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...
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...
Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a...
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...
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...
Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.
We are afraid to venture into the unknown because to do so would remind us of how unsafe we once felt.
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...
[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...
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...
The word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of pervasive unsatisfactoriness, I was even more impressed. Suffering always sounded a bit melodramatic, even...
Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.
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 ag...
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....
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.
Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them.
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...
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