I have learned in the last few years, as I have spent some time exploring this, [that] originally the word “sage” was a verb and not a noun, and it meant “to taste,” not “to know.” So when we can enter into this relationship, this conversation with aliveness, it leads us to taste, to embody, into a state of knowing as opposed to collecting knowledge. And that leads us to wisdom.
TS: I love that. The sage is the act of tasting.
MN: And it’s also fascinating that the early use of “sage,” the first use of it when it became a noun, appeared in Hindu culture, in Chinese culture, and in Greek [culture.] What’s interesting is that the seven sages in Hindu cultures were Vedic poets. And they are anonymous. They are not named. They are those who were able to hear and praise the hymns of the universe.
It’s not until we get to Greek times [when] Socrates is the first one to actually name people as sages. He names the Seven Sages of Greece. As soon as he does that, everybody starts arguing, “Why seven? Why not ten? And you left out Harry!” [Laughs] And what happens? Everybody stops tasting and they start arguing about who were the best wisdom tasters. And we get away from direct experience. We get away from the exquisite risk.
TS: Now Mark, I’m going to hold nothing back here and ask you a question that feels a little risky for me related to your cancer journey. And what I’m curious about—you know, people often say things like, “Well, this person made it through because they changed this part of their belief system, and that is why they lived through this terrible disease that they weren’t supposed to live through.” What I’m curious about [is], what do you make of the fact that you recovered? Do you think that it is because you had these great spiritual discoveries? Do you think that it was that you were just lucky? Chance? What do you make of it?
MN: Well, yes, and thank you for asking the question, which I’m happy to explore. You know, it was a very profound journey for me, and this is what has really led me—[this was] the doorway to all of my work in the last 24 years. I’m 60. I was 36 when I went through this. It was a three-year period of intense period of chemo and surgeries.
You know, I feel deeply that—I was raised Jewish, and I went into this journey and I was blessed that everyone I met was kind enough to offer something to me. I had Sufis that I had never met pray for me. I had my brother who tried to design a macrobiotic diet, which was awful but I did it. It tasted awful. And I even had a friend who was priest and he wanted to lay hands on me. I found suddenly, you know what, these things didn’t require conversation or thought. I said to him, “When, where, and how many times would you like to do it? Thank you.” I didn’t need discern, “Well, I’m Jewish and he’s a priest. Should I let him lay hands on my head?”
So arriving, being blessed to still be here—to be kind of thrown, like Jonah, out of the mouth of the whale, two things became clear to me. Very clear. One was that I am not wise enough, on this side, to know what worked. So from that point forward, I was challenged to believe in everything. And my challenge, which is why I have been a student of all the spiritual traditions, is to find where they all meet in the middle. What is the common core that they all resonate from and how they manifest so many different, beautiful ways for people to choose from.
I was constantly faced with people after I was still here who would come up to me and ask very much the question you asked, but with a hidden agenda. Everybody, when I got sick, wanted to blame it on their partial understanding of disease. “It’s what you ate. It’s the car you drove. It’s your sexuality. It’s your lack of sexuality. It’s your stubbornness. It’s your lack of will.” And when I was blessed to be well, so many people that I met wanted me to corroborate their partial understanding of wellness. “Oh, it was mind-over-matter,” said the person who doesn’t believe in God. “Oh, it’s Jesus.” “No, it’s Moses.” “No, it was all the vegetables.” “It was the vitamins.” “It was your will to live.” “It was your will to surrender.” Again, you know, I’m not wise enough to know. It led me into the unity and wholeness of life.
Let’s use the analogy of spring. You know, there are thousands of different insects, each designed by nature to be attracted to different nectar, and they each carry a particular pollen and pollinate a particular plant. And they don’t repeat themselves, but together, they bring this miracle we call “spring.” Why [can we not do the same] in the spiritual paths that human beings are open to? There are so many different paths because each of us is born with an attraction to one way that will pollinate our spirit. And no one person can hold it all. So the human spiritual notion of spring gives us just as many choices.
TS: So you said that there were two things that you came to: the first one was that you weren’t wise enough to know what the factors were so you welcomed all these different approaches, which I really appreciate. But what’s the second one?
MN: The second is that I woke up on the other side of that journey, of almost dying and through no wisdom of my own—you know, I went into it in my 30s believing in a hard view of the world, but I was still really very much in my head. And I woke up and I was living lower. I was suddenly in my chest.
The image I like to use is like in early spring, in March or April when the snow melts into the ground. It’s like my understanding of life melted from my head into the ground of me and from that point forward, my mind has served my heart and not the other way around. And that has helped me in everything I’ve investigated and discovered and in living closer in my own journey with the exquisite risk.
TS: That’s beautiful. You have a phrase, I wonder if you can unpack it for us, “beginner’s heart?”
MN: Yes. Well, often we know, and I think we’ve heard about “beginner’s mind” in the sense of dropping everything we know. Either love or great suffering often prompts us to do that. Then spiritual practice encourages us to do it without love or suffering being the catalyst. To drop what we know so we can see life freshly again as if we just arrived. Well, beginner’s mind helps us apprehend life freshly. But beginner’s heart, I believe, helps us embody life freshly. It helps us stop watching and enter what’s before us.
Maybe you know this, but I’ve been out to Naropa [University] several times over the years, and I always was interested in why the university was named Naropa. And I finally found someone who taught there who could tell me and I love this story. Naropa (and you’re probably aware of this), in the 11th century, was a renowned scholar, kind of like the Houston Smith of 11th-century India. He just knew every nuance of spiritual practice, of different sects and different traditions. He was walking down the street one day and an old woman crossed his path and stopped, pointed her finger at him and said, “Are you Naropa?” And he puffed up, ready to give an autograph and said, “Why yes, I am.” She looked at him and she pointed her finger, and asked, “Do you know the heart of all those paths?” And he felt somewhat affronted and taken by surprise and he said, “Well of course I do!” And then he walked on for a ways, but he of course knew that he had lied. So he ran back in front of her and got down before her and said, “Be my teacher.”
Naropa represents embodied wisdom. Beginner’s heart leads us, returns us through the exquisite risk, through holding nothing back, through effort and grace, it returns us every day if need be, to the aliveness and the freshness of what it is to be here. We are the only creatures. We certainly can go astray and we can be encased in a cocoon of our own making, but we are the only creatures that can shed that cocoon more than once in a lifetime.
TS: When you say that we can shed our cocoon, tell me more about what you mean by that, and how we’re the only creatures that can do that.
MN: Well, because, you know, we are—in the life of a butterfly, the cocoon is one stage of its life. It incubates. It forms. It breaks out of that cocoon and becomes a butterfly. We, as human beings, as spiritual creatures encased in a body living on earth, we go through many lives in one lifetime. We go through many cells if—if—we dare to grow, if we take the risks that are put before us. If, when we suffer, we’re not just broken but broken open. If, when we love, we are loved and loving beyond our sense of ourselves, we lose ourselves in a good way.
We have the opportunity to live many lives in one life. So the idea or image of a butterfly is that more than once in our lifetime, we have a cocoon. We burst through it after we’ve formed. We fly and then we resurrect again. We go through the process again. I am not the same—though I am the same soul—self as I was five years ago, let alone 10 years ago, let alone 20, let alone before my cancer journey. I recognize those people as stages of me along the way. And the thing that we often do in our culture in the name of the blame game is, in order to have security about who we are now, we often need to make false who we were before. And that’s not helpful.
The cocoon for the butterfly, once the butterfly has emerged, wasn’t false—it just served its purpose. So who I was ten years ago, even though I can look and find some embarrassing moments, doesn’t mean that I was false. I was true as far as I knew how to be. And limited. And now I’ve grown, and I’m truer and I have less limitations. But who I will be, hopefully in five years from now, will be less limited than I am now.
TS: You know, one thing that I’m curious about, Mark, because I see this in the lives of people I am close to, is that one of the things that keeps people from breaking through that cocoon and growing into a new phase of life again and again is this concern about “leaving people behind.” Leaving people from a certain period of your life behind as you grow and change. And in the context of holding nothing back, I’m wondering what you can say about that.
MN: Well, I think that you raise a very poignant and difficult aspect of growing, which, you know, archetypally is in all of the stories of all the great spiritual teachers. Buddha [in Siddhartha]—we kind of pass over that part of the story because there is so much amazing that happens once he leaves, but you know, he was groomed to be king. He was a prince. And he had to leave life as he knew it and embark on his own.
And often, when we deify these people from the past, I think we step over the intense humanity and the lessons in [experience], that it probably wasn’t easy, that it was difficult. For me, I think that’s what’s very difficult, and we all have relationships and friendships and we grow in different directions. I think honoring the truth of who we are and who we become is one of the most difficult things that we have to face.
But if you imagine that relationships—if you were to put two row boats in the ocean and they were not tied together but just simply left there, and you came back the next day, you would not expect them to be in the exact same place. If you came back in a month, they might not even be near each other. If you came back in a year, they might not even be visible to each other. So there’s this very precarious current of life that we have no control over. And this is, again, a paradox. There is effort and commitment I believe and loyalty and devotion and commitment to people that we journey with. But there are times in everyone’s life when at the worst, who we are is kept down by the stubbornness or fear of someone close to us. And at the very best, who we are is that we grow to be who we are, and one of us grows into a land creature and one into an amphibian or a water creature. We can’t really live that close to each other though we may still love each other.
So either way, these are difficult passages. I think of my own journey with cancer, and there were many people from that time who helped me live who I am no longer—we’re not really in each other’s lives anymore because we grew in different directions. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t in my heart. It doesn’t mean that I don’t know when their birthdays are or go to a jazz concert and know that they would have loved it because they love this person. And feel that ache or that tug. But I think our obligation (and then let me tell you a story about not doing this) is to be as true to the aliveness we are born with as we can be and support that in others and be as truthful as we can be when they collide and even crowd each other out.
The story is—this is a story from the New Hebrides in Polynesian culture, and it’s the story about how human beings lost the ability to be immortal. It was believed in early indigenous cultures that what gave human beings the ability to be immortal was that they could shed their skin. And when they stopped shedding their skin, they lost that ability. So the story is, in this culture, that Alta Maremma (which literally means “changed skin of the world”), she was the matriarchal mother of this tribe, went to the river to shed her skin as she had done many times. And as she shed he skin and felt the freshness of a new skin, she just looked over her shoulder and saw that her old skin caught on a branch on a piece of drift wood. At the moment she thought nothing of it, and she returned to her village where he teenage daughter saw her and was frightened because she didn’t recognize her mother, who looked not much older than her.
She comforted her [daughter] that, “Yes, it’s still me.” Her mother said, “Look it’s still me.” And the daughter was repulsed, was angry. And Alta Maremma, to appease and sooth the fear and anxiety of her daughter, went back to the river, found her old skin and put it back on. And in the New Hebrides, it is said that from that day forward, human beings lost the ability to be immortal, which I take not to mean “live forever” but “to live as close to life as possible in any one moment.”
That’s a wonderful ancient story because, like all archetypes, it captures that we are all faced with this, almost daily. “Am I going to put on my old skin in order to avoid conflict with a loved one? Am I going to put on my old skin and keep my fresh aliveness from meeting the air because I want to appease their anxiety rather than help them through their anxiety?” There’s no answer to this, but you raise a very poignant, difficult question. This is part of the practice of being human and why we need to compare notes and help each other, because every generation, every life learns something more about how to do this.
TS: Mark, I feel like I could talk to you for a long time. I feel like talking to you is a little bit like sitting next to a beautiful fireplace, a beautiful hearth.
Now Mark, I would like to ask you two more questions. This first one is a bit personal. There’s a quote I read from you that “we’re both born with a gift and an emptiness.” And I’m curious, I’m sure you’ve reflected on, in your own life, what you feel is your gift and what would you say is the emptiness?
MN: Thank you. Let me say for a second that what you read there is something that I’ve been exploring lately, and that is that we are each born with a gift and an emptiness and we often try to push away the emptiness. We try to push it away and only focus on the gift when I think that one of our callings in life is for those two aspects of our soul to be in conversation with each other. So imagine a hole dug out of the earth. Unless you put the light of your gift in that hole, you cannot see the depths that the emptiness revealed.
Before I speak about my gift and emptiness, as I think I know it at least so far, let me just say that the nature of emptiness, I’m sure you’re aware of, is two-fold here. There is the deep emptiness that is not empty, that all the traditions speak about. The Hindu and Buddhist traditions especially. The still center. The center that holds everything. The quiet that is at the heart of silence. The bareness, if you will. The is-ness of things in which we are always held if we can quiet all the noise. That is the large emptiness that is not empty. There is the psychological emptiness that we all struggle with about our own worth, about our own contributing, about our own mattering. And so these two are very close to each other. Often when we can face our psychological emptiness, the bottom falls out, which from that position we think is terrible. But then it drops into this bareness that holds us.
So, I think that my emptiness that I struggle with is [this:] from an early age—and growing up in a family that was pretty critical and angry, and also a family that supported my gift, but also made me feel this emptiness (and I nurtured it in myself as well)—is I flash from being a mature person who has journeyed on earth for 60 years to being a little boy in a man’s body, unsure how to proceed. So I think my emptiness is a trail or a psychological reflex that has certainly lessoned over the years, but I don’t think we ever get rid of it. Just like we don’t get to a permanent state of enlightenment, I don’t think we ever get rid of these things. I think they lesson. They right-size. When I fall into that little boy’s space, I know it more quickly. I can come out of it in less time than 10 years ago. I can have the person I am—it’s in me rather than me being in it.
My gift is seeing the world through my heart. And certainly you can see, as with everybody, the relationship between my gift and my emptiness. It is very important because if I am stuck in my little boy psychological emptiness, the only thing I can see through my heart is my fear and insecurity. I can’t see everything else. So my gift helps turn my emptiness into the larger bareness of being. Now, you can replace those particulars for me with your own, and anybody who is listening can [do the same]. But we don’t eliminate these things. We build relationships with them and that’s at the core of being here. That’s at the core of staying awake and holding nothing back and the practice of being human.
TS: And then Mark, just to end our conversation, if you would be willing, I wonder if you could share with us whatever lines of poetry, of your poetry, occur to you that would be kind of a ribbon on our conversation.
MN: Sure, and actually, this is kind of amazing, because I’m on a writing sabbatical now for these couple of months here, but I just wrote a poem last week called, The Empty Necklace. So let me share that.
TS: Perfect!
MN: The Empty Necklace
We each have one, made over a lifetime
of the empty moments in between, when
everything is still and complete, each a
clear bead strung on the invisible chain
of our experience.
I’m thinking of the long silence after
we’d talked for months about what it’s
like to be alive.
Or the time in winter when the snowy
pines were creaking and swaying a
hundred feet up like the eye of the
earth opening slightly.
Or the time in early fall when you
were pinching a pot in the sun
and our dog was chewing on a stick
and I started to cry.
And the moment I woke from surgery
too soon and my soul had to decide
which way to swim.
And sometimes, when the wind sweeps
the next task from my mind, I am
returned to the moment before I
was born: floating with a brief sense
of all there is, just as I was ushered
into the world with our need to
find that feeling between us.
TS: Thank you, Mark, for a very intimate, beautiful and heart-warming conversation. Thank you so much.
MN: Oh, you’re welcome. It was a joy for me too. I think we could talk for hours.
TS: That’s true.
I’ve been speaking with Mark Nepo. He has created with Sounds True a new eight-session audio learning program called Staying Awake: The Ordinary Art, and it is filled with poetry, stories, teachings, metaphors—it’s just gorgeous! Also a two-session audio program called Holding Nothing Back: The Essentials for an Authentic Life.
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Good to read this post https://www.hiretablets.ae/
Thank you Mark Nepo for such exquisite writing and stories about being
fully present, taking exquisite risk, and the opening of our minds and
hearts in not limiting our journey by being too attached to any one goal
or plan. I am saving this interview to re-read as there are so many
gems contained within! Hugs from my heart to yours, Kristin
"We trip on the garbage."
It's all for a reason, the stones and the garbage. Maybe the point is to learn from everything. And if that is the point, it's all for a reason.
Thank you, Mark Nepo.
I love that I get what I need at any given time. And this interview is in perfect timing. I look forward to reading/listening to more of Mark's teachings. It opens my mind/heart to a deeper understanding and also confirms how my heart mind has been forming. I believe we are all striving to journey into a deeper understanding of our woundedness and healing and way of Being. Thank you.