When we are gripped by strong emotions like anger, anxiety, or sadness, we typically either get swept away by them or fight desperately to suppress them. But as Mingyur Rinpoche explains in this month’s teaching, there is a third way — and it is the key to befriending our feelings.

By utilizing the traditional threefold path of view, meditation, and application, Rinpoche shows us how to stop fighting our inner experience and instead welcome it. We begin with the view, shifting our perspective to see our challenging emotions not as solid, permanent blocks of ice, but as fluid water. Through meditation, we then learn to sit with the warmth of awareness on our feelings, allowing the frozen, painful thoughts to naturally melt back into the spacious flow of the mind. Finally, we bring this into application off the cushion. When you stop struggling with your feelings in daily life, your emotions stop controlling you and instead become your greatest inner teachers and friends.

This teaching is from Tergar’s Joy of Living online program. To learn more, click here.

Click here to download an English transcript of the video [pdf].