YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Nepo

lines on the record: 33
first: 2018-12-03
most recent: 2018-12-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah You know, I, in my 40s, I'm 62, but I really wanted so badly to become a poet. It felt like the aliveness was there. I didn't know it, but it was leading me into the depth and field of my spirit. So in my 40s, as my spirit grew, the identity of being a poet was too small. And I had a crisis because I had to, I was never going to stop writing, but what did this mean? I had to drop being a poet so that I could become the spirit that it led me to.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Whether it's, I mean, one of the interesting things is that in our culture, In our world, and it's always been so. If someone is good at something, We tell them if I write, someone says, You should be a writer. If someone loves the land, oh, you should be a gardener. Or if someone sings, you should be a singer However, we were being turned into a noun when the aliveness is in staying a verb.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're tuned to your life. And then we want to make a contribution. And we have such a production imprint in our culture that we want to. Produce something, but you know, for me, as we've talked, as life had other ideas, I found that it wasn't helpful to try to create great poems. I needed to find true poems to help me live And then, as I was able to still be here, it was all about being the moment of life come alive. That's the poem to stay as close to our aliveness as possible.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it means that, and I think it's not just for a poet, but it works that way for me. I think it's for all of us, I think very understandably we start out learning who we are, we start to become familiar with our gifts, and then we want to be accomplished.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Become intimate with everything that's not us. We become intimate. With the nature of life And it's the rhythm. Between our own nature and the nature of life that allows us to find the thread we are thread we are in the unseeable connections that hold everything together.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“cruel or evil or hurt or unjust, but only from the wholeness of life. Can we see how the spirit in a body Can navigate it. And so one of the biggest humbling ways that I feel like I'm learning in my 60s is that I think we are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need. Only to practice accepting what we're given. We're asked to learn. To keep asking for what we need Only to practice accepting what we're given. And that's a paradox. But what's so important about this? For me, is that asking for what we need doesn't always lead to getting what we need. Sometimes it does, and that's great. But the reward for asking for what we need is that we become intimate with our own nature. We learn who we are by standing in who we are. reward for practicing accepting what we're given.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like I needed every. Effort from every spiritual tradition, I needed every effort. So one of the biggest lessons is that whatever situation we're in, we are challenged if we think we're open, we need to double our efforts to be open and welcome everything because only the logic of the heart. Can put it all together. And so this leads me to what has been a teacher for me in the last year after all this time, and that is that the teacher is that all things are true Not that all things are right or that all things are fair or all things are just, but all things are true and only an open heart. Can start to make sense of how, because that helps us, when we keep choosing between right and wrong, We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it. Doesn't it mean that there aren't things that”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the chemo, the damn chemo was one of the dirty angels It was part of the whole miracle I can't throw that out either.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the first kind of takeaway of that for me is that I understood that to be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and somewhere from within me I don't know where I whisper here. And I think I have spent all the books I've written in the last 25 years. All the places I go to listen and teach. I think I've spent all these years trying to understand what came through me in that moment.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and then it was clear I had to go to the emergency room, but what's important about this story is that around five in the morning, While I'm kind of in the corner with my hands on my knees, and my former wife said, where is God?”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was my first chemo treatment and no one prepared me that I not only might get sick but would get sick and the only medicine they gave me was oral so I couldn't keep it down we didn't know whether oh so I got sick once so maybe this will pass and now we'll wait and see so this went on for almost all night where I got sick every half hour”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was open to karma. I don't think I had very many fixed beliefs. I think the real journey, spiritual journey, is sharing the evidence in our experience and holding off on making conclusions because even at my age and all that I've been through, what we experience leads us to new holes. And as soon as I make a conclusion, I've kind of closed the door on the barn. So I've learned to kind of share what happens, but hold off on what it means.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know why I didn't think I would die. I was afraid of what I'd have to go through. I was terrified of all the pain and the procedures and what it might cause. But then when it returned or had been there all along and I didn't know. I really was afraid I was going to die. I felt desperate. I felt off course. I didn't know what to do. I tried to enlist all the things that I'd been open to and none of it worked.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really changed the course of my work, and so since that time I was put back in this body on this earth with the challenge to believe in everything. and to discover how it works together. And it's like we're all taught I carried around like a suitcase from adolescents that said open in case of emergency. When the emergency came, I opened it and there was nothing in it. So why I'm going to keep carrying it around? So now that I'm a lighter, but now I had to start looking for the real tools that help us live.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was very disorienting. It was very disorienting because I had been a driven artist. Imagine a river. Has banks, and it's a strong river. Like the Mississippi When I was in my river, I knew because I knew this current and the noise of the effort along the banks. Well, what this experience had done, it had brought me to the mouth of a larger sea. And there were no more banks. And I didn't have any familiar signs. I lost the drive. And for a while, I thought I had lost my creativity. But I learned that that current Is there just goes deeper and it's quieter? And then I started to realize, oh, I'm drawn to things now. There's much more freedom and joy.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I wish I could say it was some wisdom on my part. I just woke up having been scoured by this experience into a more elemental being.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a spiritual person. I mean, I think I had the same Holistic, unified world view, but I was much more in my head. And one of the gifts from going through this journey was that through no wisdom of mind, I woke up on the other side after a three-year period, living from my heart and not my head. So from that point forward, my mind served my heart and not the other way around.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is one of the first amazing lessons in openness. I thought I was an open person. Well, I wasn't open until I was desperate to be here.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a tuning fork. If you hit a tuning fork. And when I woke up that morning, that was gone. It was completely still. And I went in later that morning, had the MRI, and by this time I had films. I held it up in the waiting room and it was gone.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were getting ready to give me spinal chemotherapy and wholehead radiation, and I insisted on one more MRI before agreeing to that because I felt the tumor Moving and shifting, even though no one believed me, I just knew it. And so at that time, and I'll remember it was October 15th, 1987, And I woke up at five in the morning. I was supposed to have that MRI around 9, and I knew the tumor was gone.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, I believe that it roots in compassion. Compassion really means being with. It means keeping honest heart company. With. I insisted on one more MRI”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And my memory, which is like knees to a quarterback for me, you know And he came in at the 11th hour and said, I've done hundreds of these, but I don't know what's happening. And so I want to bring in one more specialist. And he unhooked me and sent me home for a week. And I was like, Jonah spit out of the mouth of the whale, back on the streets. And what is this? What am I doing?”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only way is through. And initially it was just surrendering and letting go. You know, I was in my 30s trying to contribute, make a change in life, help do things. Teaching, writing, and all of a sudden life was changing me, and I had no control over anything. I kept feeling that the tumor was fluctuating and no one would believe me.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different all without being put out. So I had to meet pain I'd never known and actually The fear of pain at times was a greater pain than the pain I wound up encountering. So that was one of my first lessons.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a rare form of lymphoma. It was systemic. That means that the cancer should have shown up throughout my body, but it was site specific. It was growing in bone. So it was in my skull bone pressing both ways on my brain and it was the size of like a grapefruit. And I should have had all kinds of neurological problems and I didn't have any. I just had this huge... Growth”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely And so I've stopped over the years trying to get through the tasks and running from them and running to the other because I've started to understand it's the rhythm between the two that lets us experience heaven on earth.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a billowing of spirit. And as we've talked before, in other things, God is in both that moment, focused moment and in the billowing of spirit. So over the years, I've stopped”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in fact, allow it to be. I feel like we are asked to be committed to this unending dynamism. Of what it is to be human. And that is the payback of chance. It doesn't stop. You know, one day I can be plodding along like anybody with an ant with the grain of sand over my head and everything is this task that I can't seem to get out from under. And all of a sudden, Here we are. All of a sudden.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's genuine, it's real, and that is something that everyone has to go through. And when it opens is the beginning of the next part of the journey.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's nothing, whatever opens us. Is never as important as what it opens Feel that it opens is what matters. That's good. Not to deify the The cancer or the obstacle or the thing. But it's not, I think, to be Romanticized or deified or in a negative way, like prey to the obstacle. So, you know, years ago, and”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think that as we talk about this, it's also that It's not the cancer, it's what the cancer open. It's not the loss of a loved one. It's not the loss of a job.”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because it seems like yesterday and a lifetime ago, back 26 years ago, I was in a former life and a former marriage, and I had this lump start to grow. And it was huge And I'd never been ill. I had a lot going on. I didn't really pay much attention until an old friend said, I think you're growing a second head. You better look at that. And I went to the doctor. And the first doctor, I went to a sports doctor because I didn't think anything was wrong with me. And he said, I think there's somebody else you should see. And all of a sudden, as I think most people experience, I went through a door And when I went to go back out that door, it was gone. There was no way to get back to the life I had lived Every Had changed”
2018-12-03 · Oprah's Super Soul · Mark Nepo: 7,000 Ways to Listen (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source