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

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
Pain
Mother
Children
Acknowledges
Heart
Frightened
Much
Acknowledge
Mind
Toward
Like
Child
Turns

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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.
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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.
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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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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)
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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.
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I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)
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If you can find the God inside yourself, you can find the God inside everybody.
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The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time.
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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.
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That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom. (116)
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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
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Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.
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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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