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

Stephen Levine

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Stephen Levine
Age: 78 †
Born: 1937
Born: July 17
Died: 2016
Died: January 17
Poet
Screenwriter
the United States of America
Stephan Levine
Caused
Holding
Suffering
Might
Things

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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.
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How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)
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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.
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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.
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Relate to the fear, not just from it. (50)
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When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred.
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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.
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That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom. (116)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.
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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.
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Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There is nothing to do but be.
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It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.
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