Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a Tibetan teacher and master of the Karma Kagyu and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism. He has written five books and oversees the Tergar Meditation Community, an international network of Buddhist meditation centers.

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[ENCORE EPISODE] Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche: “In Lo...

A nine-year-old asks his father how to fight his panic attacks. His father says: don’t.

That answer set the course of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s life—and, twenty-seven years later, sent him out of his monastery in the middle of the night.

In this encore presentation, Tami Simon speaks with Rinpoche—beloved Tibetan Buddhist teacher in the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, guiding teacher of the Tergar meditation community, and author of In Love with the World—about the four-and-a-half-year wandering retreat that nearly killed him, and the teaching he calls “adding wood to the fire.”

Raised as a tulku with attendants at his side, he left at 36 with almost no money. Within weeks he was begging for food, sleeping on a train station floor, and severely ill—and when he believed he was dying, he chose not to reach for rescue.

Join Tami and Mingyur Rinpoche to explore:

  • “Adding wood to the fire”: how obstacles become opportunity, and poison becomes medicine
  • His father’s teaching on the sky: why no storm can change the nature of awareness
  • Why banging your head against the wall isn’t courage, and what acceptance actually opens
  • The bardo as everyday experience: job loss, breakups, falling asleep, and the gaps between
  • The four steps of the dying practice—offering, dedication, intention, and prayer
  • Child luminosity meeting mother luminosity, and what he directly experienced that night
  • Why he titled the book In Love with the World: “If you love the world, world loves you back”

Rinpoche is now partnering with Sounds True on a brand-new course, Wild World, Steady Mind: 21 Days to Embrace Modern Reality with Clarity and Calm, filmed on location at his monastery in Nepal.

Listen now, and find the sky behind the storm. →

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche: In Love with the World

Can you recall an experience from your past that felt simply awful at the time, but you now see as something positive and necessary for your personal growth? When we’re in the midst of a painful situation, it’s natural for us to resist, complain, or wish it would just go away. The last thing we want to hear from someone is, “Be grateful for this learning opportunity!” In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with world-renowned meditation teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche about his book In Love with the World, and how we can begin to transform suffering into a pathway to compassion and connection. 

Give a listen for some profound insights on: adding wood to the fire, or turning obstacles into opportunities; thinking outside of the box for solutions; impermanence; making friends with life’s ups and downs; challenging yourself to grow and testing your level of realization in the real world; uncovering the fundamental qualities of awareness, love, and compassion within you; cultivating courage; bardo practice and meditating on our mortality; discovering the ground of luminosity; the four-step process of offering, dedication, intention, and motivation; emptiness, or “unborn awareness”; how acceptance leads to freedom; maintaining confidence and trust during times of uncertainty or despair; and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

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Just One Question | Adyashanti: Is It an Awakening If ...

Is a spiritual awakening only real if it completely rearranges your life? That’s the question Tami Simon puts to Adyashanti in this episode, and his answer digs into something a lot of seekers wrestle with: the gap between a powerful glimpse of clarity and the ongoing work of actually living from it.

Adya, the American-born teacher behind books like The End of Your World and Falling into Grace, walks through why those temporary tastes of awakening are real, even when they fade, and offers a surprisingly practical way to hold onto what they revealed without grasping at them. Then he does something rare: he tells the story of his own first major awakening, a moment he describes as feeling like a nuclear explosion going off inside him.

Here’s what we cover:

  • Why a fleeting shift still counts as a real awakening, even if it doesn’t stick
  • The two (seemingly contradictory) pieces of advice Adya gives people chasing a past peak experience
  • How the first awakening can feel like a “freebie,” while everything after asks you to participate consciously
  • Adya’s own account of the night everything fell away and the still, small voice that told him, “This isn’t all of it. Keep going.”

And there’s so much more. Listen to the entire conversation from this Insights At the Edge episode, “Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean?” 

Kimberly Ann Johnson: “Becoming a Sexual Alchemi...

What if aging isn’t the slow closing of your erotic life, but the doorway into its most alive season?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Kimberly Ann Johnson—sexological body worker, somatic experiencing practitioner, birth doula, and author of the new Sounds True book Erotic Seasons: Tuning In to the Rhythms of Women’s Sexuality and Spirituality—about what she calls erotic sovereignty, and the sentence that closes her book: the female body is its own spiritual path.

Join Tami and Kimberly to explore:

  • Erotic sovereignty—your relationship to your own life force, and why it stays with you across every season
  • Why the goal isn’t a more regulated nervous system, but a more responsive one, and what it means to run more charge
  • The four erotic seasons—maiden, mother, virgin, crone—and the surprising reason virgin comes after mother
  • Why hormonal transitions are “wet clay”: golden opportunities for repatterning that our culture teaches us to rush past
  • Menopause as a death rehearsal, and the life review that arrives decades before we expect it
  • Hot sex and warm sex—widening the range beyond adrenaline, and learning the language of the pause
  • “Hormones are gods”: the collective endocrine system, and why living intergenerationally may be the original hormone therapy
  • Becoming a sexual alchemist—arousal as healing energy, and why care is the whole ethic

Whether you are 25 or 75, Kimberly offers a map for meeting your body’s changes as thresholds rather than losses.

Please note: this episode includes candid discussion of sexual abuse and sexual wounding, including Kimberly Ann Johnson’s own experience.

Listen now, and meet your body as the path. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

The Point of Insight | Our Medicine Lives in the Wound


What if the very thing that wounded you is the source of the medicine you’re here to give?

In this month’s Point of Insight, Tami Simon shares a personal story: minutes before going live with an archetypal astrologer, she was told—correctly, and within seconds—that she carried “the mother of all mother wounds.” That single moment became the culmination of a much longer, gradual unfolding: a lifetime’s worth of “drops,” from a mentor she called the Queen of the Reframe, to an interview with yoga teacher and activist Seane Corn titled “Your Pain Is Your Purpose,” to an email from a business coach whose four simple words reframed everything—your karma is your dharma.

Join Tami as she reflects on:

  • How a lifelong feeling of not belonging became the soil for a life’s work helping others feel connected
  • The difference between sudden insight and the slow, gradual “boiling water” of a tipping point
  • Why real breakthrough requires going all the way through pain, not around it
  • Joanna Macy’s question—”What breaks your heart?”—and how grief and care become fuel for service
  • Why “never turn away” may be one of the most important spiritual instructions there is

This is a shorter, solo reflection from Tami—released once a month on the Insights at the Edge feed—on where our deepest wounds and our clearest purpose meet.

Listen now. →

Find the original Insights at the Edge episodes here: “Seane Corn: Your Pain Is Your Purpose“