-5) and "original face" (120-21) meditations. "Trust the process" (p. 63), Levine advises us. "No one can afford to put this work off any longer" (p. 17). In the end, as the book's title makes clear, this is not so much a book about death, but a book about conscious living.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Death is a good teacher.
Review: 250,000 people die each day, like "deciduous leaves piled at the foot of the great tree" (p. 110). This is a wise book about reclaiming "our lives one step at a time" (p. 5) through the practice of dying. "I offer an experiment that amplifies your potential for healing by living the next year as if it were your last" (p. 3), Stephen Levine writes, "a year to live as consciously as possible, a year to finish business, to catch up with our lives, to investigate and deal with our fear of death, to cultivate our true heart and find essential wisdom and joy" (p. 4).

Levine knows death. He is a Buddhist meditation teacher who works with terminal patients. He tells us that we should not wait for a terminal diagnosis, though, "before opening to the potential grace and wonder of this living moment" (p. 17). His book offers several guided meditations on embracing the mystery of death, including "soft-belly" (pp. 32-33), fear (pp. 49-50), "life review" (pp. 82-86), forgiveness (pp. 89-92), gratitude (pp. 96-97), body awareness (pp. 104-5) and "original face" (120-21) meditations. "Trust the process" (p. 63), Levine advises us. "No one can afford to put this work off any longer" (p. 17). In the end, as the book's title makes clear, this is not so much a book about death, but a book about conscious living.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Not very practical
Review: A Year To Live by Levine proves the old saying: "There's nothing new under the sun." This book, which claims to be on the cutting edge, might offer something to someone who has never given the subject of dying a second thought, but the banal, maudlin, self righteous approach left this listener - I bought the tape - begging for silence. On top of that, Mr. Levine reads his work as though he were trying to induce a hypnotic trance or s p e a k i n g to the mentally impaired.

Rating:
Summary: A Year to Live
Review: A Year To Live by Levine proves the old saying: "There's nothing new under the sun." This book, which claims to be on the cutting edge, might offer something to someone who has never given the subject of dying a second thought, but the banal, maudlin, self righteous approach left this listener - I bought the tape - begging for silence. On top of that, Mr. Levine reads his work as though he were trying to induce a hypnotic trance or s p e a k i n g to the mentally impaired.

Rating:
Summary: Stephen Levine on living life with vivid fullness.
Review: A YEAR TO LIVE Stephen Levine

If you had only one year left to live, what would you do? When Stephen Levine posed this question to himself, it led to a profound, year-long experiment in conscious living that is fully revealed in A Year to Live. In his work with the dying, Levine observed the radical life changes people can make in the face of death: how they quit dead-end jobs, opened to love, healed their relationships, and acted on plans they had put off for years. He challenged himself to live an entire year as if it were his last, and to investigate how death is cut from the same fabric as life - and why it is never to be feared.

Carefully planned as a series of month-by-month practices anyone can do, A Year to Live teaches a way to live your life with vivid fullness while opening to the ultimate mystery of what the end will bring. With special meditations and exercises, Levine helps you discover the "deathless nature" contained in your moment-to-moment experiences. For seekers of all faiths and all ages, A Year to Live shows that every minute of life is not only part of a promise made at birth, but the spiritual adventure of a lifetime.

Stephen Levine is a poet and teacher of guided meditation healing techniques. He and his wife and spiritual partner, Ondrea, have counseled the dying and their loved ones for more than 30 years. Stephen Levine's bestselling books Healing into Life and Death; A Gradual Awakening; and A Year to Live are considered classics in the field of conscious living and dying. He is also the coauthor, with Ondrea, of the acclaimed To Love and Be Loved; and Who Dies?

Ondrea Levine has worked with dying and healing for more than 30 years. Her counseling of the terminally ill and work with those in coma has served many. For some years she was the mainstay of the 24 hour-a-day free counseling phone established as one of the many projects she and Stephen collaborated on as co-directors fo the Hanuman foundation Dying Project during 30 years of shared experiments of the heart.

The Levine's work is said to stretch from the most painful experiences of the human spectrum to the furthest point on the human horizon, from hell to heaven, from pain to ease, from our ongoing sense of loss to the legacy of our unending interconnectedness. Their experiential "Conscious Living / Conscious Dying" workshops are a meditative investigation of what it means to be fully alive, cultivating the qualitities which heal the mind and heart, exploring the nature of what it is that dies.

Presently Stephen and Ondrea live in the high mountains of the Southwest; attempting to practice what they preach in the silence of the deep woods, seeking the healing they took birth for. They no longer have a telephone or do individual counseling as their energies, for now, are mostly directed inward. To continue their work they have created Warm Rock Tapes as a separate business, which also distributes past productions, to share their guided meditations and talks from the few times a year they go out to teach, but they are not available directly. To order other programs by the Levines, write to:

Warm Rock Tapes PO Box 100 Chamisal, NM 87521

Or phone [phone]-HEAL

Rating:
Summary: A truly inspirational book
Review: Having suffered a near death experience myself it makes me realize how uncertain life is and how soon it can come to an end. One never knows when Basil will pay us a visit.
Living your life as if each day is your last really makes you live life to the fullest and you learn to appreciate the little things in life. As a person who tries to follow the spiritual path this book was truly enlightening for me. It truly puts a new meaning to life. Stephen Levine's 'A Year to Live' is truly an inspiration

Rating:
Summary: Excellent in theory, difficult in practice
Review: I am currently almost halfway through my "Year to Live." My mother, her best friend, and her best friend's oldest daughter are among a larger group of people all over the nation who are actually trying to do exactly what this book discusses: Treat this year as if it were your last. It is easier said than done.

I will say that it has brought my mother and I closer together, which I did not think was possible, and it has forced me to examine one of my deepest fears: losing her. This work is deep, intense, and harder than you might think... but the rewards are great.

Rating:
Summary: This may be my last year
Review: I bought this book and began to put it into practice. Days later I was shocked to find I had an inoperable cancer. Statistics for this cancer offer less than 1% chance of living 5 years.

I threw the book out. I was too scared to continue to act on the premise that this year is my last.

It's been 7 months. I recently found I had been mis-diagnosed. Oh, I had cancer but they were treating me for the wrong subtype of cancer. All those months, all that pain. Talk about the odds being against you. Ah well.

Today, I re-ordered this book. As frightening as it is, I want to follow his advice and live every day even knowing it may be my last. Thank you Stephen Levine. You came into my life at the right time even though I refused to acknowledge it.