92 Quotes by Mark Epstein

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.

Developmental trauma occurs when “emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.”1 In retrospect, I can see that this was the case for.

Making one’s life into a meditation is different from using meditation to escape from life.

Much of what we think of as “relational knowing” – joking around, expressing affection, and making friends5 – is based in this kind of memory. We know how to do it without thinking about it. It does not require deliberate attention or verbal processing, yet it is intrinsic to who we are.

Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything.

Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.

The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not.

The ego needs all the help it can get. We can all benefit from getting over ourselves.

When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others’, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through.