Mark Epstein > Quotes

“Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person (dare we call it a soul?) wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. ... There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most sensual of desires.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“We are what we think, having become what we thought.”
― Mark Epstein

“The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.”
― Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

“The teaching of the sexual tantras all come down to one point. Although desire, of whatever shape or form, seeks completion, there is another kind of union than the one we imagine. In this union, achieved when the egocentric model of dualistic thinking is no longer dominant, we are not united with it, nor am I united with you, but we all just are. The movement from object to subject, as described in both Eastern meditation and modern psychotherapy, is training for this union, but its perception usually comes as a surprise, even when this shift is well under way. It is a kind of grace. The emphasis on sexual relations in the tantric teachings make it clear that the ecstatic surprise of orgasm is the best approximation of this grace.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Awakening does not mean a change in difficulty, it means a change in how those difficulties are met.”
― Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

“Meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using the ego to observe and tame its own manifestations.”
― Mark Epstein

“The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one.”
― Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

“While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that which was once so real starts to unwind. If things do not exist in their own right and are flickering rather than static, then we can no longer fear their ultimate demise. We may fear their instability, or their emptiness, but the looming threat of death starts to seem absurd. Things are constantly dying, we find. Or rather, they are constantly in flux, arising and passing away with each moment of consciousness.”
― Mark Epstein, Going on Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change

“The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.”
― Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

“When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others’, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through.”
― Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

“We are all haunted by the lost perfection of the ego that contained everything, and we measure ourselves and our lovers against this standard. We search for a replica in external satisfactions, in food, comfort, sex, or success, but gradually learn, through the process of sublimation, that the best approximation of that lost feeling comes from creative acts that evoke states of being in which self-consciousness is temporarily relinquished. These are the states in which the artist, writer, scientist, or musician, like Freud’s da Vinci, dissolves into the act of creation.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through.”
― Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

“Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them.”
― Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

“In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“We reduce, concretize, or substantialize experiences or feelings, which are, in their very nature, fleeting or evanescent. In so doing, we define ourselves by our moods and by our thoughts. We do not just let ourselves be happy or sad, for instance; we must become a happy person or a sad one. This is the chronic tendency of the ignorant or deluded mind, to make “things” out of that which is no thing.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“Trauma, if it doesn't destroy us, wakes us up both to our own relational capacities and to the suffering of others. Not only does it makes us hurt, it makes us more human, caring, and wise.”
― Mark Epstein, M.D.

“A recently deceased American Zen master and navy veteran, John Daido Loori, used to say that those who think Buddhism is just about stillness end up sitting very silently up to their necks in their own shit.”
― Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

“Mourning has no timetable. Grief is not the same for everyone. And it does not necessarily go away. The healthiest way to deal with it is to lean into it, rather than try to keep it at bay. In the attempt to fit in, to be normal, we end up feeling estranged.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“One of the age-old truths about love is that while it offers unparalleled opportunities for union and the lifting of ego boundaries, it also washes us up on the shores of the loved one's otherness. Sooner or later, love makes us feel inescapably separate.”
― Mark Epstein

“In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If we can put our minds into a place of surrender, we will have an easier time feeling the contours of the land. We do not have to break our way through as much as we have to find our way around the major obstacles. We do not have to cure every neurosis, we just have to learn how not to be caught by them.”
― Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

“Making one’s life into a meditation is different from using meditation to escape from life.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“Developmental trauma occurs when “emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.”1 In retrospect, I can see that this was the case for”
― Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

“In demonstrating this, the Buddha was making an important example for the ages. For almost no one is exempt from trauma. While some people have it in a much more pronounced way than others, the unpredictable and unstable nature of things makes life inherently traumatic. What the Buddha revealed through his dreams was that, true as this may be, the mind, by its very nature, is capable of holding trauma much the way a mother naturally relates to a baby. One does not have to be helpless and fearful, nor does one have to be hostile and self-referential. The mind knows intuitively how to find a middle path. Its implicit relational capacity is hardwired.”
― Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

“Enlightenment does not mean getting rid of anything. It means changing one's frame of reference so that all things become enlightening.”
― Mark Epstein

“The mind that realizes its own Buddha nature is said to be like clear space—it is empty and all-pervasive but also vividly aware.”
― Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

“After the ecstasy, it is said, comes the laundry.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself