Unattended Sorrow

Recovering from Loss and Reviving the Heart

• Original editions published in 2005 and 2006 sold over twenty thousand copies. This was also his last non-fiction book. He died in 2016. This will be his first posthumous publication which features new introductory material by his wife Ondrea Levine and Mirabai Starr, and so an appreciation of Stephen Levine’s life will be part of the promotion. His wife Ondrea is greatly beloved nationally and will be helping publicize the book, as will Mirabai Starr. This book has been out of print for about 6 years now. Mirabai’s God of Love published by Monkfish has already sold over 9,000 copies since its publication in 2012. It continues to sell well.
• Stephen Levine was and remains a “big deal” in contemporary Western spirituality. He was an American poet, author and teacher best known for his work on death and dying. He is one of a generation of pioneering teachers who, along with Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, have made the teachings of Theravada Buddhism more widely available to students in the West. Like the writings of his colleague and close friend, Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert), Stephen's work is also flavoured by the devotional practices and teachings (also known as Bhakti Yoga) of the Hindu Guru Neem Karoli Baba. This aspect of his teaching may be considered one way in which his work differs from that of the more purely Buddhist oriented teachers named above. Since Buddhism is largely considered a non-theistic faith, his allusions in his teachings to a creator, which he variously terms God, The Beloved, The One and 'Uugghh,' further distinguish his work from that of other contemporary Buddhist writers.