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

Categorized in : World Want Different

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.

Stephen Levine

dust art fall

When your fear touches someone's pain it becomes pity;

Stephen Levine

pain compassion inspirational

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

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

maps life-and-love jesus

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definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay.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

definitions pain healing

Letting the last breath come.

Stephen Levine

rest-in-peace space light

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

intuition next rooms

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

suffering letting-go mean

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?

Stephen Levine

motivational inspirational friendship

Death is just a change in lifestyles.

Stephen Levine

change life death

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

balance mind letting-go

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

attachment mind feelings

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

Stephen Levine

suffering should-have might

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

going-away pain praying

Love is not what we become but who we already are

Stephen Levine

love-you love-is love

Our work is to keep our hearts open in hell.

Stephen Levine

hell heart

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

appreciation lying cheating

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

partners distance heart

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)

Stephen Levine

ongoing mindfulness joy