When Tibetan Buddhist teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche left his life of comfort in 2011 to go on a wandering retreat, he had hoped to let go of his privileged life and his sense of identity. Then a near-death experience less than one month into what would become a four-and-a-half year journey changed his understanding of this goal. As he tells Tricycle’s founding editor and the co-author on his new book In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey through the Bardos of Living and Dying, Helen Tworkov, in this video interview, he began meditating on death and dying and discovered the importance of “letting the old self die.”

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche explains that examining the process of dying can make it easier to let go in our daily lives and see how the things of this world are always transitioning, like the bardos, or the states between death and rebirth. By being seeing and being present with the bardos in this life, he found a renewed freshness to his experience of the moment.