How to Train a Happy Mind

Latest Episodes:

The Precious Life—Chapter Reading from How to Train a Happy Mind #154 Mar 19, 2024

Show notes

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

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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How to Train a Happy Mind book launch conversation with Scott Snibbe and Vicki Mackenzi #153 Mar 12, 2024

Show notes

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. You've helped me develop the book's simple eight-step program that combines Tibetan Buddhism with modern science and psychology. I'm excited to hear what you think about it.
If you'd like to buy How to Train a Happy Mind, you can find it anywhere you buy books. I've donated all my proceeds from the book to the Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment nonprofit. So your purchase helps support this podcast. If you end up enjoying the book, please consider reviewing it on Amazon or Goodreads, which will help other people discover it.
Episode 153: How to Train a Happy Mind book launch conversation with Scott Snibbe and Vicki Mackenzi

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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Meditation on Feeling Good with Meenadchi #152 Mar 05, 2024

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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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Decolonizing Nonviolent Communication with Meenadchi #151 Feb 27, 2024

Show notes

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 with me recently about the ways that she's updated nonviolent communication to account for the power structures in our society that exacerbate conflicts, and the interdependence between people and our environments that may have been missing from nonviolent communication's original formulation.
I find her approach, distinctly Buddhist as a "middle way" that helps us draw strong boundaries and fight the injustices in the world, while still holding love and compassion, even for our enemies. Meenadchi's therapeutic work centers on social change and embodied transformation. She specializes in healing members of communities impacted by gender-based violence, complex trauma, and serious mental illness.

Episode 151: Decolonizing Nonviolent Communication with Meenadchi

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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Compassionate Speech with Dr. Suzanne Wertheim #150 Feb 20, 2024

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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 language. Suzanne and I spoke for so long that it far outran our normal episode length. So, if you'd like to hear the full unedited hour and a half of our great conversation, including many specific examples of ways to speak inclusively and compassionately, check out the Skeptic's Path YouTube channel.
Episode 150: Compassionate Speech with Dr. Suzanne Wertheim

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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Meditation on Stabilizing the Mind and Watching Thoughts #3 [rebroadcast] Feb 13, 2024

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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 compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we will be re-releasing newly recorded versions of these talks and meditations.

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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What Is Meditation? #2 [rebroadcast] Feb 06, 2024

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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?
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 will be re-releasing newly recorded versions of these talks and meditations.

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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Equanimity Meditation with Scott Tusa #149 Jan 30, 2024

Show notes

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

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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What Is the Right Thing to Do? with Scott Tusa #148 Jan 23, 2024

Show notes

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 the biggest ethical dilemmas facing the world today, the violent conflict in Israel and Gaza.
Episode 148: What Is the Right Thing to Do? with Scott Tusa

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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10-Minute Meditation to Calm the Mind Jan 16, 2024

Show notes

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 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 will be re-releasing newly recorded versions of these talks and meditations.

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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