Mark Epstein

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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