Mark / Amy

Mark sitting atop the boat.

Mark with Ram Dass in Hawai'i, 2017.

Mark's author photo.

Amy in bed with Jimmy DeWitt and Roxanne Malenbaum, 1975.

Amy now.

Psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein talks to classmate Amy Spies about how he stumbled into a lifelong fascination with Buddhism and meditation during his freshman year—thanks to a cool TA in purple bell-bottom cords and Karmu (né Edgar Warner), a local car mechanic and self-taught healer.

The intersection of psychotherapy and Buddhism is Mark Epstein’s specialty. And he chalks up his attraction to it to the first semester of  “Introduction to World Religions,” when he discovered that Buddhism is about the anxious mind and how to liberate yourself from your own anxiety. “So, I was naturally drawn to that,” he explains.

The author of “The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life,” which a New York Times reviewer described as “a warm, profound and clear-eyed memoir,” Mark has also written “Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself,” “The Trauma of Everyday Life,” and “Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness—Lessons from Meditation and Psychotherapy,” a book that suggests that only by letting go can we start on the path to a more peaceful and spiritually satisfying life.

In this fascinating episode of PasstheMic75, Mark tells Amy Spies, a screen and television writer who also teaches mindfulness to writers, how feeling “plagued by a sense of emptiness” can be a good thing, why embracing the counterculture at Harvard led him to Ram Dass, and when psychotherapy can be a two-person meditation.