Showing posts with label Stephen Levine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen Levine. Show all posts

Monday, May 9, 2022

opening to suffering

 
 
 
 
 
 

 



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, our holding released, our grasping seen with little surprise or judgement.
 
 The vastness of our being meeting each moment wholeheartedly 
whether it holds pleasure or pain. Then the healing goes deeper 
than we ever imagined, deeper than we ever dreamed.
 
The teaching of opening mindfully, heartfully, to our deepest suffering
 is part of our essential healing. The deepening awareness brings attention
 to part of the mind that had lost heart, a hidden part of ourselves 
which felt disconnected from itself and all else. It allows access to what
 was closed off, to the pain that was so deep and had been pushed deeper yet
 with each moment of self negation and suppression.
 
 
 
 
 
~ Stephen Levine
from Healing into Life and Death
 art by Kan Srijira
 
 
 
 



Wednesday, December 16, 2020

just below our fear







There are words in us
that don't know how
to get to the surface.
Words hidden in our marrow
afraid to show themselves
concerned the world will end
if they are uttered.
Words that cross 
the river of pain
that wish to tell the world
how much love is hidden
just below our fear.
And some of these words
sometimes find their way
to live among us
in the trust to hear them,
words that spin our compass
anger and loneliness redirected
by insight and forgiveness,
words like mercy and compassion,
words we never trusted to exist.
Words hide in the strangest places,
under stones, in clouds,
in a moment of a friend's kindness,
in a moment to your generosity;
in poems beginning their first line
climbing happily into the heart singing
how close the moon comes 
when we trust the night.
Words even hide in other words.
 Mercy hides in the hesitant pause,
questioning how much can be trusted
to the tongue, to the pen.
Invoking their true voice
rise to the surface
to sing their original song.




 ~ Stephen Levine
from Becoming Kuan Yin



Tuesday, October 13, 2020

making the darkness conscious

 


 
 
 
 
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious.
The later procedure, however,
 is disagreeable and therefore not popular.


~ Carl Jung
from The Philosophical Tree 
 
 
When we turn toward our pain instead of away from it,
self-mercy enters those parts of ourselves we had closed off, withdrawn from,
or abandoned to feelings of impotence. When it seems there is nowhere
 else to turn, when all our prayers and strategies seem to be of little avail,
 something deeper arises: a mercy that leads toward the heart.

Without mercy (a quality of loving kindness that is the tender
 acceptance of even that which might be otherwise unacceptable) as 
an alternative to holding to our pain, we abandon those most painful 
memories within us to harsh judgment and merciless reflection.

The appearance of mercy, ...compassion... is absolutely unmistakable
as we learn to open into that which once closed us off.
 
Memories may always be bittersweet, but we may also find peace
 flickering, at the edges of what once caused us agitation. 
Healing, then, becomes not the absence of pain but the 
increased ability to meet it with mercy instead of loathing.
No one can wholly remove our pain. All we can do is 
increase the spaciousness of mind and heart in which it 
is allowed to decompress. 

We  meet ourselves  with simple kindness that confounds
our addiction to critical self-judgement.  We find ourselves
more likely to meet others' confusion and helplessness 
open-heartedly.  We find less need for others or ourselves
to be different in order to be loved.

We find ourselves.



~ Stephen Levine
from Unattended Sorrow
 
 
 



Friday, June 12, 2020

in the realm of the passing away









This is the realm of the passing away.  All that 
exists does not for long.
Whatever comes into this world never stops sliding
toward the edge of eternity.
Form arises from formlessness and passes back,
arising and dissolving in a few dance steps between
creation and destruction.

We are born passing away.
Seedlings and deadfall all face forward.
Earthworms eat what remains.
We sing not for that which dies but for that which 
never does.




~ Stephen Livine
from Breaking the Drought: 
Visions of Grace



Wednesday, April 29, 2020

not enemies







We are not enemies
though parents told us so

We are not enemies 
though they taught us so as school

We are not enemies
just because the pulpit insists

We are not enemies
though strangers toss epithets

We are not enemies
though even love goes sour

We are not enemies
just because we can't contain our pain

We are not enemies
though we meet short of our sameness,
the best of each of us live in the other.

If we can forgive ourselves
we can forgive anyone.





~ Stephen Levine
from Breaking the Drought



 

Monday, August 5, 2019

allowing heartbreak allows healing






There come a point where it is more important to just let our heart break
 and get on with it than to keep trying to figure out why 
we are so often in pain or who's at fault and what sort of punishment they deserve.  

It takes a lot of work to get healed, to merge the heart and the disheartened.  
But even in the least observation, it becomes clear that no one needs any excuse
 for being in so much pain.  Wherever there is expectation or broken hope,
 disappointment or loss, there is the stuff of Shakespearean malady.

Healing is entering, with mercy and awareness, 
into those areas of ourselves we have withdrawn from with fear
 and a sense of helplessness. Healing is reoccupying those parts of ourselves
 that we abandoned because of mental or physical pain.
 Healing is replacing our merciless reactions with a merciful response.

Without mercy, we don't have a chance.  
And that chance is the breadth of heart that is our birthright.




~ Stephen Levine
from Untended Sorrow
art by Van Gogh



 

Thursday, August 1, 2019

floating on an idea of me






fall into the breath,
stilled mind sank into
a bright bubble, sinking
down through the sea,
through ocean bottom,
through the minds floor.
no control

nothing here of my own
floating on the idea of me
just awareness observing
thoughts, ideas, perceptions
appearing and disappearing
on the surface of
an imagined thinker

free from entanglement
watching the habitual trinkets
the call and response of senses
immersed within absolute stillness
beyond name and form
a Pure Land
 of our inherent nature


 
 ~ adapted form Becoming Kuan Yin
by Stephen Levine


 

Sunday, July 28, 2019

Becoming Kuan Yin - The evolution of Compassion







the Chinese character for "Benevolence."  
It is the character that represent "person" along with that of the number "2."  
Recognizing that when 2 are present, benevolence is a natural occurrence.  
Benevolence eases duality. It is one of the Maha Viharas,
 great abodes of the true heart.


To know Kuan Yin we need to let go of all that is unloved, 

judged, forged from old mind clingings. She is the unconditional love 
behind the conditioned mind.
Some ancient force is called forth in surrendering
 hindrance after hindrance of our secret wretchedness 
and obvious suffering, to yield to the light of our Original Heart.



~ Stephen Levine







Sunday, June 9, 2019

no superstition in the breath






Sometimes when I meditate
there is nothing left of me
but the breath
all the rest of me inseparable
from all the rest of you.

There is no superstition in the breath
only in the mind and body surrounding.

The mind and body are suspicious,
full of fables and myths;
but there is no superstition in the breath.
With each exhalation
wordless sensation migrates
from the nostrils to the belly and back again
brings water to the fields,
brings breath down the cord from mother to child,
brings blood to the sacrifice of love and war,
brings bright offerings to the temple;
sings into the dark,
assuring the aspirant bent in the shadow
the breath that never ends,
whether dropped to our knees below the cross,
or easy in the slippers of the Beloved,
and certainly behind the diamond brow,
sighs the sigh heard 'round the world.

That famous ten percent we are supposed 
to have use of our brain seems true
of the rest of the body and mind as well.
We occupy very little of ourselves
A few percent perhaps...

We barely inhabit the breath
living in the shallows of our life.
Our ordinary breath hollowed by fear and anger,
lost behind the nostrils somewhere near the heart,
lost somewhere between the back of the cave 
and to top of Jacob's ladder...our cells
are starving for breath.

The breath does not lie.
It has nothing to say
It simply is
overflowing with sensation
met crossing the bright field
inviting the body and the rest of the mind
to enter subtle as the breath
subtler levels of being...

The fable of each inhalation, like the first
firing of the imagination (full of the superstition of "I")
and animating the body; that first inhalation
still being drawn...
And last exhalation suspended in myth
begun to be expelled soon after birth.

Taking each breath as if it were the last,
before we enter the enormity at the center
of each breath.

Though superstition surrounds the first breath
and is rarely discarded even with the last,
these two breaths - separated by joyful swoons
and plaintive cries - come together in the great silence,
the bitter tears before and after
the great peace between breaths
when mind slows to wisdom and the body
knows itself, as T. S. Eliot nearly says,
for the very first time.

The wise man, the flying woman, dwells
in the space between breaths as faint echoes
drop over the edge and fade into
the vast chasm of silence.

Letting go at the end of each out-breath
stills the enormity.

Occasionally in the meditation hall my breath
nearly stopped.  I needed nothing more 
as thought stilled, and the wind-blown mind
settled.  As the drum stopped.
Breath and fear surrendered.
"If the breath never returns
the universe will breath for me."

Overcoming the distrust, not holding
to the last breath or grasping at the next.
Letting go completely of control of the breath.
Trusting a breath unshaped by pretense
or superstition, a breath that breaths itself
from the oceanic tides between planets ...
a breath like the one before
the one that created the universe,
that began thought, and forgot
its original face.



~Stephen Levine
from Breaking the Drought
photo by Diane Varner


Friday, December 28, 2018

half life





We walk through half our life
as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open
our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are
we watch the ghost of us drift
from room to room
through friends and lovers
never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean
or meaning half we say
we dream ourselves
from birth to birth
seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks
and the heart can not abide
a moment longer
as the rest of us awakens,
summoned from the dream,
not half caring for anything but love.





- Stephen Levine
from Breaking the Drought


Saturday, October 13, 2018

millennium blessing







There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

And that is what we sing about.
 
 
 
~ Stephen Levine 
from Breaking the Drought: Visions of Grace
 
 
 

Saturday, April 27, 2013

there is none





Many have gone mad looking for a solid center,
but there is none.
We think of centering as only a continual narrowing
of focus until we touch the pearl
but in practice it is often a continual expansion
of focus until we become the ocean.

Our center is vast space, boundless awareness
indistinguishable from unconditional love.

Of course I play the fool when I dare allow
consciousness to describe itself!  Isn't that the birth
of the ego, the "I am this" that closed behind us
when we entered the body?



~ Stephen Levine



Monday, July 16, 2012

dispatches from the front





When told that grace is our original face
and the Beloved our true body
the "ripe buffoon" breaks through
and dances with those who reject their foolishness.
He is trying to help.  But only the wandering minstrel
and the dervishing chimney-sweep can be trusted.
Only mercy.  Only the god-drunken who are ruined
for life and can't help but love.
Only Dionysius and the lotus.

In the dark room he called out uncertainly,
"Bark twice if you are God!"





~ Stephen Levine
from Breaking the Drought