How to Train a Happy Mind

What happens when you die? No one knows for sure. But the Tibetan Buddhist system describes a precise series of steps that our consciousness may experience as we die, which we can explore in a meditation to probe the boundary of life and death with curiosity and wonder. Episode 58: What Happens When You Die? Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California&...

The idea of past lives may not make sense, and isn’t scientifically verifiable. But still, the question of what we might have been before our conception is one worth asking. Where did I come from? Episode 57: Where Did I Come From? Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California's redwoods August 13–16. LEARN MORE If you’d like to practice with others...

I want to tell you a story about birth and death and infinity. We’re all born and we’re all going to die, but I don’t know how many of you have ever felt a connection to infinity. I want to tell you about the time in my life when I felt this connection to infinity every day. And I also want to tell you about how I lost it, and whether it’s possible to get it back again. Episode 56: Birth, Death, a...

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo is one of the very first Westerners to become ordained into the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. She is best known for having lived in a remote cave in the Himalayas for 12 years. In this 10-minute  meditation, she offers us the invitation to cultivate moment-to-moment inner awareness - the essence of meditation practice. Episode 93: Cultivating Our Inner Awareness with Jetsunma T...

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo is one of the world’s most revered Buddhist teachers and one of the very first Westerners to become ordained into the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. She is best known for having lived in a remote cave in the Himalayas for 12 years. She spoke with us about the role of women in Buddhism from a historical and contemporary lens, the nature of mind and simple, powerful ways to medita...

A 10-Minute guided meditation on love shows us how to expand our love for our partner and family to a loving-kindness, or metta, that embraces all beings. 10 Minute Meditation on Love (Loving-kindness) Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California's redwoods August 13–16. LEARN MORE If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into yo...

If you want to know what love is, search beyond eighties songs to the wisdom of Buddhist loving-kindness that expands our love to all beings while also deepening our connection to our partner and family. This special  episode on love asks great Buddhist teachers the question of what love is, including Dr. Jan Willis, Ven. Kathleen McDonald, Dr. Rick Hanson, Geshe Tenzin Namdak, and Dzigar Kongtrul...

Buddhist teacher and author Wendy Haylett discusses the practice of Naikan and leads an analytical meditation that uses compassion to reflect on our more difficult relationships without judgement. Episode 133: Guided Meditation: Compassion through Looking Inside Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California's redwoods August 13–16. LEARN MORE If you...

Wendy Shinyo Haylett is an author, Buddhist teacher, and lay minister with the Bright Dawn Center of Oneness Buddhism. She's the host of the popular Everyday Buddhism podcast where she kindly had me on as a guest last year. Wendy has more than 30 years of experience as a Buddhist practitioner and coach helping people live their personal and professional lives with more mindfulness and resilie...

From the Buddhist, as well as the psychological and scientific perspectives, gratitude and dedication aren’t just polite bookends. The process of feeling gratitude and resolve creates the mental and neurological causes to actually become better people and to better serve the world. Episode 45: Meditation on Gratitude, Dedication, and Determination Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind th...

We’ve spent the better part of a year going step-by-step through a modern secular version of the major topics from Tibetan Buddhism’s Stages of the Path, what we call A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment. In Tibetan this sequence is called the lamrim . It’s a series of meditations that progressively move our mind to better understand itself, bring out our best qualities, and create the causes for a h...

This guided meditation explores consciousness through a Tibetan Buddhist lens. What does it mean to be aware? Is your mind limited to your physical body? And who is it that observes your thoughts? Episode 131: Guided Meditation on Consciousness Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California's redwoods August 13–16. LEARN MORE If you’d like to practic...

Dr. Anil Seth has written an extraordinary book called Being You — A New Science of Consciousness. I had a chance to talk to him recently in an event sponsored by Science & Wisdom Live . Dr. Seth is one of the world's foremost researchers on consciousness, and in our interview he touches on defining consciousness from a scientific perspective, whether we have free will, and the notion of...

Who am I? From the Buddhist perspective, there’s a systematic way of asking this question of who you are in the form of a meditation on the ultimate nature of the self, or "emptiness." This meditation is said to be the strongest antidote to our disturbing states of mind and a cause for greater self-awareness, happiness, and connection with others. Episode 43: Guided Meditation — The Inte...

Are you your body? Are you your mind? Are you a collection of thoughts, memories, and neural connections that could be uploaded into a computer to live forever? Or are you an old-fashioned soul? This episode probes the nature of the self using the Buddhist notion of emptiness, searching for the partless, independent, unchanging "I" that ordinarily appears to us, and finding a self that&a...

Last year I had the privilege to participate in a dialogue on compassion with my teacher, Venerable Sangye Khadro who is also well known by her Western name Venerable Kathleen McDonald. Venerable Sangye Khadro is the author of How to Meditate and Awakening the Kind Heart. She's a very active Buddhist teacher and a fully ordained nun, which is the highest level of ordination for a Buddhist mon...

This is a very special episode in which I had the chance to introduce two of my heroes: Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman and science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. They shared a lively conversation together that you now have the chance to eavesdrop on (with their permission). In their dialogue, they talk about when violence is legitimate in situations like the Tibetan or Ukrainian invasions,...

The Buddhist understanding of how things exist, called emptiness, breaks objects down into parts, causes, and a mind that bundles them into the illusion of a solid, singular, unchanging entity. When we apply this analysis to an iPhone, we see that it is made up of almost all the elements in the periodic table, and is connected to thousands of hours of hard labor and the entire history of our civil...

Buddhist teacher Emily Hsu leads an analytical meditation that explores the inner landscape—texture—of the mind and the differences between constructive and unconstructive mental states. Episode 127: Guided Meditation: Exploring the Texture of the Mind  Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California's redwoods August 13–16. LEARN MORE If you’d like t...

I've known Emily Hsu since she first started teaching Buddhist philosophy and meditation at the Tse Chen Ling Center for Tibetan Buddhism 15 years ago in San Francisco. She's a lucid, humble, and kind teacher who speaks from both deep education and rich personal experience. Emily Hsu completed the seven year FPMT Masters Program at Institute Lama Tzong Khapa in Italy in 2004—a condensed...

Objects around us ordinarily appear as if they are solid, singular, and separate from us. However, both science and the Buddhist understanding of reality show us that as we examine things more closely, they exist far more subtly and richly than they appear. This meditation focuses on an object most of us have strong feelings toward—our smartphone—breaking it apart into its myriad parts, and giving...

The Buddhist view on reality, called emptiness, combines the awe of scientific knowledge with the inner, experiential knowledge that comes from meditation and critical reasoning to arrive at a feeling of interconnectedness. The first in a seven-art series on Buddhism's view of dependent origination looks at how objects exist using the example of that most modern wonder and addiction, our smar...

Buddhist counselor Richard Prinz leads an analytical meditation on equanimity to develop compassion, introspection, love, and non-attachment for teenagers and their parents. Episode 125: Meditation on Equanimity for Parents and Teens with Richard Prinz Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California's redwoods August 13–16. LEARN MORE If you’d like to...

Teenagers face a unique and overwhelming set of problems today, from climate change to social media to isolation induced by the pandemic. Richard Prinz is a marriage, child, and family counselor who has worked as a teen counselor in the Cupertino, California public schools for over 20 years. He's also a longtime Buddhist practitioner and a good friend of mine who served as the director of the...

A guided meditation on “universalizing,” a Tibetan Buddhist mind training technique for transforming our everyday problems and pleasures through love and compassion. Episode 32. Guided Meditation: Universalizing our Problems and Pleasures Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment to share the rich tradition of Tibetan Buddhist analytical meditation in a form that requires no beli...