Mark Nepo is an American poet, spiritual teacher, and bestselling author of The Book of Awakening. His philosophy and work center on living each day fully, appreciating life in all of its hardships and awe.
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Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.
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Only awareness of your shadow qualities can help you to find an appropriate place for your unredeemed darkness and thereby create a more satisfying experience.
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The greatest satisfaction comes not from chasing pleasure and avoiding pain, but from the radical acceptance of life as it is, without fighting and clinging to passing desires.
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Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure. True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart’s willingness to feel whatever is present.
Letting go of anger and hate requires us to give up the hope for a different past, along with the hope of a fantasized future. What we gain is a life more in the present, where we are not mired in prolonged anger and resentment that doesn’t serve us.
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But one of the hallmarks of emotional maturity is to recognize the validity of multiple realities and to understand that people think, feel, and react differently. Often we behave as if ‘closeness’ means ‘sameness.’
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There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.
The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.