In chapter 5 of Stephen Levine’s book, A Year to Live, he describes the importance of “life review” in preparing for death. I learned a most effective life review tool while studying Attitudinal Healing with Dr. Susan Trout at the Washington Center for Attitudinal Healing in the late 1980s. Using what she called the “Lifeline Exercise” we created a visual image of a life review. On the horizontal line at the bottom of a blank graph we marked segments noting years of our lives in five-year increments. On the vertical line, we marked seven segments, three negative segments from bottom up–three minuses, two minuses, and one minus − one neutral segment in the center − and three positive segments – one plus, two pluses, and three pluses − above the neutral middle. We then filled in the graph by marking an “x” within the graph that signified an event in our lives from birth to our present age. For example, I noted my birth as a one + because under hypnosis as an adult I envisioned my birth, lying in my mother’s arms, surrounded by my father, grandfather and three older siblings, welcomed and loved from the beginning. I marked my high school graduation as positive, my mother’s death as negative, my marriage and birth of two boys positive, father’s death negative, and so on. (For a visual image and instructions for this graph, see Dr. Trout’s book, To See Differently, Personal Growth and Being of Service through Attitudinal Healing. (Pg. 191-192)
Over the years, I have used this lifeline graph exercise in the various Attitudinal Healing Support Groups that I have led wherever I lived. I found it very effective for myself and others to immediately identify events that caused wounds that needed healing and events that were a cause for celebration. Several years ago, while doing this exercise again, I shifted my perspective to include my spiritual journey which was connected to ever-evolving religious attitudes and beliefs at various times in my life. I discovered that during my first eighteen years I was ensconced in a fundamentalist Christian Church. The next four years while at University I began to learn that there were different ways to view the Christian faith and Bible stories. I undertook an academic study of the Bible and attended the Episcopal Chapel on the college campus where I sang classical Christian music in the choir and listened to a more modern message from the Episcopal priests who taught a more open-minded Christianity.
During the next fifteen years, after marrying Dick, I adopted his atheistic/agnostic cynical view of life and religion. After divorcing Dick, I returned to the Christian faith, but in a Methodist Church which was much more liberal and much more socially conscious than the church of my childhood, with members working for justice and equality in our society. During the 1970s I was gradually drawn into and influenced by “New Age” thinking: Goddess and Earth-based beliefs, Spirit as Love, Creation as the Energy Force of Love. Then came years of Buddhist training where I read books and attended lectures, went on silent retreats, learned to meditate, and began to view life and death from a Buddhist perspective. Most recently I have been studying with Deepak Chopra who combines a number of new age philosophies such as A Course in Miracles with the basic Hindu religion of his childhood. As I included these shifts on my “lifeline” graph I realized that I was looking at and acknowledging a profound spiritual journey as delineated by the changes in my religious study and beliefs.
My views, beliefs, and attitudes regarding death and dying seem to follow a similar path. Actually, the process of dying was not discussed during most of my early lifetime; not until later was I interested in that particular subject. During the first eighteen years of Fundamentalist Christian training, I was taught that death was the end of life on earth. At my death my soul would go before God (a powerful masculine figure living up in the sky) to be judged as to how I had lived my life, whether I had repented and been baptized by immersion and continued to live a life of goodness and service. God then decided whether I would go to heaven, a place of great beauty and peace, or hell, a place of eternal damnation. I gradually rejected those beliefs during my fifteen years of marriage to Dick.
From the period of “New Age” exploration I learned that after my death my “spirit” would continue in a state of Universal Love; I would go back to my Source, which is Love. My later years of Christianity were not so judgmental and the concept of heaven and hell was not emphasized. In Buddhism I learned several different scenarios of what happens after the death of the physical body. For example, some Buddhists believe that there is nothing after death, just a continuation of “consciousness,” (whatever that meant to me at the time). I learned from a brief study of Tibetan Buddhism the concept of “karma” or the law of cause and effect both during this lifetime and in continuing lifetimes. And I learned that there are six realms possible for re-birth and existence after death: gods, demi-gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hells. Quite a remarkable cosmology. All of these left me with more confusion than certainty that there is life after death and what that might be like.
In chapter 5 of A Year to Live. in addition to the life review, Levine talks about a second element of the year long experiment −to become more present, more mindful of the process we call our life. We do this through the practice of meditation. For me, it also means doing the emotional work needed to heal all those places of my “lifeline” graph where a negative event caused a wound and was still suppressed in my sub-conscious. Those wounds would continue to plague my present moment experience until I brought them, or they brought themselves, to the surface of my conscious mind, and I did the work necessary to heal the wound. Emotional work might include talking to a therapist, journaling, going on retreats and attending healing workshops, exploring these painful events of the past and learning how to let go of fear, anger, and guilt of those wounds. It might also include practices such as forgiveness and gratitude. I did most of this emotional healing work through the process of Attitudinal Healing. I also attended several weekend workshops at that time with Stephen and Ondrea Levine. These were extremely meaningful and healing.
So, where am I now in this process of exploring my thoughts and feelings about death?
We know what death is – the body stops− the lungs stop breathing, the heart stops pumping blood− life in the body ends. But what happens next? What happens with the mind? And what about my soul? These are questions that I ponder.
I remember a time during a weekend workshop with Stephen and Ondrea Levine years ago when he suggested that it is not only possible but necessary to learn to live with “not knowing” –for example not knowing “why” a loved one died, or a particular event “happened” to us. Perhaps it also means not knowing what happens to us after death and living a life of joy and fulfillment anyway. Levine says that doing the psychological work of the life review and the spiritual work of a mindful meditation practice helps us to keep both feet on the ground and become a whole human being.
In my meditation practice now, I am using guided meditations from Deepak Chopra using affirmative statements and Sanskrit mantras. These meditations focus on letting go of the ego’s firm grip on the belief that we are each a separate being – a belief that keeps us in a state of aloneness and fear and the need to control ourselves and our environment, which, of course, is impossible. Each meditation helps me to let go of the ego’s grip on negative thinking, at least for the moment, and sink into silence, the infinitesimal and infinite space between thoughts. Chopra calls this space the “True Self,” the experience of Pure Awareness, or Universal Consciousness. By meditating daily on my True self, Pure Awareness, Universal Consciousness, I find myself becoming more tranquil, more at peace with myself and the chaotic world that I live in. Perhaps, this is what happens at the moment of death of the body – we enter this space of Eternal Pure Awareness or Universal Consciousness. Have you heard the phrase “field of all possibilities?” It comes from modern physics and is used by Chopra in his discussions about life and consciousness. It seems to me that focusing on this possibility might be helpful, hopeful, a way for me to approach my death without fear. May it be so.
Self-Inquiry questions:
1.What do you notice about your life with its pluses and minuses?
2. What patterns do you see?
3. What does your spiritual journey look like?our fear of death?
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