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

by Mark Nepo

So what will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth?

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

but in a moment of ego we refuse to put down what we carry in order to open the door. Time and time again, we are offered the chance to truly learn this: We cannot hold on to things and enter. We must put down what we carry, open the door, and then take up only what we need to bring inside.

for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential.

sudden enlightenment

And whether the film is a veil of culture, of memory, of mental or religious training, of trauma or sophistication, the removal of that film and the restoration of that timeless spot of grace is the goal of all therapy and education.

the secret of life somehow always has to do with the awakening and freeing of what has been asleep.

We are born with only one obligation—to be completely who we are. Yet how much of our time is spent comparing ourselves to others, dead and alive? This is encouraged as necessary in the pursuit of excellence. Yet a flower in its excellence does not yearn to be a fish, and a fish in its unmanaged elegance does not long to be a tiger.

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

the best chance to be whole is to love whatever gets in the way, until it ceases to be an obstacle.

“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 things. . . . Stop being a glass. Become a lake.”

those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are.

Often, this kind of discernment is seen as having high standards, when in actuality it is only a means of isolating ourselves from being touched by life, while rationalizing that we are more special than those who can't meet our very demanding standards.

Rather, it means that joy can be found even in hardship, not by demanding that we be treated as special at every turn, but through accepting the demand of the sacred that we treat everything that comes our way as special.

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things. —JACK KORNFIELD

“It is more than seeing them, it is tuning in on them and allowing the current they hold to connect with one's own, like electricity. To put it differently, this means an end of living in front of things and a beginning of living with them. Never mind if the word sounds shocking, for this is love.”

that everything—you and I and the people we mistrust and even the things we fear—everything at heart follows the same beat of life pulsing beneath all the distractions and preferences we can create.

But when we believe that only what we want holds the gold, then we find ourselves easily depressed by what we lack.

realize there are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.

If you want to be truly understood, you need to say everything three times, in three different ways. Once for each ear . . . and once for the heart.

There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

There is no end to worry, because there is no end to what exists out of view,

When we put ourselves fully before another, it makes love possible, the way the stubborn land goes soft before the sea.

This is the reward of all meditation. It's like taking the path of our aloneness deep enough through the woods so we can reach that unspoiled clearing.

How many opportunities for true living are barrier-free, if we can only remove ourselves and our minds from their traditional points of entry?

Experience can in effect lose its essential tenderness and poignancy, as we mistakenly conclude that life is losing its meaning.

In truth, it has never been about first meeting, though this can happen, but more about first coming into view.

Life is hard enough without viewing all our pain as evidence of some basic insufficiency we must endure.

This myth affirms that all spiritual warriors have a broken heart—alas, must have a broken heart—because it is only through the break that the wonder and mysteries of life can enter us.

If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective.

Which defines our day—the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening?

So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts.

Often, confusion is the tension of trying to make sense of things too soon,

To hold nothing back in every breath means staying committed to letting whatever we experience make its way in and letting whatever is in make its way out.

as the wish for more always issues from a sense of lack.