Quote

Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Truth
Spiritually
Matter
Compelled
Feel
Holding
Feels
Breath
Long
Breaths
Way
Telling
Imagine
Withhold
Whatever
Unthinkable

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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The many ways to listen have been reaching into me for years. To enter deep listening, I've had to learn how to keep emptying and opening, how to keep beginning. I've had to lean into all I don't understand, accepting that I am changed by what I hear.
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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.
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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
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I was a very driven person, wanting to help and to do good, hopefully to write and teach in a meaningful way - wanting to make change. And I discovered humbly that life was changing me.
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The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.
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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
Mark Nepo
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The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.
Mark Nepo
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For listening to the stories of others ... 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.
Mark Nepo
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When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.
Mark Nepo
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If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.
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Listening reminds me how precious it is to be here at all. And so, listening is the first step to peace, both inner peace and the compassion that connects people.
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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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Let's be in awe which doesn't mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.
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We are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we're given.
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Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
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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 sacred
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What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
Mark Nepo
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My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so.
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Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone.
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The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.
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