How not to be owned by anxiety, anger, and other difficult emotions

“When you see the river, you’re out of the river.”

A few years ago, the eminent Tibetan monk and meditation teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche saw a sign on the side of a truck that promised to “ship everywhere, anytime, anything.”

He decided to tweak that to: “Meditate everywhere, anytime, with anything.”

Here’s how you do it:

• Notice what you’re feeling. Next time you feel a powerful emotion—be it anger, anxiety, boredom, or whatever—try to catch it. As soon as you see it, you’re no longer in it. Or, as Mingyur says, “When you see the river, you’re out of the river.”

• Let it in. Our normal strategy of resistance only makes things worse. Counterintuitively, letting in the difficult emotion is the kindest and most effective move.

• Check it out. What is anger? What is anxiety? As you get curious, you see that this heretofore monolithic emotion is actually made up of constituent parts: sensations in the body, thoughts and images in the mind, etc. Mingyur compares it to a lump of shaving cream. From a distance, it might look solid, but when you poke at it, you see it’s mostly bubbles.

Mingyur is on the pod today—the episode is a rerun, and one of our faves. He’s both incredibly wise and irresistibly charming.

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Episode cheatsheet

The big takeaway

Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche opens up about his longstanding relationship with anxiety and panic. He shares how awareness, self-compassion, and wisdom are universally accessible—even in moments of self-doubt or stress. He says all of us can learn to transform anxiety, not by erasing it, but by relating differently to our experience.