About
Mingyur Rinpoche is a meditation teacher in the Meditation tradition.
Teaching focus
Mingyur teaches Mahamudra and Dzogchen in the Karma Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, with the Joy of Living curriculum as the main on-ramp for new students. The curriculum is structured in three workbook levels, moving from shamatha and basic awareness practices into open-presence and essence Mahamudra training. He emphasizes practical, daily-life integration. His teaching on awareness uses ordinary experience, sound, sensation, thought, as practice objects rather than treating them as distractions. He returns often to what he calls the difference between meditation and merely sitting still, and his instructions on dropping the meditator are central to his pointing-out style. He talks openly about his childhood panic disorder and uses it as teaching material. Anxiety, in his framing, is something to befriend rather than defeat, and the practices he teaches are framed as a way of making the relationship with difficult experience more honest.
Background
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche was born in Nubri, Nepal, in 1975, the youngest son of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and brother of Chokyi Nyima, Tsoknyi, and Tsikey Chokling Rinpoches. He was recognized as a young child as the seventh incarnation of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a seventeenth-century master, and as the incarnation of Kangyur Rinpoche. He studied at Sherab Ling Monastery in northern India under Tai Situ Rinpoche, completed the traditional three-year retreat at fourteen, and became youngest retreat master at Sherab Ling shortly after. In 2011 he left his teaching responsibilities, walked out of his monastery in the middle of the night, and spent four and a half years on a wandering yogi retreat through India and Nepal, sleeping in caves and on the streets, an experience he wrote about in In Love with the World. He returned to teaching in 2015 and now leads the Tergar Meditation Community, an international network of practice groups, study programs, and retreat centers in over thirty countries. His teaching method, the Joy of Living, is a graduated curriculum that introduces Tibetan contemplative practice without requiring traditional preliminaries upfront. He's been the subject of neuroscience research, including studies at the University of Wisconsin under Richard Davidson that documented unusual gamma activity in his brain during meditation. His books include The Joy of Living, Joyful Wisdom, In Love with the World, and Turning Confusion into Clarity. His teaching style is exceptionally clear, often funny, and built on his own long history with severe panic attacks as a child, which he treats as an early laboratory for the practices he now teaches.
Lineage
Mingyur Rinpoche holds lineages in the Karma Kagyu and Nyingma traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. He's a recognized tulku and was trained primarily by his father Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, by Tai Situ Rinpoche, Saljay Rinpoche, and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. He completed the traditional three-year retreat at Sherab Ling Monastery and served as retreat master there as a young man. He oversees Tergar Osel Ling Monastery in Kathmandu and Tergar Rigzin Khachoe Dzong in Bodhgaya, India, and leads the international Tergar community.
What to expect
His public retreats and Tergar courses follow a clear curriculum. Expect formal sittings, guided meditations across a range of techniques, teaching segments, and group inquiry. He uses humor liberally and is unusually generous with his own life material in talks. Online programs are well-produced and structured for working laypeople. Retreats include traditional Tibetan elements, refuge, occasional empowerments for advanced students, and chanting, but the core teaching reaches Western students without requiring preexisting Tibetan training.