Picture a young man climbing a Himalayan mountain, then hiding in a forest, then walking home with friends, all in an effort to outrun the same thing. That thing is panic. In a short teaching published on his YouTube channel on September 30, 2026, as part of the Anytime Anywhere Meditation course, Mingyur Rinpoche tells the story of those years. The panic attacks he describes were not abstractions: a pounding heart, a tight neck, a headache, frightening images, a sense of collapsing. His father told him to stop trying to get rid of panic. Over time he found that panic could become a support for awareness itself, and eventually something he could call a friend and a teacher. The symptoms, he says, were still there. What changed was the depth at which he experienced them.
Rinpoche begins with the strategy most of us would choose. He fought panic, and when that failed he tried to leave it behind. The image he gives is physical and a little funny: he climbed the mountains of the Himalayas hoping to run away from panic, but it followed him like a shadow. He went down into the forest to hide, and panic hid there with him. He went back to playing with his friends, and panic was there too. When he returned home, panic came home with him.
"I was fighting with my panic and sometime I hike the mountain in the Himalayas hoping that I can run away from panic but panic follow me as like shadow."
— Mingyur Rinpoche, "How Panic Became My Teacher," YouTube, 2026 (0:13)
The point of the story is not that running fails. It is that flight never separates you from the thing you flee. Panic was never out on the mountain, waiting for him. It was travelling with him the whole time. Every escape route he took was a route that carried the problem along. That recognition is the hinge of the entire teaching, and it is why the next move, the one his father suggested, is so counterintuitive.
When the young Rinpoche finally asked how to get rid of his panic, his father said no. Don't try to get rid of it. Then he offered an image rooted in the place where Rinpoche grew up.
In the hometown, the sky is often beautiful and clear. But in the Himalayas the sky is not always blue and pristine. When a storm comes, it comes terribly. His father compared panic to those clouds and storms. Our real home, he said, is the sky: the innate qualities of awareness, love, compassion, and wisdom. However much cloud, thunderstorm, or snowstorm moves through the mountains, it never changes the nature of the sky. The sky is always there, beyond the weather.
"So he said don't try to get rid of panic. If you try to get rid of panic panic become bigger."
— Mingyur Rinpoche, "How Panic Became My Teacher," YouTube, 2026 (1:54)
It is worth slowing down on what this metaphor is doing. The father is not saying panic is unreal or harmless. Storms are real. The claim is about where the self is located. If you identify with the storm, every clap of thunder feels like the end of your world. If you can recognize the sky underneath, the storm is still a storm, but it is no longer the whole of what you are. The practice becomes less about clearing the weather and more about remembering what was there all along.
Rinpoche admits he was skeptical at first. Then he began to notice something in his own experience. The panic itself was not the only problem. There was a second layer on top of it: the fear of panic, the aversion to panic. That reaction, he came to see, was what made panic bigger.
"The fear of panic aversion of panic that makes panic bigger actually."
— Mingyur Rinpoche, "How Panic Became My Teacher," YouTube, 2026 (2:14)
This is the mechanism that many people who live with anxiety will recognize. A sensation arises, such as a flutter in the chest. The mind labels it dangerous. Now there is the sensation, plus the alarm about the sensation, plus the alarm about the alarm. Each layer feeds the next. Fighting panic does not remove the first layer; it adds a second one to it. The teaching here is not to feel calm about panic as a goal. It is to see that resistance has been pouring fuel on the fire.
Rinpoche describes the practice he began with. He would say, in effect, hello panic, welcome. And it helped. When he greeted panic this way, the intensity began to diminish, and he was, in his words, quite happy to have found something that worked.
"What I'm doing is hello panic welcome. And what happened actually it helps when I say welcome to panic the intense is diminishing I was quite happy."
— Mingyur Rinpoche, "How Panic Became My Teacher," YouTube, 2026 (2:21)
Then he noticed the catch. If welcoming panic makes it leave, the welcome is really a bargain: come in, then go away. And if you know that, you are back in the loop. Panic returns, you say welcome to make it go, and the cycle repeats, like a dog chasing its own tail. He calls it a fake welcome.
What is striking is his conclusion. Even though the welcome was partly fake, it still helped. The phrase did something useful even while the motive behind it was still mixed. Readers should take this as an honest report, not a formula. Rinpoche is not telling you that welcoming panic will dissolve it on schedule. He is telling you that a practice can be imperfect and still open a door. The motive gradually changes as the practice continues.
The next stage moved from welcoming panic to using it. Rinpoche had already learned to use breathing as a support for meditation, and sound as a support too. Each gave the mind something to rest on while awareness was developing. Eventually, he says, panic itself became a support.
"So at the beginning I use breathing as support for meditation sound as support for meditation but in the end panic become support for meditation so what happened now awareness become bigger than panic."
— Mingyur Rinpoche, "How Panic Became My Teacher," YouTube, 2026 (3:32)
This is the part of the teaching that asks the most of a reader. Breath and sound are neutral objects. Panic is not. Yet Rinpoche describes it in the same language he used for breath: something you rest attention on, which then brings you back to awareness. He puts it simply. Panic is supporting awareness, almost as a reminder of awareness. The more awareness grows, the less panic can claim the whole field.
A related idea appears in the free guided sound meditation that accompanies the course. There, Rinpoche explains that you do not need to block your thoughts or push emotions away. Thoughts come and go. Simply knowing that you are hearing a sound is already meditation. The same logic extends to panic: you do not have to win against it to recognize the awareness that is already knowing it.
This is the most important caveat in the teaching, and it is easy to skip. Rinpoche does not claim his body stopped responding to panic. He says the symptoms were the same as before. His heart still beat hard. His neck was still tight. The headache, the images, and the feeling of collapsing were still present.
"My panic really become my friend my teacher so what I call panic is my best friend my teacher the symptoms are same as before but what I feel is deeper level."
— Mingyur Rinpoche, "How Panic Became My Teacher," YouTube, 2026 (4:11)
What changed was the level of experience. He describes a kind of excitement and something he calls joy, though he is careful to say it is not happiness in the ordinary sense. In the middle of the symptoms, he notices that the heart is disappearing, that the next thought is arising, and that all of it is held in awareness. The sensations are not gone. They are simply no longer the only thing happening.
For readers who live with panic attacks, this matters. The goal described here is not a body that never reacts. It is a relationship to the reaction that is less about escape and more about recognition. That is a meaningful distinction, and it is the one his father pointed to on the mountain.
Rinpoche closes with a statement that frames everything before it. Once we find our home, he says, the obstacles and problems become support for finding our true home. And then we can have real, lasting happiness.
"It's really wonderful that once we find our home in the end all the obstacles problems become support for finding our true home then we will have real lasting happiness."
— Mingyur Rinpoche, "How Panic Became My Teacher," YouTube, 2026 (4:56)
Read against the whole story, this line is not a slogan. It describes the path that the young man on the mountain could not see from where he stood. Panic did not change its nature. He changed where he was standing, from inside the storm to the sky underneath it, and the storm became something that could teach him. A teacher who is constantly running from is not much of a teacher. A teacher you learn to sit with can be.
The teaching is short, about five minutes, but it is dense, and it rewards repeated listening. If you want to practice with it, the full Anytime Anywhere Meditation course is available for free, including video teachings and guided meditations, in the Joy of Living app. You can download it at https://joy.tergar.org/app. The app also includes the guided sound meditation Rinpoche describes, which is a simple way to begin recognizing awareness for yourself without needing to push anything away.
Two notes before you begin. First, the quotations here come from an auto-generated transcript, so they have been lightly cleaned for readability and should be checked against the original video if exact wording matters for your work. Second, this is a contemplative teaching, not a treatment plan. If panic attacks are disrupting your life, talk with a qualified health professional alongside any meditation practice. The idea that panic can become a support is most useful as an addition to care, not a replacement for it.
