How to Train a Happy Mind

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

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

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials 

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

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

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials 

When uncertainty and bad news pull the mind toward pessimism, how can we cultivate genuine hope without ignoring reality?

In this guided meditation, Geshe Legtsok leads a reflection on gratitude, good fortune, impermanence, and intentional action. By recognizing the blessings in our own lives, appreciating the positive contributions of others, and remembering that change is always possible, we develop a more balanced and hopeful outlook.

Episode 226: Meditation to Cultivate Hope for the Future | Geshe Legtsok

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

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials 

What if we've been looking at the modern world all wrong?

Despite the headlines, extreme poverty has plummeted, knowledge is more accessible than ever, and ancient meditation practices are spreading across the globe. In this conversation, Geshe Tenzin Legtsok suggests that humanity may not be living in the worst of times, but on the edge of an unprecedented opportunity for wisdom, compassion, and human flourishing.

Episode 225: Is This Actually the Best Time to Be Alive? — Geshe Legtsok

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

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials 

Dostoevsky is often credited with saying, “The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison.” The practice of renunciation begins by recognizing the ways we're already trapped—by anger, craving, impatience, and the endless search for satisfaction outside ourselves. 

This meditation helps us see these patterns clearly and turn toward a deeper source of freedom, discovering a refuge within our own mind that no external circumstance can provide.

Episode 18. Guided Meditation - Renunciation

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

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials 

What do The Matrix and Jerry Seinfeld have in common with Buddhist wisdom? In this episode, Scott explores the practice of renunciation—not giving up life's pleasures, but letting go of the mistaken belief that lasting happiness comes from external circumstances. 

Through insights from The Matrix, comedy, and Buddhist psychology, discover how true freedom begins when we stop blaming the world for our suffering and start transforming our own minds.

Episode 17: The Red Pill of Renunciation: Embracing Reality As It Is

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

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials 

Following the passing of Robert Thurman, we wanted to revisit one of our favorite conversations with the beloved scholar, teacher, and pioneer who helped bring Tibetan Buddhist wisdom to the modern world.

A former monk ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Columbia University professor, bestselling author, and co-founder of Tibet House US, Thurman devoted his life to sharing profound insights on compassion, interconnectedness, and human flourishing. His books, teachings, and joyful spirit inspired generations of students and seekers around the world.

In this memorable conversation, we explore the illusion of separateness, the nature of reality, and the possibility that our deepest nature is joy itself. Thurman once said this was one of his favorite interviews, and we’re grateful to share it again in celebration of his extraordinary life and enduring legacy.

Episode 224: Remembering Robert Thurman: Psychonaut, Scholar, and Friend 

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

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials 

So many of us get lost in terror about humanity’s future, but how often do we ask, “What’s our best possible future?” Bestselling author and climate activist Kim Stanley Robinson joined Scott on Earth Day this year for an urgent and hopeful conversation at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism.

This is the third time we've been fortunate enough to have Stan on the podcast, and this time we traced a through line across humanity’s past, present, and future through three of Scott's favorite books of Stan's: The Ministry for the Future, High Sierra: A Love Story, and Shaman.

Where do we find hope in the face of the climate crisis? How can we reconnect with the extraordinary nature that, for many of us, is right outside our door? And what can our ancestors from 30,000 years ago teach us about living in balance with the planet and one another today? Find out in today's episode.

Episode 223: Our Best Possible Future—Kim Stanley Robinson

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

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials 

This is a clear-eyed meditation on suffering: both what suffering is, and the mental source of suffering in our delusions of attachment, anger, and self-centered ignorance. 

We practice the antidotes to these delusions, giving us tools for a more balanced, less self-centered view of our experience that offers sustained stability and happiness through life’s challenges and desires.

16. Guided Meditation: Letting Go of Suffering

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

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials 

Do we each secretly believe we matter just a little more than everyone else? That my happiness, my ambitions, my relationships carry greater weight? 

From a Buddhist perspective, this deeply ingrained belief is the root of our suffering: a delusion known as ignorance, considered the true source of everything from heartbreak and disappointment to the quiet dissatisfaction that lingers even when we get exactly what we want. 

This is a modern retelling of the Buddha’s first teaching, The Four Noble Truths, exploring the nature of suffering, its causes, and the path beyond it through a contemporary lens.

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

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

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials