The Buddha compared attachment to drinking salt water from an ocean. The more we drink, the thirstier we get. Likewise, when our mind is conditioned by attachment, however much we have, we never really experience contentment. Mingyur Rinpoche
Objectless meditation is like accepting whatever clouds and mist might obscure the sky while recognizing that the sky itself remains unchanged even when it is obscured. Mingyur Rinpoche
The Buddha’s plan went far beyond learning to become “okay.” His aim was for us to become buddhas: to awaken our capacity to approach every experience — grief, shame, jealousy, frustration, illness, and even death —with the innocent perspective we experience when looking for the first time, for example, at the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National […]
Most conflicts between people stem from a misunderstanding of one another’s motives. We all have our reasons for doing what we do and saying what we say. The more we allow ourselves to be guided by compassion – to pause for a moment and try to see where another person is coming from – the […]
Awareness in itself is always clear, capable of reflecting anything, even misconceptions about itself. Mingyur Rinpoche
Although the texts of Buddhist psychology examine a wide range of conditioning factors, all of them agree in identifying three primary afflictions that form the basis of all other factors that inhabit our ability to see things as they really are: ignorance, attachment, and aversion. Mingyur Rinpoche
There’s an old story, told in several sutras, about a woman who had suffered the death of her young son. She refused to believe that her son was dead, however, and ran from house to house in the village asking for medicine to revive her child. Of course, no one could help her. The boy […]
Whatever we experience is in essence an expression of the fundamentally unlimited potential of our buddhanature. Mingyur Rinpoche
We have to understand our basic situation in order to work with it. Mingyur Rinpoche
In private interviews, I hear about problems with family members, partners, and employers. When you listen, the problems sound so small. But if you think about that problem again and again, it gets bigger and bigger. Making a mountain out of a molehill is the monkey’s specialty. This is the nature of the restless monkey-mind. […]
In general, people tend to minimize the importance of the ordinary sangha: Buddha is a big deal, Dharma is a big deal, and Sangha is something to put up with. Yet it’s within the ordinary sangha, monastic or lay, that the roughest edges of our arrogance and pride can be smoothed down a little. Americans […]
Meditation is not a competition. Mingyur Rinpoche
Samsara is an expression of nirvana, just as relative reality is an expression of absolute reality. Mingyur Rinpoche
Looking at the way we look is the essence of taking life on the path. Mingyur Rinpoche
Also like getting to know a friend, discovering the nature of your mind is a gradual process. Rarely does it occur all at once. The only difference between meditation and ordinary social interaction is that the friend you’re gradually coming to know is yourself. Mingyur Rinpoche
The essence of the Buddha’s teachings was that while formal practice can help us to develop direct experience of emptiness, wisdom, and compassion, such experiences are meaningless unless we can bring them to bear on every aspect of our daily lives. For it’s in facing the challenges of daily life that we can really measure […]
Our lives are bounded by challenges of every conceivable variety. How do we deal with them? Typically we try either to deny or to eliminate them — treating them as enemies — or allow them to overwhelm us, treating them as “bosses.” A third option — the middle way exemplified by the hermit meditators of […]
We must recognize that the “whole truth” is that everyone just wants to be happy. The truly sad thing is that most people seek happiness in ways that actually sabotage their attempts. If we could see the whole truth of any situation, our only response would be one of compassion. Mingyur Rinpoche
Many people are attracted to Buddhism because they’ve read or heard somewhere that it offers a novel method of overcoming pain and attaining a measure of peace and well-being. It often comes as a shock that the teachings and practices laid out by the Buddha twenty-five hundred years ago do not in any way involve […]
A compassionate mind is a diligent mind. Mingyur Rinpoche
