The joy of living

What Hacker News says

1. bamboozledJan 2026
   I once read “The Joy of Living” by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. It should come with a warning. It broke me for a year. I’m actually grateful for the existential crisis it caused me. But it was a brutal experience at first.
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2. bamboozledJul 2024
   The Joy of Living by Mingyur Rinpoche. I was like "what's this nice innocent book, how wonderful sounding"...

   It was a great book, but the way I thought about myself was let's say, very incompatible with the Buddhist ideas about self. The words I read in that book were undeniably true, and it shocked me.

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3. mtalantikiteMay 2024
   Oh wow, how to answer succinctly -- it's been a long, meandering path! I'll try my best. While I'd say I first learned about meditation from my music practice as a child, my first formal introduction to meditation was through Thanissaro Bhikkhu [1] who a few of my friends practiced with in college (and later ordained as monks with). I later came to Mahayana Buddhism through Suzuki [2] and Thich Nhat Hanh [3], and then settled into a Vajrayana practice -- I'd suggest Mingyur Rinpoche's Joy of Living course for an intro to Vajrayana [4].

   For yoga practice I happened to one day wander into the closest yoga studio to my house here in Brooklyn, which coincidentally happened to be one of the best yoga schools in the city at the time. The owner [5] was exceptionally challenging, all his teachers were the best around, and he really pushed everyone to expand their limits, it was a great environment to learn in. I was going at least 5x per week for a few years. It can be hard to find a yoga school, as most these days are just gym classes, and very few are going to teach pranayama, kriyas, meditation, etc. If I'm in a new place and am looking for a shala to practice in I'll typically choose the place that has Ashtanga/Mysore on the schedule, as it's likely that the owners/teachers aren't just interested in yoga as exercise. I'd really suggest finding a master teacher/s to practice with in real life, there's nothing like it. You'll know it when you find it.

   I also read pretty obsessively when I started my yoga practice, some of which I'll leave below [6][7][8][9][10][11]. If you start practicing you'll find the sutras and other texts that speak to you as well, just put in the work and stay curious and open! Happy to answer any questions.

   [1] https://www.dhammatalks.org/

   [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner%27s_Mind

   [3] https://plumvillage.shop/products/books/zen/the-other-shore-...

   [4] https://joy.tergar.org/

   [5] https://www.instagram.com/wearejared/

   [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roots_of_Yoga

   [7] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/784289

   [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_on_Yoga

   [9] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35455963

   [10] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13542603

   [11] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/295000.Cutting_Through_S...

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4. rand_rDec 2017
   There is a basic meditation technique where you just lightly focus your attention on your breath. When you notice you’re not thinking of your breath, which will happen 10s to 100s of times a minute, typically, you bring your focus back to your breath.

   It’s incorporated into a general school called “mindfulness” which you read more about. A book I’d recommend for beginners is “The Joy of Living” by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

   The theory is that training your mind to focus on something mundane like your breath for 10 minutes, you will generally train the capacity of your mind to direct focus.

   This greater focusing ability will come in handy when you want to focus on other specific things without being distracted as easily, like listening to someone in a conversation or going through the debugging process for a bug.

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5. tomaskazemekasJul 2015
   This reminded me the description of Tibetan Buddhist teachings about the nature of the mind from the book "The Joy of Living" by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche:

   "Later, when I came to the West, I heard a number of psychologists compare the experience of 'mind' or 'self' to watching a movie. When we watch a movie, they explained, we seem to experience a continuous flow of sound and motion as individual frames pass through a projector. The experience would be drastically different, however, if we had the chance to look at the film frame by frame.

   "This is exactly how my father [Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche] began to teach me to look at my mind. If I observed every thought, feeling, and sensation that passed through my mind, the illusion of a limited self would dissolve, to be replaced by a sense of awareness that is much more calm, spacious, and serene. And what I learned from other scientists was that because experience changes the neuronal structure of the brain, when we observe the mind this way, we can change the cellular gossip that perpetuates our experience of our 'self'."

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