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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.

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
Things
Precious
Partners
Relationships
Distance
Aspect
Difficult
Heart
Partner
Make
Aspects

More quotes by Stephen Levine

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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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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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Whatever prepares you for death enhances life.
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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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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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The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.
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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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Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.
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How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)
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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.
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[D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95)
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Acting from the appropriateness of the heart, we are freed from the neediness of the mind.
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It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!
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Our addiction to always being right is a great block to the truth. It keeps us from the kind of openness that comes from confidence in our natural wisdom.
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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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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 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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When the heart acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child.
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Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.
Stephen Levine