Why Does My Mind Keep Thinking That?

What It Covers

Psychiatrist and Buddhist practitioner Mark Epstein explores how meditation and psychotherapy reveal the mind's automatic patterns, the illusion of a fixed self, and cultivating awareness without judgment after decades of practice.

Key Questions Answered

• •Thought observation: Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein describes thoughts as just a little something more than nothing. This reframing helps practitioners stop fetishizing the empty mind and instead cultivate useful thoughts rather than eliminating thinking entirely, which would make you more stupid not more aware.
• •Self-location practice: Buddhist psychology teaches that the best time to locate the self that doesn't exist is when someone you love hurts your feelings and accuses you falsely. That gripped feeling of injustice reveals the self as just a feeling that breaks up under observation, not a stable entity requiring defense.
• •Therapeutic stance: Freud advised therapists to suspend judgment and give impartial attention to everything observed, identical to Buddhist meditation instruction. This creates space for the other person and allows openness rarely experienced in normal relationships, making therapy valuable as a place to be yourself without judgment.
• •Trauma processing: Trauma becomes definitional when not relationally held. The therapeutic goal is helping people articulate difficult experiences so they take their place in conscious history rather than leaping out from unconscious storage. Over-articulation becomes as problematic as suppression when it creates limiting self-identification rather than understanding.
• •Desire and freedom: Love reveals the other person's freedom and subjectivity can never be fully known. The gap between desired union and reality creates disappointment that becomes release when you stop clinging. Holding desire with an open palm rather than clenched fist allows space for inevitable separation without alienating the other.