Noah Levine is an American Buddhist teacher, writer, and counselor. Best known for his intersection of punk ideology and Buddhist philosophy, he is the creator of Refuge Recovery—a Buddhist-inspired approach to addiction recovery.
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Feb 10, 2020 Compassion is totally natural on some level, and it’s somewhat foreign when it comes to meeting our own pain with tenderness, care, friendliness, our survival instinct when we feel pain, is to hate it.
Dec 30 2019 Letting go is always the right thing to do. If your desire is to not suffer, the solution is always let go. “Let go” It's so easy to say, “let go”, such a simple idea.
The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one’s own mind and heart.
Meditation is a necessity for creating positive change, but we are not meditating merely to get good at meditation, or to have pleasant spiritual experiences. We are, as Gandhi put it, trying to “be the change we wish to see in the world.”
The path of Refuge Recovery begins with the First Truth: addiction creates suffering. This is not a philosophy. It is a practice; it demands action. We must understand, acknowledge, admit, and accept all the ways addiction has caused suffering in our lives.
As Noah Levine says, it may be that all we can do is make wise choices as to who we think will bring about less suffering and confusion to the world. That, he says, is where our Buddhist practice becomes a form of engaged rebellion.
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We must not confuse letting go of past injuries with feeling an obligation to let the injurers back into our life. The freedom of forgiveness often includes a firm boundary and loving distance from those who have harmed us.
When we practice loving-kindness, says Noah Levine, we change for the better—and so does our world.
All beings are responsible for their own actions. Suffering or happiness is created through one’s relationship to experience, not by experience itself. The freedom and happiness of others is dependent on their actions, not on my wishes for them.
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Photo Credit: Photograph by Wikimedia user SiddharthaSmith / Distributed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 International license