Online: Getting Over Your Self – A Buddhist Therapist’s Path to Freedom
A Conversation with Mark Epstein and Amy Gross
Saturday, January 23rd, 2021 | 3:00pm – 5:00pm ET
Is your self a problem? Does it get in the way of your well-being? Twenty-five years ago, when Amy Gross was editor of Elle Magazine, she interviewed Mark Epstein, a then unknown shrink who was about to publish his first book, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy From a Buddhist Perspective. It was the first time a journalist had taken a deep interest, let alone done an interview, let alone taken him out to lunch at Montrachet.
Join Mark and Amy as they sit down together again for a conversation about Mark’s evolving understanding of how therapy and Buddhism combine to untangle the tangle of self and suffering. How does he bring a Buddhist understanding to his work with patients? Is meditation a must? What can therapy offer that Buddhism needs? Plus: a first look at his forthcoming book, The Zen of Therapy.
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Teacher(s)
Mark Epstein
Mark Epstein, M.D., a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City, is the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including Thoughts without a Thinker, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, Going on Being, Open to Desire, Psychotherapy without the Self, The Trauma of Everyday Life and Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself. His latest work, The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life, was published in January 2022 by Penguin Press. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University.
Amy Gross
Amy Gross has been practicing mindfulness meditation since l994, sitting many retreats, including two three-month retreats, at the Insight Meditation Society, Forest Refuge, and Spirit Rock Meditation Center. A former magazine writer and editor, she last served as editor in chief of “O, The Oprah Magazine” before retiring to devote herself to practice and teaching MBSR.
She completed the Professional Training workshop led by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, founder of MBSR and of the UMass Medical School’s Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, and Saki Santorelli, EdD, then-Executive Director of the CFM. She also completed the CFM’s MBSR practicum and Teacher Development Intensive. She remains awed by the course as a brilliant way to retrain our minds, to free us from the kind of reactions that make for stress and suffering.
She is currently a member of the board of New York Insight Meditation Center and a contributing editor at “Tricycle, The Buddhist Review.”