92 Quotes by Mark Epstein

The problem is not desire. It’s that your desires are too small.”3 The left-handed path means opening to desire so that it becomes more than just a craving for whatever the culture has conditioned us to want. 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.

What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.

The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into the domain of reflective self-awareness, there is a possibility of emerging from their constraints. Choice emerges where before there was only blind and conditioned behavior.

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

The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there.

When Jack was returning to America from his years in Thailand, he sought out an elderly Western monk and asked him if he had any advice about being back in the West. “Only one thing,” said the monk. “When you’re running to catch the subway and you see it leaving without you, don’t panic, just remember, ‘There’s always another train.

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

We do not get lots of realizations in our lives as much as we get the same ones over and over.

Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way.