Home > Work > Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness QUOTES

Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness QUOTES

1 " 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 easier time feeling the contours of the land. We do not have to break our way through as much as we have to find our way around the major obstacles. We do not have to cure every neurosis, we just have to learn how not to be caught by them. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

2 " The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

3 " The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

4 " Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

5 " We do not get lots of realizations in our lives as much as we get the same ones over and over. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

6 " Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

7 " 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. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

8 " Love is the revelation of the other person’s freedom, "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

9 " 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. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

10 " The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

11 " Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

12 " 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. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

13 " We are afraid to venture into the unknown because to do so would remind us of how unsafe we once felt. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

14 " 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 eyes. In the stillness of the retreat I saw how I did this a lot: envisioning how something, or someone, had to be perfect, and then being disappointed when they failed, pulling myself back into a sullen remove. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

15 " Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

16 " Separate and together cease to be mutually exclusive and instead become, in psychoanalyst Christopher Bolla's phrase, "reciprocally enhancing and mutually informative. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

17 " I began to think that there was something awesome about my timing. How was it that, at the exact moment of my stopping, such incredible things were happening? It took me longer than I am prepared to admit to realize that such things were always happening. It was only that I was finally paying attention. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

18 " In coping with the world, we come to identify only with our compensatory selves and our reactive minds. We build up our selves out of our defenses but then come to be imprisoned by them. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

19 " Like meditation, psychotherapy has the potential to reveal how much of our thinking is an artificial construaction designed to help us cope with an unpredictable world. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

20 " 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 and connection make each other possible; they are not mutually exclusive. "

― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness