The psychiatrist Mark Epstein shares his insights about the mind after decades of working with patients and practicing Buddhism.
By Ezra Klein
I’ve had a meditation practice for about 15 years now. I have a bit of a highly tuned nervous system, and I went into it thinking it would calm me down. And it has done that.
But over time, and in the periods when the practice is a bit deeper, when I have a little bit more grit under its tires, the thing it really seems to do is alienate me from my own mind.
I watch what is playing on the projector of my psyche, and I think: Why? Why did I — or some part of me — load up that particular film and, at least in the way my mind works, do so again and again and again and again?
There are people who have been thinking about and exploring the strange way the mind performs for a very long time. One of them, Mark Epstein, is someone whose work I’ve long been interested in.
Epstein is a Buddhist and a psychotherapist. His first book, published in 1995, was called “Thoughts Without a Thinker.” His 2022 book is “The Zen of Therapy.”
Now a lot of people go to therapy. The fact that today it might have all these dimensions of mindfulness and awareness in it would seem normal and natural. But some people built that bridge, and Epstein was one of them.
I’ve thought for a while that it would be interesting to ask him, after his decades of therapeutic practice and intense meditation, what he has learned about the mind. How does he think about how the mind works?
What is the relationship you have to your own thoughts when you realize you’re not the one controlling them?
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.