The Trauma of Everyday Life

Do not grasp after the pleasant or push away the unpleasant, but give equal attention to everything there is to observe, taught the Buddha.

“There is no self apart from the world.”

“Outside is pure energy and colorless substance. All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

In his careful elucidation of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, he established the means by which implicit memories can be converted to narrative ones.

In so doing, the Buddha’s mother acted out an inadequacy that many a mother—like many a lover—is vulnerable to, an inadequacy fed by thoughts of doubt and fear that erode confidence and corrode connection.

It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience. . . .

Traumatized people are left with an experience of “singularity” that creates a divide between their experience and the consensual reality of others.

Our humanity resides in our feelings, and we reclaim our humanity when we direct our curiosity at that which we would prefer to avoid.

“the unbearable embeddedness of