Letting My Self Die

An interviewer asks Mingyur Rinpoche how his near-death experience, a few weeks into the four-and-a-half-year wandering retreat he came out of in 2015, shaped his understanding of dying. He describes training to let go and using death-and-dying meditation, and says learning is possible until the last breath.

Asked by the interviewer about rebirth in a culture where it is unfamiliar, he talks about awareness and about not holding a fixed mind. He explains carefree, as opposed to careless, and presents the bardo as the in-between moments of loss or change: a crack in the wall through which one can recognise one’s nature. The interviewer names sneezing and yawning as traditional examples of such gaps, and he ends on dying every day versus physical death. The captions are automatic and rough in places.