Severe Anxiety

Severe Anxiety

Date of Advice:
July 2021
Date Posted:
March 2023

Rinpoche gave this advice to a student who had developed severe anxiety, with a high heart rate and panic, nerve pain, insomnia and shortness of breath. The student had been unwell for three years and wrote that the symptoms arose after smoking marijuana just once.

My most dear, was kind, most precious, wish-fulfilling one,
According to my observation you should take one precious pill called Rinchen Ratna Samphel but you can’t expose it to light. It’s wrapped in cloth, so you cut the knots around the cloth, then you put it in your mouth to keep it dark and then remove the cloth. You can crush it with your teeth and drink with water slowly, early in the morning.

Also, for two weeks take one moon crystal precious pill (Rinchen Tsotru Dashel Chenmo). Take one pill each week for two weeks.

Recite Vajra Armour mantra every day. Do this like a retreat for three days with sessions, and then after three days you can do one mala per day. This mantra helps with many problems and disease.

Recite the mantra from the Sutra of Great Liberation twenty-one times or seven times. It’s incredibly precious, most precious; it purifies negativities and obscurations and brings you to enlightenment quickly.

You can also do Vajrasattva practice, which is a common purification. If you don’t recite Vajrasattva mantra, then your negative karma only increases.

It’s important to recite one mala or half a mala of the long mantra every day, or at least recite it twenty-one times, or recite the short mantra, OM VAJRASATTVA HUM, twenty-eight times. This stops the negative karma from multiplying to double by the next day. It purifies the negative karma from today and yesterday and from the past.

[If the negative karma is not purified] after fifteen days it increases, and just one negative karma—just one, every single negative karma of body, speech, and mind—becomes 18,184, then after eighteen days it becomes 100,072. Both explanations come from Pabongka, the great enlightened being of Tibet.

[Vajrasattva practice] stops that increase and purifies that, so there are twenty-eight recitations of the short mantra or twenty-one recitations of the long mantra. Also, recite 100,000 if you break the tantric vows or anything like that. The root downfalls get purified, also the bodhisattva and tantric vows.

The wise ones, even if they had heavy negative karma, it becomes small, and the foolish ones, even if their negative karma is small, it becomes heavy.

This means the foolish ones who don’t know Dharma practice or Vajrasattva practice, their negative karma collected with body, speech and mind may be small, but each day, and day-by-day, it increases, then when they die, each negative karma becomes like a mountain. Then for eons, they are reborn in the lower realms and it’s difficult to be born in the higher realms, the happy realms of devas and human beings.

Wise ones, even if their negative karma is heavy, but they know Vajrasattva, they know the technique, then their negativities become small. They don’t have to experience suffering at all or they just have some problems in this life as a result of their past heavy negative karma, compared to suffering for many eons in the lower realms.

Also the other one, if there is not strong purification, they are still reborn in the lower realms, but just for a short second, a moment, a lesser or shorter time, like that.

If you have a chance to study the Bodhicaryavatara (A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life) then do that, or read my book, Bodhichitta, then live the life with bodhicitta.

I wanted you also to have these cards to remember bodhicitta, Compassion is of the Utmost Need and Live with Compassion. [Find links to these printable cards in the FPMT Catalogue.]

Thank you very much.

With much love and prayers ...