If The Buddha Dated Quotes

I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.

Thirty seconds of pure awareness is a long time, especially after a lifetime of escaping yourself at all costs.

We do not deserve to be trapped in hell. It isnt our fault.

I need them to be aware and present with me in the midst of the storm, not just tell me what to do.

All you want is love and belonging, and your very existence depends on it. But when you get it, you have no existence except that love; there’s still no you.

What initially began as a couple of pieces that fitted together from first dates, slowly expands with time and for a moment the puzzle actually looks like it will be realized. Heartbreak is when the puzzle is nearly finished and you suddenly realize that pieces are missing. Perhaps they were never in the box in the first place or perhaps they went missing along the way; regardless, the puzzle remains undone. You frantically search the box and your surroundings, desperately trying to find the missing pieces, anxiously looking to fill the void, but you search for what cannot be found.

An inner ease spreads inside me. Such is the power of acceptance and understanding from other people, the power of validation

Connection gives us our life, yet it also threatens to take it from us.

Maybe the Buddha was right: pain and suffering are the only true constants in life.

I've grown up with an ethic, call it a part, that insists I hide my pain at all costs. As I talk, I feel this pain leaking out—not just the core symptom of BPD, but all the years of being blamed or ignored for my condition, and all the years I've blamed others for how I am. It's the pain of being told I was too needy even as could never get the help I needed.

We need this help from the outside because we don't know how to to do this for ourselves. We start with a deep deficit—a chasm really—when it comes to understanding and being tolerant of ourselves, and that's even before we go forth to do battle with the rest of the world. As soon as someone judges, criticizes, dismisses, or ignores, the cycle of pain and reactivity ramps up, compounded by shame, remorse, and rejection. The act of validation, simply saying, 'I can see things from your perspective,' can short-circuit that emotional detour.

Staying loyal to your journey means you never abandon yourself by compromising your integrity or discounting your intuition or the signals that come from your body—the knot in the gut, emotional detachment, or loss of energy that signals something is amiss.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: “If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …” And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.

Ironically, the word “borderline” has become the most perfect expression of my experience— the experience of being in two places at once: disordered and perfect.

Accepting a psychiatric diagnosis is like a religious conversion. It's an adjustment in cosmology, with all its accompanying high priests, sacred texts, and stories of religion. And I am, for better or worse, an instant convert.

Ego says: I want someone to fill me up. Spirit says: I'll have someone to help me wake up, to challenge my blind spots and be a companion and playmate on the journey.

So at family gatherings… I try to stick to the acceptable script. Indeed, I discover that the less I say, the happier everyone seems to be with me. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off as a paraplegic or afflicted by some tragic form of cancer. The invisibility and periodicity of my disorder, along with how often I border on normalcy, allows them to evade my need for their understanding. And because our most enduring family heirloom is avoidance and denial of pain and suffering, I don’t need much prompting to shut myself down in their presence.

On the spiritual path we must become a gentle warrior--curious, kind, and alert to our own con games--whispering to ourselves, wake up.

I’ve read that, for some borderlines, the flip side of abandonment fear is the fear of engulfment. It’s another one of those “screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t” situations. All you want is love and belonging, and your very existence depends on it. But when you get it, you have no existence except that love; there’s still no you.

Our refuge is being exactly where we are - not dramatizing problems by replaying them in our heads, telling stories to our friends, eliciting sympathy and convincing ourselves that this is a very big deal. Our refuge is in the stillness of being the compassionate witness to our panic and fear - not judging it as good or bad, just accepting the what is of the moment.

I’m not interested in Bob Marley telling me to ‘lively up’ myself. The only music that satisfies me is Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor’s voice crying through industrial rhytms. In the August evenings, I lie on my bed with earphones, letting his laments roll through me like unrepentant thunderstorms. I envy the courage that carries his voice into the world. He doesn’t berate himself for pain and anger; he howls. And this delights me, even though I feel ashamed when my own rage comes to the surface. My anger doesn’t signify courage; it’s just more confirmation that I’m bad.

DBT's catchphrase of developing a life worth living means you're not just surviving; rather, you have good reasons for living. I'm also getting better at keeping another dialectic in mind: On the one hand, the disorder decimates all relationships and social functions, so you're basically wandering in the wasteland of your own failure, and yet you have to keep walking through it, gathering the small bits of life that can eventually go into creating a life worth living. To be in the desolate badlands while envisioning the lush tropics without being totally triggered again isn't easy, especially when life seems so effortless for everyone else.

Great. I hate you; don’t leave me. That’s exactly what I feel with Bennet most of the time. Though more precisely it’s “I hate you, why don’t you leave your fucking ex-girlfriend?

If in a relationship there is no tension [meaning no deepening of knowledge of self and others], it ceases to be a relationship and merely becomes a comfortable sleep state, an opiate - which most people want and prefer.

Instead of trying to freeze the present moment and hang on to it, we need to remember that life is a process of constantly letting go. The ego wants dependable rituals and people who stay the same. But to be free means that we enjoy this touch, this kiss, this sunrise, and then let it go. This is sometimes described as not letting the ground under your feet get too solid, not grasping for security or predictability.

Love brings up anything that is hiding.

Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

Remember, it’s better to speak up and let a relationship fall apart than to live in fear, or sacrifice your integrity.

If we succumb to fear, we start holding back, and do that all-to-common dance of getting close, then pulling away. When we remember that our safe harbor depends on our awareness and honesty, we're less likely to make internal compromises, put on masks, or act like a chameleon to attract a partner or keep a hurtful relationship together. If we live by truth, we may have pain, but we will always rest securely in ourselves.

• Our longing is also our desire to be known completely. Imagine having your beloved look tenderly into your eyes, knowing all your secrets, having seen you be crabby and sweet, selfish and generous, and still truly loving you. Imagine being able to do the same. That is the potential of a conscious relationship.

he wants to know what will give me hope again. It’s the first time anyone has asked me that. “If I have hope, I’m only going to get crushed again,” I say tearfully. “If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?” he asks. “Love,” I say without a second’s hesitation. “But that’s the biggest setup of all.

The only way of full knowledge lies in the act of love; this act transcends thought, it transcends words. It is the daring plunge into the experience of union. To love somebody is not just a strong feeling—it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.

I may have no emotional skin and come undone at the smallest interpersonal upset, but I’d make a great bullfighter or firefighter—anything that gets my adrenaline going and focuses me on a physical target. The motorcycle is all of that and more. When I’m on the bike, it feels like a door opens in my chest and the world rushes in, pure, fresh, and sparkling with clarity. It forces me to approach fear with total awareness and to pull reason mind into the moment of intense reactions.

Generosity says a great deal about a person's emotional and spiritual development. When it's hard to give, or it feels like ripping away a part of the self, we are still anchored in our attachments or stories we've created about scarcity. If this applies to you, make friends with the part of you that feels resentful or finds it difficult to give.

More than anything else, I want myself. I want to live with integrity and truth. I’m not going to hide the jewel of who I am, nor will I mask my imperfections. No bargains, no avoiding reality, no conning myself, no lies.

I want this music and this dawn and the warmth of your cheek against mine. —R

Suicide is like a little cyanide capsule in my pocket, just in case the enemy comes too close—always there, but only to be used when facing seemingly insurmountable odds.

I'm constantly searching for confirmation of his love for me, and each of his gestures and words, no matter how trivial, can either prove or disprove it.

there is a circular relationship between our ability to know and love another and our ability to know and love ourselves.

Trust your observations and intuitive responses. Bring up your concerns as they appear.

Poisoned by what's inside us and vulnerable to anything outside us

Every time we open one door, we close another. It's lovely to spend Sunday morning with our new love, cooking breakfast and taking a walk together. But in the midst of our happiness, we may feel nostalgia for our former Sunday morning ritual of uninterrupted time alone at a favorite restaurant reading the newspaper. We need to acknowledge the presence of both excitement and loss, to feel their rhythm as they ebb and flow through a new relationship. If we try to deny our losses, they lead to resentments, a gnawing discomfort, and a desire to withdraw. Yet we also need to remind our ego that love means letting go of our entrenched rituals, of comparing, of wanting life to stay the same...Entering a relationship and living in the heart of the Beloved means our life will change, our shells will crack open and we will never be the same again.

If you put sexual attraction on a scale of one to ten, where ten equals "you can't keep your hands off each other,"five equals "you can take it or leave it," and one equals "repulsed," to support a vibrant relationship, it should be at least a seven, preferably an eight, nine, or ten. With work, you might raise the attraction one notch, but because there is so much biochemistry involved in sexual attraction, it's hard to do much more than that. So if a sexual attraction doesn't evolve, remember, it's not anyone's fault and it's just the what is of your pairing, and you might make better friends than lovers. Sexual attraction doesn't have to be instantaneous on first meeting, but it must eventually flower because it provides a basic glue for successful conjugal union. If we're not sexually alive to our beloved, it often leads to a subdued relationship, loneliness, affairs, or lots of fantasies.

Instead of turning our heads from pain, we merge with it, neither holding on to it nor pushing it away, becoming instead an instrument of transformation. Recently, on my early morning drive to a health club, I saw a deer in the middle lane, trying to get up, but obviously crippled. Her eyes looked confused and frightened. As I drove by, I breathed in her pain and breathed out a blessing. I could feel a dark cloud swirling inside of me, but I also had an image of a deer running freely in the woods. I can never know if it helped her, but something loosened inside of me. Instead of turning away from her pain, I joined her. It was then I realized more deeply the power of Tonglin... When you feel hurt, confused, lonely, or sad, breathe into your pain, feel it, be with it, then breathe out an image of clarity, light, and a blessing. This alone will start to change your life.

We feel connected one moment and disconnected the next. A tender sexual moment will never be exactly the same. Every breath we take connects us to life, then passes, until a new breath fills us. We move through new developmental and spiritual stages, daily, weekly... we stop the flow the moment we try to hold on to anything... You partner with someone as they are in this moment. The vitality can remain if you adventure forth, side by side savoring the moment to moment shifts that inevitably arise as you both stay open to the journey. We need to look at each other anew every day, with clear eyes and an open mind, so we see the person of today, not an image from the past.

We're like the teenager who "will die" if he or she can't go to a certain rock concert or see a certain friend. Because we tell ourselves it's absolutely crucial that [things should be a certain way right now] we create turmoil and anxiety. It's not [the way things are] that causes pain, it's the meaning we give to these events and our demand that such things not happen. While we can have preferences, the minute we start insisting that people and situations be different, we create internal turmoil - anger, hostility, sadness, and so on. It's our attachments that lead us to donning a mask, blaming others, or feeling incomplete.

On the spiritual path, the purpose of my relationship is to wake up and get to know ourselves and our lover, thoroughly, without judgment or pride. On the spiritual path, we enter into a shared union where we cherish and give to each other, expanding our ability to love unconditionally. We would also accept that the process an be awkward, unpredictable, challenging, and surprising.

The more we commit to knowing and accepting ourselves, the more we are able to surrender to loving another person because we have nothing to hide and nothing to feel ashamed of. Our spiritual commitment to truth and integrity creates a safe harbor within us- a mooring, a home to return to when the journey gets rough, This is immensely important in the dating process because new love can resurrect our most primitive feelings of fear, dependency, and emptiness. If we know how to soothe our pain and relax into or emptiness, we won't be afraid to be open and honest, regardless of the outcome.

Well, it’s not like I don’t like people; I just find them disturbing and can’t manage their effects on me, positive or negative.

wonder: How much of what I feel as neglect has been fueled by the force of my constant need? How much can any person hold another who is perpetually falling?

Then I go on to say that one of the reasons I’m doing so well is because of how much I’ve learned about BPD and DBT, especially the part about Linehan’s biosocial model and how BPD develops through a combination of biological vulnerabilities and an invalidating environment. When I explain what an “invalidating environment” is like, she stops chewing her spring roll.

Some of the often told stories we use to con ourselves: It’s getting better. Nobody’s perfect. S/he had a hard childhood. I know s/he really loves me, s/he just has a hard time showing it. S/he has so much potential. I’m sure it will get better. Don’t ever marry potential or plan on someone changing. Ask yourself, why would it get better? Why would this person change?

Within six weeks they were lovers... 'I realized, from having nearly died, that when you're alive, that's what you're supposed to be doing, being alive. There's plenty of time to be dead.

grew up in a very invalidating environment,” I declare. “People didn’t take my problems seriously. I was blamed for everything I did. When I got upset, no one taught me how to take care of myself. And you were gone half the time on your trips around the world, and when you were around, you were constantly preoccupied. Even with you there, you weren’t there. I felt entirely alone.

When you feel hurt, confused, lonely, or sad, breathe into your pain, feel it, be with it, then breathe out an image of clarity, light, and a blessing. This alone will start to change your life.

If God or Buddha, or whoever the higher power is, has decided to put an expiration date on the relationships we have with our loved ones, then we just make the best out of every day we have left.

Here we are, immersed in a sea of shame and self-hatred beyond reason, and on top of that, our illness is considered too shameful to even admit to, and apparently no one else wants to deal with it.

The Diamond Cutter is the oldest dated book in the world that was printed, rather than being written out by hand. The British Museum holds a copy that is dated A.D. 868, or about 600 years before the Gutenberg Bible was produced.

often feel like I’m regressing. He doesn’t turn the radio down like I ask him to, so I decide that means he doesn’t care about me and I spend the rest of the day strangled and stupefied by the emotions from just this one slight. I’ll

Jesus's December 25th birthdate was established in 354 CE. This most famous date, however, was already celebrated in some Christian sects at least as early as the end of the second century, a critical time in the formation of Christianity.

In the "British Museum Papyrus" of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, parts of which may date to 7,000 years ago,3 the God Sun Ra is called "the lord of heaven, the lord of earth, the king of righteousness, the lord of eternity, the prince of everlasting, ruler of gods all, god of life, maker of eternity, creator of heaven..."4 The bulk of these epithets were later used to describe the Christian solar logos, Jesus.

This is the same stuff your parents did to you: ignoring your feelings, not recognizing what you needed, invalidating you. You grew up never being taught how to be honest about what was going on inside you. You also had to pretend.” “So now you have blame them too? It this what therapy does—teaches you to blame and hurt others to make yourself feel better?” “I don’t see why we can’t look at the facts without judging them. No one ever talked about what was really going on in our family. We were always hiding, or ignoring, or punishing when things came to the surface.” “That was years ago! If you can’t let go of the past, then I don’t think you’re making all that much progress. And you can tell your therapist that.” She’s waving frantically at the waiter to give her the check, even though our dinner is only half eaten. “Just go…” she hisses, not looking at me any more, fumbling for her purse. “Just leave.

Although Krishna in his distinct personality does not appear in the earliest Hindu texts, the Vedas, the term "Krishna," meaning "black" or "darkness," is found numerous times in those scriptures, dating to more than a millennium and a half before the Christian era. At Rig Veda 7.63.1, for example, the sun is the god "who has rolled up his darkness like a skin." "His darkness" and "skin" go hand in hand with the depictions of Krishna, who is portrayed with blue or navy skin, the color of the evening and night skies.

In any event, what can be stated definitively is that Christianity is not original and that its myths and doctrines can be and repeatedly have been shown to have precedent in numerous parts of the world, dating back ages before the common era. The reason for all this similarity is not because there were various men with comparable lives popping up all over the place but because the spiritual figureheads of numerous religions, Christianity and Buddhism included, are mythical characters based in large part on astrotheology.

The last quarter of –6C saw the opening of a two-century burst of philosophic work across the Eurasian land mass, dating roughly from –520 to –320, in which human beings thought through some large proportion of all the great philosophic issues—not in primitive forms that were later discarded, but as profound philosophic systems. Both of India’s dominating traditions were founded at the outset of this two-century seminal period—Hinduism with the assembly of the Upanishads sometime in –6C, and Buddhism with Buddha a century later. In some of the same decades when Buddha was teaching his disciples, so was Confucius in China. In Greece, the earliest thinkers to take up philosophic topics, Thales and Anaximander, were at work in the early part of –6C, followed by Pythagoras at its close.

It’s probably long overdue for us to throw out what we think we know about love. Girls have grown up with too many fairy tale/date movies/romance bodice-rippers racing around in our heads—the warrior with his rippling muscles and the golden-maned damsel clinging to his breeches. The title is something like Savage Heat or Destiny’s Desire. This is the fairy tale world where men and women always orgasm at the same time or where the man wakes the sleeping princess with a kiss, or where the hero slays the dragon and rescues the damsel from a tower, or where, essentially, everyone lives happily ever after and no one writes what happens next. What happens next is that reality sets in. The golden bubble bursts. There are bills to pay. Someone has to walk the dog and clean the cat litter box and go to the grocery store for milk.

I want this music and this dawn and the warmth of your cheek against mine. —RUMI, SUFI POET, from LIKE THIS You

Gujarat's temple of Somnath [...] had been fortified in 1216 to protect it from attacks by Hindu rulers in neighbouring Malwa. Recorded instances of Indian kings attacking the temples of their political rivals date from at least the eighth century, when Bengali troops destroyed what they thought was the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, Kahsmir's state deity under King Lalitaditya (r. 724-60). In the early ninth century Govinda III, a king of the Deccan's Rashtrakuta dynasty (753-982), invaded and occupied Kanchipuram in the Tamil country. Intimidated by this action, the king of nearby Sri Lanka sent Govinda several (probably Buddhist) images that the Rashtrakuta king then installed in Śiva temple in his capital. At about the same time the Pandya King Śrimara Śrivallabha (r. 815-62) also invaded Sri Lanka and took back to his capital at Madurai, in India's extreme south, a golden Buddha image -- a symbol of the integrity of the Sinhalese state -- that had been installed in the island kingdom's Jewel Palace. In the early tenth century, King Herambapala of north India's Pratihara dynasty (c.750-1036) seized a solid-gold image of Vishnu Vaikuntha when he defeated the king of Kangra, in the Himalayan foothills. By mid-century the same image had been seized from the Pratiharas by the Chandela King Yasovarman (r. 925-45), who installed it in the Lakshmana Temple of Khajuraho, the Chandelas' capital in north-central India. In the mid eleventh century the Chola King Rajadhiraja (r. 1044-52), Rajendra's son, defeated the Chalukyas and raided their capital, Kalyana, in the central Deccan plateau, taking a large black stone door guardian to his capital in Tanjavur, where it was displayed as a trophy of war. In the late eleventh century, the Kashmiri King Harsha (r. 1089-1111) raised the plundering of enemy temples to an institutionalized activity. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, kings of the Paramara dynasty (800-1327) attacked and plundered Jain temples in Gujarat. Although the dominant pattern here was one of looting and carrying off images of state deities, we also hear of Hindu kings destroying their enemies' temples. In the early tenth century, the Rashtrakuta monarch Indra III (r. 914-29) not only demolished the temple of Kalapriya (at Kalpi near the Jammu river), patronized by the Rashtrakutas' deadly enemies the Pratiharas, but took special delight in recording the fact.

And how ironic is it that after doing so much LSD as a teenager and trying to be a hippie, I’m getting my first real taste of Zen meditation in a mental hospital—if you can call feeling tortured for two minutes Zen.

No one wants to suffer. But much as we would all like to live a totally happy life, suffering is an inescapable fact of our human existence. The observation that ‘Man is born unto trouble, as sparks fly upward’ may not have been much consolation to Job but, nevertheless, remains an uncomfortable truth. Generally speaking, suffering arises through our encounters with problems and difficulties; this is why much of our time is spent trying to avoid them, even though they are inherent in life. In trying to avoid problems, however, we are often simply putting off the inevitable to a future date, by which time the trouble has usually grown much more difficult to resolve. Personal relationships are a good example of this. The failure to tackle a problem between two people — a clash of desires, for instance – usually for fear of not knowing what the consequences will be, or perhaps simply because of a dislike of conflict, can very easily lead to a build-up of resentments which, when finally expressed, can be immensely destructive. The story of the ‘mild-mannered’ civil servant who, in 1987, was jailed for strangling his wife after twenty-six years of marriage, ostensibly because she simply moved his favourite mustard from its usual place at the dinner table, is an extreme, but true, example of this.

baptism with water, whether by immersion or sprinkling, is found in numerous pre-Christian religions/cults, dating back to ancient times. Baptism or lustration for the removal of evil or sins existed in the Sumerian culture, for example, 2,000

Concerning Attis, apologist Weigall remarks: Then again, there was the worship of Attis, a very popular religion which must have influenced the early Christians. Attis was the Good Shepherd, the son of Cybele, the Great Mother, or alternatively, of the Virgin Nana, who conceived him without union with mortal man, as in the story of the Virgin Mary... In Rome the festival of his death and resurrection was annually held from March 22nd to 25th; and the connection of this religion with Christianity is shown by the fact that in Phrygia, Gaul, Italy and other countries where Attis-worship was powerful, the Christians adopted the actual date, March 25th, as the anniversary of our Lord's passion.258

The Chronicon Paschale, or Paschal Chronicle, is a compilation finalized in the 7th century CE that seeks to establish a Christian chronology from "creation" to the year 628, focusing on the date of Easter. In establishing this date, the Christian authors naturally discussed astronomy/astrology, since such is the basis of the celebration of Easter, a pre-Christian festival founded upon the vernal equinox, or spring, when the "sun of God" is resurrected in full glory from his winter death.

The December 25th birthday of the sun god is a common motif globally, dating back at least 12,000 years as reflected in winter solstices artfully recorded in caves. "Nearly all nations," says Doane, commemorated the birth of the god Sol to the "Queen of Heaven" and "Celestial Virgin." The winter solstice was celebrated in countless places, from China to the Americas. The winter solstice festival in Egypt has already been mentioned several times, with the babe in a manger brought out of the sanctuary.

some of its natives worshipped the birth of "Krishna" on December 25th. When critics claim that this idea is erroneous because this date is not found in any "original" ancient texts, in return we would ask where is the evidence of the December 25th birthday of Christ in the "original" Christian texts? It is not in the Bible-if future archaeologists were to rely on such texts for proof that Christians celebrated the birth of Christ on December 25th, they would certainly come up empty-handed.

As can be seen, the charges of plagiarism by the Indians of Christian concepts are unsustainable, and we are left with Indian images of crucified gods, at least some of which likely represent Krishna. Another Indian god depicted in cruciform is Agni,32 the fire and sun god who so resembled both Krishna and Christ, yet whose story dates to the earliest Vedic period, well over a thousand years before Christianity was created. Also interchangeable with Wittoba and Krishna is the solar hero Indra, who, as noted, was frequently portrayed as crucified as well. The crucifixion of Indra is likewise recorded in Georgius's Alphabetum Tibetanum, p. 203,

Anything to stop the pain" might be a good subtitle for BPD.

He can't, however, see things from my perspective, and, ultimately, this is more devastating than any imagined betrayal, because it feels like I am still alone.

I want to be free of the cognitive filters that insist the world is hostile and I am unlovable and alone.

In some ways, coming to terms with myself and working toward recovery has been like saying "I love you" to someone but keeping a loaded gun hidden in your back pocket, just in case that person pisses you off enough.

The cycle, once started, is unstoppable. My jealousy and insecurity begin to devastate the relationship like a wrecking ball as I helplessly watch the slow-motion collapse of the building.

I've never understood why I freak out like this, but now I know it's a borderline symptom: intolerance of aloneness and a pervasive sense of emptiness.

Most of my life I've been unable to manage myself and looked to others to take care of me. This certainly resulted in my feeling like a child: powerless and vulnerable. And the people around me behaved in ways that, if not intentionally hurtful, still left me feeling neglected, misunderstood and unprotected.

We don't "come down" from our emotions for a long time. Once the nerves have been touched, the sensations keep peaking. Shock waves of emotion that might pass through others in minutes might keep cresting in us for hours, sometimes days.

The difference between being told "There's no reason to feel that way" and "I can understand how you feel that wat" is the difference between taunting a rabid squirrel and giving it a tranquilizer.

With BPD, falling in love, intimacy, attachment - all open the trapdoor to yet another dark place.

I need a certain kind of person to grow intimate with: someone who doesn't view my vulnerabilities as weaknesses; someone who can remain calm in the face of my upsets.

The training being offered by family organizations teach validation as one of the most critical techniques in helping someone with BPD.

I see my own kind, the borderlines, each hiding alone in an echo chamber of judgement and helplessness.

The borderline symptoms are the core element of what Buddhism describes as dukkha (suffering): endless grasping, all-consuming intolerance, and complete ignorance of how our actions keep us trapped in this endless cycle.

Yes, I am a thirty-five-year-old woman, and yet I can only find comfort in having imaginary conversations with stuffed animals.

I’ve gained a shell of security, but I’ve barely touched the seed within myself that is real and enduring

Why, for example, do people who are walking down the middle of a crowded sidewalk decide to suddenly stop? It’s not like they don’t know there are a hundred people behind them. So do they not care? If I kicked them or pushed them out of the way, not entirely gently, as I passed by, would it help? “The truth is, you’ll never know all the reasons people do the things they do,” Ethan tells me. “That’s when you can say to yourself, ‘What the fuck.

Equality doesn’t need to mean that both people earn the same amount of money, have equal status, or are equally good-looking. It means they value each other as equals when it comes to making plans, making love, or making decisions. They have an equal voice. One does not sacrifice himself, or herself, to the other. They adore and appreciate each other equally. They may contribute differently to the relationship, but they are equal in feeling responsible for keeping the partnership alive and growing. (I do have one personal bias, however, which is that to be genuinely equal, both people need to know they can support themselves financially so they know they have the option to leave the relationship.)

In the Pāli version over 5,000 suttas are gathered together, representing the teaching activity of the Buddha over forty-five years. Even so it appears that much was thought to have been lost after only the first thousand years of the transmission. Supposedly recited by Ānanda at the First Council and so personally witnessed and authenticated by him, each sutta begins with the words ‘Thus have I heard. At one time ...’. However, as already suggested, many of them post-date this time, and some can be seen to be composite in character, with an early core surrounded by additions.

THE SADDHARMA-PUṆḌARĪKA SŪTRA OR LOTUS SŪTRA The earliest date ascertainable for this sūtra is between 100BCE and 100CE. It is a composite text, showing an overall division into two sections, the first relating to upāya and ekayāna, and the latter to the life-span of the Buddha. Upāya, or skilful means, is the central teaching of the sūtra, and describes the way in which the Buddha adapts his teaching to the disposition (adhimukti) of his hearers, which means that the value of a teaching is relative to its result. This doctrine became the prime means used to account for the varied teachings of the sūtras, since those which were not thought to teach the ultimate truth, paramārtha-satya, were seen as upāya of the Buddha.

When I cry in bed, I take to surrounding myself with all of my stuffed animals, as I discover the surges of pain pass more quickly when I do this. I’ve always had stuffed animals, but only now have I started talking to them. I look into the glass eyes in their plush faces and ask them to tell me I’m going to be okay.

Until then, his anger at the Chinese government was vague and unfocused. He hated the way they condescended to Tibetans. He hated the Chinese companies that were cutting trees from Tibetan land and mining in sacred hills. He hated that you could be sent to jail for reading a banned book or pamphlet, that Tibetans were forced to learn the language of their oppressors, and that they had to go to lectures in which the Chinese government defamed His Holiness the Dalai Lama. But Tsepey hadn’t felt anger toward the Chinese as individuals—he had many Chinese friends and had dated Chinese women. He was a Buddhist who respected human life.

And my dirty little secret? I am always on the verge of drowning, no matter how hard I work to keep myself afloat. And the only way I know to stay afloat—to survive—is to find a savior.

Chinese chroniclers of the Han and Tang dynasties report tall, fiery-haired, and light-eyed barbarians with full beards and in felt caps and leather leggings in the Western Regions (today Xinjiang), who traded in jade and horses.20 Wall frescoes of the rock-cut Kizil Cave monasteries dating to the fourth through sixth centuries depict some native rulers, merchants, or Buddhist monks with red hair and fair-skinned features. The complex, often known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, is seventy-five miles west of Kucha, a major oasis city on the northern side of the Tarim Basin. Kucha has yielded many documents in Tocharian B. The murals, dating between the third and sixth centuries AD, depict scenes from the life of the Buddha, and share close stylistic similarities to the contemporary art of Gandhara.21