The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

by Mark Nepo

He lives out loud.

Unknowingly, he has shown me how to love the world.

Humility, which comes from the word humus, the soil, offers more than a bowed head. It gives us a connection with everything older than we are and so, provides us with a calming perspective outside of our daily worries, and often beyond our understanding.

How we all climb through the trials of our outer life to the precipice of humility and indwell there on the edge of mystery.

How we climb through our suffering to a place where we can carve out a tiny home from which to dizzy ourselves with the knowledge that we are small and the Universe is big.

Oh, I have suffered the climb, like climbers before me, to live high on the wall and wait. There we stood together and alone, worn by the days to exactly what we are. There, on the inner cliffs where humbled creatures meet to see what can't be seen

and know what can't be known, we spread our arms like hawks to taste the ancient air. We

spread our minds like trees rooted on the edge to accept the end of knowledge arriving like sun, not to instruct us...

The world thrives on endless possibilities.

Yet if the heart is cramped or the mind locks on to its

pai...

can narrow wonder to ...

Phenomenon, John Travolta's character

and your spirit will wake from its fever, and you will want others like soup.

laced with difficulties and joys alike.

was living, no matter my circumstance, was the only safe place.

In large measure, it was ...

after fear and the reaching for others after worry t...

Take one thing that is worrying you, and use your breathing to mak...

With each exhalation, shake your hands open, letting the gust of wo...

Feel

the moment your worry has left your hands, no matter how brief it seems. If you feel worried or fearful during your day, ...

More than anything, fear blinds, and only by stepping without hesitation into the next inch of the unknown can we build confidence in the life we are about to live.

I tried so hard to please that I never realized no one is watching. Iimagined, like everyone else at school, that my parents were sitting

We don't let go into trust until we've exhausted our egos. —ROB LEHMAN

Like the thought of love, God starts in everything unseeable, but comes to us plainly in the things of this world.

Close your eyes and pray for one thing you need.

Open your eyes and enter your day listening to the things around you, for th...

Unconditional love is not so much about how we receive and endure each other, as it is about the deep vow to never, under any condition, stop bringing the flawed truth of who we are to each other.

Much is said about unconditional love today, and I fear that it has been misconstrued as an extreme form of “turning the other cheek,” which to anyone who has been abused is not good advice.

However, this exaggerated passivity is quite different from the unimpeded flow of love that carries who we are. In truth, unconditional

love does not require a passive acceptance of whatever happens in the...

involves

knowing.

have always been a reader.

knowledge or expertise—though these things may happen—but joy; and the reward for kindness is not goodness or being thought well of or even having kindness returned—though these things may happen too. No, the reward for kindness, as well, is joy.

sacred texts from so many different paths, I have learned that the blessing for experiencing oneness is not the strength or clarity that arrives with it, but, more deeply, a peace from dividedness. Whether resting in a hospital bed when the pain has stopped, or waking in my lover's arms as her fingers ease the worry from my head, or falling asleep with the words of someone long dead lying open on my lap,

the bareness of truth and compassion is the same. It

returns me to a simple if rare moment in which thinking and feeling and knowing an...

It is...

enlivening moment—so hard to find and so elusive to hold—that i...

Without judging either, note the sameness or difference in how these knowings live in you.

We spend so much of our time on Earth running after or running from. In

our want of love, we chase after someone or set ourselves up as bait.

In our dreams of success, we...

goals and hide from what we or others perceive...

none of the strategizing to land a job or...

order to prevent being hurt—can reward us with peace or pr...

So many times in life our pulling in panic only handcuffs us more tightly. In this small

moment, the philosopher as a boy reveals to us the paradox that underscores all courage: that leaning into what is gripping us will allow us to work our way free.