Mark Epstein, MD, is an American author and psychiatrist who integrates Buddhism with Western psychotherapy. A meditation and yoga practitioner, he has written numerous books about ego, trauma, sexuality, and finding wholeness.
CLEAR ALL
Ultimately, nothing in this life is ‘commonplace,’ nothing is ‘in between.’ The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge. [Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own.
This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase.
We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.
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Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.
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How ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.
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How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change.
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Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
We are what we believe we are!
No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.
Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.