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Aging and Death

A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last

In his new book, Stephen Levine, author of the perennial best-seller Who Dies?, teaches us how to live each moment, each hour, each day mindfully–as if it were all that was left. On his deathbed, Socrates exhorted his followers to practice dying as the highest form of wisdom. Levine decided to live this way himself for a whole year, and now he shares with us how such immediacy radically changes our view of the world and forces us to examine our priorities. Most of us go to extraordinary lengths to ignore, laugh off, or deny the fact that we are going to die, but preparing for death is one of the most rational and rewarding acts of a lifetime. It is an exercise that gives us the opportunity to deal with unfinished business and enter into a new and vibrant relationship with life. Levine provides us with a year-long program of intensely practical strategies and powerful guided meditations to help with this work, so that whenever the ultimate moment does arrive for each of us, we will not feel that it has come too soon.

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Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death

The Buddhist approach to death can be of great benefit to people of all backgrounds—as has been demonstrated time and again in Joan Halifax’s decades of work with the dying and their caregivers. Inspired by traditional Buddhist teachings, her work is a source of wisdom for all those who are charged with a dying person’s care, facing their own death, or wishing to explore and contemplate the transformative power of the dying process. Her teachings affirm that we can open and contact our inner strength, and that we can help others who are suffering to do the same.

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The Second Half of Life: Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom

Cultural anthropologist and award-winning author Angeles Arrien presents The Second Half of Life–a collection of teachings, reflections, and stories from around the world to open us to the challenges and deeper mysteries of “the great crossing” at midlife. Working with the images, poetry, metaphors, and other forms of symbolic language from diverse cultures, Arrien introduces us to the “Eight Gates of Initiation.” By mastering their lessons and gifts, we harvest the meaning and purpose of our life, and come into our spiritual maturity. This popular seller is now available in paperback, with a foreword by John O’Donohue.

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Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying

This is the first book to show how to open oneself to the immensity of living with death, to participate fully in life as the perfect preparation for whatever may come next. Who Dies? provides calm compassion rather than the frightening melodrama of death.

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