Quotes by Mark Epstein

About Mark Epstein:

Mark Epstein is an American author and psychotherapist, integrating both Buddha's and Sigmund Freud's approaches to trauma, who writes about their interplay. In his most recent book, The Trauma of Everyday Life, he interprets the Buddha’s spiritual journey as grounded in Buddha's personal childhood trauma.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 no...

Mark Epstein

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...

Mark Epstein

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...

Mark Epstein

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...

Mark Epstein

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 thinki...

Mark Epstein

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...

Mark Epstein

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 ...

Mark Epstein

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

Mark Epstein

[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

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

Mark Epstein

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

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

Mark Epstein

Author Bio

  • NameMark Epstein
  • DescriptionAmerican psychiatrist
  • Born1953
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPsychologist; Psychotherapist