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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.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Keep
Listening
Many
Listen
Emptying
Years
Accepting
Lean
Way
Changed
Reaching
Hear
Enter
Ways
Opening
Learn
Beginning
Understand
Deep

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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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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The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.
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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
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What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
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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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Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak.
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling.
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Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
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Try as we do to resist what we're given, this is the only doorway to truth. We waste too much time and energy denying or fighting where we find ourselves.
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The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.
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When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
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As nature erodes the earth into magnificent forms, life through endless experience opens us further and further to the essence of what matters. Each time I've been opened further, the way I experience life and receive things has changed.
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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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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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To listen also means to stay in relationship, the central challenge of our time, and this requires us to constantly minimize whatever stands between us and life.
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To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
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In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.
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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
Mark Nepo