Healing Into Life and Death

Stephen Levine spent decades sitting with the dying. What he discovered there — about pain, about healing, about the startling mercy available in the midst of suffering — became one of the most quietly transformative books in contemplative medicine. Healing Into Life and Death is not a book about getting better. It is a book about becoming more fully present to whatever is: pain, grief, illness, loss, and the extraordinary possibility of an open heart.

Drawing on Buddhist meditation practice and years of work with the terminally ill alongside his partner Ondrea, Levine offers original techniques for working with physical and emotional pain, practices for cultivating merciful awareness, and a vision of healing that reaches beyond cure into something far more enduring. Endorsed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Ram Dass, and Gerald Jampolsky, this is a book that has accompanied countless readers through the hardest passages of a human life.

For readers drawn to contemplative literature, Healing Into Life and Death is both a spiritual classic and a living practice — for those facing serious illness, for caregivers and therapists, and for anyone seeking a more honest and tender relationship with their own mortality.

Explore more on healing and mortality: Continue with Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach for the practice of meeting life with compassion, or explore The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller for the sacred work of grief.

What You'll Discover

• Original techniques for working with physical and emotional pain
• Practices for developing merciful awareness as a path to healing
• Guidance for supporting others through illness, grief, and dying
• A vision of healing that embraces rather than resists what is
• Wisdom drawn from Buddhist meditation and decades of hospice work

Stephen Levine was a poet, meditation teacher, and one of the foremost voices in the conscious dying movement. Alongside his partner Ondrea Levine, he worked for decades with the terminally ill and the bereaved, and authored numerous beloved works including A Year to Live and Who Dies?

Perfect for: Those facing serious illness or loss, caregivers and hospice workers, therapists and counselors, readers of Ram Dass or Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, practitioners of Buddhist meditation, anyone exploring the relationship between healing and mortality, and seekers of a more conscious relationship with life and death.

Paperback edition. Stephen Levine's enduring classic on healing, pain, and the opening of the heart — timeless wisdom for the most difficult passages of a human life.