“We all want to be normal. Life, even normal life, is arduous, demanding, and ultimately threatening. We all have to deal with it, and none of us really knows how. We are all traumatized by life, by its unpredictability, its… — 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
There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness.… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
“With some gratitude, I realized that my awareness was now stronger than my neurosis. This did not mean that things would never go to… — Mark Epstein Copy Share Image
