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The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there.
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Mark Epstein |
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Primitive agonies exist in many of us. Originating in painful experiences that occurred before we had the cognitive capacities to know what was happening, they tend to blindside us, traumatizing us again and again as we find ourselves enacting a pain we do not understand.
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Mark Epstein |
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Because the media control sources of information, according to Dylan, "We live in a world of fantasy where Disney has won. . . . It's all fantasy."
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Daniel Mark Epstein |
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Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.
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Mark Epstein |
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Just as mind rises up and rebels at un unskillful attempt to subdue it in meditation, a relationship will fall apart if the partners are not respectful of each other's differences. <...> Separateness and connection make each other possible; they are not mutually exclusive.
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relationships
love
couples
separateness
romantic-love
differences
connection
desire
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Mark Epstein |
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1e42092
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The Buddha, in recovering his capacity for nonsensual joy, learned that this joy was limitless. He found that if he got himself out of the way, his joy completely suffused his mindful awareness. This gave him the confidence, the stability, the trust, and the means to see clearly whatever presented itself to his mind. In the curious bifurcation of consciousness that meditation develops, where we can be both observer and that which is being o..
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Mark Epstein |
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What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.
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Mark Epstein |
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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It is always true to say when reviewing one of this patient's sessions that if she could scream she would be well," wrote Winnicott. "The great non-event of every session is screaming."6 The Burmese master who counseled Sharon was making much the same point. In encouraging her to cry her heart out, he was countering her inclination to make crying the "great non-event" of every meditation session. Like the Burmese teacher, Winnicott felt tha..
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Mark Epstein |
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Subliminally, the Buddha was saying, we are all tending these fires (of greed, hatred, and delusion), motivated as we are by our insecure place in the world, by the feeling, the dukkha, of not fitting in. The fires of greed, hatred, and delusion are defenses against acknowledging that everything is on fire, instinctive attempts at protecting ourselves from what feels like an impossible situation. The Buddha stressed the burning nature of th..
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Mark Epstein |
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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.
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Mark Epstein |
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It's one of my theories that when people give you advice,
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Mark Epstein |
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These feelings of rage and distress and despair that you talk about," I said, circling something I knew I would have trouble articulating. "They only exist because of your original love for your father. They are like signposts back to that love. His leaving took that love with him, or appeared to, but you will see, if you stay with your meditation, that all of that love is still there in you. From the infant's perspective, it's directed at ..
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Mark Epstein |
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He was aware of his trauma, but he was using it to distance himself from life. He had a story about himself but no access to who he might have been before his trauma derailed him. I was trying to use his feelings of deprivation as a means of bringing him back in touch with a more fundamental truth about himself, to guide him back toward--or at least help him to visualize--the intrinsic relational foundation of his being. By not fighting wit..
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Mark Epstein |
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The Buddha's fifth dream evokes both the extraordinary and the ordinary nature of his achievement. He walks on a mountain of dirt and is not fouled by it. Note that the dirt is not transformed into gold or anything. It stays dirty. But the Buddha, astride his pile of dirt, is untouched by it. This is another version of the third dream, in which that which was seen as a barrier to awakening is now known as the foundation upon which it rests...
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Mark Epstein |
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Simply speaking, they showed him that he could be kind. In his years of spiritual searching he had perfected all kinds of esoteric talents. He could take his mind into spheres of nothingness, go for days and weeks without eating, and rend his flesh with the best of them, but he was still operating with barely disguised contempt, not benevolence, toward himself and his world. When the enlightened Buddha told his admirer that he was awake, it..
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Mark Epstein |
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According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering.
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Mark Epstein |
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We are afraid to venture into the unknown because to do so would remind us of how unsafe we once felt.
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Mark Epstein |
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I felt silly to be falling into such an obvious trap of letting my expectations interfere with what was actually happening, but I also felt an all-too-familiar sadness creeping up from my chest to my eyes. In the stillness of the retreat I saw how I did this a lot: envisioning how something, or someone, had to be perfect, and then being disappointed when they failed, pulling myself back into a sullen remove.
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Mark Epstein |
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Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything.
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Mark Epstein |
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Meditation, as taught by the Buddha, is a means of investigating the mind by bringing the entire range of thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations into awareness. This not only makes what we would today call "the unconscious" conscious but also makes the conscious more conscious. There were already various forms of meditation widely practiced in the Buddha's day, but they were all techniques that solely emphasized concentration. The Budd..
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Mark Epstein |
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For the supersophisticated, he would often say there is neither self nor nonself and then further confuse them by saying that if they took that too seriously they would be wrong too. 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 birthrig..
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Mark Epstein |
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Separate and together cease to be mutually exclusive and instead become, in psychoanalyst Christopher Bolla's phrase, "reciprocally enhancing and mutually informative."
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Mark Epstein |
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When I taught the meditation on sound to the participants at my weekend workshop and had people open to the ringing of their cell phones, I was trying to introduce them to his method. By listening meditatively, we were changing the way we listen, pulling ourselves out of our usual orientation to the world based on our likes and dislikes. Rather than trying to figure out what was going on around us, resisting the unpleasant noises and gravit..
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Mark Epstein |
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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."
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Mark Epstein |
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In mindfulness meditation, the self that needs protection is put into neutral. The observing self slips into the space between the ego and the dissociated aspects of the personality and observes from there. The breath, or sound, becomes the central object of focus, as opposed to thought. Thinking becomes one more thing to observe in the field of awareness but is robbed of its preeminent position. Do not grasp after the pleasant or push away..
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Mark Epstein |