How to Train a Happy Mind

What can Buddhism teach us about how Bitcoin works and why it's so valuable? What can Bitcoin teach us about emptiness, the interdependent nature of reality? Episode 70. Bitcoin and Buddhism 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 lif...

Dan Harris, host of the hit podcast Ten Percent Happier, leads a loving-kindness meditation for skeptics. Recent research has shown that this practice positively impacts mental and physical health. Episode 135: Dan Harris Loving-Kindness Guided 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...

Dan Harris, former ABC News anchor and host of the hit podcast Ten Percent Happier, talks with Scott Snibbe about love, skepticism, Buddhism, and the "cheesy upward spiral." Episode 134: Dan Harris: Love, Skepticism, and the "Cheesy Upward Spiral" Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person retreat in California's redwoods August 13–16. LEARN MORE I...

A 10 minute guided meditation on the body, relaxing into the open connection between body and mind through mindful awareness. Episode 63. 10 Minute Body 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 co...

Could the true cause of happiness be simply thinking about whatever we are doing at the moment, what scientists and meditators call mindfulness? Episode 60. Why Mindfulness? 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 med...

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the greatest living science fiction writers, and one of the few people ever to have developed a credible solution to the climate crisis, which he describes in his latest novel, The Ministry for the Future .  In this interview, we talk about climate change solutions, Buddhism in his life and work, sci-fi and cli-fi (climate fiction), colonizing Mars, the outdoors as m...

Rob Hopkins, climate activist, co-founder of the Transition Network and host of the podcast series From What If to What Next talks about an engaged, passionate form of Buddhism that actively works for positive change in our communities and in the world. Episode 103. From What If to What Next — Rob Hopkins' Climate Optimism Join our third annual How to Train a Happy Mind three-day in-person re...

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...