Rating
7
Qualities
For Beginners
Engaging
Inspiring
Advice Not Given
A Guide to Getting Over Yourself
Mark Epstein | © 2018
From ADVICE NOT GIVEN by Mark Epstein, MD Summarized by arrangement with Penguin
Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Psychiatrist Mark Epstein, a practicing Buddhist, has written numerous books about how
psychiatry and Buddhism work together. Here, he weaves elements of psychology into a
discussion of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, focusing on experiences from his medical
practice as they relate to Buddhist stories. His theme is that everything in life is transient and
temporary, including your emotions, angers and frustrations. Instead of reacting to situations,
he urges you to become more mindful and aware as you pause to observe your emotions and
thoughts.
Take-Aways
•
•
•
•
•
•
Your self-esteem doesn’t need to increase. Your ego needs to change.
Draw from Buddhism’s Eightfold Path. Start with the Right View to see yourself realistically.
Right Motivation calls for living in plain sight and acting with conscious awareness.
Apply Right Speech to yourself and others.
Pursue Right Action to avoid destructive behavior that hurts you and those around you.
Right Livelihood goes beyond what you do for work. It encompasses how you treat those
around you.
• Right Effort asks you to use neither too much nor too little energy.
• Right Mindfulness teaches you to observe your thoughts and emotions rather than reacting to
them.
• Right Concentration helps calm your body and mind, which provides significant physiological
benefits.
www.getabstract.com
LoginContext[cu=6051940,ssoId=3082808,asp=4670,subs=7,free=0,lo=en,co=US] 2020-06-22 22:30:17 CEST
Summary
Your self-esteem doesn’t need to increase. Your ego needs to change.
Your ego helps you self-regulate, plan large projects and deal with conflicts. While this shared
“affliction” seemingly wants to take care of you, ego pushes to gain more of your focus and
energy. The West is undergoing a self-esteem craze, but greater self-esteem won’t reduce your
suffering. The ego can learn and change. You can talk your ego away from its atavistic purpose in
the world and focus it internally. Teaching your ego to “let go” leaves you freer. Using the Buddhist
Eightfold Path – potentially alongside Western therapy – can help repair the damage the ego
causes. If you want to heal, you must see yourself realistically. When you understand what you are
afraid of and what you want, you can free yourself.
Draw from Buddhism’s Eightfold Path. Start with the Right View to see yourself
realistically.
The Buddha’s Right View calls for being realistic about yourself and life. In meditation, the mind
can be in tune with itself as well as with your surroundings. Meditation isn’t meant to strengthen
the self but to help you understand the transience of life and accept its fluidity, so be “mindfully
aware” when you meditate. If your emotions kick in or your thoughts flow in an endless loop that
details your daily tasks, turn your attention back to your breathing. If you sit with your eyes closed
and concentrate on what you hear, notice how you react to a bird’s song or a car horn. Realize that
you don’t need to react to everything you hear.
Siddhartha "and Sigmund Freud...both identified the untrammeled ego as the limiting
factor in our well-being.”
Meditation delineates your awareness. Its goal isn’t to create a quiet refuge from life but to help
you understand life’s constant changes. It can help psychiatric patients gain perspective. The Right
View embodies being authentic with yourself and understanding the ephemeral nature of life.
Right Motivation calls for living in plain sight and acting with conscious awareness.
The goal of Right Motivation is to reveal yourself instead of hiding, acting consciously instead of
being reactive. Use meditation to let yourself open up, be honest and acknowledge uncomfortable
emotions. Don’t make it a controlled, change-restricting environment.
“The Buddha was like a contemporary behaviorist who teaches people to carefully go
toward the things they fear the most.”
Within the Eightfold Path, your motivation for any action should be free from fear, insecurity or
the burden of what others may think.
www.getabstract.com
2 of 6
LoginContext[cu=6051940,ssoId=3082808,asp=4670,subs=7,free=0,lo=en,co=US] 2020-06-22 22:30:17 CEST
Apply Right Speech to yourself and others.
Traditionally, Right Speech embodies how you talk with others. It condemns telling lies, talking
about people when they aren’t present, inflating yourself and making unkind retorts. Buddhism
teaches that such actions create mental disharmony. You may often repeat certain thoughts and
stories that you hold in your mind, but they usually aren’t true. Buddhism and psychotherapy
concentrate on these stories but, traditionally, Buddhism mentions only external speech.
Buddhism enjoins you to pay heed to the time between a thought and a statement and to pause if
the statement will be unkind or hurtful. In your mind, your thoughts may seem to appear from a
void without prompting. People often define themselves by their thoughts. Use Right Speech as a
guide to observe your thoughts without accepting them as fact.
“Just because you think it…doesn’t make it true.”
A real-world example is being stuck in traffic. Instead of simply accepting being in a long line
of cars, you worry that you’re going to be late to an event and think about the repercussions of
being behind schedule. The feeling of frustration is real, but jumping to the worst-case scenario
is a meaning you attributed to it. Meditation helps you differentiate your life events and your
thoughts from the meanings you attach to them.
Someone who feels a sense of separation from other people may jump to feeling abandoned
due to their experiences. Right Speech gives you the opportunity to redefine how you
experience separation by dealing directly with your feelings and eliminating the mental link to
abandonment. By exploring emotions that show up in dreams or reactive conversations, you can
understand and identify them. At the junction of Buddhism and psychotherapy, use mindfulness
to aid your physical and emotional self. Right Speech allows you to be present with your feelings
without spiraling into self-hatred. You can learn to view negative stories as just other ideas rather
than as eternal vérités.
Pursue Right Action to avoid destructive behavior that hurts you and those around
you.
Along with Right Speech and Right Livelihood, Right Action ethically guides your behaviors.
Traditionally, Right Action created a social behavioral code in religious communities. Destructive
behavior hurts the individual and those in the group. A quiet mind is one of Buddhism’s goals, so
people look to Buddhism to release thoughts or emotions that make them uncomfortable. But
actively trying to let go only strengthens those thoughts or emotions. Instead, when you “settle
into yourself,” the unwanted thoughts or emotions are likely to fade away by themselves. You can’t
force this to happen.
“Making one’s life into a meditation is different from using meditation to escape from
life.”
www.getabstract.com
3 of 6
LoginContext[cu=6051940,ssoId=3082808,asp=4670,subs=7,free=0,lo=en,co=US] 2020-06-22 22:30:17 CEST
Consider how flirting works. When two people flirt, they pretend to share some degree of
closeness, though neither knows what the other is thinking. Being present in that realm of
uncertainty closely aligns with Buddhism. A Buddhist parable tells of two monks who encounter
a young woman who needs help to cross a river. Although they vowed never to touch women,
one of the monks carries her across. The monks continue walking, and the second monk berates
the first for breaking his vow. The first monk observes, “I put her down long ago. You are still
carrying her.” The story illustrates how Right Action offers the opportunity to be present and act
accordingly.
Right Livelihood goes beyond what you do for work. It encompasses how you treat
those around you.
Right Livelihood guides how people earn money. Similar to Right Action, this precept was
intended to protect monks and their communities from their human impulses. People often
interweave work, salary and financial means with their sense of self-worth. The Buddha identified
four pairs of worldly concerns: “gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, and fame
and disgrace.” He understood that none are constant, but they still remain people’s primary
motivators. In terms of why people work, money is the primary motivator.
In therapy, people talk more readily about sex than finances. It’s true that someone else will
always have more money or more success than you. The Buddha had his monks give up their
professions, but he didn’t let their meditation and study isolate them. Each day, he required
them to beg for food from the community. In return, the monks taught “the Buddha’s psychology”
to their benefactors. The monks thus created and maintained relationships with townspeople.
“Letting go, even when you know you are right, is not a bad thing to keep in mind.”
Right Livelihood has this trusting relationship at its core. Life shouldn’t focus on how you make
money but on how you treat people along the way. Your behavior toward those around you is as
meaningful a currency as the dollar.
Right Effort asks you to use neither too much nor too little energy.
The Buddha illustrated Right Effort to a disciple who had been a lute player. The disciple came to
the Buddha because he couldn’t calm his mind during meditation. The Buddha asked him how the
lute played if a string was too loose or wound too tightly. In both instances, the disciple said the
lute wouldn’t be in tune or be ready to be played. If it was strung correctly, the instrument played
well. Energy, the Buddha continued, is the same. Just as instruments need constant retuning,
so does energy. The disciple simply needed to stop trying so hard.
Athletes exemplify this when they play well without overthinking. The Buddha attached joy to
the correct type and level of effort. The feeling of joy is similar to what the lute player felt when
www.getabstract.com
4 of 6
LoginContext[cu=6051940,ssoId=3082808,asp=4670,subs=7,free=0,lo=en,co=US] 2020-06-22 22:30:17 CEST
hearing a correctly tuned instrument or how an athlete feels when “in the zone.” By their very
nature, these feelings are fleeting.
“From a Buddhist perspective, mindfulness…is an entry-level practice whose purpose is
to open doors to insight.”
A therapist listening to patients without second-guessing or highlighting his or her
intelligence allows patients to come to their own understanding. By using Right Effort, therapists
can determine whether patients are feeling, denying or avoiding strong emotions. Right Effort’s
intrinsic balance helps people walk the line between indulgence and avoidance.
Right Mindfulness teaches you to observe your thoughts and emotions rather
than reacting to them.
Although many Westerners interpret mindfulness as the ultimate destination, in Buddhism, it
is more of a gateway. By allowing yourself to observe your thoughts or feelings, you reduce their
power to control you. Right Mindfulness helps you practice self-observation without judgment.
The Buddha compared it to building a raft to cross water. Once you use it to make the crossing,
would you carry the raft for the remainder of your trip?
“Right Mindfulness…means remembering to keep an eye on oneself.”
Initially, you exert effort to keep your mind from wandering, but after time, it occurs naturally,
and mindfulness continues without further effort. The ego wants to control this flow. In the West,
the word “mindfulness” comes from an 1881 English translation of the Asian word sati, which
means “remembering.” Right Sati requires being able to “keep an eye on oneself.”
Right Concentration helps calm your body and mind, which provides significant
physiological benefits.
Right Concentration is the foundational element of the Buddhist therapeutic technique. It requires
a single focus for a significant amount of time as you concentrate on your breathing or a sound.
Beginners find that it’s not easy to focus, since the mind continually tries to assert itself by
providing distractions.
“Right Concentration…offers stillness, not just as respite, but as a way of entertaining
uncertainty.”
When you concentrate, your mind and body become calm. The nervous system relaxes, and
other physical systems respond positively. The area of the brain associated with fretfulness
and anxiety goes into neutral. This physiological response of the body surprised Western
scientists. Today meditation is a recognized method for managing stress, but concentration
involves much more than that, and there is really no word for the experience. Some people call
it the “unconscious” or “imagination.” You may want to make it more real by naming it, but is
www.getabstract.com
5 of 6
LoginContext[cu=6051940,ssoId=3082808,asp=4670,subs=7,free=0,lo=en,co=US] 2020-06-22 22:30:17 CEST
too elusive for that. The feelings that mediation invoke are temporary. The momentary stillness
is a way of willingly experiencing uncertainty. Some people feel an overabundance of love when
in a state of concentration. Sometimes the calm will be sufficient, or it may help you realize a
connection with something in your life.
When describing the relief of “getting over yourself,” Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco
Zen Center, equated it to a peaceful ocean. If you try to remove the waves – the ego – you won’t
succeed. Instead, realize that the waves are part of the ocean, and don’t worry about how they
change constantly. This shift in perspective can change how you feel about yourself. The Buddha’s
strategy of dispassionate observation offers a way for people to free themselves from their egos
and to get to know themselves more authentically.
About the Author
Psychiatrist Mark Epstein is the author of numerous books on the intersection of Buddhism and
psychotherapy, including The Trauma of Everyday Life, Thoughts Without a Thinker and Going
to Pieces Without Falling Apart.
Did you like this summary?
Buy book or audiobook
http://getab.li/32466
This document is restricted to the personal use of Gary Bongiorni (Gary.Bongiorni@amexgbt.com)
getAbstract maintains complete editorial responsibility for all parts of this abstract. getAbstract acknowledges the copyrights of authors and
publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this abstract may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, photocopying or
otherwise – without prior written permission of getAbstract AG (Switzerland).
6 of 6
LoginContext[cu=6051940,ssoId=3082808,asp=4670,subs=7,free=0,lo=en,co=US] 2020-06-22 22:30:17 CEST