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. →
