2010
A young man is rocked by two announcements from his elderly father: that he has terminal cancer and that he has a young male lover.
105 min
CLEAR ALL
Stephen and Ondrea Levine, counselors and meditation teachers, sit down with psychotherapist Barbara Platek to speak about easing the transition from life to death.
What people do [when faced with their own death] is to begin looking into their own hearts and into the eyes of those with whom they share their lives. And all too often they find that these aren’t places they’ve looked very deeply before.
We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process.
We hold our grief hard in the belly. We store fear and disappointment, anger and guilt in our gut. Softening the Belly… of Sorrow Our belly has become fossilized with a long resistance to life and to loss.
1
This video is an excerpt from Stephen and Ondrea’s “Couch Talk 15.”
Based on his extensive counseling work with the terminally ill, Levine’s book integrates death into the context of life with compassion, skill, and hope.
This book shows the reader how to open to the immensity of living with death, to participate fully in life as the perfect preparation for whatever may come next. Levine provides calm compassion rather than the frightening melodrama of death.