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e6769d4
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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.
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relationships
spirituality
tantra
desire
sexuality
psychology
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Mark Epstein |
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fa86aa9
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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.
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suffering
freedom
buddhism
transcendence
desire
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Mark Epstein |
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1bf7731
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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.
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spirituality
buddhism
desire
psychology
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Mark Epstein |
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b68726f
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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 ..
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relationships
objectification
meditation
desire
disappointment
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Mark Epstein |
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4bc6335
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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 psycho..
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relationships
dualistic-thinking
tantra
objectification
grace
meditation
desire
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Mark Epstein |
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c531420
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The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.
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Mark Epstein |
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1f6e54b
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To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.
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Mark Epstein |
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21964a8
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The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one.
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Mark Epstein |
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89c3590
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He was a secretive man, who kept his own counsel. He was an ambitious man of humble origins, with colossal designs on the future. And it would always be advantageous not to be closely known, never to be transparent. Passing a farmer on a day, he would tip his hat and grin. Everybody knew him. Nobody knew him. He would play the fool, the clown, the melancholy poet dying for love, the bumpkin. He would take the world by stealth and not by sto..
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Daniel Mark Epstein |
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e6b0e37
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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 fin..
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Mark Epstein |
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39db8b8
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Awakening does not mean a change in difficulty, it means a change in how those difficulties are met.
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Mark Epstein |
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f3045e6
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The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.
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Mark Epstein |
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2760991
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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33f7f0e
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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. ..
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Mark Epstein |
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0f4d801
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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."
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Mark Epstein |
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8f6cfa9
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Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them.
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Mark Epstein |
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585c0e5
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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" --
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Mark Epstein |
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656bdf2
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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..
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Mark Epstein |
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0fb0216
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Having released the wartime images he was carrying in his unconscious, he became worried that he would now be at their mercy, plagued by them in day as well as by night. But what he found was just the opposite. While he did retrieve the horrible images, he rediscovered a lost innocence as well. The beauty of the jungle, the glistening white sands of the Vietnamese beaches, and the intense greens of the rice paddies at dawn all filtered back..
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Mark Epstein |
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07ffe0c
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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35b5a66
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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72e9f7f
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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b49b8b2
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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6dcf97e
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The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not.
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Mark Epstein |
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a6cff1a
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His efforts were always in the service of releasing people from their fixed ideas about who or what they were, about freeing them from attachment to whatever concept they were clinging to, about loosening the hold that the fear-based ego claimed as its birthright.
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Mark Epstein |
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e52ff4b
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We do not get lots of realizations in our lives as much as we get the same ones over and over.
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Mark Epstein |
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2206472
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Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.
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Mark Epstein |
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c11e77b
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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c2609de
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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49da740
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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"
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Mark Epstein |
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d323921
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Painful or frightening affect becomes traumatic when the attunement that the child needs to assist in its tolerance, containment, and integration is profoundly absent,"8 writes Robert Stolorow, a philosopher, psychologist, and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, in his book about trauma. "One consequence of developmental trauma, relationally conceived, is that affect states take on enduring, crushing meanings. From recurring experienc..
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Mark Epstein |
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964ace7
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Much of what we think of as "relational knowing"--joking around, expressing affection, and making friends5--is based in this kind of memory. We know how to do it without thinking about it. It does not require deliberate attention or verbal processing, yet it is intrinsic to who we are."
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Mark Epstein |
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7dcc4b2
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Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way.
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Mark Epstein |
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6377c27
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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....
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Mark Epstein |
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6704415
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The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into the domain of reflective self-awareness, there is a possibility of emerging from their constraints. Choice emerges where before there was only blind and conditioned behavior.
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Mark Epstein |
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bafe71b
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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6bca80d
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Whether or not the historical Buddha actually suffered from the kind of primitive agonies Winnicott expounded upon, the meditations he taught in the aftermath of his awakening "hold" the mind just as Winnicott described a mother "holding" an infant. In making the observational posture of mindfulness central to his technique, the Buddha established another version of "an auxiliary ego-function" in the psyches of his followers, one that enabl..
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Mark Epstein |
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88d60b0
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After the ecstasy, it is said, comes the laundry.
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Mark Epstein |
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4cd5c1f
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Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom,
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Mark Epstein |
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5ddbe58
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In the practice of mindfulness, the ego's usual insistence on control and security is deliberately and progressively undermined. This is accomplished by steadily shifting one's center of gravity from the thinking mind to a neutral object like the breath, or in the case of my workshop, the random sounds of the environment.
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Mark Epstein |
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5204db0
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The traumatized individual lives outside time, in his or her own separate reality, unable to relate to the consensual reality of others. The remembering quality of mindfulness counters this tendency.
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Mark Epstein |
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5959746
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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1d2aa61
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Trauma is a basic fact of life, according to the Buddha. It is not just an occasional thing that happens only to some people; it is there all the time.
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Mark Epstein |
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e352dc1
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In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves.
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Mark Epstein |