A Joyful Mind: Mingyur Rinpoche, the monkey mind and what meditation really is

Between the ages of seven and nine, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche was afraid of thunder, earthquakes and strangers, and suffered panic attacks that left him dizzy and short of breath. As a boy he learned meditation from his father, found the practice dull and only took it seriously when he decided to stay shut in his room for three days meditating with his own panic instead of running from it. He says he came out free of the attacks and that the fear became his best teacher.

Now a Tibetan Buddhist teacher with students around the world, Mingyur is the thread running through A Joyful Mind, a documentary director Paul MacGowan took six years to finish. The film alternates between the teacher and beginners, long-time practitioners, scientists, doctors and schoolteachers.

The monkey mind

The first target is expectations. Many people start out thinking meditation means having no thoughts, in a state of calm or bliss, and give up when their head will not stop. Mingyur calls that restlessness the monkey mind, and his approach is not to fight it but to give the monkey a job. The exercise he teaches is to listen to the sounds around you, without effort, and notice that you are hearing them. When attention wanders, you simply come back. Meditation, in this view, is the awareness that notices what is happening, not inner silence.

The meditator's brain

One researcher recalls that when the team measured Mingyur's brain, it saw gamma waves, fast oscillations that in ordinary people last less than a second, stay large and synchronized for minutes, and even took the equipment apart to rule out an error. The finding is consistent with a study published in PNAS in 2004 that found this pattern in long-term Buddhist practitioners. Another scientist says that two weeks of practice, 30 minutes a day, is already enough to change brain activity.

In the hospital and the classroom

The final part takes meditation out of the monastery: free sessions for staff at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, in the United States, the account of someone who leads trauma surgeries and learned to keep the team calm, and a school where mindfulness became the first step in conflict-resolution lessons.

Caveats, and why watch

The results in workplaces and schools are presented as testimonials, not studies. And the film is not independent: according to its official site, the company that produced it belongs to Tergar International, the meditation community in which Mingyur teaches. Even so, it is a clear, good-humored introduction, free of overblown promises, for anyone who wants to start meditating.