How to Train a Happy Mind

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 anger with equanimity, transform criticism into compassion, and uncover the ways your mind shape your experience of reality.

Episode #175: Compassion for our Country: Meditations for Healing After a Divisive Election 

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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 from the violence in their own families, and strategies for ending the seemingly intractable wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Episode 173: Does Nonviolent Protest Work? Kazu Haga

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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 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 challenges of long-term retreat and the practicalities of how to pay for it, how to find support, and how to cheer yourself up with a “one person party” when things get tough.

Episode 171: Diary of a Yogini with Paula Chichester

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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. Laurie has won the Grammy Award and many other honors, and her artwork is regularly shown in major museums and galleries worldwide.

Episode 170: Stories We Tell Ourselves—Laurie Anderson & Scott Snibbe at Tibet House

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