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Mark Epstein Biography

Mark Epstein (born 1953) is 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.

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Mark Epstein Quotes

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.

Anxiety, Confusion, Flesh, Meditation, Showed

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, Future, Self, Tilted, Turns, Two

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

Ego, Manifestations, Mean, Meditation, Method

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.

Buddhist, Capacity, Create, Disappointment, Moving, Work

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.

Acquisitiveness, Buddhism, Happiness, Letting Go, Material, Teaches

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.

Buddhism, Happiness, Letting Go, People, Perfection

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.

Awareness, Cure, Feelings, Land, Place, Self

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.

Mystery, Real, Realize, Unknown, Way

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.

Come, Direct, Experience, Lives, Term, Warts

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

Give, Past, People, Talking

Anger is sign that something needs to change.

Anger, Change, Need A Change, Needs, Sign

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.

Ego, Love, Opportunities, Opportunity, Shores, Unparalleled

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

Become, Having, Think, Thinking, Thought

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

Obscures, Ought, Picture, Present, Think, 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.

Clinging, Desire, Fully, Inspirational, Mind, Teacher

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

Buddhist, Emerges, Shown, Space, Teacher

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.

Become, Cutting, Hatred, Healing, Indulged, Person

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.

Consciousness, Dying, Entities, Exist, Independent, Real

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

Absence, Difficult, Kind, Maintain, Presence