About
About Tergar
The Tergar Meditation Community supports individuals, practice groups, and meditation communities around the world in learning to live with awareness, compassion, and wisdom.
Grounded in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage of our guiding teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, our online and in-person programs are accessible to people of all cultures and faiths, and support a lifelong path toward the application of these principles in everyday life.
OUR FOUNDER
Mingyur Rinpoche
In his approach to teaching meditation, Mingyur Rinpoche integrates traditional Buddhist practice and philosophy with the current scientific understanding of the mind and mental health – making the practice of meditation relevant and accessible to students around the world.
Mingyur Rinpoche is a world-renowned meditation teacher with personal experience of anxiety and panic attacks, which he suffered from throughout his childhood and into his teenage years, when he learned to transform his panic through meditation. Born in Nepal in 1975, Mingyur Rinpoche began to study meditation as a young boy with his father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, himself a well-respected Buddhist teacher. As a child he became interested in contemporary science through conversations with scientists who were visiting his father, and as he grew older he began to collaborate with neuroscientists and psychologists, including Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz at the University of Wisconsin, on research projects that study the effects of meditation on the brain and the mind.
Mingyur Rinpoche’s first book, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness, debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into over twenty languages. His second book, Joyful Wisdom: Embracing Change and Finding Freedom, explores how difficult emotions and challenging life situations can be used as stepping stones to discover joy and freedom. In his most recent book, In Love with the World, Mingyur Rinpoche shares how his meditation practice sustained him when he left his monastery to wander through India and the powerfully transformative insights he gained from the near-death experience he had at the beginning of his journey. Mingyur Rinpoche recently appeared in the Netflix series The Mind, Explained, in an episode about the benefits of mindfulness.
As the head of the Tergar Meditation Community, Mingyur Rinpoche supports groups of students in more than thirty countries, leading workshops around the world for new and returning students every year.
OUR LINEAGE
The Tergar Lineage
Ter is a Tibetan word for treasure, referring to the wisdom and methods that lead to the alleviation of suffering, the activation of our greatest potential, and ultimately to complete enlightenment. Gar means gathering and can connote bringing many people or elements together. So, Tergar can be understood as a place where people come together to find this sublime treasure, or as the coalescence of the causes and conditions enabling this transformational process of discovery.
The Tergar Lineage is a stream of spiritual teachings formed by the merging of two great tributaries — the Karma Kagyu lineage and the Nyingma lineage . A profound alchemy between the two traditions has occurred at many steps along the way, producing a fertile field of learning and practice that has attracted thousands of students from around the world.
Historically, the Karma Kagyu lineage was transmitted to successive incarnations of Mingyur Rinpoche primarily through the Karmapas (beginning with the 10th Karmapa) and Tai Situ Rinpoches (starting with the 8th), while the Nyingma lineage came both through terma (treasure teachings) and through interaction between various Nyingma and Kagyu masters. In this life, the 7th Mingyur Rinpoche received the Karma Kagyu transmissions primarily from Tai Situ Rinpoche and Saljey Rinpoche, and the Nyingma transmissions primarily from Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche.
The Tergar lineage of today draws on this rich history and adds to it the current Mingyur Rinpoche’s distinctive approach, incorporating modern presentations of the teachings to make them available and accessible to people of all backgrounds and beliefs.
More about the Tergar lineage at tergar.org
About Tergar Australia
Tergar Australia started its life in 2020 as The Melbourne Treasure Hunters, an informal book club inspired by Mingyur Rinpoche’s teachings. This small group soon evolved into the Tergar Melbourne Practice Group and quickly became a burgeoning Australia-wide online community during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Tergar Australia strives to bring the beneficial teachings of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche to all.
We are a friendly, vibrant and engaged group with people from all walks of life and all levels of experience. We are also fortunate to be supported by two Tergar Instructors and co-founders of Tergar International, Edwin and Myoshin Kelley, who recently returned to Australia.
We offer a variety of regular hybrid and online-only groups for varying levels of experience and interest, both secular and non-secular. We also hold in person events throughout the year, including residential and non-residential retreats. These provide an opportunity to deepen both our practice and our connection.
In 2022, members of our group travelled to Portland, Oregon (USA), to present Mingyur Rinpoche with a formal invitation to teach in Australia. His inaugural visit to Sydney and Melbourne in December 2023 marks an exciting new chapter for our community which will launch a series of new events and opportunities in 2024 and beyond.
Tergar Australia is a not-for-profit business and is currently in the process of establishing itself as a charity with the ACNC.
To learn more about our upcoming events please subscribe to our weekly newsletter. If you prefer more infrequent updates, we also have a monthly highlights-only newsletter.
To help facilitate communications between sessions we maintain an active Slack community. Existing members can join anytime.
Tergar Australia Leadership & Volunteers
Offering your time as a volunteer for Tergar can be a great way to apply practice in daily life, as well as connecting with other community members.
If you are interested in becoming a Tergar volunteer, please email us your name and details to info@tergar.org.au and we will get in touch if any opportunities arise. At the moment we are particularly looking for volunteer support with our marketing and social media efforts.
For more information about volunteering with Tergar please read our Volunteer Guidelines.
Inclusion Aspiration
“The more openhearted you become toward others, the more openhearted they become toward you” Mingyur Rinpoche
The organisation Tergar International was established in order to provide access to all those who are interested in meditation teachings and practice as presented by Mingyur Rinpoche, other Tergar teachers, instructors, facilitators, practice leaders, and qualified community members.
We are a global community striving to create and maintain a community culture where all who wish to participate are respected, safe, deeply valued, and have a sense of belonging. This intention is in line with the teachings that we study and aspire to practise to the best of our ability. We also recognize that inclusion enriches us all, bringing a wide range of perspectives,experiences and capacities, whereas exclusion impoverishes us as individuals, in our local communities and as a global society.
All human beings share the same potential, yet we recognise there may be barriers to experiencing full belonging in Tergar as a spiritual community. These barriers may be social, physical, financial and cultural, or linked to language, ethnicity, nationality, racism, gender, abilities, and sexual orientation, or to historical and ongoing patterns of discrimination or inequality in many parts of the world. This list of examples may not cover all situations.
However, it is meant to express the sincere aspiration and intention of Tergar to heartily welcome all those who wish to learn and to practise, and to say that we are committed to learning how to be a welcoming home for all.
Support Us
We believe people everywhere can change themselves and the world by making meditation a part of their daily life. Everything we do is based on the motivation to help people and communities live with boundless awareness, compassion, and wisdom. You can help transform the world with a donation today.