How a Buddhist Monk Deals With Anxiety | Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Renowned Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche discusses his personal practices for working with anxiety and panic, emphasizing connecting with innate awareness. He outlines a three-step meditation approach, including sound meditation and deconstructing emotions, to help listeners navigate life's ups and downs.
Deep Dive Analysis
19 Topic Outline
Dan Harris's TED Talk Anxiety and Meeting Mingyur Rinpoche
Mingyur Rinpoche's Experience with Nervousness and Awareness
Connecting with Awareness: The Sky and the Storm Analogy
Systematic Practice: Sound Meditation Explained
Effortless Hearing and Remembering to Hear
Three Steps to Connect with Awareness: Overview
First Step: Simple Meditation (Sound, Breath, Mantra)
Second Step: Free-Range Meditation and Working with Strong Emotions
Understanding Panic: Deconstructing it into Pieces (Wisdom)
Self-Kindness and the Three-in-One Benefit of Panic
Third Step: Open Awareness (Objectless Meditation)
Awareness as Our Fundamental Nature: The Watch Analogy
How Awareness Helps with Aversion and Craving
Letting Go Without Losing: The Palm Up Analogy
Addressing Striving and 'Fake Welcome' in Practice
Inner Recycling: Meditating on Aversion Itself
Wisdom as Seeing Reality's Impermanence and Interdependence
Four Guidelines for Working with Difficult Emotions in Meditation
The True Purpose of Meditation: Discovering Innate Goodness
6 Key Concepts
Awareness
Awareness is described as the fundamental nature of our mind, a wonderful, present, pure, and calm quality that is three-in-one with love, compassion, and wisdom. It is the knowing that observes thoughts and emotions, always present even amidst panic, and is our core being.
Sound Meditation
This practice involves simply listening to sounds without strong focus or trying to stop thoughts, just remembering to hear. It serves as a support to connect with awareness, helping the mind become more pliable and workable by allowing sounds to come and go effortlessly.
Free-Range Meditation
This is the practice of meditating everywhere, anytime, with anything, including one's own problems or strong emotions. It involves learning to observe emotions from a detached perspective, like seeing a river without being carried away by it, which helps to reduce their overwhelming power.
Wisdom (in meditation)
In meditation, wisdom is the ability to deconstruct strong emotions, such as panic, into their constituent 'pieces' like physical sensations, frightening images, unpleasant voices, and underlying beliefs. Recognizing these components as changing and interdependent causes the emotion to lose its solid meaning and power.
Aversion and Craving
These are identified as the core causes of suffering (dukkha). Aversion makes unwanted things persist (e.g., trying not to think about something makes you think about it more), while craving makes desired things run away. Letting go of these allows for automatic liberation and reveals wisdom, love, and compassion.
Basic Innate Goodness
This refers to the ultimate purpose of meditation practice: discovering the beautiful quality of our own mind, which is awareness, love, compassion, and wisdom, all three in one. It is the fundamental 'light' from which all thoughts, emotions, and perceptions manifest, rather than just the 'stories' they create.
8 Questions Answered
One can acknowledge the nervousness but also connect with a deeper level of contentment and joy, recognizing that fundamental awareness, love, compassion, and wisdom are always present beneath the surface of fear and panic.
Start with systematic practice, using supports like sound meditation, breath awareness, or mental recitation. The key is to simply listen or be aware without trying to stop thoughts or emotions, allowing them to come and go while maintaining awareness of the chosen support.
Relax your body, keep your spine loosely straight, and just listen with your ear and mind together. You don't need strong focus or to stop thoughts; simply remember that you are still hearing, allowing sounds to come to you effortlessly.
Once you have a basic meditation practice, you can extend it to include your problems. Instead of being carried away by the emotion ('falling in the river'), you learn to observe it from a distance ('seeing the river'), which automatically creates separation and reduces its power.
It means recognizing that strong emotions like panic are not solid entities but are made up of changing 'pieces' such as physical sensations, frightening images, unpleasant voices, and underlying beliefs. Seeing these components separately makes the emotion lose its meaning and power.
Aversion makes unwanted things persist (e.g., trying not to think about pizza makes you think about it more), and craving makes desired things elusive (e.g., seeking peace makes it run away). Letting go of these allows for automatic liberation and reveals wisdom, love, and compassion, which are more powerful and meaningful.
Yes, taking a break is part of the practice. If being aware of panic makes it feel worse, or if you're too tired, it's okay to try something different, step back, or even stop meditating for a while to rest, like resting during a mountain hike.
The purpose is to discover one's 'basic innate goodness' – the beautiful quality of our own mind, which is awareness, love, compassion, and wisdom, all three in one. It's about seeing this fundamental 'light' that underlies all experiences, rather than just getting lost in the 'stories' it projects.
19 Actionable Insights
1. Recognize Innate Awareness
Understand that your fundamental nature is a wonderful ‘awareness, love and compassion, wisdom, three in one,’ which exists as a background to fear, panic, and depression. This deeper level of contentment and joy is always present, even amidst life’s ups and downs.
2. Embrace Anxiety as Teacher
Instead of fighting anxiety, be happy to have it, viewing it as a teacher and friend that makes you more alive and reminds you to practice meditation. This perspective helps you discover a deeper, unchanging nature within you, like the sky unaffected by storms.
3. Follow 3-Step Meditation
Follow a three-step approach to connect with awareness: first, use supports like sound or breath; second, apply meditation freely to all experiences; and third, cultivate open, objectless awareness. This systematic path helps you gradually recognize your inherent clarity and presence.
4. Daily Support-Based Meditation
Begin by connecting with awareness through a chosen support for at least five minutes every day for one to two months. Options include listening to sounds, focusing on your breath, or silently reciting a word or mantra, ensuring regularity to make the mind pliable and foster acceptance.
5. Effortlessly Listen to Sound
In sound meditation, relax your body and spine, then simply listen with your ear and mind together, allowing sounds to come to you without strong focus or trying to stop thoughts. The key is to remember that you are still hearing, even if thoughts or emotions arise, which is the beginning of acceptance and self-compassion.
6. Practice Free-Range Meditation
Extend your meditation practice to all situations, using everyday problems and emotions as objects of awareness, rather than limiting it to formal sessions. This means you can meditate ’everywhere, anytime, with anything,’ transforming challenges into opportunities for practice.
7. Start with Smaller Emotions
If a strong emotion like panic feels overwhelming to work with directly, begin by meditating on a smaller, less intense emotion, such as anger, as a stepping stone. This allows you to build capacity before tackling major afflictions.
8. Observe Emotions from Distance
When experiencing strong emotions, aim to ‘see’ them rather than being carried away by them, similar to seeing a river from its bank instead of falling in. This practice helps you realize that awareness is separate from the emotion, allowing you to be present without being overwhelmed.
9. Deconstruct Emotions for Wisdom
Apply wisdom by deconstructing strong emotions like panic into their constituent parts: physical sensations, images, unpleasant voices, and underlying beliefs. Recognizing these pieces makes the emotion less solid, reveals its impermanence, and allows you to find space and freedom within it.
10. Release Aversion and Craving
Understand that aversion (trying to push away unpleasant experiences) and craving (trying to grasp pleasant ones) are core causes of suffering. By letting go of these tendencies, emotions like panic can liberate themselves, allowing wisdom, love, and compassion to emerge as more effective guides for life.
11. Cultivate Open Awareness
Progress to open awareness, where you simply ‘just be’ with your mind as it is, without any specific focus or object of meditation. This ’non-meditation’ allows clarity and presence to naturally reveal themselves, a state made possible by consistent practice of the earlier steps.
12. Recognize Awareness in Daily Life
Understand that awareness is not an esoteric state but is available to you 24/7, even in sleep, and can be recognized in simple moments. For instance, a nanosecond of noticing raw physical sensations of anxiety, rather than being lost in the story of fear, is connecting with awareness.
13. Use 4 Steps for Difficulty
When meditation becomes challenging or overwhelming, employ four strategies: 1) be aware of the difficulty; 2) try something different (e.g., a smaller emotion, sound meditation); 3) step back and observe your aversion to the emotion; or 4) take a break from meditation entirely without guilt, as rest is part of the practice.
14. Observe ‘Panic of Panic’
If direct awareness of panic is too difficult, shift your attention to the ‘panic of panic’—the feeling of fighting or aversion towards the initial panic. By observing this secondary emotion, you can use it as a support for meditation, allowing you to include everything as fuel for awareness.
15. Adopt Open-Handed Living
Instead of clinging tightly to your life, work, or achievements (like clawing a watch with a downward-facing palm), learn to rest them gently on an open, upward-facing palm. This symbolizes letting go of aversion and craving while still holding your life, connecting with awareness, wisdom, love, and compassion without loss.
16. Take Guilt-Free Meditation Breaks
If you feel too tired or exhausted during meditation practice, it’s perfectly acceptable and even beneficial to take a break. Stop meditating for a while, engage in other activities like drinking coffee, exercising, or sleeping, understanding that resting is a valid part of the overall practice, not a failure.
17. Cultivate ‘View Meditation’
Develop a clear understanding of what awareness is, how it functions, its benefits, and how to practice it, holding the idea that ‘my core being is awareness.’ This conceptual understanding provides a foundation that automatically guides your meditation practice and helps you connect with your core being.
18. Welcome Difficult Emotions
When difficult emotions arise, practice saying ‘welcome’ to them, even if it initially feels like a ‘fake welcome’ driven by a desire for them to disappear. This act of welcoming, though imperfect, can still help to reduce aversion and soften the emotion’s power.
19. Regular Reminders Deepen Practice
Understand that continually hearing and being reminded of these meditation principles, even after years of practice, is crucial because they cut against human nature and modern life. Each reminder offers a new ‘aha’ moment, deepening your understanding and making the practice more ordinary and profound.
9 Key Quotes
I always discover kind of like can be with something beyond fear and anxiety within me, kind of a deeper level, that sense of contentment, like joy.
Mingyur Rinpoche
All these storms, cloud comes in the sky. But no matter how the storm, storm there in the sky, the nature of sky cannot be changed by storm or pollution. Sky is always present, pure, calm. And you can have cloud, allow cloud to come and go.
Mingyur Rinpoche
When you see the river, you're out of river. When you see the mountain, you're out of mountain. When you see the television now, you're not in the program. You're not in the television.
Mingyur Rinpoche
Panic become like shaving foam. Looks like piece of rock, shaving foam, you know, when you shave the beers. I have beers. But I don't use shaving foam. Anyway, anyway. So the shaving foam looks like piece of rock, but inside full of bubbles.
Mingyur Rinpoche
Aversion is, let's say, when we say, don't think about pizza. Don't think about pizza. No pizza. What happens? We think about pizza. So that is the job of aversion.
Mingyur Rinpoche
When you look for peace, peace will say, I'm busy. You have to make appointment first.
Mingyur Rinpoche
To learn non-meditation, first you have to learn meditation, right? So then eventually you let go of meditation, but you're not lost.
Mingyur Rinpoche
The only difference is you recognize or not recognize. You have watch at first place, but you are not recognized. You're on watch. Then watch cannot tell your time. Although you have the best watch in the world.
Mingyur Rinpoche
The biggest problem for my panic is panic of panic, fear of panic, aversion of panic. That keeps my panic ongoing.
Mingyur Rinpoche
2 Protocols
Three Steps to Connect with Awareness
Mingyur Rinpoche- **Simple Meditation Practice**: Begin by using a support to connect with awareness, such as listening to sound, focusing on your own breath, or silently reciting a mental mantra (e.g., 'I'm fine, everything's fine'). Practice for at least five minutes every day for one to two months.
- **Free-Range Meditation**: Extend the simple meditation practice to everywhere, anytime, with anything, including your own problems or strong emotions as objects of meditation. If a major affliction like panic is too overwhelming at first, start with a smaller emotion like anger as a stepping stone.
- **Open Awareness (Objectless Meditation)**: Progress to a state of non-meditation where you just 'be' with your mind as it is, without needing any support or object. This is a complete natural state of being, where clarity and presence are experienced without focus or effort.
Navigating Difficult Emotions in Free-Range Meditation
Mingyur Rinpoche- **Be Aware**: When you begin to be aware of a strong emotion like panic, it might initially feel worse, like a muddy river clearing to reveal many fish.
- **Try Something Different**: If the strong emotion is overwhelming, switch to a smaller emotion, or return to the first step's supports (sound, breath, mental recitation).
- **Step Back**: If 'trying something different' doesn't work, step back by observing the aversion to the emotion itself (e.g., 'panic of panic' or 'fear of panic') rather than the primary emotion.
- **Take a Break**: If you are too tired or exhausted, stop meditating for a while. This break (e.g., drinking coffee, physical exercise, sleep, watching Netflix) is part of the practice and does not mean returning backward.