In a world fraying with loneliness and division, Mark Nepo says friendship is how we find our way back to ourselves.
The beloved poet and spiritual adviser describes friendship as a “place of high safety” — a refuge where we can fall apart and still be held, a place that steadies us when everything else slips. It’s a theme he explores in his recent work, You Don’t Have to Do It Alone, and one he’s carried for decades through 25 books, countless talks, and the spiritual guidance that has made him a trusted voice to millions — including Oprah Winfrey, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Melinda French Gates.
“There’s a physics to friendship,” he says. “There’s a physics to loving the governing patterns of life force as it comes into us and through us and between us.”
In a recent conversation, I asked Nepo to reflect on what decades of writing, teaching, and friendship have taught him about how we can better care for one another.
What follows are some of Nepo’s most powerful lessons — guideposts for how to create safe spaces, hold each other through pain, and stay open to the small connections that can change everything.
Seek Safety in Friendship
“The word friendship comes from a German root that means place of high safety,” Nepo says. “And I love that.”
He compares this safety to the ocean: on the surface, waves crash and churn, yet beneath them, the water is calm. “You can’t tell where the wave stops and the deep begins,” he says. “It’s all one water. When we go deep enough, the edge of that disturbance is taken off, and we live in both the surface and the depth.”
To Nepo, friendship offers that same depth — a place where we can steady ourselves amid the surface storms of life, and remember what still holds.
As he puts it, peace isn’t what’s found at the end of trouble. “There is no end of trouble,” he says. Instead, “peace is that grace of being that holds all trouble.”
Recognize the Invisible Forces That Connect Us
Just as the deep ocean stays calm beneath surface storms, Nepo believes friendship offers a depth apart from life’s turbulence — a place where we can touch something larger than ourselves, the unseen currents moving through and between us.
Modern research echoes this truth. The 85-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development has found that our closest relationships — more than wealth, fame, or even genetics — are the strongest predictors of lifelong happiness and well-being.
To Nepo, this truth isn’t only about outward relationships — it’s about how we move through life itself.
Friendship, he says, helps us understand the rhythms of life — the rise and fall of suffering or joy, emptiness or fulfillment. “We are connected to everything,” he says. “We learn from each other… ‘Where is the current of life flowing and where does it get locked up?’”
For Nepo, this is the quiet gift of friendship: it trains the heart to stay open to all of life. “It’s an apprenticeship for befriending everything larger than us — even the harsh teachers: pain, fear, grief.”
Let Friends Carry You When You Cannot Stand
As Nepo spoke, I thought of a day when a dear friend flew nearly a thousand miles to stand with me as I accompanied my teenage niece to choose a dress for her father’s (my brother’s) funeral. I had cried to my friend the night before, saying I had no idea how I would get through the mall lights and cheerful salespeople while carrying my own grief and hers. My friend booked a flight, held us as best she could, and returned home having gifted us exactly what we needed: her presence.
This is the essence of friendship. As Nepo writes, friends offer far more than companionship. They help us feel seen. They stand beside us when we are frightened or shattered. They reflect back our possibilities when we can’t see them ourselves.
Friendship, in other words, holds us together, even as we are coming apart.
Seek Wholeness Even in Moments of Fracture
Nepo’s understanding of this truth was shaped during a period of extreme vulnerability. Diagnosed with a rare lymphoma, he remembers a night when he was vomiting every 20 minutes, barely able to sit upright. His wife and friend stayed up with him through the night, their presence a reminder that though he was terrified, exhausted, and broken, the opposing reality of wholeness remained.
“We tend to extrapolate and make it true that if I’m in pain, the world’s a broken place,” Nepo says. “If I’m afraid, the world’s not safe. Our friends offer us the reality of other states. They hold hope when we are unsure.”
That morning, he experienced a profound realization and spiritual turning point.
“Somehow I felt at the same time as my fear and pain, somewhere nearby a baby’s being born, somewhere nearby a couple’s making love for the first time, somewhere an estranged father and son are sitting down and having coffee for the first time in years,” he recalls. “And so I learned in that moment that to be broken is no reason to see all things as broken. And that was maybe my first introduction into ‘all things are true,’ and therefore my friendship with life shifted.”
In moments of brokenness, the steadiness of friends reminds us of what still holds.
“When I’m broken, I need the company of those who know what it’s like to be broken, but I need everything whole to heal… this means that our friendship with each other and with life has to do with being who I am so that I can learn from all I am not.”
Choose Connection Over Division
This paradox of brokenness and wholeness echoes throughout Nepo’s work, and in a time when polarization and fear can make it easier to divide than to connect, his words feel especially urgent.
Friendship — to one another and to ourselves — is not a soft gesture, but a courageous act of resistance to isolation, cynicism, and dehumanization. It asks us to recognize our interdependence and the quiet, radical power of staying open to each other.
“Now, all the things we have in common, all the endeavors of respect that we treasure, all the ways that we find strength in our kindness — all our efforts of heart — matter now more than ever,” he writes in More Together Than Alone. “We are at a basic crossroads between deepening the decency that comes from caring for each other and spreading the contagion of making anyone who is different into an enemy.”
Practice the Daily Work of Being a Friend
This idea — that friendship offers both safety and growth — was at the heart of a recent retreat Nepo led at the Siena Retreat Center, in Racine, WI. The center, a Make It Better Foundation grant partner, has been a place of reflection and renewal for nearly 60 years and regularly hosts a wide range of retreats — both in person and virtual — on themes from spirituality and social justice to creativity and contemplative practice.
Nepo continues to share his teachings with audiences around the world, leading both in-person and online retreats throughout the year.
“My hope is that folks who come and join for these journeys will not only touch into their own place of high safety,” he says, “but will hopefully go away with at least one, two, or three ways that they can discover a little bit more of their own wisdom and their own gifts and their own ways that they might practice being a better friend.”
Reap the Healing Power of Even the Smallest Connections
Nepo’s message arrives at a critical time. Loneliness is now considered an epidemic, with former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy warning in his 2023 Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community that social isolation can have devastating consequences for both mental and physical health. Loneliness is linked to increased risks of stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death, threatening not only individual well-being but the health of our communities.
Multi-day retreats like those hosted by Siena Retreat Center can provide the rare gift of uninterrupted space to reconnect with others and with ourselves — and new tools to apply those practices at home.
But, Nepo emphasizes, countless opportunities for connection and growth also surround us every day.
He encourages leaning into even the smallest opportunities to connect, describing them as part of a larger practice of befriending life. A warm smile to a passerby, a brief conversation with a stranger, a handshake held a little longer — these, he says, are acts of presence that quietly affirm our shared humanity.
His perspective aligns with the work of UNC psychology researcher Barbara Fredrickson, who has found profound psychological and physical benefits in such “micro-moments” of connection. In Love 2.0, Fredrickson notes that even fleeting exchanges can spark health-boosting responses in the brain, heart, and nervous system while lifting our emotional state and reinforcing our sense of belonging.
Remember We’re All Walking Each Other Home
Will every fleeting bond change the course of a life? Probably not. But they all matter. Each moment of connection affirms our shared humanity. As American spiritual leader Ram Dass often said, “We are all just walking each other home.”
Nepo believes this too — and goes further. When we show up wholeheartedly for another person’s pain or joy, he says, we momentarily dissolve the boundaries of the self and join a larger human river. “If I really feel your pain, I also feel the pain of everyone who has ever felt pain. If I feel your joy, I feel the joy of everyone who has ever felt joy.”
“We take turns being in grief and in joy, in love and in heartbreak,” Nepo says. “We take turns being the light in the crack and the crack.”
Ultimately, he suggests, friendship is how we help one another find our way through the dark.
Live Fully in the ‘Fifth Season’ of Life
In our final few minutes of conversation, I asked Nepo about the cumulative wisdom of his experience and how he hopes to participate in what he calls the “fifth season” of life. His response distills decades of seeking, suffering, and wonder into a simple vision for how to live now.
“I just want to stay as close in this corridor of aliveness as possible,” he said. “I want to just keep being a student of the inside of everything. I want to stay in these holy teaching circles and just be close to loved ones. No five-year plan. There’s no bucket list. This is it. This is heaven on earth… that’s what I think I’ve learned — that by being vulnerable, by being authentic, we trip into heaven on earth.”
How To Help
Siena Retreat Center in Racine, Wisconsin, is a place where people can cultivate meaning in their lives. By offering space for personal and group retreats, spirituality programs, and one-on-one spiritual companioning, Siena Retreat Center helps people make the connections that construct meaning and purpose.
Siena Retreat Center’s mission is to provide retreats and programs “that renew lives and deepen holistic spirituality in an environment of peace, joy, and beauty.” Your donation helps organizers maintain the center, enhances programs, supports scholarships for potential visitors, and helps make retreats like Mark Nepo’s recent program.
Maria Sirois, Psy.D. is an inspirational speaker, consultant, and licensed clinical psychologist who has worked in the fields of wellness and positive psychology for twenty years. As a lecturer and motivational speaker, Maria has been invited to keynote at conferences for wellness organizations, businesses, hospitals, hospices, religious and philanthropic institutions around the country. A master storyteller, her lectures and workshops combine powerful and moving anecdotes with research to bring an audience to the place we all most want to be: moved to tears, joy and positive action within the lives we are already living.
