Mark Epstein Quotes

#1. It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence

Mark Epstein

#2. The Way Out Is Through

Mark Epstein

#3. 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

#4. Buddhism teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes from letting go. In Buddhism, the impenetrable, separate, and individuated self is more of the problem than the solution.

Mark Epstein

#5. Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame, or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.

Mark Epstein

#6. 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

#7. Enlightenment does not mean getting rid of anything. It means changing one's frame of reference so that all things become enlightening.

Mark Epstein

#8. the word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of "pervasive unsatisfactoriness," I was even more impressed. "Suffering" always sounded a bit melodramatic, even if a careful reading of history seemed to support it. "Pervasive unsatisfactoriness

Mark Epstein

#9. Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away.

Mark Epstein

#10. The koans in the Blue Cliff Record do their best to introduce people to their true natures. One of them (number 27 out of 100) quotes a monk asking the master Yun Men, "How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?" There are many ways to interpret the question, of course.

Mark Epstein

#11. The willingness to face traumas - be they large, small, primitive or fresh - is the key to healing from them. They may never disappear in the way we think they should, but maybe they don't need to. Trauma is an ineradicable aspect of life. We are human as a result of it, not in spite of it.

Mark Epstein

#12. [The Buddha] is not dividing himself into worthy and unworthy pieces; he is one being, indivisible, immune from the tendency to double back and beat up on himself. He has seen the worst in himself and not been taken down.

Mark Epstein

#13. The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one.

Mark Epstein

#14. If aspects of the person remain undigested-cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated-they become the points around which the core forces of greed, hatred and delusion attach themselves.

Mark Epstein

#15. 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

#16. We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.

Mark Epstein

#17. Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them.

Mark Epstein

#18. The Buddha may well have been the original psychoanalyst, or, at least, the first to use the mode of analytic inquiry that Freud was later to codify and develop.

Mark Epstein

#19. After five minutes, or ten, or fifteen - it doesn't matter - open your eyes and resume your day. For a moment or two things might seem more alive.

Mark Epstein

#20. 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

#21. Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom,

Mark Epstein

#22. 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

#23. To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as we really are, warts and all.

Mark Epstein

#24. The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.

Mark Epstein

#25. We are what we think, having become what we thought.

Mark Epstein

#26. The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.

Mark Epstein

#27. Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.

Mark Epstein

#28. The ability to see things the way they are, not to expect constant gratification but to understand that all things are limited, is what allows for personal growth.

Mark Epstein

#29. Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression.

Mark Epstein

#30. As my Buddhist teachers have shown me, wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as from language itself.

Mark Epstein

#31. Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.

Mark Epstein

#32. Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

Mark Epstein

#33. Although there are occasions when it is more pronounced and awful and occasions when it is actually horrific, trauma does not just happen to a few unlucky people. It is the bedrock of our biology.

Mark Epstein

#34. Awakening does not mean a change in difficulty, it means a change in how those difficulties are met.

Mark Epstein

#35. Separate and together cease to be mutually exclusive and instead become, in psychoanalyst Christopher Bolla's phrase, reciprocally enhancing and mutually informative.

Mark Epstein

#36. We look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fingertips, a kind of gluttony pervades our mind-sets.

Mark Epstein

#37. To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.

Mark Epstein

#38. It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience ... .

Mark Epstein

#39. The central premise of this book is that the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed.

Mark Epstein

#40. Anger is sign that something needs to change.

Mark Epstein