Just as mind rises up and rebels at un unskillful attempt to subdue it in meditation, a relationship will fall apart if the partners are not respectful of each other's differences. <...> Separateness...
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...
Enlightenment does not mean getting rid of anything. It means changing one's frame of reference so that all things become enlightening.
The teaching of the sexual tantras all come down to one point. Although desire, of whatever shape or form, seeks completion, there is another kind of union than the one we imagine. In this union, achi...
Meditation, as taught by the Buddha, is a means of investigating the mind by bringing the entire range of thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations into awareness. This not only makes what we would...
In demonstrating this, the Buddha was making an important example for the ages. For almost no one is exempt from trauma. While some people have it in a much more pronounced way than others, the unpred...
Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.
Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.
We look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fing...
There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Somet...
To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.
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 u...
For the supersophisticated, he would often say there is neither self nor nonself and then further confuse them by saying that if they took that too seriously they would be wrong too. His efforts were...
[The Buddha] is not dividing himself into worthy and unworthy pieces; he is one being, indivisible, immune from the tendency to double back and beat up on himself. He has seen the worst in himself and...
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.
These feelings of rage and distress and despair that you talk about, I said, circling something I knew I would have trouble articulating. They only exist because of your original love for your father....
If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that which was once so real starts to unwind. If things do not exist in th...
The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.
We are afraid to venture into the unknown because to do so would remind us of how unsafe we once felt.
Painful or frightening affect becomes traumatic when the attunement that the child needs to assist in its tolerance, containment, and integration is profoundly absent,8 writes Robert Stolorow, a philo...
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