Home > Work > The Little Book of Awakening

The Little Book of Awakening QUOTES

The Little Book of Awakening QUOTES

1 " dialogue with this feeling and ask why it will not go; just what does it need in order to leave? "

― Mark Nepo , The Little Book of Awakening

2 " Despite all consequence, there is an inevitable honoring of what is true, and at this deep level of inner voice, it is not a summoning of will, but a following of true knowing. "

― Mark Nepo , The Little Book of Awakening

3 " Despite all consequence, there is an inevitable honoring of what is true, and at this deep level of inner voice, it is not a summoning of will, but a following of true knowing. My own life is a trail of such following. Time and again, I have heard deep callings that felt inevitable and which I could have ignored, but only at great risk of something essential perishing. "

― Mark Nepo , The Little Book of Awakening

4 " Truly, the most we can ask of others is for their guidance and comfort on the way—without imposition, design, or thought of reward. This is the hospitality of relationship: for family to help us manifest who we are in the world, for friends to bring us to thresholds of realness, for loved ones to encourage us to cross barriers of our own making into moments of full aliveness. "

― Mark Nepo , The Little Book of Awakening

5 " how to feel the pain of living without denying it and without letting that pain define us. Ultimately, no matter the burden we are given—apartheid, cancer, abuse, depression, addiction—once whittled to the bone, we are faced with a never-ending choice: to become the wound or to heal. "

― Mark Nepo , The Little Book of Awakening

6 " And further, the thing put to rest—whether it be a loved one, a dream, or a false way of seeing—becomes the fertilizer for the life about to form. As the well-used thing joins with the earth, the old love fertilizes the new; the broken dream fertilizes the dream yet conceived; the painful way of being that strapped us to the world fertilizes the freer inner stance about to unfold. "

― Mark Nepo , The Little Book of Awakening

7 " Thus, we are often stymied and confused because we forget that—beneath our sorting of everything into good and bad, right and wrong, success and failure—all the choices still hold the truth and strength of life, no matter what we prefer. To be certain, sharing a common beat does not mean that everything is the same, for things are infinite in how they differ. And faced with the richness of life, we can't value everything the same. But when we believe that only what we want holds the gold, then we find ourselves easily depressed by what we lack. Then we are pained by what we perceive as the difference between here and there, between what we have and what we need. "

― Mark Nepo , The Little Book of Awakening

8 " life becomes a living of who we are until that form of self can no longer hold us, and, like Taaora in his shell, we must break the forms that contain us in order to birth our way into the next self. This is how we shed our many ways of seeing the world, not that any are false, but that each serves its purpose for a time until we grow and they no longer serve us. "

― Mark Nepo , The Little Book of Awakening

9 " The famous British child psychologist D. W. Winnicott called these aspects of personality our True Self and False Self. It is the True Self that lets us know what is authentic and what has become artificial, while the False Self is a diplomat of distrust, enforcing a lifestyle of guardedness, secrecy, and complaint. "

― Mark Nepo , The Little Book of Awakening

10 " Not surprisingly, like most people, in the first half of my life, I worked very hard to understand and strengthen my uniqueness. "

― Mark Nepo , The Little Book of Awakening