Quotes from Stephen Levine

Each day become more fully alive. Practice noting gently and nonjudgmentally throughout the day. Add mindfulness practice to soft-belly opening work: fifteen minutes soft-belly and twenty minutes watching the breath, noting the activities of the mind. Approach illness as an experiment in staying present, in opening your heart in hell. Discuss how we fear our hidden pain even more than death, and how noting and mindfulness brings that pain to the surface where it can be healed.

As we begin to see where we have been absent from life, increasing possibilities audition for our approval.

You could look the whole world over and never find anyone more deserving of love than yourself.

our birth before we die, becoming truly whole rather than just appearing to "have it together"—is more difficult.

Making room in our heart for our own pain, we make room in our heart for theirs.

There have been so few moments when life was all it was cracked up to be. So much that might have been different had the heart not been obstructed by fear.

Preparing for death is one of the most profoundly healing acts of a lifetime. For

love is the only gift worth giving.

In almost every spiritual prototype we have to go through hell on our way to pure awareness, indistinguishable from unconditional love, the Pure Land of our illuminated nature. For some, that process of awakening and "enlightening" is the experience the Taoists call "self ablaze.

To become Kuan Yin is to recognize the extreme toil and commitment that brings fruition. Her accomplishment not bestowed on her by some celestial prize committee, Zeus, or the Holy Ghost, but by the hard-earned forgoing of all earthly pleasure, to complete what Buddha called "the work to be done.

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

The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.

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.

Enlightenment is freedom, the thought of enlightenment is prison. The truth exists in the moment. If we´re anywhere else, seeking something outside of the moment, we´re in prison.

Understanding is the ultimate seduction of the mind. Go to the truth beyond the mind.

Meditation allows us to directly participate in our lives instead of living life as an afterthought.

To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear.

Letting ourselves be forgiven is one of the most difficult healings we will undertake. And one of the most fruitful. (79)

Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it. (74)

D]on't cling to your self-righteous suffering, let it go. . . . Nothing is too good to be true, let yourself be forgiven. To the degree you insist that you must suffer, you insist on the suffering of others as well. (90)

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?

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)

T]hose who insist they've got their 'shit together' are usually standing in it at the time. (16)

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)