How to Tap into Your Awareness | Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche | TED

So I would like to discuss about meditation.

But first of all,

I'd like to ask you a very simple question.

Can you see my hand?

Yes, raise your hand.

Audience: Yes.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche: OK, can you hear me?

Audience: Yes.

YMR: Yes?

Great.

That is the meditation.

So, finished.

My TED Talk is finished.

(Laughter and applause)

Of course, I'm just kidding.

But in a way that is true.

Why?

What we call the essence of meditation is awareness.

And what is awareness?

Knows what you are thinking,

feeling, doing, seeing, hearing.

That's all.

So actually meditation is very easy,

but many people find it difficult.

Why?

There are two misunderstandings about meditation.

So the first is many people think meditation means, think of nothing,

stop thinking,

concentration.

Ah.

(Laughter)

Shh!

I'm meditating, keep quiet.

(Laughter)

So the more, when you try to stop thinking

what happens, you will think more.

So we will do a small experiment, OK?

Now, please don't think about pizza.

(Laughter)

No pizza.

No pizza.

What happened?

Did you think about pizza or not?

Yes, raise your hand.

(Laughter)

I know.

(Laughter)

Actually, we don't need to stop thinking.

We just need to connect with awareness.

And another misunderstanding about meditation

is what we call “blissing out.”

Looking for peace, calm, joy,

relax.

(Laughter)

The more you look for relax,

then peace, calm, joy, relax run away.

So ...

Let me share [with] you my own experience.

When I was young, I had panic attacks.

Although I was born right in the middle of the Himalayan mountains,

the area, the village, wonderful,

but panic followed me like a shadow.

And I have so much fear [of] strangers, I cannot go out and meet people.

And lot of storms in the Himalayan mountains,

thunderstorm, snowstorm.

These storms drive me crazy.

And when I was nine years old,

I asked my father to teach me meditation.

Luckily, he was a great meditation teacher.

And the first thing what he said is,

"Don't try to fight with the panic.

Don't try to get rid of panic."

"And actually," he said, "you don't have to." Why?

Awareness is like sky in the mountain,

and the panic is like storm in the mountain, like cloud.

And no matter how strong a storm is,

it doesn't change the nature of sky.

So sky is always present, pure, calm.

Similarly, our fundamental quality of mind, awareness

is always present, pure, calm.

But the problem is we don't know how to connect with awareness,

what we see,

only a thought, emotion, that's all.

So he said, there are three steps of practice to connect with awareness.

The first one, we have to use an object.

Support, to connect with awareness.

So this is one of my first meditation techniques

that I learned from my father.

So you can join and you can relax your muscles in your body.

If you cannot relax, also OK, allowed.

(Laughter)

And close your eyes, and please listen to sound.

(Ding)

And when you hear the sound,

through ear and mind together ...

(Ding)

That is the meditation.

And let panic come and go.

Let pizza come and go.

(Ding)

And maybe two pizzas, three pizzas, ten pizzas.

As long as you remember the sound,

you can have pizza.

(Ding)

(Ding)

(Ding)

OK, how was it?

Did you hear the sound?

Yes, raise your hand.

Great.

That is the meditation.

Very easy.

Just hear, that's all.

You don't have to do anything.

So if panic comes, let panic come and go, don't care.

Just listen to sound.

Monkey mind comes blah, blah, blah.

Let it come and go, just listen to sound.

So I did that.

But I had a big problem.

The problem is lazy.

(Laughter)

I'm lazy boy, I love the idea of meditation,

but I don't like the practice of meditation.

So on and off like that for five years.

When I was 13 years old in India,

there's traditional three-year retreat going to start.

I thought I should join this because it's good for my laziness.

And I join.

The first month, wonderful, no lazy.

Second month, lazy come back.

(Laughter)

Now what happened?

My lazy and my panic, they two become good friends.

(Laughter)

The life in the retreat becomes disaster.

And I thought I should leave.

But I feel embarrassed to leave

because I told all my childhood friends that I can do the retreat, you know.

I don't want to lose my face.

But if I stay,

almost three years to go.

Then I thought, what should I do?

In the end, I decided to learn how to live with the panic.

So now we have the second step what we call,

actually, we can meditate everywhere,

anytime with anything.

So you can meditate with panic.

How do you do that?

Just like listen to sound,

when you listen to sound,

sound becomes support for your meditation.

Now you're going to watch panic.

If you see the panic, great.

What we call, when you see the river, you're out of the river.

When you see the mountain, you're out of the montain.

So now awareness becomes more than panic.

More than depression, stress.

Monkey mind, whatever.

Let them come, let them go.

So that is the first benefit and second benefit of what we call,

there's a wisdom comes.

So when you look at the panic,

panic is not solid stone anymore.

Panic becomes pieces.

Sensation here, frightening image, voice, background belief.

And if you take one of these away, you cannot find panic.

So what I call panic becomes like shaving foam,

looks like a piece of rock but inside full of bubbles.

Then three, what I call this is acceptance,

like self-kind, self-love, self-compassion.

You let panic come and go,

that's the real acceptance, isn't it?

So three in one:

awareness, love and compassion, wisdom.

Sometimes what I call buy one, get two free.

(Laughter)

Big deal, right?

And all this because of panic.

So now panic becomes your teacher,

your best friend.

So I did this practice and in the end,

me and my panic become very good friends.

And few weeks later, panic is gone.

I miss my friend.

And I finished my retreat, my retreat went very well.

And after that I have been eager to share this wonderful technique with the world.

So I taught meditation many places,

wrote three books, become bestseller,

and then students and become abbot of a few monasteries.

And what happened?

Kind of new ego emerged within me.

I thought, oh, I have to watch out, this so.

Then I decided to do something very special,

what we call wandering retreat.

Meaning you leave everything behind,

go on the street with nothing.

So I decided to do that.

In 2011, I left my monastery, my students,

my wonderful cozy bed.

Everything, and got on street with only a few thousand Indian rupees,

and that finished within a few weeks.

Now I have to beg for food.

And I got food poisoning.

Vomiting, diarrhea.

I'm alone on the street,

now I'm going to die.

Then I thought, what should I do?

So now we have the third step,

what we call open awareness meditation.

Awareness, be with itself.

Sky, be with itself.

Now, no need to have support.

Just be awareness itself.

I did that practice.

Then what happened?

My body become decayed,

I cannot see, I cannot hear.

But my mind becomes so present,

beyond free.

And I was in that state for a few hours.

Luckily, I didn't die, I come back.

So when I come back, the street becomes like my home.

When I look at a tree, tree becomes like tree of love.

And the wind blows to my face become a joyful experience.

And the rest of my retreat went very well.

I learned a lot from my retreat.

So I like to share this open awareness meditation,

but it is very difficult to explain.

But I want to do something drama.

And this is what I learned from my father.

So what we call, this mala is the crazy monkey mind,

blah, blah, blah, yada yada.

And the open awareness meditation means you don't have to do anything.

Just be.

That's all, and you don't need to meditate.

The sense of presence, being, but not loss.

Be free.

Be present.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)