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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b1b393e | It's one of my theories that when people give you advice, | Mark Epstein | ||
| 9aacff5 | 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 .. | Mark Epstein | ||
| a810cd3 | 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.. | Mark Epstein | ||
| eae954f | 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... | Mark Epstein | ||
| 4926046 | A friend of mine who spent years in India with a great teacher from the ancient forest tradition tells a moving story... Years after his beloved teacher had died, he was back in India staying at the home of his guru's most devoted Indian disciple. "I must show you something," the disciple said to my friend one day. "This is what he left for me." My friend was excited, of course. Any trace of his teacher was nectar to him. He watched as the .. | Epstein Mark | ||
| f6aaee1 | 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.. | Mark Epstein | ||
| f3c60a0 | According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering. | Mark Epstein | ||
| b0bd376 | We are afraid to venture into the unknown because to do so would remind us of how unsafe we once felt. | Mark Epstein | ||
| 20bfe9f | I do know one thing for sure: there's much more for me to do. Whether or not 100% happy is achievable, I can definitely be more than 10% happier--and I'm excited to | Dan Harris | ||
| e762935 | 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. | Mark Epstein | ||
| 5c1e594 | Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything. | Mark Epstein | ||
| 451d759 | 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.. | Mark Epstein | ||
| 0f9de9d | 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.. | Mark Epstein | ||
| 73382bb | Separate and together cease to be mutually exclusive and instead become, in psychoanalyst Christopher Bolla's phrase, "reciprocally enhancing and mutually informative." | Mark Epstein | ||
| a1ff470 | 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.. | Mark Epstein | ||
| 596e2fb | 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 | ||
| 74b77bc | 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.. | Mark Epstein | ||
| a79da67 | What he really meant was something like, "Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won't last." -- | Dan Harris | ||
| 7afcc88 | Our entire lives, he argued, are governed by a voice in our heads. This voice is engaged in a ceaseless stream of thinking--most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential. It squawks away at us from the minute we open our eyes in the morning until the minute we fall asleep at night, if it allows us to sleep at all. Talk, talk, talk: the voice is constantly judging and labeling everything in its field of vision. Its targets aren't jus.. | Dan Harris | ||
| 23bc361 | In moments where I was temporarily able to suspend my monkey mind and simply experience whatever was going on, I got just the smallest taste of the happiness I'd achieved while on retreat. | Dan Harris | ||
| 967ca60 | As best I could understand it, the Buddha's main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won't last. A central theme of the Buddha's "dharma" (which roughly translates to "teaching") revolved around the very word that had been wafting through my consciousness when I used to lie on my office couch, pondering the unpredictability of television news: "impermanence." | Dan Harris | ||
| e9a7906 | In his books, Tolle repeatedly denigrated the habit of worrying, which he characterized as a useless process of projecting fearfully into an imaginary future. "There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn't exist." | Dan Harris | ||
| 94c9cf8 | Marturano recommended something radical: do only one thing at a time. When you're on the phone, be on the phone. When you're in a meeting, be there. Set aside an hour to check your email, and then shut off your computer monitor and focus on the task | Dan Harris | ||
| 3a73b0d | There's actually a term for this--"hedonic adaptation." When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations," | Dan Harris | ||
| ca01665 | Alles zal vergeten worden en ten slotte verdwijnen en dan nooit gebeurd zijn. En het is deze gedachte, die hem plotseling de verdorven kracht geef om te doen wat hem te doen staat. | Harry Mulisch | ||
| 726fc1d | You have a quote that I love. You say, 'Most of one's own troubles, worries, and sadness come from self-cherishing, self-centeredness.' But don't we need to be somewhat self-centered in order to succeed in life?" "Self-cherishing, that's by nature," he said (by which I assumed he meant it's "natural"). "Without that, we human beings become like robots, no feeling. But now, practice for development of concern for well-being of others, that a.. | Dan Harris | ||
| f07d812 | often it's not the unknown that scares us, it's that we think we know what's going to happen--and that it's going to be bad. But the truth is, we really don't know." The smart play, she said, was to turn the situation to my internal advantage. "Fear of annihilation," she said, "can lead to great insight, because it reminds us of impermanence and the fact that we are not in control." | Dan Harris | ||
| 91c2982 | Striving is fine, as long as it's tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don't waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome--so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust your.. | Dan Harris | ||
| 0720682 | The price of security is insecurity." Dr. Jay Harris," | Dan Harris | ||
| 8b8bde1 | It's like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do every interview, you can be prepared, but you have very little control over the marketplace. So you put it out there without attachment, so it has its own life. Everything is like that. | Dan Harris | ||
| 901efb1 | It was the longest, most exquisite high of my life, but the hangover came first. | Dan Harris | ||
| 6a95f30 | Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We "live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation," he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now... | Dan Harris | ||
| 20124b5 | Focusing on the breath as a way to temporarily stop the thinking was like using a broom to sweep a floor crawling with cockroaches. You could clear the space briefly, but then the bugs came marauding back in. | Dan Harris | ||
| 935b25b | Ca ne fait pas grand bien de s'installer dans les reves en oubliant de vivre, souviens-toi de ca. | J.K. Rowling | ||
| 7f8c0c7 | The Self-Interested Case for Not Being a Dick | Dan Harris | ||
| a4f152b | Mark had helped me see that the point of getting behind the waterfall wasn't to magically solve all of your problems, only to handle them better, by creating space between stimulus and response. It was about mitigation, not alleviation. | Dan Harris | ||
| 1ddb318 | It's not me telling you," she said. "It's neuroscience that would say that our capacity to multitask is virtually nonexistent. Multitasking is a computer-derived term. We have one processor. We can't do it." "I think that when I'm sitting at my desk feverishly doing seventeen things at once that I'm being clever and efficient, but you're saying I'm actually wasting my time?" "Yes, because when you're moving from this project to this project.. | Dan Harris | ||
| bb4c796 | These books can't possibly compete with centuries of established history, especially when that history is endorsed by the ultimate bestseller of all time." Faukman's eyes went wide. "Don't tell me Harry Potter is actually about the Holy Grail." | Dan Brown | ||
| 1b9ca39 | What's with you and the whole meditation thing?" Trying to avoid another long, unsuccessful answer, I blurted out, "I do it because it makes me 10% happier." The look on her face instantly changed. What had been a tiny glimmer of scorn was suddenly transformed into an expression of genuine interest. "Really?" she said. "That sounds pretty good, actually." | Dan Harris | ||
| ff44c9b | We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these "if only" thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness." | Dan Harris | ||
| 16b089a | We "live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation," he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing." | Dan Harris | ||
| ce66268 | meditation is simply exercise for your brain. It's a proven technique for preventing the voice in your head from leading you around by the nose. | Dan Harris | ||
| 195adae | Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That | Dan Harris | ||
| 98d0968 | Self-cherishing, that's by nature," he said (by which I assumed he meant it's "natural"). "Without that, we human beings become like robots, no feeling. But now, practice for development of concern for well-being of others, that actually is immense benefit to oneself." A light went off in my head. "It seems like you're saying that there is a self-interested, or selfish, case for being compassionate?" "Yes. Practice of compassion is ultimate.. | Dan Harris |