Mark Epstein Quotes

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

Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.

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

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.

Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away.

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

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.

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.

Anger is sign that something needs to change.

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

The central premise of this book is that the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed.

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

To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.

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

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.

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

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