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… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
I have come to see that our problem is that we don't know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It's the ability… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need,… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
“the Buddha may well have been the original psychoanalyst, or, at least, the first to use the mode of analytic inquiry that Freud was… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
The willingness to face traumas - be they large, small, primitive or fresh - is the key to healing from them. They may never… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
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… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
The central premise of this book is that the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed. — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
“In making a path like the Buddha, we discover our own capacities for relationship. Doing this is like feeling our way in the dark.… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
“The teaching of the sexual tantras all come down to one point. Although desire, of whatever shape or form, seeks completion, there is another… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are. — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
“A recently deceased American Zen master and navy veteran, John Daido Loori, used to say that those who think Buddhism is just about stillness… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
“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.… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
