Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away. Mark Epstein More Quotes by Mark Epstein More Quotes From Mark Epstein To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as we really are, warts and all. Mark Epstein warts direct term One of the age-old truths about love is that while it offers unparalleled opportunities for union and the lifting of ego boundaries, it also washes us up on the shores of the loved one's otherness. Sooner or later, love makes us feel inescapably separate. Mark Epstein ego opportunity love The central premise of this book is that the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed. Mark Epstein self mean book It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence Mark Epstein difficult kind absence As my Buddhist teachers have shown me, wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as from language itself. Mark Epstein buddhist space teacher 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 their own right and are flickering rather than static, then we can no longer fear their ultimate demise. We may fear their instability, or their emptiness, but the looming threat of death starts to seem absurd. Things are constantly dying, we find. Or rather, they are constantly in flux, arising and passing away with each moment of consciousness. Mark Epstein independent dying real
