Mark Nepo's Blog, page 15

In the Thick of It

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

While guiding a workshop, we fell into a deep conversation about the part of us that is constantly changed by meeting the world and the depth of who we are that never changes. The Rocky Mountains were nearby and as I began to explore all this, the wisdom of the mountains was suddenly in reach.

 

In the Thick of It

I’m in Estes Park, Colorado, that divine bowl in the middle of the Rockies, peaks to every side. With a small hike, I can see the town below. Then back down, in the thick of it. But for a time, the life we’re in can be lived with a view from above. This is how the soul can move through the days with an awareness of all souls, how a person can trip and bump through the streets while feeling the heart of all things.

 

Our living center is like this peak with the sun on its face. It reminds me that the first use of the word courage meant to stand by one’s core. When I lose my way, I need to climb my core to regain a more complete view of life. Like standing on this peak, it makes a difference in how I see the days. It makes a difference in the decisions I will make.

 

When standing by our core, we also stand by the core of all things. For it’s impossible to tell where the mountain ends and the earth it rises from begins. In just this way, it’s hard to know where our individual soul ends and the continent of Spirit begins. So finding the courage to climb our center refreshes who we are, because we can briefly see the totality of life we are a small part of and briefly feel the center of everything. This glimpse of Oneness and feeling of Wholeness can heal us; can give us the strength of heart and clarity of mind to continue.

 

Now imagine this peak—that is our core—is a cliff of being that faces the sea. Imagine, as the great teacher Jack Kornfield says, that waves of thought and feeling wash up on us and recede constantly. All day long, all night long, the waves of thought and feeling splash, spray, and wash against our center. We are meant to receive them, not deny them or drown in them. The entire practice of meditation and mindfulness is to help us stand in our being and let the thoughts and feelings come and go. We have no hope of eliminating the waves of thought and feeling, any more than the cliff can stop the sea from being the sea. Nor can the cliff uproot itself and go somewhere else. This is the life of every soul in human form. We are where we are: rising like a cliff out of the massive center of all being to receive our humanness like the sea. We are where we are: rising out of it, while being worn by it.

 

This is where we meet: our being softened and worn by our humanness. This is where relationship begins: as the sea of thoughts and feelings washes up debris from the living. This is where we make sense of our life together: leaning against our core, staring out into the sea of life, feeling the light come and go, feeling the tide of thought and feeling rise and fall. Worn by the sea of life, the smallest pebble drops from the cliff. We pick it up. We rub it in our hands and carry it for a time, until someone we love is in need. And against all logic, we place this pebble of being in their hands like a stone of light that, if kissed and held, might help us on our way.

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe your history with letting feelings and thoughts come and go. How would you describe your own difficulty with letting feelings and thoughts come and go? How would you describe the foundation of who you are that can’t be washed away?

Holding Nothing Back

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

I’m always surprised to rediscover that life waits behind a door that can only be opened when we give our all, when we hold nothing back. This video clip from an interview with Sounds True took place in Colorado during a week of recording my box set of teaching conversations, Staying Awake: The Ordinary Art.

HOLDING NOTHING BACK

(VIDEO—SOUNDS TRUE)

Mark Nepo – Holding Nothing Back from Sounds True on Vimeo.

A Question to Walk With: Recount a time when you held some of who you are back and how that affected you. Recount a time when you held nothing back and how that affected you. Describe what holding nothing back means to you now.

Gentleness and Co-dependence

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

Since life can be abrupt and harsh, it’s a constant challenge to meet experience without shutting down. If we’re too guarded, we’re never touched by what matters. On the contrary, it seems that to be touched by what matters, we need to develop our gentleness.

Gentleness and Co-dependence

Receiving depends on gentleness, which relaxes our boundaries. It lets us interact with what comes our way. It lets us lend some of our shape to what’s before us. Lending our shape in this way allows for a momentary joining, through which we can feel the aliveness that flows between things. When rigid, we close and bounce off each other. When gentle, we open, to exchange energy and life-force.

Yet even gentleness, taken to the extreme, has an underside, which we all struggle to avoid. Without steadfastness as our anchor, we can give ourselves away completely, through the dissipation of our center and through over-compliance. In this, co-dependence is the shadow of gentleness. The examples are everywhere and commonplace: not voicing truth to power, always putting our needs last, being nice instead of authentic, hiding who we are instead of expressing who we are.

Remarkably, being human is dynamic, not static, and so we are always beginning, as the maps we draw are out-of-date by the time they dry. We are left squarely in the practice of being human, which requires us to course-correct constantly. As one steering a boat is always adjusting the tiller to approximate the true course—first left to right, then right to left, we have to steer our way back and forth between steadfastness and stubbornness, between gentleness and co-dependence. Until, drawn as we are to the surface, we sink below the noise of our blindness, where the heart can see.

 

A Question to Walk With: Begin to tell the story of the gentlest person you have known as well as the story of the most co-dependent person you have known. Describe one way you are gentle these days and one way you are co-dependent. What’s the difference?

 

Mark wins Books for a Better Life award!

Congratulations to Mark, who won the 17th Annual Books for a Better Life Award in the Spirituality category.

Since its inception in 1996, Books for a Better Life has recognized more than 650 self-improvement authors and has now raised more than $1.9 million for the New York City – Southern New York Chapter’s comprehensive support services and educational programs for people living with MS, their friends and families. The Awards recognize self-improvement authors whose messages are aligned with the chapter’s mission of inspiring people to live their best lives. To see a full list of past finalists and winners click here.

Five finalists in each of the ten categories above were chosen by an esteemed panel of book sellers and magazine, book club and television book editors. Independent panels of expert judges in each category will now select a winner for each category.

Become a fan of the Books for a Better Life group on facebook here.

Awards Event History

 

 

Steadfastness

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

It’s important to discern between steadfastness and stubbornness. There are crucial, if subtle, differences between the two. To be steadfast is to be faithful to what we know to be true, without a need to explain or justify that truth, but simply to live it. To be stubborn is to resist views and truths other than our own, to avoid the challenge of growth. Steadfastness brings us closer to life, while stubbornness isolates us.

 

Steadfastness

Walt Whitman is a great example of steadfastness. In 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay called The Poet, in which he yearned for and called for a new American sensibility that could break the British hold on our young imagination. While America had stopped being a colony of England almost a hundred years before, he rightly claimed that our imagination and language as a people were still obedient and compliant to the English tradition. Emerson’s essay swept America.

 

Eleven years later, upon reading the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), Emerson was stunned to find that Walt Whitman was the American poet he’d imagined. He wrote Whitman a now famous letter (July 21, 1855) in which he praised the young poet:

 

I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

 

Emerson and Whitman became fast friends. But in 1860, as Whitman was preparing to publish the third edition of Leaves of Grass, he ran into opposition from his greatest champion.

 

While visiting Emerson, the two poets went for a long walk through the Boston Commons. In his diary, Specimen Days, Whitman tells us that the two walked and talked the better part of an afternoon, during which Emerson persistently tried to convince Whitman not to publish his “Children of Adam” poems, which revealed his homosexuality. Whitman recounts that he listened for two hours without saying a word. When Emerson was done, Whitman was more certain than ever that he was right—he couldn’t hide who he was.

 

This is a profound example of quiet integrity—staying true to one’s own nature and staying whole. Steadfastness, in its deepest regard, inhabits the resolve not to be persuaded or worn down to be something we are not. Stubbornness, on the other hand, is resisting the teachers and lessons we are given that invite or require us to change and grow. The line between the two is often thin and steadfastness can slip into stubbornness all too quickly, while we are the last to know.

 

A Question to Walk With: Begin to tell the story of the most steadfast person you have known as well as the story of the most stubborn person you have known. Describe one way you are steadfast these days and one way you are stubborn. What’s the difference?

The Myth of Urgency

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

We live in an age where information, demands, and choices are more plentiful than ever. This rush of possibility gives us the illusion that we can do anything without limit. With this rush of possibility and the illusion of no limits comes a relentless urgency to do it all. This poem comes from the ground of Oneness that waits under all urgency.

 

THE MYTH OF URGENCY

Everyone wants you to quietly be Atlas,

to shoulder it all. Even the voice in your

head insists you are behind. But I’ve seen

the light in you, the one the gods finger

while we sleep. I’ve seen the blossom open

in your heart, no matter what remains to

be done. There are never enough hours

to satisfy the minions of want. So close

your eyes and lean into the Oneness that

asks nothing of you. When the calls stack,

answer to no one, though you receive them

all. Just open your beautiful hands, born with

nothing in them. You have never been more

complete than in this incomplete moment.

A Question to Walk With: Put one urgency you are feeling down and go for a walk. See what waits, when you can enter a single moment without any expectation. Describe what happens to a friend.

Side by Side

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

Experience opens us to humility and humility opens us to compassion, which means to suffer with, to keep company with, to be with. Nothing can as strong and soft at the same time as compassion.

 

Side by Side

Until we trip, we don’t understand

why it takes so long to get up. Until

we lose our way, we have no patience

for indecision. Eventually, we land

so close to the shallow breathing of

another that it doesn’t matter where

we’re from or where we’re going, if

we’re living like a waterfall or asleep

with our eyes open. The only thing

that matters is the hand we offer and

the assurance that everything will be

alright, though we really don’t know.

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe some situation or feeling you had no patience for, and describe how experiencing that situation or feeling has changed your regard for others.

Come with Me

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

I was on retreat, in deep silence and solitude, when I felt a moment of great aliveness and a sudden want to share that sense. It led to this poem, which I thought was a song for company. It was only upon reading it later that I realized that the voice of the poem was a call from my soul for me to spend more time with it.

 

COME WITH ME

I can’t be more in love with life.

And still, your eyes crack me wider.

It’s more than I can stand, if not for

the flower of all time slipping from

my mouth when all words fail. Come

with me to the ledge I’ve found within.

You can see the valley below where the

greatest minds have all been shattered

by love. I am so at peace on that ledge,

halfway between life and death. This

sweetness is like a nail of light that

pins me to the moment we have.

Come, please. I can’t stand

all this wonder by myself.

A Question to Walk With: A month ago, we discussed the notion that everyone has their own genius, their own attendant spirit. What is your attendant spirit, your soul asking of you today?

How to Return to Your Center

This article by Mark is featured on Oprah.com today.

We all have moments of clarity and then we’re confused. We’re awake and then we’re numb. We’re buoyant and then we’re down. Just as we inhale and exhale constantly, our wakefulness ebbs and flows.

The practice of being human is the practice of coming awake, staying awake and returning to wakefulness when we go to sleep. We go to sleep because we’re mortal—not because there’s anything wrong with us. This opening and closing is part of the human journey. Therefore the practice of being a spirit—in a body, in the world—is a practice of returning to our center, where we can know the world fully. Life has taught me two things about being centered. First, returning to our center, our solid place of inborn knowing, is only nourishing because it is through our core that we find our connection to the common Center of All Life. As thirst would drive you to a well, to drop your bucket and pull up water from the underground spring that feeds all wells, the individual soul is such a well that draws on the water of Spirit that feeds all souls. We need to know where our well is.

Second, the fact that we need to return to our center lets us know that we will drift away from what matters. This drifting is part of being human, and so, there is an ongoing need to find our way back to what matters. Most of us are educated to think that if we work hard enough and are good enough and disciplined enough, we’ll crack the secret of life and live at the end of all trouble. While these traits are helpful tools, being human doesn’t work that way. From the very start, we’re asked to stay as close as we can to all that is alive. The point of our experience is not to escape life but to live it; and the wakefulness and sleepiness, the agitation and calm, the joy and suffering we encounter, are continual. Our aim is not to eliminate these conditions but to navigate them from a living center, the way you’d steer a boat at sea while balanced in its stable bottom.

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E Dai

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

There are teachers everywhere. Every culture and tradition on Earth has quiet teachers and customs that are time-tried and still relevant. This teaching comes from Brazil.

 

E Dai

When in Brazil, my friend David encountered the phrase E daí (ay-die-ee), which is Portuguese for “And then?” Regardless of the story told or hardship conveyed, the custom is for the listener to ask after a while, “E daí?” with a tone that implies,“And so? What now?” Literally e is and and daí means from there, from a place near you, as in “What is just beyond where you are?” or “And so, what is your next step?”

The phrase E daí invokes three successive meanings, often asked by the one who will hear you out:First, I hear what life has given you. E daí? And so, what does this matter? What does this mean? Second, I see where you are. E daí? And so, from there, what is in front of you? What is just beyond where you are? And third, E daí? And so, what now? What is your next step?

In a deeply practical way, this custom invites us to locate ourselves in any given situation from the inside out and from the largest frame of reference possible to the immediate circumstance. Before we overreact or react prematurely to whatever situation we find ourselves in, it helps to ask, E daí? What does this mean in the journey of one life in its time on Earth within the larger journey of all life across all time? Such consideration will affect whether we respond at all or in what way. After locating the event in the largest frame, it helps to look at the particular situation and determine, E daí?  What is in front of us? Will the ground before us bear our weight? Should we back up? Should we sidestep the situation? Or should we stand firmly where we are? Both the larger and more particular context help us to ask and know, E daí?  What is our next step?

In most cases, urgency is not an issue. In most instances, we have time to engage this situational inventory, which practiced enough becomes automatic like breathing. And in those few cases where we need to act quickly, we are challenged to trust our intuition, dared to enter the moment without hesitation. From inside such moments, time often slows down and opens up, becoming timeless. This is what people report after moving through physical crises, that the event seemed to unfold in slow motion.

For each of us, these next steps are acts of love that require courage and compassion. They are profound gestures that change both the giver and receiver. They can change the landscape of a life.

 

—excerpt from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen,

just published from Simon & Schuster, October 9, 2012

 

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe a situation you are facing. Ask yourself the question—E daí—in its three meanings, and bring what you learn to a friend.