92 Quotes by Mark Epstein

In coping with the world, we come to identify only with our compensatory selves and our reactive minds. We build up our selves out of our defenses but then come to be imprisoned by them.

With some gratitude, I realized that my awareness was now stronger than my neurosis. This did not mean that things would never go to pieces, only that I did not have to fall apart when they did. In fact, my own ability to go to pieces was protecting me in this situation. I did not have to let my identity as an efficient and together person imprison me.

We look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fingertips, a kind of gluttony pervades our mind-sets.

We all want to be normal. Life, even normal life, is arduous, demanding, and ultimately threatening. We all have to deal with it, and none of us really knows how. We are all traumatized by life, by its unpredictability, its randomness, its lack of regard for our feelings and the losses it brings. Each in our own way, we suffer.

Enlightenment does not mean getting rid of anything. It means changing one's frame of reference so that all things become enlightening.

But trauma is all pervasive. It does not go away. It continues to reassert itself as life unfolds.

Trauma, if it doesn't destroy us, wakes us up both to our own relational capacities and to the suffering of others. Not only does it makes us hurt, it makes us more human, caring, and wise.

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

Form is emptiness", the Buddhists teach, but form is also form. I would never be able to approach the emptiness of form if I continued to deny myself the experience of it.