Top 60 Mark Epstein Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Anger is sign that something needs to change.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

3. “We are what we think, having become what we thought.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

5. “Buddhism teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes from letting go. In Buddhism, the impenetrable, separate, and individuated self is more of the problem than the solution.”

— Mark Epstein

6. “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.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

8. “Developmental trauma occurs when “emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.”1 In retrospect, I can see that this was the case for.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

10. “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.”

— Mark Epstein

11. “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.”

— Mark Epstein

12. “Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

14. “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.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

16. “According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

19. “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.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

21. “When the psychologists Daniel Brown and Jack Engler studied experienced meditators, they found, to their surprise, that meditators were just as anxious as everyone else. There was no lessening of internal conflict, but only a “marked non-defensiveness in experiencing such conflicts”3 among their subjects. The implications of these findings are profound, because Brown and Engler discovered that meditation, on its own, is not particularly effective at solving people’s emotional problems. It.”

— Mark Epstein

22. “Mourning has no timetable. Grief is not the same for everyone. And it does not necessarily go away. The healthiest way to deal with it is to lean into it, rather than try to keep it at bay. In the attempt to fit in, to be normal, we end up feeling estranged.”

— Mark Epstein

23. “The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not.”

— Mark Epstein

24. “The problem is not desire. It’s that your desires are too small.”3 The left-handed path means opening to desire so that it becomes more than just a craving for whatever the culture has conditioned us to want. 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.”

— Mark Epstein

25. “We are afraid to venture into the unknown because to do so would remind us of how unsafe we once felt.”

— Mark Epstein

26. “After the ecstasy, it is said, comes the laundry.”

— Mark Epstein

27. “Trauma is a basic fact of life, according to the Buddha. It is not just an occasional thing that happens only to some people; it is there all the time.”

— Mark Epstein

28. “I felt silly to be falling into such an obvious trap of letting my expectations interfere with what was actually happening, but I also felt an all-too-familiar sadness creeping up from my chest to my eyes. In the stillness of the retreat I saw how I did this a lot: envisioning how something, or someone, had to be perfect, and then being disappointed when they failed, pulling myself back into a sullen remove.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

30. “In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves.”

— Mark Epstein

31. “Primitive agonies exist in many of us. Originating in painful experiences that occurred before we had the cognitive capacities to know what was happening, they tend to blindside us, traumatizing us again and again as we find ourselves enacting a pain we do not understand.”

— Mark Epstein

32. “When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others’, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

34. “What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.”

— Mark Epstein

35. “Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.”

— Mark Epstein

36. “In the practice of mindfulness, the ego’s usual insistence on control and security is deliberately and progressively undermined. This is accomplished by steadily shifting one’s center of gravity from the thinking mind to a neutral object like the breath, or in the case of my workshop, the random sounds of the environment.”

— Mark Epstein

37. “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.”

— Mark Epstein

38. “Although there are occasions when it is more pronounced and awful and occasions when it is actually horrific, trauma does not just happen to a few unlucky people. It is the bedrock of our biology.”

— Mark Epstein

39. “The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into the domain of reflective self-awareness, there is a possibility of emerging from their constraints. Choice emerges where before there was only blind and conditioned behavior.”

— Mark Epstein

40. “Separate and together cease to be mutually exclusive and instead become, in psychoanalyst Christopher Bolla’s phrase, “reciprocally enhancing and mutually informative.”

— Mark Epstein

41. “With some gratitude, I realized that my awareness was now stronger than my neurosis. This did not mean that things would never go to pieces, only that I did not have to fall apart when they did. In fact, my own ability to go to pieces was protecting me in this situation. I did not have to let my identity as an efficient and together person imprison me.”

— Mark Epstein

42. “After five minutes, or ten, or fifteen – it doesn’t matter – open your eyes and resume your day. For a moment or two things might seem more alive.”

— Mark Epstein

43. “The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there.”

— Mark Epstein

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

— Mark Epstein

45. “The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.”

— Mark Epstein

46. “Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.”

— Mark Epstein

47. “The traumatized individual lives outside time, in his or her own separate reality, unable to relate to the consensual reality of others. The remembering quality of mindfulness counters this tendency.”

— Mark Epstein

48. “The ability to see things the way they are, not to expect constant gratification but to understand that all things are limited, is what allows for personal growth.”

— Mark Epstein

49. “Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them.”

— Mark Epstein

50. “When Jack was returning to America from his years in Thailand, he sought out an elderly Western monk and asked him if he had any advice about being back in the West. “Only one thing,” said the monk. “When you’re running to catch the subway and you see it leaving without you, don’t panic, just remember, ‘There’s always another train.”

— Mark Epstein