Balmi Luni > Balmi's Quotes

“When you need to be loved, you take love wherever you can find it. When you are desperate to be loved, feel love, know love, you seek out what you think love should look like. When you find love, or what you think love is, you will lie, kill, and steal to keep it. But learning about real love comes from within. It cannot be given. It cannot be taken away. It grows from your ability to re-create within yourself, the essence of loving experiences you have had in your life.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“Your willingness to look at your darkness is what empowers you to change.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“Everything that happens to you is a reflection of what you believe about yourself. We cannot outperform our level of self-esteem. We cannot draw to ourselves more than we think we are worth.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“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”
― Iyanla Vanzant, Yesterday, I Cried

“The only way to get what you really want is to let go of what you don't want.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“Wind is lord and change is sovereign of the strand.”
― Algernon Charles Swinburne

“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

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

“…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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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