Quotes from Mark Epstein

We do not want to admit our lack of substance to ourselves and, instead, strive to project an image of completeness, or self-sufficiency. The paradox is that, to the extent that we succumb to this urge, we are estranged from ourselves and are not real. Our narcissism requires that we keep the truth about our selves at bay.

everything had changed but nothing was altered.

But when we are able to see the extent of our own fears and desires, there is something in us, recognized by both Buddha and Freud, which is able to break free.

From a Buddhist perspective, there is really nothing but resistance to be analyzed; there is no true self waiting in the wings to be released. Only by revealing the insecurity can a measure of freedom be gained. When we can know our fear as fear and surround it with the patience of Buddha, we can begin to rest in our own minds and approach those to whom we would like to feel close.

As my Buddhist teachers have shown me, wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as from language itself.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one.

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

The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.

We reduce, concretize, or substantialize experiences or feelings, which are, in their very nature, fleeting or evanescent. In so doing, we define ourselves by our moods and by our thoughts. We do not just let ourselves be happy or sad, for instance; we must become a happy person or a sad one. This is the chronic tendency of the ignorant or deluded mind, to make "things" out of that which is no thing.

After the ecstasy, it is said, comes the laundry.

Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them.

In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves.

Developmental trauma occurs when "emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held."1 In retrospect, I can see that this was the case for

A recently deceased American Zen master and navy veteran, John Daido Loori, used to say that those who think Buddhism is just about stillness end up sitting very silently up to their necks in their own shit.