Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

by Mark Epstein

Right View states that the fundamental purpose of Buddhist meditation is not to create a comfortable hiding place for oneself; it is to acquaint the mind, on a moment-to-moment basis, with impermanence.

A concentrated mind is a quiet mind in which the pressures of having to be somebody recede.

There is a rush to normal that closes us off, not only to the depth of our own suffering, but also, as a consequence, to the suffering of others.

suffering is an ineradicable aspect of life. We are human as a result of suffering, not in spite of it.

When we can help people see their repetitive thoughts as mere thoughts rather than as true stories, there is a whiff of freedom.

“How do you use meditation in your relationship?” I asked an old friend in Boston, a longtime Zen student named Richard Barsky, many years ago, before his untimely early death from myeloma, when he was one of the only married people I knew. “By letting go even when you know you are right,” he responded.

A friend of mine confided that he tries to stay mindful when eating dinner with his wife, for example, but that this did not seem to lessen the tension between them. I pointed out that he would do better to engage her in conversation rather than hiding behind mindfulness as if it were the newspaper. He saw my point, but it had not occurred to him on his own.

This need to blame is of course a very common one. I come up against it all the time in my work as a therapist—in myself and in my patients—and I am often aware both of how alluring it can be and of how people are better off without it.