Stephen Levine Quotes about Pain

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

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.

Stephen Levine

Inspirational, Pain, Compassion

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.

Stephen Levine

Pain, Essence, Suffering

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

Stephen Levine

Pain, Grief, Compassion

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definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay.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

Pain, Healing, Definitions

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

Stephen Levine

Mother, Children, Pain

Stephen Levine (2009). “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last”, p.21, Harmony

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

Pain, Going Away, Praying

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

Motivational, Pain, Healing

Stephen Levine (2009). “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last”, p.54, Harmony

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.

Stephen Levine

Gratitude, Pain, Compassion

Stephen Levine (2009). “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last”, p.109, Harmony