The Trauma of Everyday Life by Mark Epstein

Trauma, in any of its forms, is not a failure or a mistake.  It is not something to be ashamed of, not a sign of weakness, and not a reflection of inner failing.  It is simply a fact of life.

We emerge, as infants, from a relational matrix and then struggle to come to terms with the trauma of aloneness.

Trauma forces one into an experience of the impersonal, random, and contingent nature of reality, but it forces one violently and against one's will.

In dissociation the personality wards off becoming fragmented.  It does this by withdrawing from that which it cannot bear.  The shocked self is sacrificed, sent to its room for an endless time-out…. In order to go on, the self cuts its losses and dissociates its alarm.

In dissociation there is no self-reflection -- in order to survive trauma the devastated self is immobilized and hidden out of view.  The emotional impact has nowhere to go, however.  It becomes stuck, in a frozen state, inaccessible to the person's usual waking consciousness.  It is never digested, never symbolized or imagined, never processed by thought or language, and never really felt.

There is no single word for meditation in the original language of Buddhism.  The closest is one that translates as "mental development". 

Mindfulness, in its fullest flowering, actually balances two distinct mental qualities:  relaxation and investigation.

Feelings are always present.  They accompany every moment of awareness.  They can be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, and they can be based in the body or in the mind.  They flow continuously, although we tend to intervene reactively, dissociating from the painful feelings, clinging to the pleasant ones, and ignoring the neutral.

Our egos, in our relentless rush to normal, pulls us away from our feelings when they are difficult and immerse us in them unconditionally when they are alluring.

Dreams are dissociative by definition.  They occur when the rest of the mind is shut down, and they allow difficult feelings to be expressed in symbolic form.

Awakening does not mean an end to difficulty; it means a change in the way those difficulties are met. 

Thoughts Without a Thinker by Dr Mark Epstein

All quotes from Mark's book

The uncovering of the past is really only a prelude to the mystery of the present.   

Mindfulness confers upon us the capacity to relate to emotional life in an open, balanced, accepting, and tolerant way, while freeing us to act with compassion, rather than on impulse. 

Meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using ego to observe and tame its own manifestations.  Development of the capacity to attend to the moment-to-moment nature of mind allows the self to be experienced without the distortions of idealization or wishful fantasy?

The entire ego is not transcended; the self-representation is revealed as lacking concrete existence.

Pay precise attention, moment by moment, to exactly what you are experiencing, right now, separating out your reactions from the raw sensory events.

The uncovering of the past is really only a prelude to the mystery of the present. 

Mindfulness confers upon us the capacity to relate to emotional life in an open, balanced, accepting, and tolerant way, while freeing us to act with compassion, rather than on impulse.

Meditation is not world denying; the slowing down that it requires is in service of closer examination of the day-to-day mind.

The personality is built on these points of self-estrangement; the paradox is that what we take to be so real, ourselves, is constricted on a reaction against just what we do not wish to acknowledge.

The fabric of self is stitched together out of… holes in our emotional experience.

No matter what we do, [the Buddha] taught, we cannot sustain the illusion of our self-sufficiency.  We are all subject to decay, old age, and death, to disappointment, loss, and disuse.  We are all engaged in a futile struggle to maintain ourselves in our own image.

The crises in our lives inevitably reveal how impossible our attempts to control our destinies really are. 

The mind endeavors to make nouns even out of verbs.

We are still subject to … a primitive tendency to believe things are the way we wish them to be without regard for reality, logic, or even our own sensory feedback.

What is craving, after all, but a wish – a wish for satisfaction, gratification, holding, security, or solidarity.

Avoid the two extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification, or, in more contemporary terms, of idealization and denial.

Sometimes we feel that the only solution is to act out every emotion, that we get in touch with.  We feel as if we must express it to whomever it is directed or that we are somehow cheating ourselves.  The idea of simply knowing the feeling does not occur to us.