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One of the wonderful practices in Insight Buddhist tradition actually developed by Stephen Levine.

Year to live practice. In that practice, you actually spend a year as if you've been given

a terminal diagnosis and you plan all the things that you would do, it actually has some pretty

profound ramifications in terms of reconnecting with people focus on what

gives our life real meaning and purpose to prioritize those to put aside concerns that would not be of value from that perspective and so forth.

So anyway, the Year to live practice is a wonderful way to get a different set of perspective on life,

but also in another way it's actually profoundly true that we actually don't have any

guarantees that we will be here a year from now even a day from now. There was a wonderful dear friend, member of this community,

Lauren, who was riding on her way to work one morning and was run over by a careless driver and killed.

And she had, of course, no preparation that that event would happen.

Just a month ago, a young woman was,

left her home and so-ho and walked outside to go to a yoga class and was a truck back over back into her and

crushed her to death. Every year countless individuals will go to the doctor for a checkup, maybe looking into

some kind of back pain and find out that they have inoperable cancer.

That happened.

...