How to Train a Happy Mind

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

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics  shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind  book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

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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

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics  shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind  book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

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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

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics  shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind  book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

Support the show

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 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 topics.

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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 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 topics.

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics  shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind  book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

Support the show

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 that he believes is required to truly steer the world toward the thriving of all human beings and all life on earth.

Episode 169: Dr. Cornel West: Truth, Justice, and Love

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics  shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind  book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

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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

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics  shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind  book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

Support the show

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, like war and the activists working to stop it. He also shares some thoughts on what he's learned about how to be an effective activist from the book America's Racial Karma; and how racism, sexism, and colonialism connect to what Buddhists understand as the core delusion of pride.

Episode 167: Freeing Ourselves from Suffering Anger, Craving, Pride, and War

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics  shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind  book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

Support the show

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.

Episode 15. Am I More Important Than Everyone Else in the Universe?

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics  shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind  book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

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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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