As It Is
By Mingyur Rinpoche • 3 min read
The mind is just like a mountain, just like the sky. No matter what you’re experiencing at present, your mind remains the unchangeable ground, like a mountain. Like the sky, it’s free and pure, and it has the wondrous quality of allowing thoughts, feelings, and perceptions to appear and dissolve like clouds.
To connect with that ground, that sky, you don’t have to do anything special. Just be with everything as it is. Welcome all the clouds, accept the temperature of the air. In this moment, perhaps there’s a nice breeze, and puffy white clouds, and birds flying: pleasant thoughts and emotions, agreeable perceptions. On the other hand, there might be a brisk chilly wind, and gathering storm clouds. The details of the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions don’t matter. The important thing is to be with everything as it is. Whatever occurs, accept any changes. Allow them to come and go. Despite all their coming and going, they exist within awareness. And awareness is completely free.
Awareness has no limitation and no edges. It is nowhere and everywhere. You can see the ocean in the far distance, but that doesn’t mean your awareness goes to the ocean, or that the ocean comes to you; awareness is completely open in the ten directions. Yet it is empty. It has no specific essence that can be held onto, nothing we can cling to. Awareness is completely empty, yet you can see, you can hear, you can think, and you can feel. If you think about it, it’s strange and wonderful. And all we have to do is — nothing. Just be with everything as it is.
“Because your mind in its natural state is infinite, the brilliant light of your own awareness shines everywhere, at all times. It sees all things, knows all things, and understands all things.”
– Mingyur Rinpoche –
In this video, Mingyur Rinpoche discusses the true nature of the mind. No matter what we experience, it always appears within our awareness.
Learn meditation under the skillful guidance of world-renowned teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche at your own pace.
In his approach to teaching meditation, Mingyur Rinpoche integrates traditional Buddhist practice and philosophy with the current scientific understanding of the mind and mental health – making the practice of meditation relevant and accessible to students around the world. Mingyur Rinpoche is the author of the best-selling book The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness, as well as Joyful Wisdom: Embracing Change and Finding Freedom, In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying, and many others.
The golden thread that runs through all of the Joy of Living is awareness. Mingyur Rinpoche introduces us directly to awareness by virtue of a practice he calls “open awareness.” To use the traditional analogy of the ocean and the wave, this is an introduction to the ocean — the vast, clean, pure expanse that is our inheritance. It is our abiding nature, always there, and can never be made better or worse. This is who we truly are.
A surgeon shares about the importance of sleep and how we can contend with sleepiness in our meditation.
The ambitious vision to reconstruct Osel Ling monastery instantly took shape in Mingyur Rinpoche’s mind after returning from his wandering yogi retreat in November 2015. Earlier that year, a devastating earthquake had severely damaged the shrine hall, necessitating its demolition and subsequent rebuilding.
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