How to Train a Happy Mind

Sympathetic joy is an easy-to-understand meditation practice that expands our love and compassion by rejoicing in all the good things that others did today. It counteracts greed, jealousy, and envy, and can be done kicking back on the couch at the end of a hard day. Episode 34. Sympathetic Joy: Opening Your Heart to the Happiness of Others Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day...

Dr. Jan Willis, renowned scholar and teacher of Buddhism, talks about race and racism through a Buddhist lens. She shares stories about growing up with racism in Birmingham, Alabama; marching with Dr. Martin Luther King there in 1963; brushes with the Black Panthers; her experience as one of the first Westerners to dive deeply into Tibetan Buddhism; and how we can compassionately combat systemic r...

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 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...

One of the most powerful Tibetan Buddhist mind training techniques is universalizing, a practice that transforms everyday pains and pleasures into profound meditations. From arguing with the family to stuffing yourself with a delicious meal, life’s problems and pleasures can bring anger, guilt, and sadness. The meditation technique of “universalization” transform our everyday experiences of pleasu...

Tonglen is a meditation practice that combines meditating on loving-kindness with meditating on compassion to release our own pain, suffering, and loneliness. In translation, tonglen practice can be called “taking and giving” or “exchanging self with other." Tonglen is one of the “mind training” techniques from Tibetan Buddhism that reverses our ordinary state of mind of selfishly seeking hap...

A 15-minute guided meditation on compassion: the wish to take away others’ suffering. Episode 29. Guided Compassion Meditation 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 your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott. 🙏 Help us stay a...

Compassion is starting to rival mindfulness as the next most popular up-and-coming form of secular meditation. But what is compassion? Compassion, from the Buddhist perspective, is not just empathizing with others’ suffering, but actively wishing to take it away. Episode 28. What Is Compassion? Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California's redwood...

Khen Rinpoche Geshe Tashi Tsering shares his profound insights on a secular understanding of karma, the importance of analytical meditation, and a warning that the popularity of meditation today might just kill it. E pisode 27. Khen Rinpoche Geshe Tashi Tsering on Karma, Analytical Meditation, and Mindfulness Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California...

A guided meditation on love, or loving-kindness, the expansive form of love wishing happiness not only to friends and family but to all beings everywhere including our enemies. Episode 26. Guided Meditation on Love 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...

Love is complex in our culture, tied up with finding a single person to satisfy our huge list of needs and dreams who we then grant the exclusive gift of our affection. But love—loving-kindness from the Buddhist perspective—is simpler, free from attachment. It's wishing others to be happy. Episode 25. What Is Love? Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in...

On Ten Percent Happier a few weeks ago, The Dalai Lama described to Dan Harris a “simple meditation” for these times. This guided meditation is an interpretation of the two meditations His Holiness recommends in the morning: meditating on the mind and meditating on the kindness of others. Episode 24. The Dalai Lama's "Simple Meditation" Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Min...

The Buddhist meditation on equanimity teaches a technique to eliminate bias and expand our love and concern from family and friends to strangers and even enemies. It tames our fierce attachment to loved ones and our anger toward enemies for a stabler, happier mind and a more just and equitable world. Episode 23: Guided Meditation: Transforming Bias with Equanimity Join our third annual How to Trai...

In everyday life we ’ re torn between fierce attachment to our loved ones and anger at those that give us trouble. But Buddhism, democracy, and social justice tell us that all people deserve the same rights and freedoms: we ’ re all equal and we all deserve happiness. The Buddhist meditation on equanimity, applied to our everyday relationships and the painful daily news, teaches us a technique of...

Venerable Robina Courtin, Buddhist nun and advocate for prisoner’s rights, on how activists can leverage meditation and mind training, how Buddhism functions as a science of the mind, and how being a Buddhist doesn’t mean being a pushover. Episode 21. Venerable Robina Courtin — Buddha's Science of Mind Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California&a...

A guided meditation on fighting the systemic racism against Black Americans through compassionate action. Episode 20. Guided Meditation: Fighting Systemic Racism through Compassionate Action #BlackLivesMatter 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...

A guided analytical meditation through Skeptic’s Path meditations, based on Tibetan Buddhism’s Lamrim Stages of the Path. Each meditation is part of an adventure for the mind to bring about inner joy and purpose considering Life’s Preciousness, Impermanence, Cause & Effect, Refuge, Suffering, and Renunciation. Episode 19. The Adventure So Far: Analytic Meditation on the Stages of the Path Join...

Dostoevsky once said, “The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison.” This is the point of meditating on renunciation: to gain a clear-eyed sense of our state of mind right now, with many moments of frustration and anger and impatience and craving: feelings that we'd rather be free from. And turning away from these delusions toward liberatio...

What do The Matrix and Jerry Seinfeld have to do with renouncing suffering? Episode 17. The Red Pill of Renunciation - Embracing Reality As It Is 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 your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott...

A clear-eyed meditation on suffering: both what suffering is, and the mental source of suffering in our delusions of attachment, anger, and self-centered ignorance. We practice the antidotes to these delusions, giving us tools for a more balanced, less self-centered view of our experience that offers sustained stability and happiness through life’s challenges and desires. Episode 16: Guided Medita...

Do each of us believe deep down that we’re just a little bit more important than everyone else? My happiness, my goals, my relationships? The root cause of our suffering from the Buddhist perspective is this belief, a delusion called ignorance, seen as the true source of all our suffering: from disappointment in the face of life’s setbacks, to the dissatisfaction we can feel even when we get exact...

What do you do when you’re alone? When you’re anxious, lonely, or afraid, when you feel strong craving? What do you turn to? In this episode we look at where our mind runs when we feel pain, when we don’t feel balanced or whole. We’ll examine the Buddhist view on this subject that reveals a deep source of strength and support within our own minds accessible to each of us any time we need it. Episo...

The How to Train a Happy Mind podcast brings Buddhist meditation to modern people hungry for happy, meaningful lives. Each week on the podcast, I and my guests share powerful mind training techniques that go beyond mindfulness to harness our intelligence, emotions, and imagination. Our approach to meditation is secular, based on science and psychology, yet grounded in the authentic thousand-year o...

Millions are now faced with enforced solitude, while others, in the crush of families together all day, realize how much we needed that time alone we took for granted. The essence of meditation is getting to know yourself alone, without social stimulus, entertainment, or reputation—what we truly are deep inside ourselves. There, we can find in our mind a place of satisfaction that’s equally at eas...

A meditation practice of self reflection, taking control of the mental cause and effect that's normally unconscious: the habits and activities conditioned by evolution, our upbringing, society and the media. This is a practice you can do at the end of each day: reviewing your day, rejoicing in the positive, and finding ways to sincerely forgive yourself for anything that you regret, so you ca...

Science has greater and greater mastery in understanding and controlling physical cause and effect, from planets to particles, but we are only starting to understand cause and effect in our minds. Evolution, habits, and society all affect our behavior. How do we gain conscious control of our behavior, much less our thoughts? One method is a daily practice of self-appreciation and self-forgiveness...