In this episode, Mark Nepo talks about how the words we use shape the way we experience our lives. Drawing from Mark’s new book The Language of the Soul, he explores how words can help us make room for pain and fear or make those experiences feel even bigger. Mark also discusses what it means to be wholehearted, why ordinary moments don’t have to feel extraordinary to matter, and how to return to a fuller sense of life when we’ve lost touch with it.
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Key Takeaways:
- The words we choose can help us meet a difficult experience or intensify it.
- Being wholehearted means making room for the full range of feelings, including the ones we’d rather avoid.
- You don’t have to feel wonder in every ordinary moment for that moment to be worthwhile.
- When fear or pain narrows your view, relationships and practices can help you find a wider perspective.
- Acceptance can help you discern when to act and when to be patient.
- Returning to presence is a practice; losing touch with it doesn’t mean you’ve failed.
Mark Nepo is a poet and philosopher who has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over 40 years. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, he has published 21 books and recorded 14 audio projects. Mark has been interviewed several times by Oprah Winfrey as part of her Super Soul Sunday TV show, and was interviewed by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America. As a cancer survivor, Mark devotes his writing and teaching to the journey of inner transformation and the life of relationship. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. His new book is Language of the Soul: How the Words You Choose Shape the Life You Live
Connect with Mark Nepo: Website | Instagram | YouTube
If you enjoyed this conversation with Mark Nepo, you might also enjoy these other episodes:
Discovering Your Inner Resilience and Strength with Mark Nepo
Connecting to What Matters with Mark Nepo (2020)
How to Strengthen Your Resilience with Linda Graham
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Episode Transcript:
Mark Nepo 00:00:00 A very simple question that I return to in difficult times whether it’s physical, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s fear, confusion, is is what’s before me. Heartening or disheartening is what’s before me life giving or life draining. If it’s life draining or disheartening, then what am I doing? If it’s life giving and heartening, then even if it’s difficult, I’m all in.
Chris Forbes 00:00:34 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do, we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:19 Mark Nepo tells an old story in this episode, a master Hans is complaining to apprentice a fistful of salt, has him stir it into a glass of water and tells him to drink. The apprentice obviously drinks it. It’s disgusting. He spits it out. Then the master walks him to a lake, has him throw the same amount of salt in, and tells him to drink again. And it tastes fine. The usual moral is that we should become more like the lake, create more space and I agree, but I’ve also been arguing something else in my book in keynotes lately. And that’s it. We can also just stop putting so much salt in the glass and a lot of that salt turns out to be words. Mark just wrote a whole book about the power of words, so we had a lot to talk about. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. I mark, welcome to the show.
Mark Nepo 00:02:11 Oh thank you. It’s great to be with you again.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:13 You have a new book called The Language of the soul.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:16 How the words you choose shape the life you live. And we’ll get into that in a moment. But we’ll start in the way we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Mark Nepo 00:02:59 I love that parable, and I think that it has to do with feeding the life of authenticity, the life of kindness, the life of our heart and in our age, particularly feeding to restore our direct connection with life that we miss, feed or feed the dark wolf.
Mark Nepo 00:03:24 The unconscious wolf is the life of fear, the life of separation, the life of isolation. And in our world, especially right now, you know, we have a perfect storm of things that separate us from technology to the insulation of our own unquestioned beliefs and opinions to pushing each other away. And so feeding those things only isolates us and diminishes us and suffocates us. And great love and great suffering have always been the great teachers, because they break us of that separation and that isolation. And as you have well know, I know, and through me, through my cancer journey many years ago and in the last two years through major back surgery, often it’s a it’s a life changing or a threatening situation that jars us to feed. I will say right to feed the enlivening wolf. And it doesn’t have to be something difficult. It can be wonder or beauty or joy or being loved unconditionally for the first time in your life. So it often is something difficult, but not always. And we don’t want to.
Mark Nepo 00:04:45 We don’t want to deify suffering. We just want to be open to where it takes us.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:50 Yeah, you were talking about this sort of being close with or intimate with life. And that’s one of the things I spend a lot of time on as a Zen practitioner. You could say that’s the whole goal of Zen practice is to become more intimate with life. I had a little bit of a realization yesterday, and in Zen, where we are talking about paying attention to the ordinary moments, the little things, and I keep looking at those things and looking at how I’m reacting to those things and wanting my reaction to those things to be uplifting, enlivening and good. Right? Like, oh, I see the beautiful flower. Shouldn’t that make me feel better inside? And I realized that I am cutting the experience in half. Yeah, because to be intimate with it is to be like the flowers. What arises in me as a result or does not arise in me as a result of those flowers. And at the moment, if I can just give it, a little space is whole and complete.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:56 And so instead of looking for the moment to make me happy or feel better, can I look at the moment just to be complete? And again, when I say it out loud, it’s like kind of duh. But I had an experience of it in a way that I hadn’t had before yesterday.
Mark Nepo 00:06:15 Yeah. Thank you. So let’s explore that a little bit, because I really feel that is so true. And one of the things that’s so important is to be as wholehearted as we can and to welcome all the spectrum of feelings. It’s the whole heartedness that we access through being real that is restorative. Sure, the difficult things don’t feel good and the wonderful things do, but that’s only half of it, as you are suggesting. And in our society in the West especially, we truncate our experience, our aliveness by holding out for only the things that are pleasant or joyous or wonderful. And this is where certainly, you know, when we look at the Declaration of Independence and the inalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Mark Nepo 00:07:13 Well, yeah. As a social contract, freedom is the most amazing social contract that’s ever been put forth. But we’ve made a cartoon out of it. We feel like we’re entitled to happiness, and we shun anything that’s challenging or difficult or thorough. And really, our birthright is thoroughness, not happiness. Thoroughness. And so let me share. This is an interesting please.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:39 Yes. Which say much about thoroughness.
Mark Nepo 00:07:41 Goes to a couple of word things. So and then we’ll get into the premise of the whole book is not really about words, but what they point to. So one is that when we look back and I’ve been interested throughout my whole teaching life, which is where this book came out of With the Origin of words, because I have found more often than not that there are more whole. The farther back we go and words over time erode like pieces of nature. So they’re fragmented. So one such is that there’s a wonderful scholar named Neil Douglas Klotz who wrote a book, The Prayer for the cosmos.
Mark Nepo 00:08:22 And he was fluent in ancient Aramaic, which is the language that is believed. Jesus spoke this book, The Prayer of the cosmos, which he also did as an audiobook for Sounds True. He went through and took a whole constellation of phrases and words that it’s believed Jesus spoke and translated them back to their original Aramaic. So where Jesus is translated in the New Testament, the saying be thou perfect? Well, that word in Aramaic didn’t mean perfect. It meant wholehearted. Be thou wholehearted. A fork in the road in 2000 years of education. So now we’re coming to what you were sharing era. No, no, don’t be perfect. Don’t be singling out. Yeah. Let it make me feel good. Let it make me feel ease. Let it know. Be thou whole hearted. Because all of it. All of it is restorative. And so now you look at, you know, Rilke said wonderfully, the great poet Rilke let everything happen. Beauty and terror. No one feeling is final.
Mark Nepo 00:09:34 Keep going. And lastly, in this constellation here that I’m sharing. So now you take a word. There was a word which goes back to the ancient Greeks. Darmanin. Now, Darmanin meant a attending spirit that is both affirming and challenging in the Native American tradition. This part of the park that’s challenging is known as the trickster spirit. Not because the spirit is tricking us, but because our habits of thinking are upended, just like Zen koans. And so we’re tricked out of the patterns of our thinking. Well, that word demon in in the Elizabethan times in England, we don’t know who, but somehow that word was split into two words angel and demon. So ever since Elizabethan times lists two, 300 years. 400 years, actually. Almost right. Now the challenging spirit is seen as evil, and the affirming spirit is seen as an angel, and it has truncated our growth because anything that’s challenging or difficult, or something we have to hold or look at, oh no, I don’t want that.
Mark Nepo 00:10:54 I don’t want that. Stay away.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:57 100%. We start off with this parable of good and bad wolves, and I think it’s a useful and instructional parable to a point. At which point, the minute that we start really dividing everything up that way, we run into trouble. And for me, the idea is that, again, if you pay attention to the ordinary moments, they will become extraordinary. And my experience is sometimes. But a lot of times what you get is ordinary. And can I just be okay with ordinary? Yeah. Like letting that just kind of be okay. It’s been a huge part of my practice.
Mark Nepo 00:11:37 Yeah, that makes total sense. And I think the extraordinary is in the ordinary. Everything is extraordinary through the ordinary. I see these details as the seams of the universe, and they touch us through the heart. And that’s why they’re so important. Even ordinary, extraordinary doesn’t quite describe it, because I think everything is aglow all the time. We think of them as peak moments, because we come in and out of being able to receive and experience them.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:11 Yes, maybe to say it differently, what I’m talking about becoming okay with is the fact that sometimes I just can’t see them that way. Yeah, right. Like, of course it’s all always complete exactly the way it is. I mean, that’s the deep insight. Where I get frustrated is when I start to think like, I should be able to see that all the time. And that’s where the frustration comes, which of course, immediately further distances me from any chance of being able to do that.
Mark Nepo 00:12:39 Well, this is why I believe that our personal practice, whatever it is, is always a practice of return. Return to the corridor of aliveness. Return to the extraordinary in the ordinary and all the relationships, experiences, practices. What’s in our toolkit, our spiritual tool toolkit to help us return. And I think, functional faith. Faith in life. Not in a doctrine or a person. Is it just because we can’t be in it all the time doesn’t mean it’s gone away. I read a while ago Albert Einstein had written at someone’s request, kind of an essay that was the autobiography of his mind.
Mark Nepo 00:13:26 And he talked about how at the age of 12, in a flash of intuition, he, he completely understood Euclidean geometry. And then he said, as an adult, looking back, he said, I knew the next day would be dull of necessity. And so, yeah, part of our part of the our spiritual hunger, our spiritual, you know, trying to be exceptional is, oh, we think we should be in it all the time and we’re not. Ram Dass said somewhat. I can’t quote it exactly. But he said, you know, the first experience of heightened awareness, consciousness, enlightenment, even if you will, is is like lightning zap. And then it’s more like the passing of clouds.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:21 Yep.
Mark Nepo 00:14:22 And if anything from my cancer journey almost 40 years ago of almost dying through no wisdom on my part, but I was scoured And lest with the lens of the miraculous. So, you know, as a young, young ish, I was in my early 30s. And as a poet, as a writer, we were all taught whatever art form be on the look for good material.
Mark Nepo 00:14:48 Well, I don’t need to do that. Everything is miraculous when I am wholehearted enough, when I’m open enough to receive it. And so I can write about praise, explore anything that is alive before me as a teacher, and when I’m not able to access it, well, then I need to rest. That I need to clean my lens. Then I need to be in conversation with you and other loved ones and until it comes back into view, Because everything is a miracle.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:54 That phrase I’ve always thought is an interesting one, because what my brain does with it is goes, well, if everything’s a miracle, then nothing’s a miracle. The old project manager in me, that was like, if you say everything’s important, then nothing’s really important. Again, I think words. I mean, obviously you wrote an entire book about words, you know? Right. And I think the words that we use, as you say, in the, in the thing, they shape how we live in finding the words that work for us in these situations is so important.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:24 Yeah. You know. Right. Like, miracle is not a word that works for me. But alive. Complete.
Mark Nepo 00:16:31 So one thing that’s important and important in the book for me is, yeah, whatever synonyms work for you. The paradox of words is that they’re placeholders for what can’t be said. And so what’s important is the relationship you have with what they point to. So I opened the book with a saying attributed to Buddha. He was teaching one night under the moon, full moon, and he noticed his students for a little too in rapt with his words what he was saying. And he stopped, and he said, my words are only fingers pointing to the moon. Make sure you look at the moon. Yeah. And so, even wonderfully as we’re talking about miracle, I agree with you. Miracle isn’t something exceptional. Miracle, to me, is a stream of aliveness that is inherent in the web, in the kinship with all things that we can access or not, depending on which wolf we feed.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:36 Near the end of the book, I was looking and I want to talk about birds because you start with birds, you come back to birds. I love birds, we’re going to get to birds. But I noticed that in one of the later paragraphs you have a couple of different phrases you say, you know, whatever points you into the river of aliveness, but river and aliveness are capitalized. So is waterfall of time. So is web of relationship. Talk to me about when you capitalize something, what you’re trying to convey.
Mark Nepo 00:18:07 What I’m trying to convey is the windows or portals into the oneness of things. And this has been a argument, I guess you will with thinkers and philosophers throughout history. And that is Is everything connected or not? Well, I’m of the tribe that everything is connected and great love and great suffering. Show us how kindness shows us how, compassion shows us how. And one of the rewards for kindness is not just that you and I have strengthened our relationship, but the act of kindness allows me to renew my kinship with all things.
Mark Nepo 00:18:51 Kinship and kindness share the same root, not by accident. So I often when I capitalize things like that, I’m trying to point to portals of the oneness, of things, of the oneness of things, and so that we are connected. And that’s a resource. The oneness is not just a pretty concept when we’re in that river. This is where one of the ancient traditions of the Dao, the Taoist way of thinking. And the Dow simply again here’s a they just capitalized the way they don’t even try to name more than that. And the image for it is that life is like an invisible river and and each soul is a fish in that river. So the purpose of our will is to align ourselves with the currents of life, of a life. Not to conquer life, not to bend the river, not to. But the purpose of our will is to cooperate with life, because that’s what brings us fully alive. You know, I really feel that all of these things, whatever synonyms work for you, we find our way.
Mark Nepo 00:20:12 You know, I had an old friend who he was raised by a very devout Christian parents. And so he hated religion. So he. So he never wanted. He was. He’s a complete atheist, avowed atheist. So. But he was also a jazz scholar, like he was a DJ for years on a radio station. So we used to get together once a month. He would create this song list to play for me and he’d go, you hear that? And you hear that? Well, I couldn’t hear half of what he heard, but man, I love doing that with him because he plays something and tears, which is. And so I said, oh, so. So his way into the kinship of all things was that was his name for God or whatever you want to call it. There’s a thousand names. That was his name for the River of aliveness. And I think we’re asked not to argue with each other, but to open ourselves to as many languages as possible.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:21 I’ve always loved the image of the river and how life is easier if you go the direction the river is going versus going up the river.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:33 And yet, in life, there are things that we are trying to steer. I guess is a way of thinking of it. And some of that comes down to deciding, like, in what case do I just let this be the way it is? And in which cases am I going to try and do something different about it? The classic Serenity Prayer dilemma that listeners are probably tired of hearing me talk about. And yet it seems to be at the heart of so much of life in your world. How do you think about when is a situation that I let be the way it is, and when is it something I’ve changed? Right? You just had back surgery. So there’s an example. You didn’t just go, well, my back is screwed. You said, I’m going to take steps to make my back better.
Mark Nepo 00:22:17 Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:18 Talk to me about that.
Mark Nepo 00:22:19 Yeah. Let me back up a second and say that I think that we are, in every situation, asked to discern how and in what way to participate in life and show up.
Mark Nepo 00:22:36 And this. Okay. And so sometimes, right, with the Serenity Prayer, that means being active. And sometimes it doesn’t mean being passive. It means being patient and leaning into acceptance as a teacher of how to act. So a question, a very simple question that I return to in difficult times, whether it’s physical, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s fear, confusion, is is what’s before me. Heartening or disheartening is what’s before me life giving or life draining. If it’s life draining or disheartening, then what am I doing? If it’s life giving and heartening, then even if it’s difficult, I’m all in. I’m all in. So a couple of years ago, I was over 6 to 8 months. I found myself in this first time of, you know, real chronic pain. And right away my compassion for people in chronic pain was, oh my God, I was blessed to find a way out. But yeah, part of the pain, the emotional pain was like, well, what is this the way it’s going to be? I’m not going to ever find a way through this.
Mark Nepo 00:23:51 And this goes back to our whole heartedness discussion. So not to reframe things, not to find a way out or to minimize our pain and fear. I was in pain and fear about what do I do with this? How do I get through it? Maybe I don’t get through it. Maybe this is the way it is all of a sudden. What started is not being able to keep up on walks with my wife and our dog. I thought I pulled something just got worse and worse till all of a sudden I couldn’t put my socks on. I couldn’t sit anywhere, I couldn’t do anything. And I needed pretty heavy duty pain meds for almost a year, which went 6 or 8 months, and then for like 3 or 4 months after the surgery. And I was on oxycodone and prednisone and morphine patches once a week that I changed on my arm. And so before I knew that surgery was an option, I was here, I’m in my study. And yeah, this is a good example.
Mark Nepo 00:24:56 I could have worked downstairs. I’m upstairs. But it felt like there was something important about making it up here. Not for some image of myself, but because this is a sacred place for me from which I’m a perch, or like a sitting on a cliff from which I listen to the vastness. So it took me literally like 20 minutes to get up the stairs because I had to take one half a step, wait till the pain subsided, take the other half a step, lean on the banister. So I got up here in this chair, and finally I had to say, okay, I’m afraid I’m in pain. But there has to be. Not everything is in pain in a frame. Just me. So what is the nearest thing to me that’s not in pain and afraid not to jump from it, to run from it, but to extend my embrace of everything that’s not me while feeling everything. So that is me. So it was Eric. The floor under my feet that wasn’t in pain or afraid.
Mark Nepo 00:26:11 And a ceiling and the sky above the ceiling, and the earth holding up our home. So now I was feeling and meeting my own pain in fear, and also feeling the rest of life that was not in pain and afraid. Thank God we have very understandably, as human beings, and this is where we have to have compassion for ourselves, because our first response is to inflate or deflate our experience and our sense of ourselves. So if I’m in pain, the world’s a painful place. If I’m afraid, the world’s a fearful place. Well, that’s not really true. And the part of the work of whole heartedness and of awareness and meeting things as they are. is to right size and say, Thank God everything is not broken and afraid because it’s the wholeness of life that is healing. This is how we are more than what is done to us. I have to face what is done to me, and I’m more than what is done to me. So the mind is a wonderful tool, but the mind’s greatest attributes are sorting, choosing, sorting and prioritizing and problem so great.
Mark Nepo 00:27:43 It’s not a code to live by the heart. The way the heart works, at least as in my life, is by absorbing and integrating. And everything that has mattered in life to me has come from absorbing and integrating. How I live that out in the surface world requires me to sort prioritize shoes and problems solve so they work hand in hand. But the mine. Ever since I almost died from cancer, my mind has served my heart and not the other way around. And so that’s what’s restorative. Absorbing and integrating, which leads us into the world of the ordinary. Being extraordinary into the world of paradox as a teacher, into cooperating with truth.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:55 Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight? Breath shallow. Are your shoulders creeping up. Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:23 It’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one UFI newsletter. That’s one. Net newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. If you don’t mind spending a little bit more time here, I think it’s very instructive to see people who have a lot of wisdom to dispense, aka yourself in this case, who’s very articulate about many different things, to see how people relate to their own difficulty when it’s great. Yeah, right. So you’re talking about fear and how, when we’re afraid, the world becomes a fearful place, it’s almost as if what happens is we’ve got a fear. The fearful lens on the light goes through that lens. Right. The lens is fear, and it kind of goes out that way. We talk a lot about how our thoughts drive our emotions, which is true, but sometimes it’s just the emotion itself starts the thought pattern.
Mark Nepo 00:30:34 Absolutely.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:35 And the thought patterns, you describe them a little bit when something like this is happening are usually not like, hey, I bet this is just a short term thing. I’ll figure it out. Hey man, don’t worry about it. Just relax. And right. It’s not that. It’s oh my God, what if I’m like this forever? How will I be able to go to my next book event? What am I right? We get afraid in that way. And so part of dealing with any hard situation, I describe it as not making it worse. Right?
Mark Nepo 00:31:01 Yeah. Fear has its proper place, and we have to relate to it and have our fear live in us and not us. In our fear and in being human. We slip in and out of this. But again, this is the work of awareness to realize when. Whoa, the raft is turned over and I’m in it. It’s not in me. So that we can right size things and pull it back.
Mark Nepo 00:31:26 Because we’re always needing to both. And this is for every human being. We have to both survive and thrive. So fear has its proper place to alert us to proper danger, but then again, not to magnify it. Or when it does get magnified, how do we right size it? And how do we continue to thrive? So we’re always moving between risk management and risk enhancement. To thrive, we have to enhance our risk to survive. We have to manage risks, and a lot of times we wind up living one or the other extremes because it feels too difficult to manage. To become skillful at both. And I think this is really our spiritual maturity where we’re asked to become skillful at both. So we’re going to be an optimist. And no, I just want to enhance my risk. And, you know, you and I can have this conversation walking along the highway, not paying attention. Get hit by a truck, okay. But otherwise, we know all too well that if we never take risk, then the fear becomes a God that we serve.
Mark Nepo 00:32:40 Yeah. And the challenge is this. This corridor of aliveness that each of us is asked to return to, letting these skills serve each other. And I’ll give you a good example. Back when I was first facing my cancer journey and I was thrown into a hospital. I had a rare form of lymphoma. I’ve never been in a life threatening situation. I was terrified of everything. And of course, I had to go through every difficult test surgery. Oh my God. I met at first everything on a scale of 1 to 10. Everything was a 14 and.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:18 I sound like my mom. Mom, what’s your pain? Level 37.
Mark Nepo 00:33:24 Well, and I quickly discovered I exhausted my heart. And so in order to meet this wholeheartedly and thoroughly, I had to begin to discern if it was a seven. I needed to give it a sevens worth of heart energy. So I still had heart energy to meet whatever was missed and to restore and to Charge. So suddenly I was thrown into a new life skill of how do I meet things accurately with my heart? Okay.
Mark Nepo 00:34:04 And this. This brings up a wonderful ancient Hindu teaching story that I talk about in the Book of Awakening. And. And there’s a master and apprentice always. And the master in this case finds the apprentice very annoying because all he does is complain. So he says to the apprentice, I want you to bring a handful of salt. Put it in a glass of water and bring it to me quietly. So he does. Master says. Drink. He apprentice drinks. He spits it out. Master said, what’s the matter? He says it’s bitter. He says, I want you to get the same exact handful of salt. Cup it in your hands and follow me quietly. He leads him to a lake.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:47 He says quietly, is the important part.
Mark Nepo 00:34:49 And part, he says, put the salt in the lake. He does, he says, not drink. So he kneels down. He scoops up some water, dribbles down his chin. The master says, well, he says, oh, it’s fresh.
Mark Nepo 00:35:02 The master looks at the apprentice and says, be like a lake. Stop being a glass. Yeah. The practice question around all of what we’ve been talking about that’s held in this anonymous teaching story from India is when faced with pain and fear, we can’t eliminate it, but we can right size it by enlarging our sense of things. And the question is what experiences, practices, and relationships in larger sense of things? What fills your toolbox so that the next time fear and pain say hello, which is by making us a glass, we can begin to enlarge our sense of things. So we listen to the story, say, well, it’s not good to be a glass. Forget it, I won’t do. Yes, we will. Because that’s how fear and pain. Say hello. Yeah, but we don’t have to stay there.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:54 I’ve always loved that story. I think it’s such a great one. And it’s interesting because in my book I’m talking about it, and I’ve been talking about it in some keynotes about the salt part.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:07 You know, like one way is you become a bigger container, which is which is certainly important. The other way is you just stop putting so much salt in your water. Right? And in the same way that language uplifts us. Language also can imprison us by inflaming the situation. I love your book because it’s got so many great words, and I thank you from the section in my book. It’s like I’m just categorizing all the words that are like salt always and never, right? But I love this idea of words, how important they are. I want to get back to your book, but I surely do have to talk about birds. So you start with a story of a bird, and at the end you basically go through a list of all the wisdom ideas throughout a lot of different traditions that all feature birds. So talk to me about the role that birds play in all of these stories, in these traditions.
Mark Nepo 00:37:05 The birds have always represented mystically the messengers between the self and the universe.
Mark Nepo 00:37:17 They are the messengers between worlds. And I mentioned several in the book ways of this. And actually there’s a whole set of called the Jataka Tales. You know that in Buddhism, where before Buddha came as a as a sentient being, he came as many animals and appeared as birds as well. I make the offering that words are these Portals between living in the world and the unseen. Mystery of the universe has always informed the world that has always informed each individual spirit. So how do we know they fly and come back? You know, I talk about the one bird in particular there that I book it with is the African honeyguide. And these birds actually lead human beings to honey, and they actually wait and want to lead human beings to honey. They get their own and they want to. And so this gives a life to that. Words want to join us. So they are placeholders. And so it’s so important our relationship to them. And you’re absolutely I agree with you completely that words and stories can both liberate us or confine us.
Mark Nepo 00:38:39 So in the modern world, words have become not openers, but labels that get in the way. So you take the image of, oh, say, someone who cans meat and fruit and stores it in the basement. Oh, and you got a label here, sausage. And here’s prunes and here’s, well, in the modern world, we look at that and we go, oh, you’re there. That’s sausage. No, it’s not sausage. So you open it and taste it. And this is one of the, the problems from the internet and Facebook and the insulation of technology is we have started to be confined by the words and names and stories without living them or touching them. So great example of this is and I call it screen mentality. Okay. You know, my father, when I grew up we used to get a National Geographic. We never traveled anywhere. He never went very far from home in his life, but he loved to look at the pictures. Great. Well, right.
Mark Nepo 00:39:44 You and me, I can go on YouTube and I can be over the shoulder of someone climbing Mount Everest. Well, great. I’m never going to climb Mount Everest, but I didn’t make the climb. Yeah, and we are in an age where we are mistaking, looking at someone, making the climb that I made, the climb that I read the label on the container. And now, therefore, I have eaten the sausage or the fruit or the experience. No. Oh, we haven’t. And this is the restoration of our direct experience with life. So stories. One of the great things about stories we all know people tell stories over and over again. And as we get older, some of it’s because we don’t remember, but I don’t I don’t think most of it I think most of it is because stories that have meaning require more than one tally to digest the meaning. And I learned this years ago with my in-laws from a former marriage, and they were farmers and I was no longer in the marriage.
Mark Nepo 00:40:52 But my father in law had passed at the age of 85 or 6. I was living in Michigan. I went back to New York to see my former mother in law, and she started Erik to tell me of how she found him in his overalls on the way to the barn. Very touching. And she told me again and then again. And, you know, at first I thought, oh, you know, maybe she’s not remembering, maybe she’s not lucid. And then, you know, I totally like they were married 67 years. My wife Susan, and I were married around 30. They were married more than twice as long. I have no idea what that might feel like Losing him was a passage that was too big to digest in one telling. And then I thought, man, you tell it as many times as you want, and I will listen as many times.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:51 There’s an old, I won’t get it right. It’s an old Chinese saying, like, read a book, you know, 99 times and the truth will appear.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:01 It’s this basic idea that, like, it takes a lot of time going through it. It’s so interesting the way that I read for this show, which is I read a lot quickly because I have a lot of guests and we just we keep moving. And yet in my own spiritual practice, I’ve had to go to the opposite. I’ve had to say, like, I am going to spend six months on 102 page book or something like that, right? Like I have to go to the opposite, where I keep just coming back to the same words, which can on one level start to be repetitive and boring, but when I spend the time with it.
Mark Nepo 00:42:42 Well, that’s because of presence. If you’re whole hearted, it’s never repetitive. If we fall out of if we’re half hearted, it becomes repetitive. So this is the difference between habit and ritual. Presence and ritual is a word that is in, in, in the book, and it comes from the Sanskrit ata rta. Amazingly, it means the hidden order of the universe.
Mark Nepo 00:43:13 So when I’m present in wholehearted with the smallest detail, it reveals the hidden order of order of the universe. If I am rushing or I’m. It turns into a habit. But we we.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:29 Earn. Yeah, I tell this story in the book of early on in AA and you go to a meeting and they read the same 12 steps, 12 traditions, the promises, every single meeting. And it used to drive me crazy, right? And then I tell the story of later in my Zen practice, the same thing occurs. But the whole heartedness that I’m bringing to that Zen practice, the connecting of what those words are pointing at more deeply allows me to take the same level of repetition and relate to it in a totally different way, based on my intentionality. And to use your word that I really love my whole heartedness. Or to go back to a word that I love that you used earlier. Thoroughness.
Mark Nepo 00:44:28 Yeah. So. So this ties back to what we were talking about in terms of when we’re in pain, when we’re in fear is whatever small detail, the extraordinarily ordinary, when we’re wholehearted and we can be with it.
Mark Nepo 00:44:47 The word trust literally means follow your heart. Stay there. There’s nowhere to go. Stay there. And like the birds, it will be a portal. Us and our suffering and the restorative whole of life. You know. And there’s a great little story I tell in the book that comes from the Talmud, where a rabbi in Europe, he’s he’s taught his students for the day, and they come back because they want to ask him a question, but they can see he’s reading a passage in a book. They don’t want to disturb him. So they all go away and one student comes back. If you I still on the same page. So he he says, excuse me, Rabbi, I noticed that your. Is everything okay? You’re on the same page. And the rabbi smiles and says when I see where else? And this is the difference between a scholar and a sage, a scholar that part of us rightfully reads as much as possible, tries to integrate. But when we stumble and follow the heart on a moment that is true, where are we going? There’s nowhere else to go.
Mark Nepo 00:46:03 And so, you know, it’s just it’s it’s remarkable. I mean, I think one of the words that I so love is the origin of the word genius. This really gets at the heart of the difference between exceptional and ordinary. So we think of genius as Mozart. Einstein, right? You know, Baryshnikov, you know. and yes, there’s an exceptional level of skill that some people are blessed to have, and they work at it. Whatever. But that’s not what genius really means. The origin of genius means attendant spirit. Everyone has a genius. Everyone has an attendant spirit, whether you call it Dharma, Ottman, Holy Ghost, Yahweh, Buddha, nature. Sufis call it call alb. Whatever you, whatever it is a thousand inner voice. Soul. There’s a thousand names. Okay. What’s important is our relationship to it. And so this is so important because this. The word genie shares the same root as genius. So the famous story, Aladdin and the lamp. It’s not about rubbing the lamp and getting what you want.
Mark Nepo 00:47:32 Instead, if you embrace the lamp of your life, show up to help guide you. So, Blake, one of his proverbs is straight is the road to improvement. Crooked is the road to genius. To our attendant spirit. And to go further. Yeats had this profound insight. He said genius is a crisis that joins the buried self and the daily mind for brief moments. Genius is a crisis that joins the buried self and the daily mind. Together for a brief moment. So again, how great love and great suffering the colons, the instances and the words and the stories are openers. You know, in the. I talk about this in the book to the in the African Yoruba tradition, they don’t name children till they’ve been here for a week or two because they want to see what the spirit that has arrived wants to be called. The name follows, whereas in the west we lead by naming the child first. No no no no. We listen to spirit. And so here’s another thing that I talk about in the book too.
Mark Nepo 00:49:03 So in the Japanese tradition, you know who Sai, who was an amazing woodblock. He was, you know, Hokusai was one of the, you know, Leonardo of Japanese printmaking. Well, it was a tradition in Japan, but he particularly embraced it. He lived to be 90, which was a long time back then, in the 17 1800s bridge those centuries. He changed his name in his life 20 to 30 times. Now we would say, whoa, this guy is like, you know, not stable. He’s like, you know what’s going on? No, he changed his name to have his name stay consistent with how his spirit was evolving over a lifetime to stay.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:55 He is so beautiful. I now I’m gonna I’m gonna spend the rest of the day thinking about my new name.
Mark Nepo 00:50:01 Yeah. My oldest friend, Robert Mason, who’s a poet, and we helped save each other’s lives. He’s in recovery from alcohol for almost 40 years, and he was hitting bottom while I was in the hospital with cancer.
Mark Nepo 00:50:16 And we really helped save each other’s lives. See, I don’t know, 6 or 7 years after that. we were sitting, both of us having neuropathy. He from extreme alcoholism and me, the effects of chemo and having little sandwiches in the sun, in silence, in a park in Albany, New York. And all of a sudden, we wound up with these spirit names for each other. I was horse running, and he was bird on head, which is very consistent with he is still enough. And, in his own very Zen nature where a bird could land on his head. And I, I have always been not her horse running to get anywhere, just thoroughly holding nothing back. And it’s interesting. One of the other words I stumbled on to, you know, the word random, which we think of as chance. That’s not what that word originally meant. You know, like you have words that describe how a horse moves. Trot, gallop. Right. Random is the moment when all four hooves are off the ground.
Mark Nepo 00:51:40 They’re this constellation of things that show how we have stopped feeding the wholeness of life and have sped the separation. Just how we went from demon into angel and demon. We went from random to random. And another word is analyze. We think of it as, you know, limbs so carefully and pulling things apart. No, the original definition of analyze means to loosen, to back up from, to look at, to loosen the hardness of our views and opinions. I’ll share two other words that are just incredible and useful to all the things we’ve been talking about. So one is the word Academy. We think of it now as is another erosion intellectual dry write academy an academic. Go back to ancient Greece. Plato. Well, you know, he was a guy like you and I. He was he didn’t have a formal school. He he was walking around with people who wanted to be in conversation about what does it mean to be here, what’s going on? And he’d have.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:00 To have.
Mark Nepo 00:53:00 Conversations while walking.
Mark Nepo 00:53:03 Yeah. He would. Yeah. And and he, he had an uncle, a rich uncle who when Plato was 33, his uncle died and he left them an olive grove. So he said to the people that were hanging out with him. Well, hey, what? Let’s walk in the olive grove and have these conversations. We can hang out there. Well, they walked there and the the word academic and he. And then he named his school the Academy. The word academy in ancient Greece means sacred grove art. Conversations like we’re having the things we’re looking at, the things we’re looking into. Where is your sacred grove? Friendship is a sacred grove where we explore the truth, where the stories and the words are openers is a sacred grove for everyone who’s listening. Where’s your sacred grove and how do you open it? And how do you go there? And so the, the other word that I would, would, would really want to bring to you. Here is the word sacrifice. So sacrifice, as we know, as we come to know it, means giving up even our lives sometimes for the common good.
Mark Nepo 00:54:26 And we think of soldiers we think of for freedom. We think of think of all the healthcare workers during the pandemic. Well, that sacrifice comes out of a more ancient soil of sacrifice. And the original definition of the word sacrifice means to give up what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred, to give up what no longer works, in order to stay close to what is sacred, that invites. This is a key practice that helps us discern in the Serenity Prayer when to be involved and when to surrender, when to be active and when to be more patient.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:17 Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again one you feed your net newsletter.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:47 Well, I think that is a wonderful place for us to wrap up this conversation. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation with maybe a couple more words that you like. I’d also like to talk about patience with you. It’s a word that has shown up like 3 or 4 times in the last few days for sure. Kind of interesting. So listeners, if you would like to get access to this post-show conversation, the other great post-show conversations we do, as well as ad free episodes. And if you want to support the one you feed and we can definitely use your support, go to one you feed.net. Mark, it is always such a pleasure. Thank you for joining us again.
Mark Nepo 00:56:28 Oh, you’re so welcome. Joy, really.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:31 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do.We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.
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