Stephen Levine

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

[D]on__ 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)

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

Often when we hear people speak about meditation, we hear about wisdom, we hear about knowledge. But what, actually, is the effect, what__ the use, of wisdom or knowledge? Understanding. When you understand mind, you__e not at its mercy. When you don__ understand, you__e lost in the midst of it.

Meditation is for many a foreign concept, somehow distant and foreboding, seemingly impossible to participate in. But another word for meditation is simply awareness. Meditation is awareness.

The mind is a useful tool but not a very good friend.

That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom. (116)

Until we find out who was born this time around, it seems irrelevant to seek earlier identities. I have heard many people speak of who they believe they were in previous incarnations, but they seem to have very little idea of who they are in this one. . . . Let__ take one life at a time. Perhaps the best way to do that is to live as though there were no afterlife or reincarnation. To live as though this moment was all that was allotted. (132)

There is nothing noble about suffering except the love and forgiveness with which we meet it. Many believe that if they are suffering they are closer to God, but I have met very few who could keep their heart open to their suffering enough for that to be true. (124)

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)

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definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay.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

Relate to the fear, not just from it. (50)

Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence. (29)

[C]oncepts of dying in to a heaven or hell seem a good deal more political than spiritual. (124)

Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge.

Love is not what we become but who we already are.

Our life is composed of events and states of mind. How ewe appraise our life from our deathbed will be predicated not only on what came to us in life but how we lived with it. It will not be simply illness or health, riches or poverty, good luck or bad, which ultimately define whether we believe we have had a good life or not, but the quality of our relationship to these situations: the attitudes of our states of mind. (34)

I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)