Mindfulness Exercises, with Sean Fargo

Your phone isn’t just a distraction, it’s a training environment. Every red badge, breaking headline, autoplay prompt, and meeting notification can condition your nervous system to live in speed, pressure, and false urgency. We sit down with Jay Vidyarthi, a mindfulness teacher and technologist and the author of Reclaim Your Mind, to map what’s really happening to our attention and how to respond...

We talk with Dr. Sara Lazar about why mindfulness meditation can feel life-changing beyond lower stress and how that shift maps onto stages of ego development and perspective taking.  We connect equanimity to measurable changes in meaning making and to brain regions tied to the narrative self, compassion, and self-referential processing.  • why stress and anxiety scores miss the deeper “new perspe...

We guide a simple hand-on-chest meditation with Master Ming Tong Gu that helps us feel the truth of our own existence beyond stories and labels. We leave with a deeper sense of gratitude, wholeness, and reconnection to the body as the place where life is actually experienced.  • welcoming Master Ming Tong Gu and naming healing beyond the physical  • setting up a safe, simple posture for practice ...

Your meditation practice might be giving you a clue you keep missing: it can be felt in the head. Sean Fargo sits down with Liam McClintock, founder of FitMind and author of “FitMind: Four Steps to Lasting Bliss”, to talk about a surprisingly concrete way to track craving, distraction, and ease through subtle sensations in the forehead, face, and skull. We dig into how the body works like a biofee...

Pain is inevitable, but the brain’s “this is unbearable” reaction is more flexible than most of us realize.  Harvard neuroscientist Dr. Sara Lazar joins us to unpack the neural correlates of equanimity and to answer a question many meditators quietly carry: does mindfulness meditation actually protect us from pain and fear, or does it just change the story we tell ourselves?  We dig into what equa...

We talk with Dr Elisha Goldstein about how tiny internal shifts can calm chronic stress, change our choices and strengthen emotional longevity. We break down the 4R method and explore why peace can feel like simply being with what is here.  • introducing Dr Elisha Goldstein and Tiny Shifts  • chronic stress as the background “water” we stop noticing  • the 4R method: recognise, release, refocus, r...

Jennifer Moffitt guides a short mindfulness practice that begins with movement and ends with a calmer, clearer connection to breath and body.  We focus on permission, presence, and a gentle way to return when the mind wanders.   • settling into breath and body awareness as a quick reset  • letting the body wiggle or stretch before stillness  • taking “no permission needed” seriously as a somatic c...

Birth has a way of destroying our best-laid plans, and that’s not a personal failure, it’s reality.  We sit down with Jennifer Moffitt, a midwife who’s attended over a thousand births and now serves as Director of Community Partnerships and senior faculty at Mindful Birthing, to talk about what actually helps when control slips away: mindfulness, embodiment, and self-compassion you can practice be...

Jhana gets talked about like a remote mountaintop experience, but Liam McClintock argues it can be trained with a surprisingly human doorway: love. I sit down with Liam, founder of FitMind and author of “FitMind: Four Steps to Lasting Bliss,” to dig into how metta (loving-kindness meditation) can unify the mind, stabilize attention, and reveal the subtle mechanics of craving and the sense of self....

If this conversation stirred something in you, Master Mingtong Gu’s book Coming Home to Embodied Awakening is a beautiful next step.  Order at mingtonggu.com/book and receive a free bonus collection of video teachings. Website: mingtonggu.com Book: mingtonggu.com/book Instagram: @chicenter Facebook: Wisdom Healing Qigong YouTube: @WisdomHealingQigong LinkedIn: Mingtong Gu For a free chapter of Mas...

Mindfulness can calm you down, but what if that’s only the entry point? I’m joined by Melvin McLeod, longtime editor at Lion’s Roar and a co-founder of Mindful Magazine, to talk about the side of mindfulness most people don’t hear about: the part that refuses to flatter us. Melvin shares the moment he was a young police reporter in Montreal, opened a Buddhist book, read a single paragraph, and fel...

Turn off the lights and the mind gets loud fast. Sean Fargo sits down with Scott Berman, founder of Sky Cave Retreats, to explore what happens when you spend days in complete darkness with no phone, no screens, no books, and none of the usual ways we keep ourselves busy. Sky Cave’s earth-sheltered cabins in southern Oregon are built to be fully blacked out and almost totally soundproof, creating a...

The fastest way to burn out in helping work is also the most socially praised: chronic self-sacrifice.  We sit down with Dr. John Demartini, world-renowned human behavior expert and creator of the Demartini Method, to untangle the guilt-ridden “shoulds” that many mindfulness teachers, coaches, and caregivers carry and replace them with a practical principle: sustainable fair exchange.  Service is...

Your phone is not the villain, and you are not weak. The real challenge is that modern technology is designed inside the attention economy, and it quietly trains your mind through cues, metaphors, and frictionless defaults. We talk with Jay Vijarthy, founder of the mindfulness-focused UX design studio Still Ape and author of Reclaim Your Mind, about how to build digital wellbeing without turning y...

Your mind can think its way into knots, but your body already knows how to come home. Sean Fargo sits down with longtime Qigong teacher, Taoist meditation guide, and author Solala Towler to explore a simple, practical reset: bring attention down into the belly. We talk about the lower dantian as the foundation of Taoist practice, and why “understanding” the Tao is less about collecting ideas and m...

We catch up with Liam McClintock, founder of FitMind and author of “ FitMind: Four Steps to Lasting Bliss ,” on how his neuroscience background and years as a Buddhist monk reshape what “mental fitness” really means.  We focus on metta as a heart-based training that supports mindfulness, reduces over-efforting, and offers a clear method for returning to the present through the four Rs. • why ordai...

Your feed can feel like reality, until you notice how quickly it makes you tense, reactive, and certain. We sit down with Jay Vijarthi, a mindfulness teacher, designer, and technologist, to unpack what’s really happening when algorithms shape our attention. We talk about filter bubbles and echo chambers, but we keep coming back to a more actionable truth: attention is still primary, and mindfulnes...

Meditation gets marketed as a calm-down button, a focus trick, or the ultimate self-improvement tool. Then you try it and discover your mind did not get the memo. Sitting with us is Susan Piver, Buddhist teacher and author of Inexplicable Joy on the Heart Sutra, to name what’s actually happening when we practice and why the usual promises can miss the point. We talk about the misconception that me...

Your calendar is packed, your phone never stops, and somehow your body still thinks every moment is an emergency. We sit down with clinical psychologist and mindfulness teacher Dr Elisha Goldstein to talk about his book *Tiny Shifts* and the practical reality behind emotional steadiness: you do not need a new personality or a perfect morning routine, you need a reliable way to access your skills w...

Mindfulness is everywhere now, but the way we talk about it can feel strangely small: a tool for stress, a way to focus, a better “hack” for busy lives. I sit down with Melvin McLeod, editor-at-large at Lion’s Roar, co-founder of Mindful Magazine, and a practitioner for over 40 years, to make a bigger claim that stays grounded in reality: mindfulness can be a complete path of living in a secular,...

Your meditation doesn’t need better willpower, a quieter mind, or a more “spiritual” seat on the floor. With renowned meditation teacher Susan Piver, we practice a clear, grounded approach to mindfulness meditation that starts where your body already is: feeling your weight land, sitting upright with dignity, softening the belly, and letting the jaw and shoulders finally unclench. If you’ve ever w...

Trying harder can feel like the only option until it stops working. We sit down with Solala Towler, a longtime teacher of Qigong, Taoist meditation, and the Way of Tea, to explore a different approach: alignment over strain, flow over force, and practice that meets you where you are. Solala shares his personal path into Eastern philosophy, the early hunger for something more grounded than words, a...

Busy can start to feel like a personality, especially when you’re doing meaningful work and getting rewarded for it. Sean Fargo sits down with Buddhist meditation teacher and author Lodro Rinzler to unpack what happened when external success still left him exhausted, stretched thin, and craving something he couldn’t schedule: space.  We talk about the real-life shift from New York City to the Huds...

Your mind does not just record reality, it edits it, polarizes it, and then makes decisions based on the edit. That is why we can feel certain we are “right” while repeating the same relationship patterns, motivation struggles, and self-sabotaging habits. We welcome world-renowned human behavior expert Dr. John DiMartini to unpack a practical way out: the DiMartini Method, a structured series of c...

Burnout doesn’t usually arrive as a dramatic collapse. It shows up as subtle numbness, constant urgency, and a workplace culture that celebrates “push through” while quietly ignoring the nervous system that makes performance possible. Sean Fargo sits down with Rosina Geiger to explore a concept that belongs at the center of every sustainability strategy: human sustainability. If your ESG goals foc...