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 Buddha, in recovering his capacity for nonsensual joy, learned that this joy was limitless. He found that if he got himself out of the way, his joy completely suffused his mindful awareness. This...
Separate and together cease to be mutually exclusive and instead become, in psychoanalyst Christopher Bolla's phrase, reciprocally enhancing and mutually informative.
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...
Love is the revelation of the other person’s freedom,
Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything.
It's one of my theories that when people give you advice,
In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If we can put our minds into a place of surrender, we will have an easi...
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 only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.
The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there.
The mind that realizes its own Buddha nature is said to be like clear space—it is empty and all-pervasive but also vividly aware.
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...
It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unle...
It is always true to say when reviewing one of this patient’s sessions that if she could scream she would be well, wrote Winnicott. The great non-event of every session is screaming.6 The Burmese mast...
In mindfulness meditation, the self that needs protection is put into neutral. The observing self slips into the space between the ego and the dissociated aspects of the personality and observes from...
Awakening does not mean a change in difficulty, it means a change in how those difficulties are met.
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.
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.