Open to Desire Quotes

“Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person (dare we call it a soul?) wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. ... There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most sensual of desires.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“The teaching of the sexual tantras all come down to one point. Although desire, of whatever shape or form, seeks completion, there is another kind of union than the one we imagine. In this union, achieved when the egocentric model of dualistic thinking is no longer dominant, we are not united with it, nor am I united with you, but we all just are. The movement from object to subject, as described in both Eastern meditation and modern psychotherapy, is training for this union, but its perception usually comes as a surprise, even when this shift is well under way. It is a kind of grace. The emphasis on sexual relations in the tantric teachings make it clear that the ecstatic surprise of orgasm is the best approximation of this grace.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“the word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of “pervasive unsatisfactoriness,” I was even more impressed. “Suffering” always sounded a bit melodramatic, even if a careful reading of history seemed to support it. “Pervasive unsatisfactoriness”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“The problem is not desire. It’s that your desires are too small.”3 The left-handed path means opening to desire so that it becomes more than just a craving for whatever the culture has conditioned us to want. Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“The ability to see things the way they are, not to expect constant gratification but to understand that all things are limited, is what allows for personal growth.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“There is a hopefulness to the human spirit that will just not accept no for an answer.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Out of the pursuit of the object comes the recognition of the other, and out of the recognition of the other comes the capacity to empathize.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“As in the Ramayana, where gods and animals have to work together to discover the intersubjective expanse of what it means to be human, we need partners in order to realize who we are. While psychotherapy and meditation offer reliable venues for this exploration, our love relations do also.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“From this perspective, the arising of desire becomes an opportunity to question, not what we desire, nor what we do with desire, nor even how we make sense out of desire, but what does desire want from us? What is its teaching? We have to be very quiet to listen to desire in this way.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“The desire to possess or control becomes the ability to relate.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Desire, which starts out wanting to control, possess, merge with or otherwise do something to or with an object, eventually finds that the object is not object enough for its liking. At this point, there is a fork in the road. In one direction lies clinging, the attempt to make the object more than it can be; and in the other direction lies non-clinging, where the gap between what is expected and what is actually found can be tolerated. This second direction—the left-handed path—requires a shift in consciousness and a training of the mind. It does not come naturally.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“the intimacy that comes when emotional surrender joins with physical release”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“This strategy of Freud’s is pivotal to understand, because it upends the conventional view, even among many therapists, of what the therapeutic task should be. Yet it is entirely consistent with the Buddha’s left-handed path, in which a crucial strategy is the willingness to not take the contents of the psyche too personally. While the acceptance of desire is certainly essential to deepen the experience of self, it is not necessary to assume that this desire is “ours.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“We have to find a way to move ourselves out of an exclusive identification with our own thoughts. In this light, the first principle of the journey is to learn to see desire as impersonal.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“It was Freud, not chasing satisfaction, who could stay present with it all. Worlds away from the high mountains of the Himalayas, his observations in the Alps nevertheless bore out the old Tibetan saying: “Just as the waters in the high mountains improve by falling, so do a yogi’s meditations improve by dissolving.” By opening to desire, Freud found, the mind, like the high mountain water, also takes a plunge. Having fallen, it can flow through all things.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“but Freud, the apostle of instinctual gratification, was someone who could understand the enjoyment of desire. This distinction lies at the heart of sexual tantra. Like Freud’s friends, most of us are conditioned to look for fulfillment for our desire. When it is not forthcoming, or not lasting, we tend to withdraw. Rather than rejoice in our lovers’ evasion of our attempts to control them, we feel dejected. In the face of unreliability, we retreat into our known selves.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“But Freud was soon persuaded that his friends’ reactions were not an anomaly. As Phillips concluded, in a deft twist of a phrase, there seem to be two kinds of people in the world, “those who can enjoy desiring and those who need satisfaction.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“All of this is in the service of opening up the sensual, intersubjective mode of relating, using genital pleasure as a foundation for shared contemplation rather than as an end in itself.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Tibetan Buddhism is notoriously “sex-friendly.” Walls of Tibetan temples are adorned with paintings of men and women in states of sexual arousal. The happiness that comes in lovemaking allows a couple to slip through a portal into the dakini’s domain. Most portrayals of sexual yoga describe methods of making this state of consciousness accessible. The man is encouraged to give priority to his partner’s arousal rather than his own. There is a deliberate enhancing of female excitement and a corresponding heightening of sensuality. Both partners are urged to bring pleasurable feelings upward from their genitals to fill the rest of the body, prolonging their intermingling while allowing sexual bliss to course through mind and body.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“I can become aware of being aware, but when this happens, what I have done is take this reflexive awareness as an object of experience. What I cannot do is be aware of the source of awareness in the act of being aware.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“In love relations we find that our lovers are out of reach but we can learn to bask in their otherness, in the interpersonal expanse that female sexuality makes possible. In meditation we find that our own awareness is similarly always eluding us, and the solution is parallel. Like a skilled lover, as awareness opens it also evades. To know it, we have to give up trying to tie it down.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“In love relations we find that our lovers are out of reach but we can learn to bask in their otherness, in the interpersonal expanse that female sexuality makes possible. In meditation we find that our own awareness is similarly always eluding us, and the solution is parallel. Like a skilled lover, as awareness opens it also evades.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“It is the essential realization of the left-handed path. Subjectivity can never be entirely known. To try to know it turns it into an object and strips it of its subjective quality. The only way to know it is to be it. This is where the lessons of desire start to manifest in the personal realm. While we tend to pursue our lovers as objects, we are quickly washed up on the shores of their subjectivity. And just as we cannot locate or possess their subjectivity, we cannot completely know our own.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“The ego can never successfully take itself as the subject of awareness.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Under the spell of passion, both self and other dissolve. And it is female sexuality, with its intrinsic regard for spaciousness, its dispersal of desire over the entire body, and its valorization of the subjective voice, that holds the key. The esoteric Buddhist teachings suggest that when we bring attention to this kind of desire, it will teach us what the Buddha wanted us to understand.”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Because her great bliss is imperturbable, She is a mountain. Because lesser beings cannot fathom her profundity, She is a forest. Because her cavern is filled with nectar, She is a cave. Because her union of wisdom and skill is deep, She is a riverbank. Because she [knows] the natural state beyond birth and death, She is primordial. Because she is the object of great bliss, Her activity is natural. Because she burns the views of early disciples and solitary achievers in the fire of great passion, She is a cremation ground.4”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy