WHEN WE TALK ABOUT practicing the Joy of Living, needless to say, we’re practicing meditation, awareness, compassion, and wisdom. This is the drumbeat of the Joy of Living and the foundation of all our training. Practicing the Joy of Living means bringing a mind that has been tamed and trained into our daily life.

The basis of meditation, especially shamatha, is to rest the mind naturally. When we talk about “mind” here, we’re talking about awareness. The nature of awareness is open, relaxed, flexible, and at ease. When the mind is open like this, we can bring it into anything — our meditation practice, our job, our family life, holidays, anything we encounter.

Right now, as we know, the mind is agitated and tight. We’re born like this. We look out into the world, see something we want and try to grab it; see something we don’t want and try to push it away. We constantly manipulate our world. And we do this because we intuit that a more open, relaxed, free, and connected way of being is possible. It is possible, but we make the mistake of trying to find it out there in the world.

As Mingyur Rinpoche teaches, we get mesmerized by the shiny appearances of life. We try to arrange them, hold them, fix them, and in doing so, we become more anxious. Even when our life looks “perfect,” something changes — because everything is always changing. Whatever we grasp is constantly moving, which makes us more uncertain and uncomfortable.

So the point of meditation is to find something unchanging, something trustworthy, something that holds all of our experience. This is “coming home.” Mingyur Rinpoche’s father used to say that the problem is we’re homesick. A bird may fly far from its nest during the day, but at night it returns home. We’re like birds who have flown far from our nest and forgotten the way back. We’ve become so engaged “out there” that we’ve lost contact with what is naturally present here as me. And because we’re lost, we become more anxious.

Meditation brings us back to an open, relaxed mind that accommodates everything — good, bad, happy, sad. This openness is where well-being and peace are found. All of the practices in the Joy of Living and in the Buddhist meditation tradition are really for this one purpose: to open the agitated, fixed mind and bring more space and balance into our experience. As we work with awareness, we discover that this spacious quality is always available. This is a tamed mind.

From that open, natural basis, we interact with the world in a more authentic way. When we relax, we open; when we tighten, we close. Relaxation naturally opens us to others. We begin to notice people, to become curious about them, and to feel that they must be just like us. For lifetimes, we have searched for happiness out in the world, and we haven’t found it. So everyone else must be the same — wanting happiness, peace, ease, and connection, but not knowing where to find it.

For that reason alone, we begin to care about others. This compassion is natural because our whole being is connected with others. Our life is given to us by others — our parents, friends, teachers. Everything we have is made possible by others, down to the food we eat and the technology we’re using right now. Recognizing this interdependence opens us further.

Then, in Joy of Living Level 3, we begin to explore: What is reality? What is this “me” I’m holding onto? What is this “other” I want or reject? We discover that things are not the way we thought. The world is fluid, changing, and dynamic. We ourselves are fluid and dynamic. This is the meaning of emptiness — not nothingness, but openness. There is a self, and there are others, but not in the solid, graspable way we imagined.

When we relax into this, we become free — free from the tight boxes of “I want this” and “I don’t want that.” Bringing this fluid, relaxed, open mind into everyday life is the essence of Joy of Living.

Based on our meditation practice, this begins to develop naturally. But at times we get stuck. In those moments, we simply recall what we’ve discovered, return to ourselves, soften again, and begin again. This is our day-to-day training.

So to summarize: the Joy of Living is a training to rediscover the natural ease, openness, and fluidity of mind. On the basis of that tamed mind, we connect with others naturally and authentically, because we are all the same. Then we look more deeply into the relationship between ourselves and the world, and we discover that nothing is as tight or as solid as we believed. We loosen up. And that loosening is the Joy of Living.

January 2026