Mark Nepo Quotes & Sayings

We are all made up of yearning and light, searching for a way out, afraid we will be shut in or cut off or repelled back into the ground from which we are reaching. This is enough to begin: To know, before all the names and histories drape who we are, that we want to be held and left alone, again and again; held and left alone until the dance of it is how we survive and grow, like spring into winter into spring again. As — Mark Nepo

Being human, we struggle constantly to stay with the miracle of what is and not to fall constantly into the black hole of what is not. This is an ancient challenge. As the Sufi poet Ghalib said centuries ago, Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise; hearing what is not can drive you mad. — Mark Nepo

Given to air alone, the cuts of this world burn. But when we dare to enter what is deep, the bruises we carry soften and glow. In truth, the more we accept our limitations and surrender to the depths below our woundedness, the more the vastness holds us up. There is no way to know this but to dive. — Mark Nepo

The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. — Mark Nepo

I would rather be fooled than not believe. — Mark Nepo

I was raised Jewish by atheistic-agnostic parents. During this journey, I had people from all walks and all faiths try to help. A Jewish priest who I was friends with wanted to lay hands on me - I didn't ask questions about how - I just said when and where and how often do you want to do it? I didn't argue. — Mark Nepo

To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken. — Mark Nepo

To love by admitting our connection to everything is how we stay well. — 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

COMING OUT While there is much to do we are not here to do. Under the want to problem-solve is the need to being-solve. Often, with full being the problem goes away. The seed being-solves its darkness by blossoming. The heart being-solves its loneliness by loving whatever it meets. The tea being-solves the water by becoming tea. — Mark Nepo

I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air. — Mark Nepo

For only while telling the truth does the truth lighten us. When we stop, it turns massive. I left some of my bags on that corner of Green Street somewhere below the equator. Now I carry less and try to dance on my crutches. For only while loving do the pains of feeling lighten. — Mark Nepo

Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them. — Mark Nepo

Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak. — Mark Nepo

Living is the original art. As a young man I wanted to be a poet and I learned along the way that I already was a poet. — Mark Nepo

The things that can restore us have to get in, too. This is what the wisdom of an open heart is all about. All the spiritual traditions speak of this but I love the Tibetan tradition: "A spiritual warrior always has a crack in his heart because that is how the mysteries can get in." — Mark Nepo

Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand. - SENG-TS'AN — Mark Nepo

As the seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way. — Mark Nepo

The work of prayer, when we feel least like praying, is neither to inflate or deflate the world or ourselves, but to restore our connection to the powerful currents of life. — Mark Nepo

being articulate is not a facility of language but a fidelity to vision. And so we are all articulate when finding the courage to say what we see. — Mark Nepo

The world needs awakened souls the way a body needs healthy cells. — Mark Nepo

In the way that I experience life, the physical world is really just the tip of the iceberg of reality. Whether it's trees or stones or water or animals or stars, everything has an ineffable interior quality. — Mark Nepo

A love astounds us or a pain consumes us and we forget that we glow on our own. — Mark Nepo

I laugh when I think of how many hours I have spent in my life weaving storylines that never came true until, like weeds, they covered my heart. — Mark Nepo

The humanitarian Carol Hegedus reminds us, Our purpose is that which we most passionately are when we pay attention to our deepest selves. — Mark Nepo

Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light. — 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

In the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones. - PABLO NERUDA — Mark Nepo

Often we find it easier to think our way around things rather than to feel our way through them: — Mark Nepo

There is a gravity of spirit that pulls the essence of who we are into being. Our job, like all our sister creatures, is to find the abundance of air and water and light, and to unfold what is already within us. — Mark Nepo

I didn't know the language of my own wisdom. I wanted to be loved and after all the various relationships I went through, I finally realized I am love. I carry love. — Mark Nepo

The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind. — Mark Nepo

No amount of thinking can stop thinking. — Mark Nepo

Whether through the patterns left in snow, or geese honking in the dark, or through the brilliant wet leaf that hits your face the moment you are questioning your worth, the quiet teachers are everywhere, pointing us to the unlived portion of our lives. When we think we are in charge, the lessons dissolve as accidents or coincidence. But when we're humble enough to welcome the connections, the glass that breaks across the room is offering us direction, giving us a clue to the story we are in. — Mark Nepo

Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth. — Mark Nepo

Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other ... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone. — Mark Nepo

The heart doesn't know it's expanding with compassion anymore than a hawk spreading its swings knows it's being a hawk. Nor does someone acting out of love often realize they are being kind. — Mark Nepo

The eye can see what we have in common or focus on what keeps us apart. And the heart can feel what joins us with everything or replay its many cuts. And the tongue can praise the wind or warn against the storm, can praise the sea or dread the flood. — Mark Nepo

Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal. — Mark Nepo

Can we listen to each other the way veins listen to blood? — Mark Nepo

Before we can count we are taught to be grateful for what others do. As we are broken open by our experience, we begin to be grateful for what is, and if we live long enough and deep enough and authentically enough, gratitude becomes a way of life. — Mark Nepo

Four hundred year old trees, who draw aliveness from the earth like smoke from the heart of God, we come, not knowing you will hush our little want to be big; we come, not knowing that all the work is so much busyness of mind; all the worry, so much busyness of heart. As the sun warms anything near, being warms everything still and the great still things that outlast us make us crack like leaves of laurel releasing a fragrance that has always been. — Mark Nepo

Now, I want only to give away all that I'm blessed to know and disappear in the stream. — Mark Nepo

The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas. — Mark Nepo

We often move away from pain, which is helpful only before being hurt. Once in pain, it seems the only way out is through. Like someone falling off a boat, struggling to stay above the water only makes things worse. We must accept we are there and settle enough so we can be carried by the deep. The willingness to do this is the genesis of faith, the giving over to currents larger than us. Even fallen leaves float in lakes, demonstrating how surrender can hold us up. — Mark Nepo

Likewise, every disturbance, whether resolved or not, is making space for an inner engagement. As a shovel digs up and displaces earth, in a way that must seem violent to the earth, an interior space is revealed for the digging. In just this way, when experience opens us, it often feels violent and the urge, quite naturally, is to refill that opening, to make it the way it was. But every experience excavates a depth, which reveals its wisdom once opened to air. — Mark Nepo

To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear. — Mark Nepo

These bodies are perishable, but the Dweller in these bodies is eternal. - BHAGAVAD-GITA — Mark Nepo

Tragedy stays alive by feeling what's been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the results. — Mark Nepo

My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so. — Mark Nepo

Most sacraments are acts of breathtaking simplicity: a simple prayer, a sip of wine and a piece of bread, a single breath in meditation, a sprinkling of water on the forehead, an exchange of rings, a kind word, a blessing. Any of these, performed in a moment of mindfulness, may open the doors of our spiritual perception and bring nourishment and delight. — Mark Nepo

When we don't get what we want, there's a legitimate grieving, and then the spiritual journey truly begins, because not getting what we want breaks our self-reference; and once that is broken, we are aware that we are a part of a larger whole. It changes everything. — Mark Nepo

To distance ourselves from our experience makes our feelings a liability, while staying in conversation with our experience makes our feelings a resource. — Mark Nepo

Joy in what we do is not an added feature; it is a sign of deep health. — Mark Nepo

As Martin Luther King Jr. prophesied, "I believe what the self-centered have torn down, the other-centered will build up. — Mark Nepo

Each soul on earth is complete unto itself. — Mark Nepo

The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence. — Mark Nepo

We're quietly aching for something to celebrate — Mark Nepo

I am more than I have shown you and more than you are willing to see. Let's work our love and know each other more fully. — Mark Nepo

Integrity Integrity is the ability to listen to a place inside oneself that doesn't change, even though the life that carries it may change. - RABBI JONATHAN OMER-MAN Much of our journey throughout this book has been about discovering that place inside and cultivating the ability to listen to it, while having compassion for the life that carries it. It moves me to share the story of a troubled man who, exhausted from his suffering and confusion, asked a sage for help. The sage looked deeply into the troubled man and with compassion offered him a choice: "You may have either a map or a boat." After looking at the many pilgrims about him, all of whom seemed equally troubled, the confused man said, "I'll take the boat." The sage kissed him on the forehead and said, "Go then. You are the boat. Life is the sea." As we have discovered so many times, we have everything we need within us. This ability to listen inside is our oldest oar. You are the boat. — Mark Nepo

The many ways to listen have been reaching into me for years. To enter deep listening, I've had to learn how to keep emptying and opening, how to keep beginning. I've had to lean into all I don't understand, accepting that I am changed by what I hear. — Mark Nepo

Whether you find it through mediation or sighing over tea or just turning all your devices off for five minutes, listening is an ancient lifeline by which we are awakened time and again. Once reawakened, we more easily find our way to each other, and so help each other live. — Mark Nepo

Patience devastates us with the truth that, in essence, when we fear another, we fear ourselves; when we distrust another, we distrust ourselves; when we hurt another, we hurt ourselves; when we kill another, we kill ourselves. — Mark Nepo

There is no tomorrow, only a string of todays. Still, — Mark Nepo

In truth, always needing to stay immediate by removing what is no longer real is the working inner definition of sacrifice
giving up with reverence and compassion what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred. — Mark Nepo

Just opening quietly for moments everyday can create a path by which life can reach us, the way rain carves a little stream in the earth by which the smallest flowers are watered. — Mark Nepo

Let the miracles, even the ones we don't want or see, unfold. — Mark Nepo

Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens. — Mark Nepo

quiet pain that comes from not honoring what we know to be true, even if all we know to be true are the questions we are asking. — Mark Nepo

And where is home? Is it where we begin or where we end up? Is it where we long to be or where life puts us to make good use of our gifts? — Mark Nepo

When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own. — Mark Nepo

It has always amazed and humbled me to how the risk to bloom can seem so insurmountable beforehand and so inevitably freeing once the threshold of suffering is crossed. — Mark Nepo

Accepting what we're given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life. — Mark Nepo

Whatever our path, whatever the color or grain of our days, whatever riddles we must solve to stay alive, the secret of life somehow always has to do with the awakening and freeing of what has been asleep. — Mark Nepo

The gift of patience opens when our body, heart, and mind slow enough to move in unison. — Mark Nepo

Though the Earth is touched by everything alive, it never stops turning around the fire at its center, and though we are touched by the stories of strangers and the far-off songs of birds lost in wind, we find our way by following the spirit's voice at our center. Too much is lost in waiting for someone else to tell us that what moves us is real. — Mark Nepo

I had tried so hard to please that I never realized no one was watching. — Mark Nepo

Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment - growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking - the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn't die, but falls into the world. — Mark Nepo

Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace. — Mark Nepo

Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature. — Mark Nepo

Living is a conversation with no end, a dance with no steps, a song with no words, a reason too big for any mind. — Mark Nepo

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

By our very nature, we are a human paradox. We are a human being. The being is infinite and the human is very finite. We walk around like lightening in a bottle. — Mark Nepo

Repetition is not failure. Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind. — Mark Nepo

I was a very driven person, wanting to help and to do good, hopefully to write and teach in a meaningful way - wanting to make change. And I discovered humbly that life was changing me. — Mark Nepo

over time, staying real becomes the work of keeping our actions in the world connected to the truth of our inner being, allowing our True Self to see the light of day. — Mark Nepo

The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble. — Mark Nepo

Having an honest friend-one before whom you can dump all your heart's pockets and still feel that you are worth something-is a form of wealth that will buy you nothing but will give you everything. And mysteriously and rightly, to find such a friend, we must be such a friend. — Mark Nepo

How often do we lose sight of what we're really after, insisting on all or nothing, when there is so much abundance wherever we are and so many opportunities that can help us on our way? — Mark Nepo

Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now. — Mark Nepo

Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us. — Mark Nepo

Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color ... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are. — Mark Nepo

Whatever difficulty you face, there are time-tried ways you can listen your way through. Because listening is the doorway to everything that matters. It enlivens the heart the way breathing enlivens the lungs. We listen to awaken our heart. We do this to stay vital and alive. — Mark Nepo

If we devote ourselves to the life at hand, the rest will follow. For life, it seems, reveals itself through those willing to live. Anything else, no matter how beautiful, is just advertising. — Mark Nepo

I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling. — 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

What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed. — Mark Nepo

What was amazing was that their small delicate hands were touching, their monkey fingers leaning into each other. It was clear that it was this small sustained touch that allowed them to sleep. As long as they were touching, they could let go. I envied their trust and simplicity. There was none of the human pretense at independence. They clearly needed each other to experience peace. One stirred but didn't wake, and the other, in sleep, kept their fingers touching. How deeply rewarding the life of touch. — Mark Nepo

If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from. — Mark Nepo

A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it — Mark Nepo