Mark Nepo > Quotes

“We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.

It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“…there are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“If peace comes from seeing the whole,
then misery stems from a loss of perspective.

We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe.

Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day—the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening?

It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. In truth, we begin taking nothing for granted, grateful that we have enough to eat, that we are well enough to eat. But somehow, through the living of our days, our focus narrows like a camera that shutters down, cropping out the horizon, and one day we’re miffed at a diner because the eggs are runny or the hash isn’t seasoned just the way we like.

When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we’re up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first.

In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.”
― Mark Nepo

“Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)”
― Mark Nepo, Facing the Lion, Being the Lion: Finding Inner Courage Where It Lives

“The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.”
― Mark Nepo

“Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“If I dare to hear you
I will feel you like the sun
And grow in your direction.”
― Mark Nepo

“Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.”
― Mark Nepo

“The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“Just as life is made up of day and night, and song is made up of music and silence, friendships, because they are of this world, are also made up of times of being in touch and spaces in-between. Being human, we sometimes fill these spaces with worry, or we imagine the silence is some form of punishment, or we internalize the time we are not in touch with a loved one as some unexpressed change of heart. Our minds work very hard to make something out of nothing. We can perceive silence as rejection in an instant, and then build a cold castle on that tiny imagined brick. The only release from the tensions we weave around nothing is to remain a creature of the heart. By giving voice to the river of feelings as they flow through and through, we can stay clear and open. In daily terms, we call this checking in with each other, though most of us reduce this to a grocery list: How are you today? Do you need any milk? Eggs? Juice? Toilet paper? Though we can help each other survive with such outer kindnesses, we help each other thrive when the checking in with each other comes from a list of inner kindnesses: How are you today? Do you need any affirmation? Clarity? Support? Understanding? When we ask these deeper questions directly, we wipe the mind clean of its misperceptions. Just as we must dust our belongings from time to time, we must wipe away what covers us when we are apart.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“Mysteriously, as elusive as it is, this moment--where the eye is what it sees, where the heart is what it feels--this moment shows us that what is real is sacred”
― Mark Nepo

“To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.”
― Mark Nepo

“we think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry; an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, Theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls it Inwardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love.

To know this spot of Inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.

When the film is worn through, we have moments of enlightenment, moments of wholeness, moments of Satori as the Zen sages term it, moments of clear living when inner meets outer, moments of full integrity of being, moments of complete Oneness. And whether the film is a veil of culture, of memory, of mental or religious training, of trauma or sophistication, the removal of that film and the restoration of that timeless spot of grace is the goal of all therapy and education.

Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God”
― Mark Nepo, Unlearning Back to God: Essays on Inwardness, 1985-2005

“there is a great choice that awaits us every day: whether we go around carving holes in others because we have been so painfully carved ourselves, or whether we let spirit play its song through our tender experience, enabling us to listen, as well, to the miraculous music coming through others.”
― Mark Nepo, Finding Inner Courage

“We work so hard to get somewhere, to realize a dream, to arrive at some destination, that we often forget that though some satisfaction may be waiting at the end of our endurance and effort, there is great and irreplaceable aliveness in the steps along the way.”
― Mark Nepo

“Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or so—just walk out from under the webs we've spun, the tasks we've assumed, the problems we have to solve. They'll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“Let's be in awe
which doesn't mean
anything but the courage
to gape like fish at the surface
breaking around our mouths
as we meet the air.”
― Mark Nepo

“But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.”
― Mark Nepo

“For though we stubbornly cling, believing in our moment of hunger that there is no other possibility of love, we only have to let go of what we want so badly and our life will unfold. For love is everywhere.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“life is always where we are.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

“We are broken open, or we willfully shed.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“In a world that lives like a fist
mercy is not more than waking
with your hands open.”
― Mark Nepo

“The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things.... Stop being a glass. Become a lake.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have