Top 85 Stephen Levine Quotes
#1. How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)
Stephen Levine
#3. 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.
Stephen Levine
#4. It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!
Stephen Levine
#5. 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)
Stephen Levine
#6. Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There is nothing to do but be.
Stephen Levine
#7. Approach illness as an experiment in staying present, in opening your heart in hell. Discuss how we fear our hidden pain even more than death, and how noting and mindfulness brings that pain to the surface where it can be healed.
Stephen Levine
#8. remember that what will die in a year's time is not our essential being but our ability to interact physically with those we love and cherish. You
Stephen Levine
#9. I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)
Stephen Levine
#10. 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.
Stephen Levine
#11. 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)
Stephen Levine
#12. To heal is to touch with love that which was previously touched by fear.
Stephen Levine
#13. Pity arises from meeting pain with fear. Compassion comes when you meet it with love.
Stephen Levine
#14. 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
Stephen Levine
#15. Meditation allows us to directly participate in our lives instead of living life as an afterthought.
Stephen Levine
#16. Once we can see the major shifts from liking to disliking, from opened to close, we will be able to acknowledge them before they gain momentum.
Stephen Levine
#17. 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.
Stephen Levine
#20. [T]hose who insist they've got their 'shit together' are usually standing in it at the time. (16)
Stephen Levine
#21. [C]oncepts of dying in to a heaven or hell seem a good deal more political than spiritual. (124)
Stephen Levine
#22. Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it. (74)
Stephen Levine
#23. 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.
Stephen Levine
#25. Acting from the appropriateness of the heart, we are freed from the neediness of the mind.
Stephen Levine
#27. Letting ourselves be forgiven is one of the most difficult healings we will undertake. And one of the most fruitful. (79)
Stephen Levine
#28. The only service you can do for anyone is to remind them of their true nature.
Stephen Levine
#29. Open yourself to discomfort. Meet it with mercy, not fear. Recognize that when our pain most calls for our embrace, we are often the least present. Soften, enter, and explore, and continue softening to make room for your life.
Stephen Levine
#30. 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.
Stephen Levine
#32. If you can find the God inside yourself, you can find the God inside everybody.
Stephen Levine
#33. 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.
Stephen Levine
#34. When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred.
Stephen Levine
#36. That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom. (116)
Stephen Levine
#37. 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)
Stephen Levine
#38. 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.
Stephen Levine
#39. God is not someone or something separate but is the suchness in each moment, the underlying reality.
Stephen Levine
#40. If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time.
Stephen Levine
#42. 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?
Stephen Levine
#43. 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.
Stephen Levine
#44. Practice daily forgiveness and gratitude meditations in relationship to both pleasant and unpleasant memories. Listen to your life song among the insights that hum through the mind.
Stephen Levine
#45. 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.
Stephen Levine
#46. The mind is a useful tool but not a very good friend.
Stephen Levine
#47. Healing comes when we meet our wounded places with compassion.
Stephen Levine
#48. When the heart acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child.
Stephen Levine
#49. Often when we hear people speak about meditation, we hear about wisdom, we hear about knowledge. But what, actually, is the effect, what's the use, of wisdom or knowledge? Understanding. When you understand mind, you're not at its mercy. When you don't understand, you're lost in the midst of it.
Stephen Levine
#50. The secret of chanting is in the listening, not the voicing, and a circuit is completed between mind and heart that opens intuition and gently increases the volume of the still small voice within.
Stephen Levine
#51. 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.
Stephen Levine
#52. Understanding is the ultimate seduction of the mind. Go to the truth beyond the mind.
Stephen Levine
#53. The basis of the practice is to directly participate in each moment as it occurs with as much awareness and understanding as possible.
Stephen Levine
#54. Meditation is for many a foreign concept, somehow distant and foreboding, seemingly impossible to participate in. But another word for meditation is simply awareness. Meditation is awareness.
Stephen Levine
#55. [D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95)
Stephen Levine
#56. 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.
Stephen Levine
#57. As we begin to see where we have been absent from life, increasing possibilities audition for our approval.
Stephen Levine
#59. 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)
Stephen Levine
#60. Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.
Stephen Levine
#61. The saddest part about being human is not paying attention. Presence is the gift of life.
Stephen Levine
#62. 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.
Stephen Levine
#63. 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.
Stephen Levine
#64. 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.
Stephen Levine
#65. We see not just that which is uninjured, but that within us which is uninjurable.
Stephen Levine
#66. What is it like after you die? Just like it was before you were born.
Stephen Levine
#67. 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)
Stephen Levine
#68. 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.
Stephen Levine
#69. 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.
Stephen Levine
#70. Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.
Stephen Levine
#71. 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.
Stephen Levine
#72. 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.
Stephen Levine
#73. Having written extensively about the practice of mindfulness in A Gradual Awakening I suggest that you refine your practice with this book as well as Jack Kornfield's excellent A Path with Heart. We
Stephen Levine
#74. 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.
Stephen Levine
#75. 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.
Stephen Levine
#76. Healing is bringing mercy and Awareness into that which we have held in judgment and fear.
Stephen Levine
#77. As Nisargadatta said, 'The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it." Often
Stephen Levine
#78. [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)
Stephen Levine
#79. 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.
Stephen Levine
#80. Aging teaches us to follow our life force inward. It is an object lesson in how awareness is gradually drawn towards the center ...
Stephen Levine
#81. For all of us there is an approach to the seemingly unapproachable. This is the life-affirming work of learning to stay present even under difficult circumstances, to embrace mental, physical, and spiritual pain using techniques suitable for each particular level of discomfort.
Stephen Levine
#82. When your fear touches someone's pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone's pain, it become compassion.
Stephen Levine
#83. 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.
Stephen Levine
#84. 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.
Stephen Levine
#85. 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)
Stephen Levine
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