There Is No Greater Teacher Than The Heart

There has been no greater teacher in my life than the heart. It has guided me through every storm. When facing death, it steadied me despite my fear. When stumbling in need of love, it opened me like a flower waiting for rain. When freefalling in search of meaning, it picked me up like a hawk gliding on the wind of Mystery. And when in need of strength to keep believing in life, my heart insisted that I keep giving as an act of mitosis in growing the tissue of humanity. And so, I’m compelled to explore the heart as our teacher and how we are led to discover and inhabit our need to love, learn, and be.

No Greater Teacher

This steadfast belief in the properties of the heart goes back to my first hours on Earth. I was born prematurely in late February of 1951, three weeks early. I was placed in an incubator, so I entered a transitional period of solitude before entering the world. This incubation period prevented my mother and father from holding me and bringing me home. I’m sure that was difficult for them. But during this crucial time, I was held and nurtured by the Mystical Unity of Life. For those three weeks, I was in a liminal womb, where I went from forming inside my mother to imprinting my deeper senses on the Whole of Life. And this became my primary inheritance.

As I was held and tended by nurses who I will never be able to thank, I quietly continued to form into a full human being. During this slow arrival into the world, I began to inhabit a deep and early sense of Oneness. Being completely alone in that incubator enabled me to experience the solitude and silence of an inner unfolding that was my first home. And though I felt myriad volatile emotions from growing up in an unpredictable and emotionally charged family, that turbulence didn’t define me. I could always enter the silence and return to my larger, first home.

Looking back, I feel certain that this unexpected cocoon between worlds secured my bond with Eternity. That chance to be fully alone, suspended between pre-life and life itself, allowed me to emerge with an irrevocable bond to all that remains unseen. It allowed me to know all that is unseeable as my foundation. And so, from the outset, the allegiance of my heart has always been to serve as a conduit between all that is inner and all that is outer, between the life of the soul and the life of the world, and between our humanness and the Web of Mystery that brings life into being.

In truth, regardless of where life has led me, my education as a student of the heart traces back to this fundamental position in life. And living through my heart has always helped me through the storms of life and brought me home. This is why I believe that helping each other return to our largest home of all, life, is an essential form of hospitality. This is why I believe that holding and tending to each other, as we form inwardly, is at the center of unconditional love. This is why I believe being at home in the Oneness of Things is central to how we come to love, learn, and be.

After all these years, I’ve seen that the heart is meant to follow the light and connect with life, the way a flower seeds in the dark, breaks ground after a storm, and opens in the light. Once rooted in the open, we are asked to practice heaven.

How the heart teaches us to do this is a lifelong journey. It is interesting that the word journey comes from the Old French “jornee,” which means “a day’s travel, a day’s work.” Nevertheless, it is still true that a meaningful journey is built on a day’s travel and a day’s work. And so, I attempt to describe the heart’s process of daily travel and daily work in as much detail as possible in my words, the way that Lewis and Clark described their unlikely passage through the Continental Divide to the Pacific coast.

Along the way, I have seen how solitude, silence, and inner unfolding are our home. I keep trying to discern what covenants and practices enable us to experience these inner elements as teachers. Clearly, we discover as we go, and from the beginning, we are called to live through our hearts. But what does this mean, and how do we inhabit this as a sacred life-giving practice?

We must all face the archetypal process of clearing out the buildup of patterns and feelings we accrue from living. This, in turn, allows us to return to a beginner’s heart and re-establish the allegiance of heart by which we can individuate to the point where we can, paradoxically, let other life in. These twin efforts are necessary to truly live—to be who we are and to let others in.

Once letting life in full, how can we then serve as a conduit between all that is inner and all that is outer, between the life of the soul and the life of the world, and between our humanness and the Web of Mystery that brings life into being? How can we inhabit the ways of heart that will help us survive the storms we face? And what commitments and practices can help us live wholeheartedly in the larger flow of life?

To be fully alive, we must look to the learning ground of intimacy, that experiential bedrock of truth where all learning takes up residence when we dare to hold and tend to each other.

Ultimately, there are infinite ways to personalize our heartwork in the days that await us if we can empty our assumptions and conclusions to stay current with the rush of life. All so that the heart can carry what matters. Yet humbly, no one quite knows how to empty what is extraneous and how to carry what matters, though do it we must. And so, we must live into the question: How do we recover what matters when in the storm? Every spirit must learn its own practice of returning to our largest home of all—life. And our quiet destiny is to practice this hospitality in all directions and let the heart be our teacher.

No Greater Teacher is excerpted from Mark Nepo’s newest book, Surviving Storms: Finding the Strength to Meet Adversity. Used with permission. St. Martin’s Essentials 9 September 2022).

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About the Author

With over a million copies sold, Mark Nepo has moved and inspired readers and seekers all over the world with his #1 New York Times bestseller, The Book of Awakening. Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our time,” “a consummate storyteller,” and “an eloquent spiritual teacher. Visit: MarkNepo.com or Live.MarkNepo.com