Seven Thousand Ways to Listen Quotes

“We are broken open, or we willfully shed.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“It seems that intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“The things that frighten us just want to be held.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“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, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“Is it possible that, with each inhalation, we take in the world and awaken our soul? And with each exhalation, do we free ourselves of the world, which inevitably entangles us? Is this how we fill up and empty a hundred times a day, always seeking the gift of the two breaths? Perhaps this is the work of being.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“Help me resist the urge to dispute whether things are true or false which is like arguing whether it is day or night. It is always one or the other somewhere in the world. Together, we can penetrate a higher truth which like the sun is always being conveyed.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“The truth is that life will break us and burn us at some point on the journey. This is not pessimistic or cynical but descriptive of the geography of being alive. It is part of how we are transformed by the journey. Yet when we’re broken or burned by events, we feel betrayed by God. When we’re broken or burned by people, we feel betrayed by other souls.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“Now, I want only to give away all that I’m blessed to know and disappear in the stream.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“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, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“Can we listen to each other the way veins listen to blood?”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“Being human, we are constantly broken apart by experience. To reconcile our humanness means we are ever learning how to accept our suffering and to restore our Wholeness.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“The wildflower’s reward for trusting what it senses but doesn’t yet know is to become what is was born to be—a flower whose inevitable place is realized in a small moment of Oneness, as it joins with elements that were here before it came alive and which will live on once it dies.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“No one can teach us how to intuitively listen or trust, but the quiet courage to say yes rather than no is close to each of us. It involves holding our opinions and identity lightly so we can be touched by the future. It means loosening our fist-like hold on how we see the world, so that other views can reach us, expand us, deepen us, and rearrange us. Saying yes is the bravest way to keep leaning into life.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred