This transcript excerpt is from a YouTube interview about Steven (Stephen) and Ondrea Levine and their role in integrating Eastern meditation, prayerful spiritual practices, and Western psychology—particularly in end-of-life care and therapy. The speakers emphasize merciful awareness, compassion grounded in personal practice, and a counselor stance of supporting each dying person's own spiritual or dignified choices rather than imposing the counselor's beliefs.
There have been pioneers that you've mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about the contributions of Steven Levine and some of the ways he's illuminated this area of working with people.
Stephen is really one of my personal heroes. And I think for a lot of people who have brought in meditation practices a deeper understanding of what it means to be present an importance of a merciful awareness, of coming in with the invitation, with such a merciful internal experience that really can only be deepened, which he has deepened through having practices in your own life that help you become in touch with your own mortality. And so the compassion and the merciful awareness really does come from the fact that you recognize how I don't have glib answers. I can relate to any emotional state that you would be in because I've touched those places inside myself. And Steven is somebody who really. Stephen and Andrea Levine are both people who have done that for so many years that they've led the forefront of bringing the Eastern meditation practices to the Western world. They brought prayerful practices, so they pretty much brought the spiritual world and the psychological world together and made their own unique blend. And I think for anybody that really wants to have further deepening, it would be worthwhile to re further their work.
In the sense that they bring east and west or a spirituality and a psychology approach together. How do you think that's useful to us as therapists in a practical sense?
Well, the thing that's so wonderful about the spirituality that they bring is that on the one hand, for people that really want to delve into a practice of any kind of faith, they're prepared to actually have prayers. They're prepared to have specific meditation practices, and they're prepared to completely drop that and have no. Absolutely nothing, have no beliefs whatsoever. And in that sense, I think they're the closest that there is to a real spiritual practice, which is, I'm coming in knowing I don't know anything. And also I may have your belief, and I can join you in your belief no matter what it is, and I'll support you to die with dignity in whatever way is going to work for you. So for you, it's just simply having the courage to be as peaceful as possible. Or for you, if it's to be authentic or not know. Or if for you it's to not know and to pray at the same time. You basically are being supported to follow what you define as spiritual or dignified. And to me, that's what we as counselors most need to understand, is that it's getting our own belief systems out of the way and only using them as is useful for the person that is dying. And in a sense, we're completely redefining spiritual as whatever you would find the optimal way to go through your dying process and your experience, whatever you would experience as dignified or perhaps spiritual or religious, I am going to help support you to do. And that that is really the fulfillment and the opportunity that we have as counselors. And it's incredibly inspiring and also very humbling because when we go deeply into it and the more people that we actually counsel, we touch a place, at least in my experience, where we don't know, we don't know the absolute answers. And at the same time, we can become more and more respectful of anyone's beliefs and whatever direction they need to go to come to peace or even if they can't come to peace, to be able to give them as much peace as possible for wherever they can take themselves to in their life. And so we don't have to push them in any direction whatsoever.
