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
You first develop your ego when you are two or three years old. It creeps into existence the moment you realize that you are not empty—you are a self, and everyone else has a self in them. As you grow up, it latches onto positive and negative feedback and uses them to build the story of who you are.
The line between psychology and spirituality has blurred, as clinicians, their patients, and religious seekers explore new perspectives on the self.
As a psychiatrist to people with spiritual aspirations, I am witness to some of the ways in which spirituality and sexuality interact, not always to either of their benefits.
In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves.
This week on The Road Home Podcast, Ethan shares a conversation with Dr. Mark Epstein about the intersection of Western psychotherapy and Buddhist psychology.
“Buddhist psychology and Western psychotherapy both hold out hope for a more flexible ego, one that does not pit the individual against everyone else in a futile attempt to gain total surety.”
A Buddhist practitioner finds that the best way to begin yoga is with a beginner’s mind.
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.
Psychology and Buddhism: what they share, how they differ, and do we need both?
An excerpt from the archive video of the February 2016 teaching on the ‘Satipatthana Sutta’ (also known as the Discourse on the Establishing Mindfulness in the Pali Cannon) with Mark Epstein M.D. from the Force For Good Class Series, recorded at Tibet House US in New York City.
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Photo Credit: Lars Niki / Stringer / Getty Images Entertainment / Getty Images
In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves.
