Mark Nepo – The Book of Soul
Mark Nepo is a poet, philosopher, and a most eloquent storyteller. In 2015 he was given a lifetime achievement award by Age Nation, and in 2016 he was named by Watkins Mind Body Spirit magazine as one of the most spiritually influential living people. Mark was part of Oprah Winfrey’s The Life You Want tour in 2014 and has appeared several times with Oprah on her Super Soul Sunday program. As a cancer survivor, Mark Nepo devotes his writing and teaching to the journey of inner transformation and the life of the relationship. He’s the author of 15 audio learning projects and 22 published books including the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life, You Want By Being Present to the Life You Have; The Way Under The Way: The Place of True Meeting; Drinking from the River of Light: The Life of Expression and his new book, The Book of Soul: 52 Paths to Living What Matters.
An Interview with Mark Nepo – The Book of Soul
by Justine Willis Toms, co-founder, and host of New Dimensions Radio Program
What is our true inheritance as part of the human family? How do we have an authentic and wholehearted life, and why is that important? How do we stay connected to the deeper purpose in our life if we rush through our days, and how do we stand above isolation and despair? We explore these and many other questions with Mark Nepo.
In our conversation, Mark and I discuss the challenges of negotiating the often-confounding experience of being human in these postmodern times.
JUSTINE WILLIS TOMS: I’m just delighted to be here with you once again. I know that in all your books, including the newest, The Book of Soul, there is this current of working with how to be present in our lives, how to be wholehearted in our life. I’d like to know what wholehearted means to you.
MARK NEPO: It’s wonderful to be with you again. Let me start by affirming that what I offer are notes from living. I offer examples, not instructions. What I offer is the best that I’ve been able to figure out so far as I keep learning and growing.
In truth, part of the challenge for every human being, for every generation, and now, in our present incarnation, is that it’s our turn to be fully actualized human beings. And this is a living paradox because the being in us is infinite, but the human aspect is very finite and limited. So, we are always like lightning in a bottle. We’re always cracking and falling and getting up, and so we have this constant challenge of how to be wholehearted when the difficulties of life make us halfhearted.
Now, we can’t avoid being halfhearted, because we’re human. Just like I can’t stay awake 24 hours a day—I must sleep. I believe, and I am committed to wholeheartedness, but being human, I’m not going to be able to sustain it. For just as you can’t keep your eyes open without blinking, part of our humanness is that we will blink.
Given all this, what does it mean to be wholehearted? Well, my experience here on Earth has been that when I can hold nothing back when I can feel what mine to feel is, and face what mine to face—including joy and tenderness and difficulty and pain is—then I am completely here. And when I’m completely here, however briefly, I become an open conduit.
One of the rewards for being authentic, which to me means being thorough, is that we are given access to a moment of Oneness, of Eternity, of completeness, through which we can touch into all the other times that anyone’s ever lived. In this way, when I am caring for you, and I’m truly present, I slip into a moment where I am now in the moment of everyone who ever cared for someone. So, by being completely thorough to what’s before me, one act of love allows us to experience all love.
By one act of compassion, we experience all compassion. If I don’t run from my pain or your pain, then I trip into the truth of all pain, which, you can say, is overwhelming. I have enough of my pain. I don’t want all the pain. Well, it’s not that we carry all pain, it’s that just as a net will distribute weight when I can access other people’s feelings and the connection—and that’s why a relationship is so important—it doesn’t burden us with those feelings. It distributes the intensity of them so that we can receive the meaning in them.
Being wholehearted is being integral. Interestingly, the root of the word integrity means “to make whole.” Now, we tend to think of integrity as I have a checklist of character traits or virtues that I believe in, and I want to try to live by them, so I do an inventory every week to see if I have lived up to this set of values. There’s nothing wrong with this, but there’s a deeper understanding of integrity, which goes beyond being considered a good person. For when I live by the values that I care about, I become integral. That is, I become whole, and the reward for being whole is not just good relationships; it’s access to Oneness. I get to experience everything larger than me.
JUSTINE WILLIS TOMS: This reminds me of something that you write and speak about that has to do with what do I stand on, and what do I stand for? Can you speak to that more deeply?
MARK NEPO: There’s a chapter in The Book of Soul about standing on and standing for. This is a distinction that I felt I needed to consider deeply. And again, when I consider something deep enough, it opens something everyone has had to consider. So, it’s worth sharing, not because of what I do with it, but the fact that we all have to deal with it. In our humanity, we are so reactive that we’re quick to stand for something or against something. But the most important thing I have found is that before I can, effectually stand for something, I need to know what I’m standing on. What is foundational? What is reliable? What are truths that will never go away? I may lose sight of them, especially when I am lost in a cloud of worry or fear or distortion or inflation or deflation, anxiety, despair, or grief. Then, where’s my footing? Where do I find what’s solid because from what’s solid, I can see more clearly what I stand for?
Often, we push against each other as a substitute for knowing where solid ground is. A dear friend in my men’s’ group, David Addiss, taught me about a Portuguese indigenous tradition practiced in South America. It’s an ancient instruction on how to deal with conflict called E dai. In Portuguese, E dai means” and so.” An example of this is that you come to me with a struggle, and you don’t know what to do. But you’re at a point where you have a real decision to make. In this ritual, I will listen to you and I will ask Edai three times. The first E dai is in the largest sense. You will share your problem, saying, “I don’t know what to do in my life. I don’t know whether to stay where I am or move or leave this job or stay in this relationship.”‘ And I will listen and say, “E dai?” Then you will explore where you stand in this matter, and what this means in the context of all life, in the context of everything. I won’t tell you what to do so that you can surface your wisdom. Then the second E dai is to explore where you’re standing, so you can discern where the next spot of solid ground is. This is a diagnostic E dai. Is solid ground over there? Is it across the room? Is it across the state? Is it in being with a friend? Where is the next position of solid ground? And the third E’dai is very specific. It is, okay, what’s your next step? This is a beautiful indigenous ritual, and it offers a compelling way to actualize this notion of what we are standing on before we decide what we are standing for.
JUSTINE WILLIS TOMS: You know, Mark, it’s always been my way, for the last forty or fifty years, to look for the biggest truth I can find that is foundational and so I’m constantly looking, researching, or in-searching as you would say, for that place. One of the things that you mention in your book is something about the choice we each have to either be present or absent. That’s a choice we have to make over and over, which may refer to that deep foundational piece that holds us. We either choose to be present and live with the presence or live with absence. I’d love for you to comment on that.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Mark Nepo
