Texts With Rafiki – Mark Nepo and Epictetus

It’s time for another random text conversation of meaningful quotes between myself and Rafiki. If you’re new to my blog and have no clue as to why I would post random texts, or, you would like to check out other random stuff that Rafiki and I have chatted about, check out Chronological List of Texts with Rafiki.

2/26/2019

“Whatever opens us is never as important as what it opens.”

~ Mark Nepo

“The fear of pain, at many times, was greater than the pain I ended up encountering.”

~ Mark Nepo

“For it is not death or pain that is to be feared, but the fear of pain or death.”

~ Epictetus (Discourses, 108)

 

“The soul does violence to itself when it is overpowered by pleasure or by pain.”

~ Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, 167 A.C.E.)

“To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.”

~ Mark Nepo

“I think we are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we are given.

“That’s a paradox. What’s so important about this for me is that asking for what we need doesn’t always lead to getting what we need. Sometimes it does, and that is great. The reward of asking for what we need is that we become intimate with our own nature. We learn who we are by standing in who we are.

“The reward for practicing accepting what we’re given we become intimate with everything that is not us. We become intimate with the nature of life. And it’s the rhythm between our own nature and the nature of life that allows us to find the thread we are in the unseeable connections that hold everything together.”

~ Mark Nepo