The Resilient Mind - Your Ambition Is the Reason You're Suffering - Shi Heng Yi

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

Shi Heng Yi is a 35th-generation Shaolin master and headmaster of the Shaolin Temple Europe. Born in Germany to Vietnamese refugee parents, he began training at age four and has spent over three decades studying the interaction between mind and body. He now shares the Shaolin path of discipline, meditation, and self-mastery with a global audience through his teachings, his TED Talks, and his book Shaolin Spirit.This episode is brought in partnership with Motiversity.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_JournalExplore tools from past guests of the podcast. Some links below are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you:💓 HeartMath: https://www.heartmath.com/resilient🧠 Muse: https://choosemuse.com/resilientmind🌿 Brain Ritual: https://www.brainritual.com/THERESILIENTMIND🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This world is filled with so much choice that it's difficult in a way to take the decision, which direction will go, what is right to do, what is not right to do. But ultimately it's only yourself who knows the answer, which means learn more about yourself. This is where it starts. Because if you have the wrong perspective of who you are, what you are, everything else in this lifetime, you base your decisions on, is just not going to be placed in the right direction.

You want to reach your goal? How to reach the goal the quickest? Be focused with your energy. Meaning be focused with the mind. Don't lose the goal from the mind. Whatever you do from the moment of waking up until the evening, whatever you do, keep the goal in the mind. This is the quickest way of making this goal become real.

The truth is the lifetime of what you carry right now and what I carry right now, it's limited. And now just imagine you would be, let's say, the director of your own movie. Jump out of the body and watch yourself right now and you are writing your story. How do you want to write the story? You want to like feel uncomfortable,

feel unsafe, feel unloved, feel like just unsatisfied with the whole life, cry or anything like this, or how do you imagine what is a really nice way of living for you the next 50 years? And based on that, purpose can be different. You say, I do like the trouble. I do like to invest this lifetime in this body to have the feeling at least that I can contribute something to all the fellow brothers and sisters that are around there.

It makes me like I wake up, I like to do it, it gives me purpose. So it is something very, very personal. There is always the struggle between doing and being. Doing, I would ask, why are you doing? So why? Why do you want to go into action? Mostly, there is a goal. The goal, why do you have that goal?

because you're aiming at receiving something that in the moment where you have it, apparently you are lacking. So that means this type of goal setting. In my perspective, I would automatically refer to it already that your goal setting already comes from a space of lack. You feel like you're lacking something.

That's why you need to do. You feel like you're lacking something That's why you need to educate yourself. Okay? So this is the one direction. When you're coming back, maybe sounds again too philosophical, connected with the source. There's nothing to add and there's nothing to take away from you. So apparently when somebody has this very, very high ambition of doing something,

achieving something, it is coming from the idea of, of wanting to nourish or create an identity, an identity that represents something that you think you want to represent. So this is the one area, the doing versus the being. There are five hindrances that could make it difficult for you to reach that goal in the mind. There is sensory desires, ill will, dullness, restlessness, and then self-doubt. I make it super simple when it comes. comes to the five hindrances, literally is like this.

Whatever appears in our life, if I have my goal set right now, what you are not supposed to do is to witness something. And now if you have like the number one, sensual desire, sensory desire, what we tend to do is we like start to pull things towards us. Okay, that's number one. The second thing, what not to do,

This is what it all belongs to that family of non-judgment. It's like when ill will, something appears in your life, something you witness, you meet a person, you don't want to meet, you get the message, you don't want to read that message, whatever it is. And you try to avoid it by doing actions in order to push it away from you. So what it ultimately means is don't do any of them because whatever you try to hold onto, the nature of self. the nature of thing is that this is happening swinging away it's going to move away from you

and whatever you try to avoid and push away from you is just a question of time until it's going to move like pretty close towards you also in the way of how it's expressed don't touch the water

if you don't want to have a life that is too shaky don't touch the water because in the moment you touch your touch is the initiation for the ripples to appear same way you want to follow that goal

you want to have it easy along that goal don't touch any additional water along your goal don't touch it because you like something and don't touch it because you dislike something because when you walk towards you go and you do here and here and here,

you're just going to ripple your whole surroundings, which ultimately means your energy is being just drawn away from your initial goal. You don't like something and then you invest the energy there. You like something and it draws your energy back to there. Don't push. Don't pull. Be very aware who are you letting into your circle

and ultimately rely on yourself, maintain the purity of your intention. How does it help people to know the hard stuff? Well, because I do think that it is symbolizing this way of life. It is symbolizing the patterns of what you are going to go through in this lifetime. Living this lifetime is not easy. The more wishes you have, the more difficult it becomes. The more ambitious you are, the more you will have to face.

So, bottom line is, I do think that in the moment where you just on a regular basis, put yourself consciously and willingly in different situations and circumstances that actually represent a little bit the structures of life, there are moments in this lifetime where you are going to be super tense, super tense. and then it's good to know already how does it feel and what is it that you can do? Well, to learn and release the tension. That's why releasing tension is also a big part of the exercises. The one thing is learning to release tension.

The other thing is like when you are too sloppy, when you're too slacky, how to increase your tension, how to increase the energy level again for you to get back into structure again. So it's always this balance. And so you're almost training to do hard things because hard things are an inevitability of the life we live. In this training that I went through, you know, for for the moment maybe take all the spiritual part out.

Simply the Kung Fu training, the Shaolin Kung Fu training. There is a saying which is Shaolin Kung Fu literally means walking through the valley of pain. So what does it mean? When you are doing stretching, stretching, stretching, stretching, it's going to be painful. When you are doing strength training is going to be painful. When you do conditioning training, it's going to be painful.

So the whole pass on this martial art journey, It is just filled with working yourself up to the level of where it feels uncomfortable, getting some consistency into the practice until the point where that uncomfortable feeling just started disappearing. Why? Because somehow you broke that initial comfort zone. But then it doesn't end. No. Next level is not that I do not feel pain.

I also feel pain. Maybe I feel it later. But the essential part is that my connection, my relation between the pain of the body towards what would it affect in the way of how I take my decisions? That is a different one. I feel the pain, but at the moment I feel the pain, but I see no necessity to still change something about my way right now. Why?

Because I can take the pain. Whereas when you are not used to this pain, you feel it and then it tells you, let's say, it's painful, the mind is okay, is not good. And so you directly change something. And this is just the difference. So it's not that I became numb. No, I just feel there is an additional layer that I can observe about myself. It is painful, but it's okay for right now. This is absolutely inner work.

This is nothing to do with doing work out here. It's inner work. How does one begin the journey of doing that inner work? You give trust in the vision that when you are investing your time right now to become more aware of yourself, of your emotional state, that this is going to benefit your life. That's the starting point. You believe in it.

You believe in it. So you don't do it because somebody tells you you're supposed to do it. You do it because you genuinely believe this is the way. I want to know more about myself. I want to really understand what is it that I made out of. We want to figure out, is there something inside of myself? I tried to look away for many years, but I know it's still there and was afraid to look at it, all of these things.

There's only one where you do make yourself free. You need to become transparent. If there are spots inside of ourselves where there's no light yet, it can't be. It can't be. Bringing light to everything that has been in the dark. This is another area of the path. which at some point everybody will face.

Even though that this is now just like a saying, but just the idea, whatever you're doing, whatever you're thinking, whether people are around you or you are alone, just imagine there is one who always sees what you're doing. So live your life based on that. It is the elevated version of you, but it's true. It's you and you.

once I've shone a light on that area of me, so I have greater awareness of its existence and it's now transparent, is it a case then of what is the work I then have to do to make a change in that context? So we're talking here about managing one's emotions and getting a grip of one's emotions so you can avoid being triggered

or perpetrating the same patterns in your life that have led you to the same outcomes. first you believe that it's possible to change. You gain a greater awareness of the parts of yourself that you've kept in the dark that you might want to change. And then what does one do from there? Let me put it like this. Whatever you are thinking, saying or doing

has a consequence. So this consequence that you have created or that you are intending to create as yourself, what is that consequence actually? Does it make yourself, does it make your being, your interaction with people? Does it make it feel more light, more pleasurable, more enjoying, more free, more nourishing?

Or is the result that you are about to create? going in the other direction, meaning you are nourishing conflict, you are nourishing aggression, feeling like you are carrying the suffering of the world on your shoulder, feeling like there's a burden on you, feeling like there's a stone on your heart, feeling like you being put under pressure. See, all of these expressions have something to do with density, have something to do with pressure. Yeah, but then when we look at, no matter which tradition it is, Buddhism, enlightenment, freedom, liberation, no matter what it is. You see, it is just two forces in the world.

Two forces in the world, one aiming for limitlessness and the other one aiming for restricting and very clear boundaries. These are the two forces. And this is exactly now turning the view upon yourself. What are you made out of? Your patterns, the emotional states that follow you within a week. Within a week, looking back the last week, what was the most dominating emotion you felt inside yourself? Was it one that had the character of limiting yourself?

in a way or were you in an emotional state like through the week this was light it was cool well liberated free uplifting joyful which of these so and this simply gives you exactly from what to what do i think you need to transform yourself if you want this the more you want your life now, let's say, in the future to be quite different than what you're used to, the more you need to be able to let go. Let go of patterns, let go of the way of thoughts that you had in the last years and months. Now, if nothing changes about that, they will not come in your life. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.