How to Train a Happy Mind

Pleasure is often viewed as a hindrance to the spiritual path, a hotbed of craving and attachment, but what if we told you that pleasure can actually be a positive part of the spiritual path, a portal to love and happiness?

Episode 84: Pleasure and Buddhism: Food, Sex and Netflix on the Path to Enlightenment

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In this imaginative and hopeful episode, Rob Hopkins—founder of the Transition movement and author of How to Fall in Love with the Future—guides listeners through a vivid meditation envisioning the year 2030. Drawing on years of community activism and storytelling, Rob invites us to step through a metaphorical door into a future shaped by collective action, resilience, and radical imagination. What might our cities, communities, and daily lives look like if we did everything we could to build a better world? This episode offers a powerful glimpse into that possibility.

Episode 206: Meditation on Falling in Love with...

Rob Hopkins is one of the people doing the most to assure that humanity has a healthy, thriving, and happy future. I was blown away by his new book, How to Fall in Love With the Future, which describes a radical new type of climate activism he's invented. Instead of bemoaning the current state of the world, he invites us to imagine the world we want to live in—that's just around the corner—and then do everything we can to make it a reality.

Join me now to find out how to fall in love with the...

This episode turns to one of the most universal human struggles: anger. Scott Snibbe explores how Buddhist psychology defines anger as a delusion: an exaggeration of the negative that blinds us to the good and fuels the wish to harm. Drawing on timeless wisdom, this meditation offers parents (and anyone else who wrestles with anger) practical antidotes rooted in curiosity and compassion.

Episode 204: Meditation for Angry Parents

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Host Scott Snibbe offers touching personal stories and a meditation on how to best love our parents and our children using powerful Buddhist teachings and techniques on understanding, listening, and compassion.

Episode 76: Loving Our Parents, Loving Our Children

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Join Geshe Sherab for a deeply reflective guided meditation on the emptiness of self—one of the core insights of Buddhist wisdom. Gently explore how the sense of “I” arises, appears, and ultimately dissolves under careful examination. This session invites you to rest in the awareness that the self, as it seems, is empty of inherent existence—opening the door to deeper freedom, compassion, and clarity. This guided journey is perfect for both beginners and experienced practitioners looking to deepen their understanding of emptiness.

Episode #203: Emptiness of Self Guided Meditation with Geshe Sherab

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We’ve reached the last in our series of episodes this year on Buddhism’s six perfections. The final perfection is described as emptiness, wisdom, or insight. These are all ways of naming the indescribable experience of discovering ourselves to be utterly interconnected with all of life, the universe, and everything.

My guest for this profound, but sometimes difficult-to-grasp subject is Geshe Sherab. For those unfamiliar with the title Geshe, it refers to those who have completed a 20-year course of study in Tibetan Buddhism, becoming highly qualified teachers and scholars. The Dalai Lama himself is a gesh...

This rebroadcast episode is in honor of the recent passing of Dr. Larry Ward. May his wisdom live on.

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Dr. Larry Ward—student of Thich Nhat Hanh and author of America's Racial Karma—leads a short but powerful breath awareness meditation.

Episode 191: 5-Minute Breath Awareness Meditation

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This rebroadcast episode is in honor of the recent passing of Dr. Larry Ward. May his wisdom live on.

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Scott talks with Dr. Larry Ward, a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, and author of America's Racial Karma. His book is about how we heal from the trauma of racism, not just as a society, but in our own minds and bodies. In our conversation, Dr. Ward shares a profound truth: racism is a fiction, but one with very real consequences, and it lives not only in the structures of our society, but in our thoughts...

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?

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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?

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Dr. David Kittay stands out as one of the most expansive, intelligent, creative, and warmhearted thinkers of our time. His course at Columbia University, Technology, Religion, Future, is often described as “life-changing” for its exploration of how technology intersects with humanity’s deepest questions. In an earlier conversation with Scott, before the AI boom, he offered insights that felt ahead of their time—making his return now all the more vital as we face a profound question: Can artificial intelligence lead to enlightenment, or are we speeding toward a super-intelligent future that may no longer include us?

This con...

We can't believe this is our 200th episode! For this special occasion, we wanted to share a talk and meditation Scott Snibbe offered in our Train a Happy Mind community a couple of weeks ago called “Is enlightenment possible?” 

Over the years, Scott's ideas of enlightenment have evolved as he's interviewed some of the world's foremost teachers and scholars of Buddhism like Dr. Jan Willis, Dr. Robert Thurman, Thupten Jinpa, and Tenzin Palmo. This episode is a reflection of these new understandings and an exploration of other tasty questions like...

Is enlightenment possible for anyone?

...

Today we’re sharing a guided meditation from the wonderful Venerable René Feusi (Scott Snibbe's long-time teacher). Settle in, find a comfortable seat, and let René’s clear, grounded guidance open the warm heart of awareness within you.

Episode #199: The Warm Heart of Awareness: A Meditation with Ven. René Feusi

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It turns out that many of the greatest living Buddhist teachers are also some of the hardest to receive teachings from. Lacking ego, they have no need to promote themselves. This is the case with Scott's closest teacher, Venerable René Feusi. 

Out of a wish to maintain his solitude and focus on long-term students—and probably mostly out of humility—Venerable René has always declined Scott's invitations to appear on this podcast. But last year he gave a public talk at Tse Chen Ling Center in San Francisco on the benefits of concentrated awareness. We asked him if we c...

This 20 minute guided meditation comes from the sequence Scott shares in the How to Train a Happy Mind podcast and book. The stages are based on the Tibetan Buddhist lamrim, which was created more than a thousand years ago by the Indian Master Atisha Dipankar. 

Over the past decade, Scott has adapted it to be a non-religious way to transform the mind from states of frustration, craving, and loneliness to states of satisfaction, connection, and meaning. 

Scott leads live meditations like this every Sunday in our Train a Happy Mind community, which you can join fo...

Welcome to this guided meditation on accessing joy with Tenzin Chogkyi. In this practice, we’ll take time to settle the body, connect with the breath, and gently open to the feeling of joy. 

Episode 196: Joyful Effort: A Guided Meditation with Tenzin Chogkyi 

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Instead of the episode we had planned to share today, a meditation from Tenzin Chogkyi as part of her beautiful conversation on joy, we're postponing that release by a week. In its place, we're sharing a meditation Scott Snibbe led just a couple of days ago with our Train a Happy Mind community. 

This meditation was recorded the day after the United States launched a new bombing campaign in Iran. In response, Scott reflects on the roots of violence, both in our world and in our minds, and to offer a path toward peace influenced by Tibetan B...

Today's guest is Tenzin Chogkyi, one of our most popular guests, and she's back to talk about another one of the six perfections that we've been talking with other guests about this year. This one is enthusiasm or joyful effort. She talks about not just the Buddhist ideas of enthusiasm, but how to maintain our joy and enthusiasm in life when things are difficult or even when we get too much of a good thing. 

Episode 194: Joy and Enthusiasm—Even When Life's Hard—with Tenzin Chogkyi

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Scott Snibbe leads a 10-minute guided meditation that is based on the sequence he shares in the How to Train a Happy Mind podcast and book. Many Tibetan Buddhists do this meditation every day. If you don't have much time or want to start small, this is a good place to begin. It touches on the precious life, impermanence, cause and effect, suffering, renunciation, love, compassion, and interdependence.

Episode 193: 10-Minute Path to a Happy Mind Guided Meditation

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"I'll tell you something. I've learned it's hard work to be happy." Brian Wilson

In this special retreat episode, Scott Snibbe guides us through the full path to a happy mind—from appreciating the simple miracle of being alive to confronting our deepest mental habits and reconnecting with our capacity for kindness, meaning, and change.

It’s not a quick fix or a life hack. It’s the whole path. And it might just shift how you see the world.

Episode 192: The Complete Path to a Happy Mind

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Dr. Larry Ward—student of Thich Nhat Hanh and author of America's Racial Karma—leads a short but powerful breath awareness meditation.

Episode 191: 5-Minute Breath Awareness Meditation

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Scott talks with Dr. Larry Ward, a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, and author of America's Racial Karma. His book is about how we heal from the trauma of racism, not just as a society, but in our own minds and bodies. In our conversation, Dr. Ward shares a profound truth: racism is a fiction, but one with very real consequences, and it lives not only in the structures of our society, but in our thoughts, our speech, and our nervous systems.

Episode 190: Healing America's Racial Karma with Larry Ward

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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 Interdependent Self

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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's far richer and interconnected with reality and with others.

Episode 42: Who am I?

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Susan Piver leads a short breath awareness meditation in this week's podcast episode. If you were to go down the Buddhist path, you would start with this practice before starting with visualizations, guru yogas, mantras, mandala practices. It's a simple practice that is suitable for all.

Episode 189: Mindfulness Awareness Meditation with Susan Piver

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This year, we're using the framework of Buddhism's Six Perfections to guide most of our episodes. Our last one with returning guest and activist Kazu Haga, focused on patience or not returning harm. This week, another favorite of the podcast is back, Susan Piver. She and I talk and riff on her new book, Inexplicable Joy, which explores one of Buddhism's most famous and mysterious texts, the heart sutra. 

This profound text is all about the perfection of wisdom, emptiness, and the ultimate interdependent nature of reality. Fully realizing this is said to lead to the inexplicable j...

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 civilization, planet, and universe.

Episode 39. The Interdependent Nature of Reality

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When the world feels like it’s unraveling, how do we come back to ourselves?

In this gentle, grounding guided meditation, activist and educator Kazu Haga invites us to sit beside our fear—not to fix or push it away, but to witness it with compassion. Through breath, body, and the ground beneath us, we rediscover a quiet strength that endures even in chaos.

This episode is more than a meditation. It’s a refuge. A place to reconnect with your essential self, to hold space for the parts of you that feel overwhelmed, and to fin...

This week, Scott is joined by transformative activist and restorative justice advocate Kazu Haga to discuss his new book, Fierce Vulnerability, which rethinks nonviolence as a path to healing and connection. In a world fueled by division, Kazu challenges the idea of winning against an enemy and asks: What if resistance wasn’t about force, but about vulnerability? If you’ve ever questioned whether conflict itself is keeping us stuck, this conversation is for you.

Episode 186: Beyond Us vs Them: Transforming Society Through Fierce Vulnerability with Kazu Haga 

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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 us a meditative glimpse of how it truly exists.

This episode is the second in a series exploring the Buddhist topic of “emptiness,” or how things exist through parts, causes, and the...

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 smartphone.

Episode 37: How Things Exist

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Settle into a mindful state and engage with your phone in this conscious exercise with digital wellness expert Jay Vidyarthi. Use this guided meditation to deeply and mindfully investigate your phone with clarity.

Episode 185: How to Use Your Phone Mindfully: A Guided Meditation for Digital Wellness—Jay Vidyarthi

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Are you in control of your technology, or is it controlling you?

In this episode of How to Train a Happy Mind, we sit down with Jay Vidyarthi, author of Reclaim Your Mind, a powerful new book released today that offers a radical yet deeply practical approach to reshaping our relationship with technology.

Jay's insights go beyond the usual advice to put your phone away. He helps us uncover the emotional needs beneath our compulsive tech habits and shows us how to reclaim our focus, relationships, and well-being. He also leads a meditation unlike anything...

What can Buddhism teach us about how Bitcoin works & why it’s so valuable? What can Bitcoin teach us about emptiness, the interdependent nature of reality? Find out in this episode with Scott Snibbe!

Episode 70: Bitcoin and Buddhism

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Meditate on the four types of generosity according to Buddhism, giving material objects, providing protection, teaching the Dharma, and spreading love. It has an emphasis on the generosity that we may or may not show to homeless people. 

It's part of a year-long series on what we call the Six Perfections, six practices of Mahayana Buddhism that lead one to, they say, a state of limitless happiness. The meditation is done in a way that you don't need to be a Buddhist or have any Buddhist beliefs, just like all the others in our program. 

Ep...

In this episode, I share lesson's I've learned about generosity from my Buddhist teachers, my college girlfriend, and, to start off, my mother on the generosity we choose to share (or not to share) with homeless people.

This year, most of our episodes are centered around what Buddhism calls the "six perfections": generosity, morality, patience, joyful effort, calm abiding, and special insight into the ultimate nature of reality, also known as emptiness. 

These six practices are centuries-old altruistic ways of thinking, speaking, and acting in the world that evolve our minds (and the minds of t...

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

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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” transforms our everyday experiences of pleasure and pain into engines of love and compassion.

Episode 31: Universalizing: Transforming Pain and Pleasure into Love and Compassion

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Esteemed Buddhist teacher and scholar Dr. Jan Willis leads two meditations on emptiness in this episode. One focuses on the emptiness of the I, this pronoun, this belief that we have that we exist, that there is an I who is Jan Willis. And the other meditation is about  the nature of the mind itself. 

She shares the analogy that the mind and the nature of the mind is like the sky.  And this "I" is an adventitious, delusional, negative and harmful cloud in that sky.  But we need to be able to notice it and notice wher...

To kick off the new year we're thrilled to welcome back one of our most beloved guests, Dr. Jan Willis, a trailblazing scholar, inspiring practitioner and powerful storyteller.  Dr. Willis guides us through the six perfections: generosity, morality, patients, joyful effort, concentration and wisdom.  Profound practices that were once closely guarded, secret teachings. 

In this episode, Dr. Willis offers a heartfelt introduction to these transformative ideas, weaving in stories from her own remarkable life. She shares insights she's learned directly from the world's most revered Buddhist masters.  reflects on navigating and resisting the racism she faced growing up i...

Today’s meditation focuses on self-compassion, inspired by the teachings of Dr. Kristin Neff. Known as the "self-compassion break," this practice is designed to be quick, accessible, and deeply grounding—perfect for those moments when life feels overwhelming. By bringing mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness into focus, this meditation offers a practical way to navigate challenges with grace and care. 

Episode 179: Meditation on Self-Compassion with Tenzin Chogkyi

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We are closing out the year with a special guest, Tenzin Chogkyi—a longtime Buddhist practitioner, teacher, and former nun ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. With decades of experience in both inner growth and social justice, Tenzin brings profound wisdom and a unique perspective. This episode explores self-compassion and how building a loving relationship with oneself creates the foundation for a meaningful, joyful life.

Episode 178: Self-Compassion with Tenzin Chogkyi 

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Today's episode features a transformative meditation known as "Exchanging Self." Originally shared with the Train a Happy Mind community, this practice has deep roots in Tibetan Buddhism. For nearly a thousand years, it remained a closely guarded tradition, recently made accessible to all. If this meditation resonates with you, consider joining the Train a Happy Mind community, which gathers on Sunday mornings. Participation is open to everyone, either for free or by donation.

Episode 177: Exchanging Self with Other

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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?

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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. In the language of Buddhism, metta or maitri.

Episode 26. Guided Meditation on Love

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NPR's Laura Sydell talks with Scott Snibbe about his book, How to Train a Happy Mind, at The Battery in San Francisco. They discuss interdependence (or emptiness) at length and also how great movies and comedians, like Jerry Seinfeld, can capture Buddhism's insights into how to live happy lives.

Episode 176: NPR's Laura Sydell Talks with Scott Snibbe

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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?

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The recent U.S. election has left our country more divided than ever, with Donald Trump elected as the next president. Whether this news fills you with hope or despair, today's episode offers a fresh perspective on how we can respond with curiosity, compassion, and a commitment to finding common ground even when it feels impossible.

Scott shares his personal reflections on nonviolence, the deeper motivations that drive us all, and how you can still recognize the fundamental goodness in everyone, even those you vehemently disagree with. Through meditation and thoughtful exploration, you'll learn to soften your...

Kazu Haga leads a powerful guided meditation for letting go of anger and other negative emotions based on the principles of nonviolence. Haga, a renowned nonviolence and restorative justice trainer, combines analytical meditation, visualization, breathwork, and mindfulness meditation to cultivate loving-kindness, inner peace, and compassion.

Episode 174: Meditation on Nonviolence with Kazu Haga 

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Kazu Haga's book, Healing Resistance, explains that nonviolence isn't just refraining from harm, but a sophisticated six-step strategy that begins with research and dialogue and ends, most importantly, with reconciliation. He explains that the purpose of nonviolence is not just to create a change we desire in the world, but to heal relationships and enrich our sense of connectedness, respect, and interdependence with all beings. 

Kazu graciously took time off from raising his five-month-old child to speak about why nonviolence works and how to counter the common objections to nonviolence. Scott and Kazu also talk about healing f...

This episode is in honor and celebration of the life of Greg Hillis.

Christian Scholar Greg Hillis speaks of the parallels between Christianity and Buddhism, the possibility of universal love, mystical experiences that break through to the beauty and interconnectedness of reality, and social activism that respects—and even loves—those we disagree with.

Episode 108: Universal Love in Christianity & Buddhism with Greg Hillis

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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

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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 “spiritual democracy” for developing healthy feelings of connection to others—even those we most despise.

Episode 22. Spiritual Democracy

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This powerful guided meditation for letting go of negative emotions with Paula Chichester helps cultivate love, mindfulness, and inner peace. Whether you're a beginner or deepening an existing meditation practice, this session invites you to take deep breaths, visualize love, and be fully present, embracing the flow of life with mindfulness.

Episode 172: Loving Yourself, Loving Others, & Letting Go—Paula Chichester

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The ancient word yogi, or yogini in its female form, refers to someone who's dedicated their life to inner transformation through meditation. They often spend years or even decades in solitary retreat. Scott's teacher and friend Paula Chichester is one of the vanishingly few modern people who has chosen to live such a life of isolation and inner adventure. 

In this conversation, Paula talks about balancing the inner development fostered by meditation with the outer transformation of social action. She talks about the joys and challenges of long-term retreat and the practicalities of how to pay for i...

The ancient word yogi, or yogini in its female form, refers to someone who has dedicated their life to inner transformation through meditation. They often spend years or even decades in solitary retreat. My teacher and friend Paula Chichester is one of the vanishingly few modern people who has chosen to live such a life of isolation and inner adventure. It was my honor recently to speak with her about her life’s journey.

In our conversation, Paula talks about balancing the inner development fostered by meditation with the outer transformation of social action, the joys and ch...

Scott speaks with artist and musician Laurie Anderson at New York's Tibet House about Scott's new book, How to Train a Happy Mind. They discuss how the tools of analytical meditation have helped them cultivate lives of meaning and satisfaction, and foster transformation and even joy through tragedy.

For those of you unfamiliar with her work, Laurie Anderson is one of our greatest living artists. Her work includes spoken word and performance, top charting albums, music videos, digital art, film, virtual reality, and the invention of ingenious instruments like the tape bow violin and the talking stick...

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 liberation, a the true source of refuge that we can find within our own mind.

Episode 18. Guided Meditation - Renunciation

Four years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path t...

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

Four years ago, we created this podcast to share the rich tradition of Tibetan Buddhist analytical meditation in a form that requires no belief beyond what science currently accepts. The first 40 episodes of the podcast gradually go through all of these topics, in order, beginning with appreciating the gift of our life and our place in the universe, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding...

Dr. Cornel West combines a formidable intellect with an enormous heart and an unceasing drive for social justice that transcends his multiple identities as an academic, author, philosopher, theologian, political activist, social critic, and public intellectual. Many of you even know him as an actor for his brief, but memorable appearances, in The Matrix films. Of course, Dr. West is also an independent candidate in this year's U.S. Presidential Election. 

Scott spoke with Dr. West a couple of weeks ago about compassionate leadership, nonviolence, social and economic justice, and the balance between inner and outer transformation t...

A couple of months ago, Scott Snibbe was in New York City for a conversation with Paul Miller at The Rubin Museum for the release of his recent book, How to Train a Happy Mind. Paul is an old friend who'd be famous enough for his incredible pioneering work with collage hip hop music as DJ Spooky, but he has so many other identities as an author, public intellectual, and artist.

Episode 168: DJ Spooky + Snibbe at the Rubin Museum

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For this week's episode, we're sharing a recent meditation Scott Snibbe led for our new Train a Happy Mind community on letting go of suffering. Every Sunday morning, he leads a meditation on one of the topics from How to Train a Happy Mind. Sometimes he also expands into other topics or leads practices relating to current events. This topic's chapter is called Am I the Most Important Person in the Universe?

In this talk and its meditation, Scott touches on how our own delusions of anger and attachment connect to the bigger problems in the world...

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 exactly what we want. It’s a retelling of the Buddha’s very first teaching, The Four Noble Truths: on suffering, its causes and antidotes, with a modern twist.
Duration: 00:38:41

Venerable Thubten Chodron offers a Buddhist meditation to help work through anger in a compassionate and loving manner.

Episode 166: Ven. Thubten Chodren Meditation on Anger

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Several years ago, I read Venerable Thubten Chodron's book, Working with Anger, and I found it quite inspiring. A couple of months ago, her schedule finally allowed time to speak with me. We talked exclusively about anger, what it is, why it's harmful, and how we can work with anger in ways that heal relationships, rather than destroy them. She touches on anger's role in some of the most challenging situations, like gender bias and war protests, and how we can deal with these situations courageously and skillfully. 

Venerable Thubten Chodron is an author, teacher, and the f...

Tenzin Chogkyi talks to Scott Snibbe about his new book, How to Train a Happy Mind, at the Medicine for Nightmares bookstore in San Francisco.

Episode 164: Tenzin Chogkyi & Scott Snibbe Medicine for Nightmares SF How to Train a Happy Mind

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What do you do when you’re alone? When you’re scared, anxious, lonely, afraid, or feeling strong craving? In our guided meditation, we explore the Buddhist view on refuge and how to find a deep source of strength and peace within our own minds.

Episode 112: Finding Refuge in the Mind—A Guided Meditation

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What do you do when you’re alone? When you’re scared, 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.

Episode 14:  What do You do When You're Alone? [re-record]

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Venerable Robina Courtin guides a beautiful Tara meditation on hope that uses visualization and Buddhist teachings.

Episode 163: Tara Meditation on Hope—Ven. Robina Courtin

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Our very first podcast guest, Venerable Robina Courtin is back in today's timely episode on how to deal with the despair and hopelessness many people feel today about war, injustice, inequity, and the environment.  Venerable Robina was ordained as a Buddhist nun in the late 1970s. She's worked closely with her teachers Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, to help spread Buddhist wisdom as an editorial director of wisdom, publications, editor of Mandala magazine, executive director of Liberation Prison Project,  and the lively, charismatic touring-teacher of Buddhism.

Episode 162:  How to Heal Despair with Venerable Robina Courtin
Duration: 00:47:03

In New York City, a couple months ago, I had the honor of sharing a public conversation with one of my Buddhist heroes, the renowned author and scholar Robert Thurman. In this episode's conversation, we share an edited recording from that evening, talking about everything from overcoming self-hatred, enjoying pleasure without attachment, getting ghosted by the Dalai Lama, and how one might come to have compassion for someone as dangerous and deadly as Vladimir Putin.

Episode 161:  Robert Thurman & Scott Snibbe at Tibet House: How to Train a Happy Mind

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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 can sleep better and be your best self the next day.

Episode 12: Guided Meditation—Mental Cause And Effect

Four years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment to share the...

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 that lets us release regret and pain to face each day with renewed presence and joy.

Episode 11: Mental Cause and Effect

Four years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment to sh...

Yangsi Rinpoche's gave a beautiful talk a couple of months ago with the intriguing title "Contentment Plus Ambition." He was generous enough to sit down with me afterwards for an interview about the same topic in which he talks about how to practice real self-compassion and even how we can create the causes for world peace.
 
Yangsi Rinpoche studied at Sera Jey Monastery in south India until 1995 when he graduated with the highest degree of Geshe Lharampa. Rinpoche now lives in Portland, Oregon where he's president and professor of Buddhist studies at Maitripa College, a Buddhist Institute o...

Restorative justice practitioner sujatha baliga talks to Scott Snibbe about his new meditation book, How to Train a Happy Mind.

Episode 159: sujatha baliga & Scott Snibbe in conversation: How to Train a Happy Mind

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A guided meditation on impermanence that helps us release fear and anxiety to embrace the constant change at every scale of reality: from particles, possessions, homes, and the environment, to our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and relationships. When we embrace impermanence, we more easily take on challenges like today’s Coronavirus crisis. We become more fully present to those around us and we can even more deeply appreciate life’s impermanent pleasures.

Episode 10. Guided Meditation - Embracing Impermanence

Four years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment to share the rich tradition of Tibeta...

We cling to things as if they won’t change, but change is the nature of reality. When we embrace impermanence, we prepare ourselves for big changes, and are able to let go of our fear and anxiety to become more fully present to those around us, to make the most meaningful choices day-to-day, and to more deeply appreciate life’s fleeting pleasures.

Episode 9. Embracing Impermanence

Four 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 belief beyond what s...

In this guided meditation, Stephen Batchelor invites you to unconditionally embrace your experience of the moment, to simply watch all thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and notice the ground of nonreactive awareness. This guides you toward a path rooted in freedom, openness, and love.

Episode 158: Meditation on Embracing Life with Stephen Batchelor

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 Nearly 30 years ago, Stephen Batchelor wrote a book called Buddhism Without Beliefs that's become a foundational work for those seeking to adopt Buddhism into a non-religious form while still maintaining the power and authenticity of its time tested practices. I had a chance to speak with Stephen Batchelor recently from his home in France, where he shared his own creative struggle with Buddhism: from his origins as an ordained Tibetan Buddhist monk to becoming a skeptical agnostic who admits that he simply doesn't know the answers to life's biggest questions.

Episode 157: Buddhism Without Beliefs with Stephen Batchelor Duration: 00:32:22

Derek Fagerstrom interviews Scott Snibbe about his new book, How to Train a Happy Mind, at San Francisco’s Book Passage. Derek is the co-founder of Pop-up Magazine, and has worked at Esquire, Interview, and Francis Ford Coppola's literary journal Zoetrope: All-Story. How to Train a Happy Mind is out now in paperback, e-book, and audiobook. You can find it anywhere you buy books.

Episode 156: Book Passage Talk with Derek Fagerstrom

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Scott Snibbe leads a meditation from his new book, How to Train a Happy Mind, on how to make the most of our precious lives.

Episode 155: Precious Life Meditation

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Scott Snibbe shares a chapter from his new book, How to Train a Happy Mind: The Precious Life. If you enjoy this episode, check out the whole audiobook on Audible, which includes guided meditations!

Episode 154: The Precious Life—Chapter Reading from How to Train a Happy Mind

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This is an exciting episode for the podcast because my book, How to Train a Happy Mind, comes out today. To celebrate its release, we're sharing a conversation I had with best-selling author Vicki McKenzie a couple of weeks ago at a book preview event in London, in front of a live audience.

This podcast is where I developed most of the ideas for the book, based on more than a decade leading meditations that eventually formed many of our episodes. I want to thank all our listeners for your feedback and support over these four years...

Meenadchi guides a meditation on discovering, playing with, and feeling the good things in your body through a light visualization.

Episode 152: Meditation on Feeling Good with Meenadchi

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A couple of decades ago, a friend introduced me to a book called Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. Over the years, I've tried imperfectly to use its gentler forms of communication. At various points in life the techniques of NVC, as it's known for short, have saved me from losing a lawsuit, losing a job, and losing a partner. Still, these techniques didn't always work for me. When our producer Annie Nguyen recently introduced me to a book called Decolonizing Nonviolent Communication, it put words to those challenges. 

The book's author, Meenadchi, a somatic healing practitioner, spoke w...

Dr. Suzanne Wertheim is the author of The Inclusive Language Field Guide. An academic for many years, she now specializes in analyzing and addressing bias at work, helping companies like Google and Reddit promote speech that's more inclusive and more connecting. After I read Suzanne's book, I was struck by the parallels between her work and the Buddhist ethical foundation of right speech. 

In our interview, we talk about embarrassing mistakes we both made in our speech, how to both forcefully and compassionately confront harmful speech, and how to recognize and transform the bias in our own l...

A complete guided meditation session expanding your compassion, stabilizing concentration on the breath, and observing your thoughts.

Episode 3: Guided Meditation: Stabilizing the Mind and Watching Thoughts

Four 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 belief beyond what science currently accepts. The first 40 episodes of the podcast gradually go through all of these topics, in order, beginning with appreciating the gift of our life and our place in the universe, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless co...

Over the past few years meditation has become popular as a way to help reduce stress, be focused at work, sleep better, or simply relax. Yet meditation isn’t just a tool to improve focus or relax, but a way to strengthen the positive qualities we all naturally possess: compassion, kindness, generosity, patience, humor, and finding joy in everyday life. This episode explores this higher purpose of meditation through the less familiar technique of analytic meditationthat uses stories, thoughts, and emotions to steer our minds toward happiness, meaning, and benefiting others.

Episode 2: What Is Meditation?

Fo...

Scott Tusa leads an equanimity meditation—based on the Mahayana Buddhist tradition—that works with three kinds of relationships in our life. The purpose is to cultivate compassion, loving-kindness, and understanding.

Episode 149: Equanimity Meditation with Scott Tusa

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After ordination by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Scott Tusa spent nine years as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Today, he's an irreverent meditation teacher and a brand-new father. In this episode, Scott and I talk about some hard decisions we've faced in life, and that the world faces today, asking ourselves, What is the right thing to do? Is there a right and wrong from a Buddhist perspective? How did Scott and I deal with the painful decisions we faced in our lives to get divorced and to give up a monastic life? We also grapple with one of...

Even a short 10-minute meditation has the power to calm your body and mind. Here’s a helpful guided meditation that in just 10 minutes a day can improve your well-being. Even though it's short, this is a complete meditation session including establishing proper meditation posture, motivating our meditation to be a force for good, stabilizing the mind on the breath, letting go of thoughts, cultivating beneficial thoughts, and a dedication to seal your meditation practice.

A Guided 10 Minute Meditation to Calm the Mind

Four years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment to shar...

Four 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 belief beyond what science currently accepts. The first 40 episodes of the podcast gradually go through all of these topics, in order, beginning with appreciating the gift of our life and our place in the universe, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these ta...

Scott Snibbe shares a gentle Buddhist approach to self-forgiveness, letting go, establishing good habits, and rejoicing in all the good we've done. Move into the new year with your best intentions and best self.

Episode 147: Letting Go and Looking Forward in the New Year

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Grammy Award winning artist Laurie Anderson, a longtime student of Buddhism and meditation, shares her personal path with Buddhism, approaching art with a beginner’s mind, staying present with suffering without letting it overwhelm you, and making our lives meaningful.

Laurie Anderson is one of our greatest living artists. Her work includes spoken word and performance, top-charting albums and music videos, digital art, film, virtual reality, and the invention of ingenious instruments like the tape bow violin and the talking stick. She’s won the Grammy Award and many other honors, and is currently the subject of a fa...

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"

This is a rebroadcast of one of the year's most popular episodes.

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Dr. Katherine MacLean leads a meditation practice called RAFT: Remembering to be Aware of Feelings in your body and Trust your experience. Katherine says that mushrooms shared this practice with her as a way to help others access the space of psychedelics from a sober standpoint.

Episode 146: RAFT Meditation with Dr. Katherine MacLean

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Ten years ago Dr. Katherine MacLean conducted the first scientific study of the combined effects of psychedelics with meditation. The encouraging results of the study showed the long-term beneficial effects these substances can have on our concentration, emotion regulation, openness, wellbeing, and happiness. 

In our conversation I learned what psychedelics have in common with meditation and how they can compliment one another. Katherine also shared when psychedelics aren't useful or even when they can be harmful. She offers careful advice as to when these substances might be of benefit and when they aren't.

Episode 145: Psychedelics, M...

Psychedelic psychotherapist Dr. Michael Sapiro leads a guided meditation on mindful awareness that connects you with the present moment and your senses.

Episode 144: Mindful Awareness Meditation with Michael Sapiro 

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Psychedelics have been in the news a lot lately as a new way to help people work through otherwise intractable issues of grief depression and PTSD. Dr. Michael Sapiro is a psychedelic psychotherapist and researcher who has worked successfully with psychedelics in his practice for years. 

He focuses on helping combat vets and first responders overcome PTSD and other trauma; in his words, transforming worldly warriors into spiritual warriors. Listen to this episode to hear how psychedelic substances, meditation, and Buddhism have helped his patients overcome huge problems and open up to themselves and to the people a...