Stephen levine quotes

The saddest part about being human is not paying attention. Presence is the gift of life.

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.

To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear.

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.

Healing comes when we meet our wounded places with compassion.

[D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95)

Whatever prepares you for death enhances life.

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definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay.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)

In all serious disease states we find a concomitant low oxygen state... Low oxygen in the body tissues is a sure indicator for disease...Hypoxia, or lack of oxygen in the tissues, is the fundamental cause for all degenerative disease. Oxygen is the source of life to all cells.

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

Healing is bringing mercy and Awareness into that which we have held in judgment and fear.

The only service you can do for anyone is to remind them of their true nature.

Buddha nature, is like the sun which is always shining, always present, though often obscured. We are blocked from our natural light by the clouds of thought and longing and fear; the overcast of the conditioned mind; the hurricane of I am.

There is nothing noble about suffering except the love and forgiveness with which we meet it. Many believe that if they are suffering they are closer to God, but I have met very few who could keep their heart open to their suffering enough for that to be true. (124)

Letting ourselves be forgiven is one of the most difficult healings we will undertake. And one of the most fruitful. (79)

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.

Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it. (74)

If you can find the God inside yourself, you can find the God inside everybody.

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)

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.

You can call it wisdom, or sanity, or health, or enlightenment. I use the word God as a short-cut. I am comfortable with the word God because I don't have the foggiest idea of what it means.

It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!

If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time.

...healing comes not from being loving but from being itself. It is not a case of being clear but of clear being. This healing is not about anything else but being itself. Nothing separate, no edges, nothing to limit healing. Entering, in moments, the realm of pure being, the gateless gate swings open- beyond life and death, our original face shines back at us.

Letting the last breath come. Letting the last breath go. Dissolving, dissolving into vast space, the light body released from its heavier form. A sense of connectedness with all that is, all sense of separation dissolved in the vastness of being. Each breath melting into space as though it were the last.

People ask what must they become to be loving. The answer is ‘nothing.’ It is a process of letting go of what you thought you had become and allowing your true nature to float to the surface naturally.

There is a delicate balance that we need to honor as we try to find meaning in any event or state of mind: Many people confuse finding meaning with finding a reason, putting our finger on something or someone for blame.

[D]on’t cling to your self-righteous suffering, let it go. . . . Nothing is too good to be true, let yourself be forgiven. To the degree you insist that you must suffer, you insist on the suffering of others as well. (90)

Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence. (29)

When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred.

Our work is to keep our hearts open in hell.

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)

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.

There is nothing to do but be.

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.

Oxygen plays a pivotal role in the proper functioning of the immune system. We can look at oxygen deficiency as the single greatest cause of all diseases.

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)

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.

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.

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.

Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.

When we turn to our innate wisdom for the harmony of mind and gut, we heal the entrance to the heart as it seeks to beat in rhythm with the world.

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?"

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.

The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.

Forgiveness is mental floss! Build the capacity to forgive slowly - start with little unkind acts, otherwise you'll sabotage yourself. When we forgive, we forgive the actor, not the action.

I have seen many die, surrounded by loved ones, and their last words were ‘I love you.’ There were some who could no longer speak yet with their eyes and soft smile left behind that same healing message. I have been in rooms where those who were dying made it feel like sacred ground. (26)

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?

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.

I have seem even those who have long since abjured God die in grace. . . . Atheists don't use their drying to bargain for a better seat at the table; indeed they may not even believe supper is being served. They are not storing up 'merit.'; They just smile because their heart is ripe. They are kind for no particular reason; they just love.

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.

Acting from the appropriateness of the heart, we are freed from the neediness of the mind.

Gratitude is the state of mind of thankfulness. As it is cultivated, we experience an increase in our "sympathetic joy," our happiness at another's happiness. Just as in the cultivation of compassion, we may feel the pain of others, so we may begin to feel their joy as well. And it doesn't stop there.

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.

Always try to see yourself through God's eyes.

Death is just a change in lifestyles.

Relate to the fear, not just from it. (50)

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.

Love is not what we become but who we already are

When the heart acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child.

Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There is nothing to do but be.

Death is perfectly safe. (55)

That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom. (116)

We've all been should upon enough.

It is not for the concept, but for the experience, that we use the term the Beloved. The experience of this enormity we falteringly label divine is unconditioned love. Absolute openness, unbounded mercy and compassion. We use this concept, not to name the unnameable vastness of being-- our greatest joy-- but to acknowledge and claim as our birthright the wonders and healings within.

God is not someone or something separate but is the suchness in each moment, the underlying reality.

How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)

Our addiction to always being right is a great block to the truth. It keeps us from the kind of openness that comes from confidence in our natural wisdom.

Quoting son, Noah Levine: Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to live or die, the work is always the same. (25)

Meditation allows us to directly participate in our lives instead of living life as an afterthought.

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.

Understanding is the ultimate seduction of the mind. Go to the truth beyond the mind.

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.

Enlightenment is freedom, the thought of enlightenment is prison. The truth exists in the moment. If we´re anywhere else, seeking something outside of the moment, we´re in prison.

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 yourself

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.

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.

I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)

Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.

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)

Meditation isn't to disappear into the light. Meditation is to see all of what we are.

What is it like after you die? Just like it was before you were born.

When your fear touches someone's pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone's pain, it becomes compassion. To train in compassion, then, is to know all beings are the same and suffer in similar ways, to honor all those who suffer, and to know you are neither separate from nor superior to anyone.