Your ego’s tendency is to keep things as they are, no matter how bad they may be. God says: “let go of the past and make room for something that honours you more deeply.” You are afraid to do that because there is no guarantee that the new will be any better than the old. You’d rather hold onto the old and invite the new in at the same time. That is the inevitable Catch-22. The new cannot come in until the old is released. When you are attached to the past, you cannot move forward toward the future. And your experience of the present is one of deadlock.

Letting go of the past is never easy. Yet it is the only act that brings the presence of God (substitute grace, if you need to) into your life. When you let go of what used to be and accept what is, the universe instantly moves to support you. The deeper your let-go is, the more resources rush to your side.

It is the nature of the ego to become attached to the past. It is the nature of the ego to project the past forward into the future, to meet the new with the conceptual nets that would tame it and make it conform to yesterday’s experience. There is nothing new in this. It is simply the movement of fear which resists anything new.

It is important to see how that fear operates in your life. It is important to realize how you have become attached to your previous experience and resist anything new that wants to come into your life.

When you hold onto your experience or use it to interpret the present experience, you “take control” of your life, and push God (grace) away. When you surrender your ideas about the way things should be, let go of the past, and open to the future, you invite God back into your life.

Paul Ferrini

Life is intentional, not accidental. I bless this central fact. Consciousness instigates shifts in outer reality. Recognizing that I have the power to change my world by changing my thinking, I set for myself a gentle vigilance towards negative thoughts. When I fear abandonment, I remind myself that the universe itself is my loving companion. When I fear stagnation, I surrender into the deeper flow of life rather than willfully forcing artificial solutions. Constantly partnered by an interactive universe, I do my part by reminding myself that I am part of a larger plan, partnered by infinite intelligence. In its perfect pink blossoming, the bloom of the apple tree does not concern itself whether a bee will appear. The blossom does its job just by blossoming. The bee is drawn to do the rest. Rather than imagine that my yearnings are self-centred or counter to the flow of life, I practice simply blossoming in the faith that I attract what I need simply by following and blessing my true nature.

Julia Cameron

And with that breath arrives a new body. Notice in the desires that arise as that new incarnation approaches the dimming of the light that precedes the forgetfulness. Attempt to stay alert through the process of re-entry.

Each breath the first.

Each breath completely new.

Taking birth once again.

Born back into a body to examine what was born. And what never dies.

Taking birth for the benefit of all sentient beings.

The light body inhabiting a heavy body. Re-animating life and the possibility of an awareness so clear it obviates any potential for the kind of still birth that lasts a lifetime.

Each breath the first.

Born to serve and explore. To deepen the mercy of whatever world we find ourselves in.

Each breath so precious, allowing the light body to remain a moment more with its earthen vessel.

Taking birth into this world to discover the healing we have so long sought. And to sing the song we have been learning since we sat beneath the bo tree or hung from the cross or looked into the eyes of our dying child. No one said it would be easy, only fruitful.

Each breath the first, the last, the only breath available, to carry us beyond our forgetfulness into the scintillating centre of the living truth.

May all beings live with death over their left shoulder and kindness in the centre of their heart.

May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings know the great fortune of their great nature.

May all beings be at peace.

Stephen Levine

Gently, gently let yourself float free of the body. Constantly expanding outward through decreasing levels of density into increasing depths of grace. Enter the vastness of being. Rest there in your birthright, your deathright. Accept your inheritance.

Let yourself dissolve into the vastness. Edges melting, boundaries disappearing. Dissolving, dissolving into space. Uniting with the absolute joy of your absolute nature. Space dissolving into space. Light merging with light.

Let go of your knowing, let go of your unknowing, and simply be the presence expanding into the luminosity of its own great heart. Let that which is light follow its well-lit path.

Don’t ask the mind for advice, just follow your light. It knows the way by heart.

Let go of your name. Let go of your face. Let go of your reputation and float free in the vastness.

With gratitude and a single sigh leave your body behind with that life you dreamed once.

Notice, as you expand into that sense of safety, that there arises a comfort so deep and natural you wonder where it has been your whole life.

Let go of your understanding and float free in your intuition.

Enter the space in which your thoughts are floating. Let go into the light. Light dissolving into light. Space dissolving in sopace. Consciousness floating free in pure awareness.

Have mercy on yourself. Let yourself go, radiating out into space. Merging with the Great Heart that has no substance but is as real as you are.

No inside, no outside, just edgeless being in endless space. Space expanding into space. Light dissolving into light.

Rest in being. Float free in your original spaciousness.

And from the vanishing point on the most distant horizon, watch as something slowly approaches. It is the first breath of life.

Stephen Levine

Observe how each breath drawn in through the nostrils of the heavy body is experienced as sensation by the light body within. Notice how each breath connects the heavy body with the light body. Notice how each breath maintains that connection, allowing life to stay one more moment in the body.

Feel the contact between the light body and the dense body that each breath provides. Feel how each breath sustains the light body balanced perfectly within.

Take each breath as though it were the last. Experience each inhalation as though it is not going to be followed by another. Don’t try to conserve your breath to stay in the body. Let it come and let it go.

Each breath the last: Let that last exhalation go. And just go on with it. The last breath of life leaving the body behind. The connection severed between the light body and the heavy body. The end of this life. The final breath.

Don’t try to hold onto it. Let go of your last breath, let the light body float free.

Let yourself die. Let go now. hold to nothing. Trust the process.

Let yourself die into space. Leave your body behind, follow the light.

The last breath vanished into space. Leave your body where it lies and go on. That was never you. There you are shining before you. Enter that light. It is your own great nature. Do not be frightened by your immensity. Release all that holds you back from your ultimate fulfilment. Dissolve your heart into the great heart. Let who you have always been become who you are.

Stephen Levine

"My name is Inigo Montoya...prepare to die."

Look about your home for a safe place to die.

Go from room to room surveying the space and sensing if you were to come home to die where that might be best accomplished. Go to that place and just for the work/play of it, sit there for this meditation. Later, as the meditation sinks from the mind into the heart and becomes more your own, you will be able to die anywhere.

“Just the simple fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.” – Aldous Huxley

Sit quietly and feel the heaviness, the substantial quality of the body. Feel gravity pull this dense body toward the ground. Notice the weight of your living corpse. It often wants to lie down. It cannot support its own weight for very long. It is drawn toward the centre of the earth.

Notice within this heavy body a flickering field of sensation. A vibratory fluxing full of your relationship to the external world. Feelings of hot and cold, of roughness or smoothness, even of up or down, which have long supported the misconception that we are of the body rather than just in the body. We imagine we own this body but it is ours only on consignment. Notice that the sensations in the heavy body are received by something lighter within. Watch how awareness illuminates each incoming sensation and reports on its existence.

Within the heavy body is a body of awareness, a light body that produces consciousness of the external vessel and the world about it. It is that which experiences life in or out of the body.

Sense the lighter body within. Experience its presence as presence itself. Notice that the sense of being present drifts in a timeless awareness that can never be defined but can always be experienced. Only that which can be named dies, the truth in which it floats has no beginning and no end.

Stephen Levine

The woman
whose speech and actions are the same -
her feet become worthy of
worship.

Keeping our word is the alchemy to become free
and whole.

Try and make amends for any broken hearts
or broken promises;

if you cannot do so in form
than prayer can heal a debt with the light you can send,

and even a man can become
this precious
gold.

Tukaram

As swimmers dare
to lie face in the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

Denise Levertov