Quotes by Mark Epstein

Mark Epstein

Anger is sign that something needs to change.

Need A Change

Needs

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.

Anxiety

Self

Two

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

Buddhist

Space

Teacher

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.

Buddhism

Happiness

Letting Go

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

Abnormal Psychology

People

Thinking

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.

Inspirational

Mind

Teacher

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.

Anxiety

Feelings

Sadness

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.

Cutting

Hatred

Healing

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.

Dying

Independent

Real

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.

Feelings

Land

Self

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Abnormal Psychology

Absence

Addiction

Anxiety

Book

Buddhism

Buddhist

Confusion

Consciousness

Cutting

Desire

Difficult

Direct

Disappointment

Dying

Ego

Feelings

Grief

Happiness

Hatred

Healing

Independent

Inspirational

Keys

Kind

Land

Letting Go

Love

Mean

Meditation

Mind

Moving

Mystery

Need A Change

Needs

Opportunity

Ought

Pain

Past

People

Real

Sadness

Self

Soul

Space

Spiritual

Suffering

Talking

Teacher

Tendencies

The Future Blueprint

Tool

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

Tool

The Autobiography

Tool

The Behaviour Diary

Tool

The Dating Diary

Tool

The Relationship Therapist

Tool

Quotes by Mark Epstein

Mark Epstein

Anger is sign that something needs to change.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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Topics by Mark Epstein

Popular Tools

The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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