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...
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...
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.
We do not get lots of realizations in our lives as much as we get the same ones over and over.
The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.
Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything.
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...
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...
Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way.
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.
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, 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...
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...
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...
Awakening does not mean a change in difficulty, it means a change in how those difficulties are met.
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.
When I taught the meditation on sound to the participants at my weekend workshop and had people open to the ringing of their cell phones, I was trying to introduce them to his method. By listening med...
We are all haunted by the lost perfection of the ego that contained everything, and we measure ourselves and our lovers against this standard. We search for a replica in external satisfactions, in foo...