There's another section in the book that I want to touch on. And you tell the story of how the Buddha is talking with one of his students about tuning a lute and if it's too tight, that's not good. You've got to find the right in tune. Right effort is an attempt to find balance in the midst of all this. In a lot of the Buddhist world, there can be a kind of anti-feeling, anti-emotional bias. But what the psychotherapists have found is that your capacity for love and for empathy are linked to being able to deal with negative feelings in a non-judgmental way.
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Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist in private practice in NYC and the author of many books about the intersection of Buddhism and psychotherapy. He's currently the clinical assistant professor in the postdoctoral program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University. His most recent book, Advice Not Given; A Guide to Getting Over Yourself is what he talks about in this episode. His wisdom is so incredibly practical, applicable, and helpful. Ideas like whether or not naming your feelings would be a helpful strategy for you and how to work with clinging in its many forms - even the clinging to inner peace - abound in this discussion. Take a listen and enrich your inner life.
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In This Interview, Mark Epstein and I Discuss...
- The Wolf Parable
- His book, Advice Not Given; A Guide to Getting Over Yourself
- The duality that we all struggle with
- Freud and the Buddha's nearly identical conclusion
- What it means to take personal responsibility for our selfish concerns
- The clinging to that which gives us a sense of control over life
- The clinging to that which nurtures our ego
- The eightfold path of the Buddha
- The conversation with his terminally ill father that inspired this book
- Right View - being realistic about one's self and the nature of things
- How change and death is happening all of the time, moment to moment
- Trying not to try as it relates to meditation
- "Take the backward step" in meditation
- FInding balance in "right effort"
- Exploring the feelings that we are otherwise afraid of through psychotherapy
- The link between being with uncomfortable feelings and empathy to others
- How anything that's happening in the body or mind can be the object of meditation
- How useful it is to name a feeling
- Making a feeling "intelligible" by naming it
- How useful it can be to find where feelings show up in the body
- When your mind is not aware of what's making you act this way (in addiction, compulsive behaviors etc) it's important to put the words on the feelings
- Whether or not all emotions show up in the body
- How clinging takes many forms - even the desire for inner peace
- "Don't chase her, let her find you."
- That our lives are made dull by our efforts to over control things
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