Stephen Levine
Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.Collection: Truth
If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?
Wanting things to be otherwise is the very essence of suffering. We almost never directly experience what pain is because our reaction to it is so immediate that most of what we call pain is actually our experience of resistance to that phenomenon. And the resistance is usually a good deal more painful than the original sensation.Collection: Pain
Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.Collection: Should Have
The process of growth is, it seems, the art of falling down. Growth is measured by the gentleness and awareness with which we once again pick ourselves up, the lightness with which we dust ourselves off, the openness with which we continue and take the next unknown step, beyond our edge, beyond our holding, into the remarkable mystery of being.Collection: Art
Healing is bringing mercy and Awareness into that which we have held in judgment and fear.Collection: Healing
Nothing is more natural than grief, no emotion more common to our daily experience. It's an innate response to loss in a world where everything is impermanent.Collection: Spiritual
Buddha left a road map, Jesus left a road map, Krishna left a road map, Rand McNally left a road map. But you still have to travel the road yourselfCollection: Jesus
When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.Collection: Pain
Letting go of our suffering is the hardest work we will ever do. It is also the most fruitful. To heal means to meet ourselves in a new way -- in the newness of each moment where all is possible and nothing is limited to the old.Collection: Letting Go
Healing comes when we meet our wounded places with compassion.Collection: Healing
Non-attachment is not the elimination of desire. It is the spaciousness to allow any quality of mind, any thought or feeling, to arise without closing around it, without eliminating the pure witness of being. It is an active receptivity to life.Collection: Attachment
If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call to make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?Collection: Inspirational
The demons aren't the noise. They are our aversion to the noise...when you can accept discomfort, doing so allows a balance of mind. That surrender, that letting go of wanting anything to be other than it is right in the moment, is what frees us from hell.Collection: Letting Go
The saddest part about being human is not paying attention. Presence is the gift of life.Collection: Listening
If there is a single definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay. (48)Collection: Pain
The only service you can do for anyone is to remind them of their true nature.Collection: Can Do
Love is not what we become but who we already areCollection: Love
When the heart acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child.Collection: Mother
To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear.Collection: Heal
Our work is to keep our hearts open in hell.Collection: Heart
It is trust in our vast 'don't know' that allows room for the truth, that allows the next intuition to float to the surface.Collection: Intuition
In Chinese, the word for heart and mind is the same -- Hsin. For when the heart is open and the mind is clear they are of one substance, of one essence.Collection: Heart
There is in all our strivings a profound homesickness for God. When we touch another we touch God. When we look at a flower, its radiance, its fragrance, its stillness is another moment's experience of something deeper within. When we hold a baby, when we hear extraordinary music, when we look into the eyes of a great saint, what draws us is that deep homesickness for our true nature, for the peace and healing that is our birthright. This homesickness for God directs us toward the healing we took birth for.Collection: God
Meditation isn't to disappear into the light. Meditation is to see all of what we are.Collection: Light
When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred.Collection: Mother
If you want the other person more than anything else in the world, you're in major trouble and the relationship is a wobbly pivot. It's different if the thing you want most in the world is truth, and your partner is the person you want most in the world.Collection: Different
If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time.Collection: Inspirational
Understanding is the ultimate seduction of the mind. Go to the truth beyond the mind.Collection: Understanding
It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!Collection: Long
Until we find out who was born this time around, it seems irrelevant to seek earlier identities. I have heard many people speak of who they believe they were in previous incarnations, but they seem to have very little idea of who they are in this one. . . . Let’s take one life at a time. Perhaps the best way to do that is to live as though there were no afterlife or reincarnation. To live as though this moment was all that was allotted. (132)Collection: Believe
Hell is not fire and brimstone, not a place where you are punished for lying or cheating or stealing. Hell is wanting to be something and somewhere different from where you are.Collection: Appreciation
We are so numb we don't even know what a direct experience is. We have an experience, then we think about it and we think the thinking about it is the experience.Collection: Thinking
Meditation allows us to directly participate in our lives instead of living life as an afterthought.Collection: Inspiration
Acting from the appropriateness of the heart, we are freed from the neediness of the mind.Collection: Heart
Death is just a change in lifestyles.Collection: Life
Always try to see yourself through God's eyes.Collection: Eye
Much thought has at its root a dissatisfaction with what is. Wanting is the urge for the next moment to contain what this moment does not. When there is wanting in the mind, that moment feels incomplete. Wanting is seeing elsewhere. Completeness is being right here.Collection: Positive Thinking
Grief can have a quality of profound healing because we are forced to a depth of feeling that is usually below the threshold of awareness.Collection: Grief
Why do so many of us not give ourselves permission to be alive until we are absolutely assured that we will die? ...If we are not in [this present millisecond of life and conscious experience], we are not alive; we are merely thinking our lives. Yet we have seen so many die, looking back over their shoulders at their lives, shaking their heads and muttering in bewilderment, "What was that all about?"Collection: Life
Safety is the most unsafe spiritual path you can take. Safety keeps you numb and dead. People are caught by surprise when it is time to die. They have allowed themselves to live so little.Collection: Spiritual
Our life is composed of events and states of mind. How ewe appraise our life from our deathbed will be predicated not only on what came to us in life but how we lived with it. It will not be simply illness or health, riches or poverty, good luck or bad, which ultimately define whether we believe we have had a good life or not, but the quality of our relationship to these situations: the attitudes of our states of mind. (34)Collection: Attitude
Sometimes pain and illness are not meant to be removed. You can't second-guess God. Rather than praying for it to go away, it's often wiser to pray that you learn as much from it as you possibly can.Collection: Pain
Your distance from your partner is the distance from your heart. The things that make relationships difficult are some of the most precious aspects to us.Collection: Distance
You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity. (24)Collection: Joy
We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain we, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive. (43)Collection: Motivational
Loss is the absence of something we were once attached to. Grief is the rope burns left behind, when that which is held is pulled beyond our grasp.Collection: Grief