Mingyur Rinpoche at Powell's Books

I arrived about ten minutes early for the author event at the Basil Halward Gallery at Powell’s City of Books on Burnside in downtown Portland. Most of the seats were already taken.

A few minutes after 7:30, suddenly most of the audience stood up with palms pressed together, so I stood up also and for a moment glimpsed a tall, old Tibetan monk walked past the front row, and I soon realized that three Tibetan monks were in the front of the room, and they sat down. An employee went to the podium and introduced Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a lama from the Karma Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

When Mingyur Rinpoche walked up to the podium, I was surprised at how short he was, under than five feet.  I am accustomed to Tibetans, and some of them are very tall and others are close to my height of five foot three. Some of the monks I saw in Tibet looked like they could bench press an elephant.  Behind the podium, Mingyur Rinpoche’s shoulders were just barely above the podium. He asked, “Can everyone see me?” The audience laughed.

Mingyur Rinpoche talked about his traveling to the West and his having visited the United States for the first time in 1998. He said that there is monkey mind in both the East and West, but monkey mind is different in each. For Easterners, it’s caused more by the external world, and for Westerners it’s caused more by the internal world. A Westerner came up to him and said that she has low self-esteem. He wasn’t familiar with low self-esteem, and in order to find out what it was like and to therefore understand her and other people who experience low self-esteem, he decided that he should have low self-esteem! This sounded to me rather like method acting, but he focused on having low-self esteem, and eventually, after about a week, he had low self-esteem, and he was delighted! He had accomplished something. When the low self-esteem went away, he was disappointed.

Rinpoche told us about experiments that American scientists did on him and other meditators. He had to lie down in a machine and had gadgets pressed against all sides of his head—actually, his description was highly amusing and I can’t begin to repeat what he said. Due to the experiment, the scientists came to the conclusion that he was crazy. He talked about the effect of meditation on the brain; it strengthens the frontal lobe.

In order to have a meditation on anxiety, you have to be experiencing the anxiety at that moment. So you observe the anxiety, embrace it.

Rinpoche asked the audience how many of us have learned to meditate, and about half the audience raised our hands. I was surprised, because I would have expected everyone in the audience to be Buddhists or at least meditators, given what a large Buddhist community Portland has. He also asked how many have not learned to meditate. And then he smilingly asked, “How many are both?” and a few raised their hands while laughing.

He gave us a little exercise: sit with your spine straight and relax. Now start thinking. Think for another minute. After this minute was up, he pointed out that we were just meditating. He asked how many of us had trouble thinking (I was surprised that quite a few people raised their hands), and he also asked how many had minds like a movie. For people who had trouble thinking, he described sitting there and thinking, “Oh, he wants me to think about something. What should I think about? Oh no, what should I think about?!” That’s essentially what they meant by having trouble thinking.

Mingyur Rinpoche gave us three steps to handling anxiety or other afflictive emotions. The three steps are: 1) Shamatta (awareness), 2) lovingkindness and compassion, and 3) insight.

An audience member stood up and asked how to meditate on nervousness. Rinpoche said to pay attention to the nervousness. The guy sat down as soon as he was done asking his question, and after he sat down, Rinpoche said, “You have to pay attention to your nervousness.” He then asked, “Are you nervous now?” The audience member said no, but he had been nervous while he was standing. He ended up standing again and Rinpoche talked him through observing his nervousness, and it worked: he stopped feeling nervous while he was still standing.

He talked about his own experience with panic attacks. He was born in northern Nepal and later moved to Dharamsala, India. He asked how many of us have heard of Dharamsala, and I raised my hand with a big grin and was a bit disappointed that he didn’t ask, “How many of you have been to Dharamsala?” because I certainly would have raised my hand. And to think I tell myself that I don’t like bragging. The topic conjured many flashbacks in a matter of seconds. He talked about how people in the West pay a lot of money for a massage, but in India, on the way to Dharamsala, you get a free massage by rocking around in a taxi. This really took me back to riding around and around up Macleod Gang in a taxi! He said that he experienced panic attacks in India, and he used them for meditation practice, by paying attention to his panic and transforming it into loving-kindness and compassion. When he stopped panicking, he was disappointed, because he no longer had the panic to focus on while meditating!

On another level, I knew that the point of this event was Mingyur Rinpoche’s new book Joyful Wisdom. His first book is The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness. Before I arrived, it occurred to me that the Dalai Lama never promotes his books and it seemed a bit dubious for a Tibetan lama to be promoting his book at Powell’s. But I cannot expect every Tibetan monk to act just like the Dalai Lama, and I left feeling inspired and encouraged as a meditator.