The Story of Lester Levenson
Lester Levenson
[Chun Geum Mt, Sedona Ilchi Meditation Center]
The retreat center that is now Sedona Ilchi Meditation Center was originally established as a retreat center by Lester Levenson in 1958. He bought the land to found a center to teach his “Sedona Method” of meditation which he developed for 42 years.
His spiritual journey began when he was a businessman from New York, a physicist by training. He had a second heart attack at the age of 42 and was told that he would die within a few months or the next time a heart attack struck. After he got over his initial rage and despair about the inevitability of death, he began to question the meaning of his life. He realized that he was looking for happiness, and that all the moments of genuine happiness in his life had come when he had give love to others.
He realized that since happiness is an emotion generated by his state of mind, he could transform the unhappy moments in his life into happy ones. His most recent unhappy experience was when his doctor told his to go home and wait for death. He had previously felt rage at his doctor for this statement. Upon reflection, he realized how difficult it must have been for the doctor to tell him he was going to die. The important thing for Levenson now was whether he could transform the anger he had felt for the doctor into love. He eventually succeeded, and realized at that moment he was indeed happy.
For three months, the amount of time he was supposed to have left to live, he sat in his home and brought up every moment of his life to dissolve negative emotions he had had. As he focused his efforts to transform negative emotions into love, his heart overflowed with happiness and love.
Finally he was led into an a world of quiet inner peace where he realized that his physical manifestation as “Lester Levenson” was not his deepest, truest nature. He understood that he was not his body or his thoughts or emotions. He was a consciousness that was eternal.
He felt a need to share what he had experienced. He spoke at seminars; and thousands of people came to hear his story. After the bought the SIMC land in 1958, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designed the original rows of small housing units, built into a hillside and blending in perfectly to be completely harmonious with the land. Here Levenson told people of his experiences and shared the methods by which they might also experience the realizations that he had had.
The “Sedona Method” of meditation became widely known, with some of his closest students in New York moving to Sedona to be near him. One of them, Dr. David Hawkins, is the well known author of Power vs. Force, who worked with Nobel Prize winning physicist Linus Pauling. Levenson lived another 42 years after his “death sentence,” leaving his physical body in 1994.