Whether or not the historical Buddha actually suffered from the kind of primitive agonies Winnicott expounded upon, the meditations he taught in the aftermath of his awakening hold the mind just as Wi...
Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.
To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.
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 Buddha may well have been the original psychoanalyst, or, at least, the first to use the mode of analytic inquiry that Freud was later to codify and develop.
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
A recently deceased American Zen master and navy veteran, John Daido Loori, used to say that those who think Buddhism is just about stillness end up sitting very silently up to their necks in their ow...
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.
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...
His efforts were always in the service of releasing people from their fixed ideas about who or what they were, about freeing them from attachment to whatever concept they were clinging to, about loose...
The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one.
He was aware of his trauma, but he was using it to distance himself from life. He had a story about himself but no access to who he might have been before his trauma derailed him. I was trying to use...
The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.
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.
The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there.
Having released the wartime images he was carrying in his unconscious, he became worried that he would now be at their mercy, plagued by them in day as well as by night. But what he found was just the...
The koans in the Blue Cliff Record do their best to introduce people to their true natures. One of them (number 27 out of 100) quotes a monk asking the master Yun Men, How is it when the tree withers...
The Buddha’s fifth dream evokes both the extraordinary and the ordinary nature of his achievement. He walks on a mountain of dirt and is not fouled by it. Note that the dirt is not transformed into go...
Subliminally, the Buddha was saying, we are all tending these fires (of greed, hatred, and delusion), motivated as we are by our insecure place in the world, by the feeling, the dukkha, of not fitting...
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...
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