Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Mark Nepo

Image
If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
Mark Nepo
Image
All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
Mark Nepo
Image
I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
If we devote ourselves to the life at hand, the rest will follow. For life, it seems, reveals itself through those willing to live. Anything else, no matter how beautiful, is just advertising.
Mark Nepo
Image
Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
Whether you find it through mediation or sighing over tea or just turning all your devices off for five minutes, listening is an ancient lifeline by which we are awakened time and again. Once reawakened, we more easily find our way to each other, and so help each other live.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
Mark Nepo
Image
To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
Mark Nepo
Image
Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.
Mark Nepo
Image
Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
Mark Nepo
Image
When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
Mark Nepo