Patrick Barker

“Our enjoyment is tainted by anxiety about keeping what we have and our compulsion to reach out and get more.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“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

“The term neurosis, as generally applied, is not accurate or helpful. In fact, one of the most negative influences on mental health is the “sick” concept itself, which tightens and distorts, keeping us from a natural unfolding and realignment.”
― Neal M. Goldsmith, Psychedelic Healing: The Promise of Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development

“There’s a big difference between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life. Certainly the experiences that psychedelics provide, while significant, perhaps even uniquely powerful, are generally still transitory unless you have a prepared mind. I think of a life lived as creating compost or humus in which advanced experiences can take root. If a perfect master could touch the forehead of an eight-year-old, youthful and unformed, and instill one minute of enlightenment, over time that experience would fade and so would not have a truly lasting transformative effect on the child’s life—even though the person might still remember it. If that same one minute of enlightenment were provided to an older person who’s been a meditator for fifty years, it could be the tipping point that initiates profound advancement.”
― Neal M. Goldsmith, Psychedelic Healing: The Promise of Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development