Stephen Levine Quotes

You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things

I think that people always say when people pass away that time heals all wounds. And that's probably the biggest lie. It's not true. I think we all need to remember that it is always still tough, and it's like losing a piece of your heart.

You can't avoid pain, but you can choose to overcome it.

You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.

Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.

I was poisoning myself with alcohol and medicating myself. I was trying to numb things. I was trying not to feel things, and that's ridiculous. It's one of the dumbest things you can do, because all you're doing is postponing the inevitable. Someday you'll have to look all those things in the eye rather than try to numb the pain.

The system [of thought] doesn't stay with the difficult problem that produces unpleasant feelings. It's conditioned somehow to move as fast as it can toward more pleasant feelings, without actually facing the thing that's making the unpleasant feeling.

In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us.

Exactly! We run or we lose ourselves in something, somebody, anything to try and ease our pain.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

For me, what Macbeth is about is people who cannot face their fears and pain and instead of facing them and going beyond, they just run away and they try to cover this with power and violence, but it doesn't work.

To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life.

Pain is one of life's great lessons. You need to know how you'll react to the negatives in your life. Only then will you learn from the pain, and the next time it happens, you can speed up your healing process.

You remind me of someone with a bad toothache who's hitting herself in the head with a hammer to distract herself from the pain in her mouth.

People will do more to avoid pain than they will do to gain pleasure.

A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

You can't demand truth and reconciliation. You have to demand truth - people have to hear it, and then they have to want to reconcile themselves to that truth.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

Forgiveness is something that we are often asked to grant and very few of us ever have the roadmap of how to get from the pain that we have experienced to being able to forgive someone.

Grief will happen either as an open healing wound or a closed festering wound, either honestly or dishonestly, either appropriately or inappropriately. But emotions will be expressed.

if we cultivate compassion for those who have hurt us, we have the possibility of overcoming our anger,pain, and fear. compassion is a great medicine.

You slammed my face down on the barbecue grill, now my scars are all healing, but my heart never will.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

You can run away from home But you can't run away from your pain I sit here alone There's always someone else to blame.

The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.