Tsoknyi Rinpoche on Emotional Well-Being

Recorded in September 2013 as an interview with Jonathan Rose, co-founder of the Garrison Institute.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche describes the suffering of people in modern societies as a disconnection from basic well-being, which he calls essence love. He contrasts the heavy stress on cognitive education in the West with the emotional development he saw growing up in Tibetan and Nepali society. He then explains a practice: drop thinking into the body, know whatever sensation or feeling arises without suppressing, indulging or fixing it, and let numbness and old emotion open by themselves. Later he discusses how reifying experience as solid freezes well-being, and suggests holding a “functional I” in the right amount, with humour.