Andrea Miller: You suffered from anxiety when you were young. What caused your anxiety, and how did you overcome it?
Mingyur Rinpoche: I grew up in the Himalayas, a wonderful environment with fresh air and trees, but also a place with extreme weather. The snow doesn’t just come from above. It comes from every direction (laughs). Winds can be so strong that they shake the whole house. At those times, I would cling to a pillar to secure myself. This violent weather was one source of my fears.
Another source was strangers. If somebody new came to my village, I’d get scared. If they came to my home, I’d panic. This was happening to me when I was around seven or eight. In a panic attack, my neck tightened, I couldn’t breathe well, and my heart hurt to the point I thought I was having a heart attack.
The doctors said my heart was fine, so my mother suggested I learn meditation from my father. He told me that panic is like a storm in the Himalayas. The fundamental quality of the mind, what we call awareness or clarity or luminosity, is like the sky around the mountains. No matter how intense the storm is, it doesn’t change the nature of the sky. That’s the view.
To practice, he said, don’t try to fight the storms. Try to connect with the sky itself, awareness itself. To do that, I started with breath meditation, sound meditation, and mantra recitation. Then, I began to welcome my panic attacks and apply the view and meditation.
Did it take courage to speak about your struggles with anxiety?
In the Tibetan community it was not difficult, but I found it more difficult to communicate in the
