Tibetan Buddhist monk Khentrul Lodrö T’hayé Rinpoche is coming back to the Yukon with a new book, The Power of Mind: A Tibetan Monk’s Guide to Finding Freedom in Every Challenge
Tibetan Buddhist monk Khentrul Lodrö T’hayé Rinpoche has been coming to the Yukon for nearly two decades, every year until the pandemic hit. The Tibetan-born, Arkansas-based Buddhist monk’s first visit back this fall coincides with the release of his newest book, The Power of Mind: A Tibetan Monk’s Guide to Finding Freedom in Every Challenge.
With The Power of Mind, Rinpoche shares meditations and practices to help readers transform suffering and mental unrest into well-being, for one’s own benefit as well as for the benefit of others.
“The book is focused primarily on the cultivation of two qualities: wisdom and compassion,” Rinpoche told What’s Up Yukon through a translator. “The wisdom we call profound wisdom. Because it’s more than just some kind of ordinary knowledge about how things function. And so, it’s not knowledge focused on the outer universe, science and biology and how things occur and so forth. But rather, it’s focused inwardly on how our mind functions.
“And the more that we understand the operating system of our mind, then we are able to work with that to find well-being, since it’s our primary source for happiness. Because that knowledge of our mind is how we find happiness, we call that profound or supreme wisdom. And then the support for that is compassion, which we call great compassion, which is focused on the welfare of others and connecting with others in positive ways that bring about benefit. The methods of the book boil down to wisdom and compassion, and each of these serves a different purpose while mutually reinforcing or supporting each other.”
Rinpoche holds three khenpo degrees (equivalent to three PhDs) in Buddhist philosophy. He directs the Buddhist organization Katog Choling and has a large international following. He is nicknamed “the mind training Khenpo” by his students, for his passion for teaching mind-training practices. He encourages those who are not familiar with or do not follow Buddhism to still attend his events, as his teachings can apply to people across all faiths and backgrounds.
“These teachings are universal to everyone, whether we’re Buddhist or not, whether we have spiritual beliefs or not, Rinpoche explained. “The reason why is because, as human beings, all of us have a mind and we’re challenged by circumstances. And the reason why is because when we don’t know how our mind operates and have tools for working with our mind, then our mind is completely under the power of other circumstances and we’ve lost the capacity to have power over our mind: our mind is subject to conditions. And so, then our mental states are detached, entirely dependent on the outer circumstances. Whether it’s about food or clothes or other things, we’re constantly under the power of conditions.
“When we learn how to work with our mind, we gain power over our own mind. And that’s what these tools are for.”
The Power of Mind is available for purchase now. Khentrul Lodrö T’hayé Rinpoche will be speaking about the book and his teachings on September 22 at Whitehorse United Church. The event is at 7 p.m. and is free to attend.For more information, visit katog.org/event/evening-talk-in-whitehorse-yukon-canada.
