How to Train a Happy Mind

Latest Episodes:

How Things Exist: Emptiness, Dependent Origination, and your Smartphone #37 [rebroadcast] Mar 11, 2025

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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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How to Use Your Phone Mindfully: A Guided Meditation for Digital Wellness—Jay Vidyarthi #185 Mar 04, 2025

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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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How to Build a Healthy Relationship with Technology–Jay Vidyarthi on Digital Wellness #184 Feb 25, 2025

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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 I've ever experienced, guiding us through a transformative practice to reset our digital instincts.
If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the constant pull of screens, notifications, and social media, this conversation is for you.

Episode 184: How to Build a Healthy Relationship with Technology–Jay Vidyarthi on Digital Wellness

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Bitcoin and Buddhism #70 [rebroadcast] Feb 18, 2025

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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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Meditation on Generosity #183 Feb 11, 2025

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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.

Episode 183: Meditation on Generosity

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A Buddhist Take on Homelessness & Generosity #182 Feb 04, 2025

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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 the people we touch) toward happiness, better relationships, and a better world.

Episode 182: A Buddhist Take on Homelessness & Generosity

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Guided Meditation: Universalizing our Problems and Pleasures #32 [rebroadcast] Jan 28, 2025

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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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Universalizing: Transforming Pain and Pleasure into Love and Compassion #31 [rebroadcast] Jan 21, 2025

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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

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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Two Meditations on Emptiness with Dr. Jan Willis #181 Jan 14, 2025

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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 where it exists and whether or not it exists in a solid way that we think it does.
Episode 181. Two Meditations on Emptiness with Dr. Jan Willis

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What Are the Six Perfections? with Dr. Jan Willis #180 Jan 07, 2025

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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 in the segregated south. And she shares her insights as one of the foremost Western practitioners and scholars of Buddhism.
And that's just the beginning. Throughout this year, we'll dive deeper into each of these six perfections with inspiring interviews, meditations and discussions. If you're ready to discover how ancient wisdom can meet modern challenges. You're in the right place.
Episode 180. What Are the Six Perfections? Dr. Jan Willis

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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