In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick … - Mark Epstein

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We want to have a spontaneous adventure. You can't plan an adventure, or it ceases to be one.

Mark Epstein

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.

Awareness, Cure, Feelings, Land, Place, Self

Same Author Quotes

When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves-from other people, relationships, or material goods-or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed. Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

Buddhism, Happiness, Letting Go, People, Perfection

I have come to see that our problem is that we don't know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It's the ability to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.

Anxiety, Come, Condemning, Feelings, Sadness

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

Give, Past, People, Talking

The willingness to face traumas - be they large, small, primitive or fresh - is the key to healing from them. They may never disappear in the way we think they should, but maybe they don’t need to. Trauma is an ineradicable aspect of life. We are human as a result of it, not in spite of it.

Healing, Keys, Result, Spite, Thinking, Way

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

Abnormal Psychology, Depressed, Maybe, People, Thinking