How to Train a Happy Mind

Latest Episodes:

5-Minute Breath Awareness Meditation with Larry Ward #191 May 27, 2025

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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

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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Healing America's Racial Karma—Larry Ward #190 May 20, 2025

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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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The Interdependent Self - Guided Meditation #43 [rebroadcast] May 13, 2025

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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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Who am I? #42 [rebroadcast] May 06, 2025

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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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Mindfulness Awareness Meditation with Susan Piver #189 Apr 22, 2025

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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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Inexplicable Joy—On the Heart Sutra & Buddhism Without Belief with Susan Piver #188 Apr 15, 2025

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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 joy that gives Susan's book its name. Join us to hear her unique take on a text she's been reciting for 30 years and discover her fresh, modern, and sometimes surprising ways of understanding words written nearly 2,000 years ago.

Episode 188: Inexplicable Joy—On the Heart Sutra & Buddhism Without Belief with Susan Piver

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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The Interdependent Nature of Reality #39 [rebroadcast] Apr 08, 2025

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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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From Panic to Peace: A Guided Meditation with Kazu Haga #187 Apr 01, 2025

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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 find peace not by escaping the world, but by grounding more deeply within it.

Episode 187: From Panic to Peace: A Guided Meditation with Kazu Haga

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Beyond Us vs Them: Transforming Society Through Fierce Vulnerability with Kazu Haga #186 Mar 25, 2025

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This week, Scott is joined by transformative activistand 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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Guided Meditation: How Things Exist #38 [rebroadcast] Mar 18, 2025

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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 minds that perceive them.
Episode 38: Meditation on How Things Exist

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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