A Quote by Peter A. Levine

Though suffering and trauma are not identical, the Buddha's insight into the nature of suffering can provide a powerful mirror for examining the effects of trauma in your life. The Buddha's basic teaching offers guidance for healing our trauma and recovering a sense of wholeness.

Peter A. Levine

Quote Topics

Basic Effects Examining Guidance Healing Identical Insight Life Mirror Nature Offers Our Powerful Provide Recovering Sense Suffering Teaching Though Trauma Wholeness Your

Quote Author

Peter A. Levine
American - Psychologist

If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma. And we're able to accept trauma with certain groups, like with soldiers, for instance - we understand that they face trauma and that trauma can be connected to things like depression or acts of violence later on in life.

Matthew Desmond

I don't want to get into splitting hairs. Trauma is trauma. I'm not in a position to quantify or qualify people's trauma.

Tarana Burke

When you read enough stories about people who have been through different levels of trauma, and it doesn't matter what the history is, trauma is trauma, there's always this freeing of the spirit.

Matana Roberts

When our response to all trauma is to call the police, then that gets us into a cycle of perpetuating trauma. Mental health trauma is different from somebody breaking into a store. Those are not the same things, and our response has to be different.

DeRay Mckesson

This stereotype that Black and brown boys and girls are dangerous or threatening has normalized systems of trauma: the cradle to prison pipeline, foster care, youth detention, and being tried and sentenced as adults. We treat trauma with more trauma.

Cori Bush

I have come to the conclusion that human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening - a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation. I have little doubt that as individuals, families, communities, and even nations, we have the capacity to learn how to heal and prevent much of the damage done by trauma. In so doing, we will significantly increase our ability to achieve both our individual and collective dreams.

Peter A. Levine

We [Americans] have a historical trauma when it comes to the past relationships when it comes to Native Americans and the history of how America was created. With this film, it's nice to see that the trauma is presented from a white male that was in the Civil War and that trauma affects him in a way that still exists.

Adam Beach

I think trauma gets a reductive treatment. We tend to think only violence or molestation or total abandonment qualify as "childhood trauma," but there are so many ruptures and disturbances in childhood that imprint themselves on us. Attachment begets trauma, in that broader sense, and so if we've ever been dependent on anyone, I think there is an Imago blueprint in us somewhere.

Melissa Febos

I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me.

Sting

Buddha nature is not something that we possess, nor is it something we can be. It is the nature of things, just as they are. To realize our buddha nature, to live in accord with this awakening, is the truth that alleviates suffering in the world.

Geoffrey Shugen Arnold

Part of what makes a situation traumatic is not talking about it. Talking reduces trauma symptoms. When we don't talk about trauma, we remain emotionally illiterate. Our most powerful feelings go unnamed and unspoken.

Tian Dayton

The buddha called suffering a holy truth, because our suffering has the capacity of showing us the path to liberation. Embrace your suffering and let it reveal to you the way to peace.

Nhat Hanh

The second noble truth states that we must discover why we are suffering. We must cultivate the courage to look deeply, with clarity and courage, into our own suffering. We often hold the tacit assumption that all of our suffering stems from events in the past. But, whatever the initial seed of trauma, the deeper truth is that our suffering is more closely a result of how we deal with the effect these past events have on us in the present.

Peter A. Levine

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.