Mark Nepo
The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.Collection: Heart
To distance ourselves from our experience makes our feelings a liability, while staying in conversation with our experience makes our feelings a resource.Collection: Distance
No amount of thinking can stop thinking.Collection: Thinking
Love and grief enable us to feel how we're all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away.Collection: Grief
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 sacredCollection: Real
There is no getting around the fundamental fact that we need to interact with everything in order to manifest the wholeness we are born with.Collection: Order
Each of us carries some wisdom waiting to be discovered at the center of our experience. Everything we meet, if faced and held, reveals a part of that wisdom.Collection: Waiting
To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Gratitude
My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.Collection: God Love
Tragedy stays alive by feeling what's been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the results.Collection: Feelings
…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)Collection: Teacher
Repetition is not failure. Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind.Collection: Wind
Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.Collection: Blessing
Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.Collection: Heaven
The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.Collection: Life
In the same way that we have to clean wax from our ears and dirt from our eyes, we're all asked to clean out our conclusions and judgments, which block our heart from meeting the world.Collection: Block
The real & lasting practice for each of us is to remove what obstructs us so we can be who we are.Collection: Real
The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.Collection: Simple
The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.Collection: Heart
When we are forced to stop the noise around us and in us, we begin to hear everything that is not us, and this is the beginning of humility and the renewal of our soul's energy; as only by listening to all that is larger than us can we discover and feel our place in the Universe.Collection: Humility
I would want to affirm how rare and magnificent and messy it is to be alive, how there is really nothing between us and life, though so many things get in the way, and how our heart is the strongest muscle and resource we have.Collection: Heart
We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.Collection: Wall
Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.Collection: Listening
I don't personally believe in an arrived state of enlightenment. I feel that being human is a constant practice of return. We have moments of clarity, and then we're confused. We have incredibly sensitive periods of being awake, and then we're numb. Being human is a very universal and a very personal practice of learning how to return when we can't get access to what we know.Collection: Confused
Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.Collection: Song
For being human, we remember and forget. We stray and return, fall down and get up, and cling and let go, again and again. But it is this straying and returning that makes life interesting, this clinging and letting go - damned as it is - that exercises the heart.Collection: Letting Go
When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.Collection: Who We Are
The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.Collection: Inspirational
Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.Collection: Meetings
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.Collection: Risk
The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Letting Go
Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.Collection: Inspirational
Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.Collection: Jobs
In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.Collection: Flames
The world needs awakened souls the way a body needs healthy cells.Collection: Cells
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 thingsstop being a glass. Become a lake.Collection: Pain
It seems that the ancient Medicine Men understood that listening to another's story somehow gives us the strength of example to carry on, as well as showing us aspects of ourselves we can't easily see. For listening to the stories of others - not to their precautions or personal commandments - is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name.Collection: Men
What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.Collection: Exes
A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered itCollection: Successful
Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we areCollection: Inspirational
Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.Collection: Important
Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to ... open our hearts once they've closed, to open our souls once they've shied away.Collection: Heart
The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.Collection: Waiting
Perhaps the hardest thing I've learned, and still struggle with, is that I don't have to be finished in order to be whole.Collection: Struggle