The Book of Awakening Inspiration Cards Mark Nepo 1. The rarity of life: There is a Buddhist precept that asks us to be mindful of how rare it is to find ourselves in human form on Earth. It is really a beautiful view of life that offers us the chance to feel enormous appreciation for the fact that we are here as individual spirits filled with consciousness, drinking water, and chopping wood. 2. What will you do today?: This precious human birth is unrepeatable. So what will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth? How will you carry yourself? What will you do with your hands? What will you ask and of whom? 3. Ask what you need to know: Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now. 4. Spot of grace: Each person is born with an unencumbered spot—free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry—an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. 5. The secret of life: Whatever our path, whatever the color or grain of our days, whatever riddles we must solve to stay alive, the secret of life somehow always has to do with the awakening and freeing of what has been asleep. 6. We become each other: Through cancer and grief and disappointment and unexpected turns in career—through the very breakdown and rearrangement of the things I have loved—I have come to realize that, as water smoothes stone and enters sand, we become each other. 7. Dive for God: The gift and responsibility of relationship is to take turns doing the dishes and putting up the storm windows, giving the other the chance to dive for God without worrying about dinner. While one explores the inner, the other must tend the outer. 8. Perseverance: Even when we can’t see, we know how to feed ourselves. Even when the way isn’t clear, the heart still pumps. Even when afraid, the air of everything enters and leaves the lungs. Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward. 9. Belief in life: Things are never quite as bad as they seem inside the problem. We have inner reflexes that keep us alive, deep impulses of being and aliveness that work beneath the hardships we are struggling with. We must remember: the hand cannot eliminate the darkness, only find its way to the mouth. Likewise, our belief in life cannot eliminate suffering, only find its way to feed our heart. 10. Our one obligation: We are born with only one obligation—to be completely who we are. Yet how much of our time is spent comparing ourselves to others, dead or alive? 11. Flicker of spirit: Underneath all we are taught, there is a voice that calls to us beyond what is reasonable, and in listening to that flicker of spirit, we often find deep healing. This is the voice of embodiment calling us to live our lives like sheet music played, and it often speaks to us briefly in moments of deep crisis. Sometimes it is so faint we mistake its whisper for wind through heaven. But taking it into the heart of our pain, it can often open the paralysis of our lives. 12. A startling secret: Whatever crisis we face, there is this voice of embodiment that speaks beneath our pain ever so quickly, and if we can hear it and believe it, it will show us a way to be reborn. The courage to hear and embody opens us to a startling secret, that the best chance to be whole is to love whatever gets in the way, until it ceases to be an obstacle. 13. Be brave: Feat gets its power from our not looking, at either the fear or what we’re afraid of. 14. The comfort on oneness: If we fear passion, we are blind to the comfort of Oneness. If we fear change, we are blind to the abundance of life. If we fear death, we are blind to the mystery of the unknown. And since to fear something is thoroughly human, to be blind is unavoidable. It is what each of us must struggle to overcome. 15. Slow down: Often, we are inconvenienced, we are being asked to slow down. When we are delayed in our travel or waiting for a check in a restaurant, we are being asked to open up and look around. When we find ourselves stalled in our very serious and ambitious plans, we are often being asked to re-find the beginning of time. 16. The truth: The truth is that while analyzing and strategizing and preparing ourselves can occupy our minds, and may even help prevent us from being hurt the same way twice, there is no substitute for giving the wound air, which in the case of the heart means saying deeply, without aversion or self-pity, “Ouch.” 17. Bring out what is in: What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed. It seems the more we express, that is, bring out what is in, the more alive we are. The more we give voice to our pain in living, the less build-up we have between our soul and our way in the world. However, the more we depress, the more we push down and keep in, the smaller we become. The more we stuff between our heart and our daily experience, the more we have to work through to feel life directly. 18. Seeing anew: At its deepest and most real level, the notion of love at first sight is spoken of in every spiritual tradition as the reward for being fully awake. Such seeing anew restores our sense of being alive. Paradoxically, first sight is recurring. Whenever we can see with that original vision—with nothing between us and the life around us—we can’t help but love what we see. To see so fundamentally opens us to love. 19. Mix your hands in the Earth: What does it mean to be a spiritual warrior? It is far from being a soldier, but more the sincerity with which a soul faces itself in a daily way. It is this courage to be authentic that keeps us strong enough to withstand the heartbreak through which enlightenment can occur. And it is by honoring how life comes through us that we get the most of our living, not by keeping ourselves out of the way. The goal is to mix our hands in the earth, not to stay clean. 20. Our elemental place in the journey: In daily ways, we are judged, discounted, and even pitied for glories that only we can affirm. In the end, life is too magnificent and difficult for us to give away our elemental place in the journey. 21. What defines your day?: We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe. Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day—the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening? It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. 22. Look wider: In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and world that is not splinter. 23. Experiencing life: We are so achievement-oriented that we often surge right by the true value of relaxing to what’s before us, because we think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will. 24. The geography of one’s soul: In order to be whole, suspend your criticism. For life is not a matter of taste, but of awakening, not a matter of finding things pleasing or disturbing, but of finding things completing, not a matter of liking or disliking, but of opening the geography of one’s soul. 25. The moment: I have found that hesitation, more than anything, has been the invisible hitch that has kept me from joy. I’ve found that the moment with all its meaning often moves on by the time I’ve reconsidered whether or not to enter it. 26. Hold Nothing Back: To hold nothing back in every breath means staying committed to letting whatever we experience make its way in and letting whatever is in make its way out. Holding nothing back means holding the intention to be an open vessel, in a daily way. 27. Our next step: The doorway to our next step of growth is always behind the urgency of now. When feeling like I can’t sit still, I need, more than ever, to sit still. When feeling like I will die if I don’t have your approval, I need, more than ever, to die to my need for your approval. What we need is always harshly and beautifully right before us, disguised in the wrapping of our nearest urgency. We just refuse to accept this, because it feels so difficult to face. 28. The being at our center: Without knowing it, we work hard at cutting a path to our deeper self that waits patiently for us to arrive, all tired, aching, and out of breath. Once that path is cleared and once the being at our center is discovered, we can return to the world in relationships with our soul. We can discover a deeper, more peaceful sense of home. 29. The opened heart: Through the opened heart, the world comes rushing in, the way oceans fill the smallest hole along the shore. It is the quietest sort of miracle: by simply being who we are, the world will come to fill us, to cleanse us, to baptize us, again and again. 30. The courage of the seed: As a seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way. 31. The clearest spiritual intent: This is once the clearest spiritual intent and yet the hardest to stay true to: how to stay open to what others feel and not to what they think. We cannot live without being affected by others, but we are only real when we let truth and love shape us from within. 32. The speaking of one’s heart: It is the speaking of one’s heart that makes a human being human. For even if no one hears us, it is the act of speaking that frees us by letting the spirit swim and fly through the world. 33. Open to love: Like flowers waiting on rain, our hearts wait on love. As much as we want to be seen and known, it is the giving of attention that keeps us whole. For giving attention opens us to love. 34. Abundance: One of the most difficult things for us to accept is that beneath all our dreams and disappointments, we live and breathe in abundance. It is hard when in pain to believe that all we ever need is before us, around us, within us. And yet it is true. 35. The quiet miracle of love: Most things break instead of transform because they resist. The quiet miracle of love is that without our interference, it, like water, accepts whatever is tossed or dropped or placed into it, embracing it completely. 36. Life’s truth: I offer what has surprised me in my pain: that life is not fair, but unending in its capacity to change us; that compassion is fair and feeling is just; and that we are not responsible for all that befalls us, only for how we receive it and for how we hold each other up along the way. 37. Look beneath: We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are, when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed, and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time. 38. The God within: We all face this turning point repeatedly: when resisting the flow of inner events suddenly feels more hurtful than leaping toward the unknown. Yet no one can tell us when to leap. There is no authority to bless our need to enter life but the God within. 39. The risk to bloom: It has always amazed and humbled me how the risk to bloom can seem so insurmountable beforehand and so inevitably freeing once the threshold of suffering is crossed. 40. Grasses that soften the world: Honest friends are doorways to our souls, and loving friends are the grasses that soften the world. It is no mistake that the German root of the word friendship means “place of high safety.” This safety opens us to God. There can be no greater simpler ambition than to be a friend. 41. Know each other more fully: We create patterns that others depend on, and then the last thing we ever imagined happens: we grow and change, and then to stay vital we must break the pattern we created. The challenge, which I don’t do well but stay committed to, is to say to those we love, “I am more than I have shown you and more than you are willing to see. Let’s work our love and know each other more fully.” 42. Stay open to the truth of others: Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us. 43. The passage of rebirth: Living long enough, we each find ourselves surrounded by an old way of being, thinking, or loving that is going up in flames. In that unexpected moment, we usually find ourselves full of fear, feeling trapped by an old way of life coming in on us. But this is the passage of rebirth that we must move through if our lives are to unfold. It is the momentary and painful crossing from what is old into what is new. 44. One with everything: It is amazing to consider how as infants we are one with everything. In time, of course, we learn to distinguish between ourselves and others, between the world we carry inside and the world we move through. But ironically, the sages of all paths are those who, after lifetimes of experience, try to return to this primary state of Oneness. 45. Now: If not now, when? 46. Change: Pain is often a sign that something has to change. 47. Sense of peace: So many times, in our despair, we see our pain as something that will never end. In fact, this often defines our moments of despair: when we believe that our pain contains the rest of us. In contrast, there is this sense of peace to work toward: the belief that life contains our pain. 48. A pledge of gratitude: Prayer of the deepest kind is more a pledge of gratitude for what has already been received than a request or plea for something not yet experienced. Such an effort refreshes the soul. 49. Be yourself: Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need. 50. Everyone shares the path: Discovering who we are is like breaking a trail up the side of a mountain. Yet the deepest friendships begin when we look into the eye of another and discover that they have been there too. It is always astonishing to me to find out that someone else sees what I have seen, and always humbling to learn that what I thought was my path and my mountain is everyone’s. 51. Open your wings: No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their heart. 52. The simplest use of will: Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or so—just walk out from under the webs we’ve spun, the tasks we’ve assumed, the problems we have to solve. They’ll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up. Wouldn’t that be nice? 53. The feel of being new: Often as we are being transformed, we cannot tell what is happening. For while in the midst of staying afloat, it is next to impossible to see the ocean we are being carried into. While struggling with the pain of change, it is often impossible to see the new self we are becoming. While feeling our hand pried loose by experience, we seldom can imagine what will fill it once it is opened. As the days rinse our heart, we can feel something unseeable scour us through, though we can’t yet imagine how much fresher milk and sky and laughter will taste once we are returned to the feel of being new. 54. Be who you are: You do not have to do anything to be loved, and being who you are does not let others down. This needs to be repeated, and often. Simply be who you are, and love what is before you. 55. The truth about change: We don’t need something to go wrong in order to change. 56. Sustain wonder: Our aliveness depends on our ability to sustain wonder: to lengthen the moments we are truly uncovered, to be still and quiet till all the elements of the earth and all the secrets of the oceans stir the aspects of life waiting within us. 57. Decision: We’d like a guarantee before making a decision or taking a risk, but the irony is that taking the risk is what opens us to our fate. It’s like wanting to know what things will taste like before putting them in your mouth. It just can’t be figured out that way. 58. Asking to be whole: Real commitment comes before knowing where anything is going. That’s what listening to your heart is all about. Without jumping off its perch, the bird would never fly. Without jumping our of your heart’s silence, love is never possible. Without asking to be whole, the divine essence waits inside everything the way bread hardens if never bitten into. 59. The mystery of it all: Sometimes just giving thanks for the mystery of it all brings everything and everyone closer, the way suction pulls streams of water together. So take a chance and openly give thanks, even if you’re not sure what for, and feel the plentitude of all that is living brush up against your heart. 60. A life of passion: Finding what we love, though it may take years, is building a life of passion. For what makes you come alive can keep you alive, whether you are paid well for it or not. And beyond the fashion of the job market, a life of passion makes us a healthy cell in the body of the world. 61. The universal stream: There are times walls are necessary, but more often we can protect ourselves by being who we are. Neither hiding or revealing ourselves will prevent our share of pain, but in being who we are, we get to be a part of the Universal stream, not just a nut in a shell waiting to fall. 62. Do everything—go anywhere: There is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Accepting this, we can do everything and go anywhere. 63. Absorbing the journey: Accepting that the world can do quite fine without us allows us to put down the burden of being corrective heroes and simply concentrate on absorbing the journey of being alive. 64. Begin anew each day: Creation is ongoing. The world begins anew each day. This is the miracle that makes not a sound, but which changes everything, if we can be quiet enough to feel it happen. When we can participate in this, we begin anew each day.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 17:15:44 +0000