Mingyur Rinpoche’s 2020 New Year’s Message

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New Year's Message 2020

Happy New Year 2020! I wish all of you a coming new year that is very meaningful, happy, and successful.

I would like to say a little bit about this coming year. We all know that everything is changing, impermanent, right? One year is gone – that is impermanence. Or, a new year is coming – that is also impermanence. Impermanence does not just mean “gone, gone, gone.” There is also something coming, it is rising. There is a lot of new possibilities, new opportunities, and a lot of potentials, too. This coming year, you might have a lot of new potentials, possibilities, and opportunities. All these are with you. The important thing is that we have to recognize that. We have to appreciate that. We have to have gratitude for this new year, impermanence, and for your life.

The world is changing. It is changing all the time. Of course, material development is really increasing every year, but our mind – the monkey mind, the happiness level of the monkey mind – is about the same. There is a lot of research about the 1960s. In the world, there were a lot of wars. But now, in 2017‒2019, the happiness level is almost the same, although the material development has really increased. Why is that? Because, normally, our mind is always looking for the negative.

If you have ten qualities within you, nine of them are positive, and one is negative, normally, you only see the one negative quality, right? Everyone says the world is getting worse, that now there are more wars, disharmony, and violence. But actually, there are some scientists that have researched this, and they say that now, the world is the least violent in the entire human history. In the past, if people did not like each other, they shot each other, right? Now, it has become more peaceful. The world has actually become more peaceful, but we do not see that. Sometimes, if we do not see that, then what happens is that we feel depression, anxiety, or panic. Then we give up. Then we do not look for hope, we do not look for inspiration, we do not make any effort. "The world is terrible. I cannot do anything." It is actually not. There are a lot of good things out there but, at the same time, the good things are unlimited, so you have to make an effort.

I am thinking maybe for this new year, we should do maybe one or two things for our New Year´s resolution. I would like to ask you, that every day, if you can, to appreciate three things. Maybe you can write them down. Buy one small book, and write down three things to appreciate every day – maybe about your life, people around you, the environment, or whatever good things that are happening to you.

You can explore for a few weeks about yourself, a few weeks about the world, and a few weeks about what is around you. You need to change it up for it to feel fresh. So you can change to different topics. At the beginning, you may feel, "Oh, I cannot find anything." But slowly, slowly, you will find a lot – there are plenty of them. When you begin to appreciate, then you begin to see new opportunities, potentials, and possibilities. There are a lot of things that exist within you, but you never knew before that they are within you. So now, you will see it.

Then, the second thing is to do whatever you can to help the world and the environment. Do whatever you can to help according to your capacity and ability. Just try to talk about the environment, plant trees, save light, electricity, water, or maybe clean. We plant a lot of trees in Nepal and India. We try to do some environmental work, too. So I hope you all try your best to help the environment.

Those are two things for the new year.

Thank You & Happy New Year!

Mingyur Rinpoche
 

Download Mingyur Rinpoche's 2020 New Year's Message [pdf]