The Heart Of Healing: Reflection from Stephen Levine

A reflection on practice by Other Teachers & Folks We Value

What we’ve really come to see is that healing is not limited to the body. The body may live or die, but the healing we took birth for occurs in the heart; if that quality of heart is not there, no matter what happens to the body, healing is absent…

…If we’re speaking of healing as being able to love wholeheartedly that which we think we love, I don’t know what would be a greater aid than a spiritual practice which would encourage seeing the whole and not being limited to the tiny increments of mind that arise and often block the heart. Nothing will do for us what a daily meditation practice will do. It’s not the only way in, but it is a profound access that allows us to go beyond the mind to our true nature. It could simply be said that meditation is just an intensification of awareness. And when there is awareness, there is healing. Awareness of anger heals anger in the sense that it gives anger an opportunity to float, and then we are better able to respond to it instead of having to react automatically to it.

In that sense, a meditation practice is invaluable for deepening the quality of awareness that allows the healing in. But meditation isn’t easy. As one teacher said, meditation is just one insult after another. This also speaks to your earlier question about how the first stages of healing are disorienting. As you go in, you see you aren’t who you think you are; often, we’re confronted with the truth of our grasping, greediness, lustfulness, self-interest, and general ignorance of ourselves and the world. But meditation allows truth to arise, and even if the truth is an unpleasant one for a moment, it is the truth. It is beautiful and feeds us, energizes us, heals us. Meditation takes us beyond the mind to who we really are, the shared heart of being.

Excerpted from an interview with Stephen by Ralph Earle in the October 1989 issue of The Sun