Stephen Levine Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Healing comes when we meet our wounded places with compassion.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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)

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

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.

Love is not what we become but who we already are

Our work is to keep our hearts open in hell.

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

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

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.

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

Death is just a change in lifestyles.

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.