Mark Epstein
Mark Epstein
Mark Epsteinis 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...
real desire consciousness
Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.
real independent dying
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.
real way realizing
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.
crab decision ghost increase wrong
We don't want to make the wrong decision and increase (sea turtle) mortality. We're going to do a ghost crab study.
architect complete education gardener glorified landscape refute rigorous university unlike
I must refute the implication ... that a landscape architect is a glorified gardener. A landscape architect -- unlike a landscape designer, nurseryman or gardener -- must complete a rigorous education from an accredited university program.
books books-and-reading changing meals standards
Changing the standards on the books is not the same as changing the meals themselves.
healing cutting hatred
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.
confusion anxiety meditation
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.
love opportunity ego
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.
desire tendencies willing
To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.
kind absence difficult
It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence
teacher buddhist space
As my Buddhist teachers have shown me, wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as from language itself.
warts term direct
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.
spiritual addiction soul
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.