Ep. 268 – Ram Dass and Stephen Levine: The Heart of Healing
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Jan 7, 2025
Dive into a heartfelt conversation exploring the essence of healing that transcends the physical. Embrace the beauty of impermanence as Ram Dass and Stephen Levine share personal stories that highlight love, loss, and the interconnectedness of experiences. They discuss the profound impact of presence and compassion in times of grief, revealing how shared sorrow can lead to deep understanding. Listen as they emphasize the importance of engaging with the present moment, offering insights into transformative personal growth.
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Shared Dying Experience
Ram Dass describes nursing his stepmother, Phyllis, through her final days.
He found the shared experience intensely real and fulfilling, contrasting with others' perceptions of it as horrible.
insights INSIGHT
Presence over Words
Ram Dass realized that presence is more powerful than words when comforting someone in pain.
His stepmother's request to "stop talking" highlighted the value of simply being present.
question_answer ANECDOTE
LSD and Funeral
Ram Dass attended his mother's funeral on LSD, experiencing a profound connection with her and the web of love surrounding them.
He reflects on the challenge of sharing such experiences with those who can't comprehend them.
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In 'A Year to Live,' Stephen Levine presents a year-long program to help readers live each moment, hour, and day mindfully, as if it were their last. The book is based on Levine's own experiment of living for a year as if it were his final year, inspired by the Dalai Lama's approach to preparing for death. Levine provides intensely practical strategies and powerful guided meditations to help readers deal with unfinished business, cultivate qualities such as mindfulness, detachment, gratitude, forgiveness, and compassion, and enter into a new and vibrant relationship with life. The book emphasizes the importance of preparing for death as a way to live more fully and meaningfully, and includes practices like life reviews, meditating on fear, and imagining one's own death to foster a deeper appreciation for life[2][3][5].
In this talk from the 1980s, Ram Dass and Stephen Levine come together to explore the heart of healing and encourage us to look with clarity and compassion at the issues of pain and death.
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This episode of Here and Now is part one of a talk Ram Dass and his good friend Stephen Levine gave in San Francisco in the 1980s. Check back soon for more of this recording.
Stephen begins by talking about how this event came to be. He explores the heart of healing and how it can occur on more than just the physical level. The body might not always reflect the healing, but the healing is happening nonetheless.
Ram Dass wants this to be a gathering that can reach for truth. Feeling touched by his stepmother’s recent passing, he shares the beauty of the process they just went through together. He tells the story about being on LSD during his mother’s funeral and explores some of the issues of burnout that are commonplace for people who are caregivers.
Stephen talks about teaching with Elisabeth Küblar-Ross and how he learned to let go of his roles when sharing space with people who are facing pain and death. He tells the story of a woman who used her pain to push past her separateness and into a place of collective being. Healing doesn’t have to do with life and death, it has to do with the heart of the moment.
About Stephen Levine:
Stephen Levine was an American poet, author and Buddhist teacher best known for his work on death and dying. He was a friend and colleague to many Be Here Now Network Teachers. Along with Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, Stephen is responsible for making the teachings of Theravada Buddhism more widely available to students in the West. Find more talks and writings from Stephen at levinetalks.com.
“Those people we know who are working with healing the body often seemto come to the place where they recognize that there is no such thing as just healing ‘my’ body, it is healing the body we all share. Entering the shared heart to experience the shared pain in the body we all share.” – Stephen Levine
Ram Dass Here And Now 
