Mark Epstein Quotes

• 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 to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.

  Mark Epstein

  Sadness, Anxiety, Feelings

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• When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves-from other people, relationships, or material goods-or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed. Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

  Mark Epstein

  Happiness, Letting Go, Buddhism

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• It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.

  Mark Epstein

  Past, Talking, People

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• The willingness to face traumas - be they large, small, primitive or fresh - is the key to healing from them. They may never disappear in the way we think they should, but maybe they don’t need to. Trauma is an ineradicable aspect of life. We are human as a result of it, not in spite of it.

  Mark Epstein

  Healing, Thinking, Keys

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• 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 not have to break our way through as much as we have to find our way around the major obstacles. We do not have to cure every neurosis, we just have to learn how not to be caught by them.

  Mark Epstein

  Self, Land, Feelings

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• Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.

  Mark Epstein

  Real, Desire, Consciousness

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• Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression.

  Mark Epstein

  Thinking, People, Abnormal Psychology

  Geshe Tsering, Mark Epstein (2010). “Going on Being: The Foundation of Buddhist Thought:”, p.8, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using the ego to observe and tame its own manifestations.

  Mark Epstein

  Mean, Meditation, Ego

  Mark Epstein (2013). “Thoughts Without A Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective”, p.57, Basic Books

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• Buddhism teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes from letting go. In Buddhism, the impenetrable, separate, and individuated self is more of the problem than the solution.

  Mark Epstein

  Happiness, Letting Go, Buddhism

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

  Mark Epstein

  Thinking, Ought

  Mark Epstein (2013). “The Trauma of Everyday Life”, p.59, Penguin

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• 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 to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. ... There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most sensual of desires.

  Mark Epstein

  Spiritual, Addiction, Soul

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• We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.

  Mark Epstein

  Real, Way, Mystery

  Mark Epstein (2013). “Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness”, p.19, Harmony

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• Anger is sign that something needs to change.

  Mark Epstein

  Needs, Need A Change

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• Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame, or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.

  Mark Epstein

  Inspirational, Teacher, Mind

  Mark Epstein (2006). “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”, p.12, Penguin

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• We are what we think, having become what we thought.

  Mark Epstein

  Thinking

  Geshe Tsering, Mark Epstein (2010). “Going on Being: The Foundation of Buddhist Thought:”, p.33, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• 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 the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.

  Mark Epstein

  Self, Two, Anxiety

  Mark Epstein (2006). “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”, p.35, Penguin

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• If aspects of the person remain undigested-cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated-they become the points around which the core forces of greed, hatred and delusion attach themselves.

  Mark Epstein

  Healing, Cutting, Hatred

  Mark Epstein (2013). “Thoughts Without A Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective”, p.23, Basic Books

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• 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

  Warts, Term, Direct

  Mark Epstein (2013). “The Trauma of Everyday Life”, p.19, Penguin

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• 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 capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.

  Mark Epstein

  Buddhist, Disappointment, Moving

  Mark Epstein (2006). “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”, p.89, Penguin

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• Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away.

  Mark Epstein

  Pain, Grief, Suffering

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• 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 meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.

  Mark Epstein

  Confusion, Meditation, Anxiety

  Mark Epstein (2006). “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”, p.35, Penguin

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• 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 washes us up on the shores of the loved one's otherness. Sooner or later, love makes us feel inescapably separate.

  Mark Epstein

  Love, Opportunity, Ego

  Mark Epstein (2006). “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”, p.58, Penguin

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• It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence

  Mark Epstein

  Kind, Absence, Difficult

  Mark Epstein (2013). “Thoughts Without A Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective”, p.46, Basic Books

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• If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that which was once so real starts to unwind. If things do not exist in their own right and are flickering rather than static, then we can no longer fear their ultimate demise. We may fear their instability, or their emptiness, but the looming threat of death starts to seem absurd. Things are constantly dying, we find. Or rather, they are constantly in flux, arising and passing away with each moment of consciousness.

  Mark Epstein

  Real, Independent, Dying

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• To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.

  Mark Epstein

  Desire, Tendencies, Willing

  Mark Epstein (2006). “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”, p.42, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

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