Diana guides walking meditation as a core recovery practice, comparing each step to a trusting fall and a snail’s glide. The practice invites letting go of self-focused stories, embodying chosen values through how one walks, and widening awareness to include others. Then you return to seated meditation to practice compassion by holding one difficult person, self-issue, or global concern with wishes for relief. Diana closes with a poem about recovery as lacing up worn running shoes and trusting the open road.

Suggested Next Episode:

You can also enjoy Diana's related talk--Episode 195 Secret Sangha: Recovery.

Related Resources

Get enhanced show notes for this episode

• Become a Wise Effort Community member
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Order my book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, and receive special bonus gifts.
• Want to become more psychologically flexible? Take Diana's "Foundations of ACT" course.

Diana's Events

• See Diana at an upcoming event

Connecting With Diana

• Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Leave a 5-star review on Apple so people like you can find the show.
• Follow Diana on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Diana’s website.

Thanks to the team, Craig and Ashley Hiatt, and Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

Are you growing? Growth is becoming more comfortable in your own skin and prioritizing what is most essential.

Growth is also letting go of needing to be the center of attention things.

In this week's, Secret Sangha we explore growth and a personal level to a transpersonal one.

Join me. It's a good one.

Listen and learn:

1. When to follow structure versus improvise, and recognizing when not to be the “star.”
2. How growth moves you towards self-transformation and deeper interconnection
3. That real growth often emerges when life cracks you open

Suggested Next Episode:

You can also enjoy Diana's related Bonus Meditation: Growth

Related Resources

Get enhanced show notes for this episode

• Become a Wise Effort Community member
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Order my book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, and receive special bonus gifts.
• Want to become more psychologically flexible? Take Diana's "Foundations of ACT" course.

Diana's Events

• See Diana at an upcoming event

Connecting With Diana

• Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Leave a 5-star review on Apple so people like you can find the show.
• Follow Diana on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Diana’s website.

Thanks to the team, Craig and Ashley Hiatt, and Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join The Wise Effort Community.

The Wise Effort Community exists to help people keep doing the work — applying ACT and contemplative practice to a real life — long after the book is closed, the workshop is done, and the retreat is over. The thing they're buying is sustained, guided practice with me and with each other, so the insights don't evaporate.

The Wise Effort Community is your guided home for ongoing Wise Effort practice — monthly live teaching with me, a weekly practice rhythm, an on-demand library, and a community of people doing the work alongside you. Also, sustaining members get “Member’s Special" early access and special pricing to Diana’s In-Person Events, including Diana’s gatherings, courses, programs, and retreats.

Wise Effort Community

Dr. Diana Hill guides a non-dual, open-awareness meditation beginning with listening to a bell, landing in the body through sound, contact with the ground, and breath (“Breathing in, I’m alive; breathing out, I’m here”). Participants visualize their life as a timeline stretching left into the past—through birth, ancestors, and even a star’s “cracking open”—and right into the future through their continuing influence. They are invited to meet a younger self from a moment of growth, bring that self to sit on the left, and then welcome an older, more authentic, flexible, focused, and harmonious self to sit on the right, offering stability while feeling “lost” in the unknown. The practice emphasizes presence, radical acceptance, and saying “I don’t know,” followed by a Shel Silverstein reading on “growing down,” and closes with the three refuges: being, becoming, and belonging.

Suggested Next Episode:

You can also enjoy Diana's related talk--Episode 193 Secret Sangha: Growth.

Related Resources

Get enhanced show notes for this episode

• Become a Wise Effort Community member
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Order my book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, and receive special bonus gifts.
• Want to become more psychologically flexible? Take Diana's "Foundations of ACT" course.

Diana's Events

• See Diana at an upcoming event

Connecting With Diana

• Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Leave a 5-star review on Apple so people like you can find the show.
• Follow Diana on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Diana’s website.

Thanks to the team, Craig and Ashley Hiatt, and Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

Do you keep trying to make big changes, only to burn out or get stuck at the choice point? In this episode of The Wise Effort Show, Dr. Diana Hill talks with Eric Zimmer, host of The One You Feed and author of How a Little Becomes a Lot, about why lasting transformation happens through small, consistent actions—shaped by clear values, a “middle way” mindset, supportive structure, and compassionate self-talk. Drawing from Eric’s recovery from heroin addiction, Diana’s pushup challenge, and everyday examples like food choices and pain language, they explore how to navigate motivation, self-doubt, autopilot, and other traps, and why meaningful change requires both inner skills and connection with others.

Listen and learn:

1. How “little by little” creates real change over time
2. How to decide what is worth wanting and work with values conflicts
3. How the middle way and self-compassion help you move through setbacks

Share this episode with someone who needs a steadier, more sustainable approach to change.

Related Resources

Get enhanced show notes for this episode

• Become a Wise Effort Community member
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Order my book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, and receive special bonus gifts.
• Want to become more psychologically flexible? Take Diana's "Foundations of ACT" course.

Diana's Events

• See Diana at an upcoming event

Connecting With Diana

• Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Leave a 5-star review on Apple so people like you can find the show.
• Follow Diana on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Diana’s website.

Thanks to the team, Craig and Ashley Hiatt, and Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

Mentioned in this episode:

Tell the Truth Salon Series

 You are invited to join me live in person or streaming online here in Santa Barbara to Tell the Truth Salon Series. This is something that I have been dreaming up for a while now. I want us to gather in person, online, and have real conversations, unedited, unscripted, with people who are change-makers in our world, but also to uncover our own inner truths. drdianahill.com/salon

Tell the Truth Salon Series

Do you shut down, look away, or push yourself harder when you’re faced with suffering—your own or someone else’s? In this Secret Sangha episode of The Wise Effort Show, Dr. Diana Hill continues the month-long series on the “four immeasurables” by exploring compassion as both sensitivity to suffering and a commitment to alleviate it. Using examples from neuroscience, the Milgram experiments, and personal stories, she unpacks common blocks to compassionate action—like overwhelm, avoidance of difficult feelings, the “just world” bias, deferring to outer authority, and diffusion of responsibility. Diana offers a grounding-based compassion practice to help you stay present, connect with your values and inner authority, take responsibility with care, and build wise action from small moments to bigger conversations, including civil discourse with people you don’t understand.

Listen and learn:

1. How compassion includes both sensitivity to suffering and committed action
2. What the Milgram experiments reveal about authority, responsibility, and harm
3. How grounding helps you stay present and act from values and inner authority

Share this episode with someone who wants to meet suffering with steadiness and courage.

Listen to the Meditation: Compassion.Related Resources

Get enhanced show notes for this episode

• Become a Wise Effort Community member
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Order my book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, and receive special bonus gifts.
• Want to become more psychologically flexible? Take Diana's "Foundations of ACT" course.

Diana's Events

• See Diana at an upcoming event

Connecting With Diana

• Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Leave a 5-star review on Apple so people like you can find the show.
• Follow Diana on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Diana’s website.

Thanks to the team, Craig and Ashley Hiatt, and Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join The Wise Effort Community.

The Wise Effort Community exists to help people keep doing the work — applying ACT and contemplative practice to a real life — long after the book is closed, the workshop is done, and the retreat is over. The thing they're buying is sustained, guided practice with me and with each other, so the insights don't evaporate.

The Wise Effort Community is your guided home for ongoing Wise Effort practice — monthly live teaching with me, a weekly practice rhythm, an on-demand library, and a community of people doing the work alongside you. Also, sustaining members get “Member’s Special" early access and special pricing to Diana’s In-Person Events, including Diana’s gatherings, courses, programs, and retreats.

Wise Effort Community

Dr. Diana Hill guides a Compassion Practice beginning with soothing rhythm breathing, slowing the breath to match one’s nervous system while breathing in clarity and breathing out tension. She then leads a grounding visualization, rooting the body into the earth and calling to mind compassionate teachers, people, or animals, distilling their wise, loving essence into light that illuminates the body and evokes a warm face, strong back, and open heart. From this “Bodhisattva” compassionate self, the listener offers care to their own current struggle, then brings in a person they find difficult and holds both perspectives with understanding. The practice expands to include the suffering of the wider community and world, offering intentions for unity, freedom from suffering, and peace, followed by silent sitting.

Listen to the Diana's Secret Sangha talk on Compassion

Related Resources

Get enhanced show notes for this episode

• Become a Wise Effort Community member
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Order my book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, and receive special bonus gifts.
• Want to become more psychologically flexible? Take Diana's "Foundations of ACT" course.

Diana's Events

• See Diana at an upcoming event

Connecting With Diana

• Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Leave a 5-star review on Apple so people like you can find the show.
• Follow Diana on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Diana’s website.

Thanks to the team, Craig and Ashley Hiatt, and Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

Do you feel thrown off balance by praise, blame, fear, or stressful news when life hits hard? In this Secret Sangha episode of The Wise Effort Show, Dr. Diana Hill continues the four-week “four immeasurables” series by focusing on equanimity—steady love—as the prior condition of balance from which pleasant and unpleasant experiences arise. She explores how the “eight worldly winds” can destabilize us, how the near enemies of equanimity show up as indifference, control, adding on stories, or acting out, and shares personal examples from her own life. Diana offers practical ways to return to steadiness through essential self-care, stillness and silence, flexible attention to what stabilizes you, remembering “enoughness,” and being the calm you seek.

Listen and learn:

1. How the “eight worldly winds” can knock you off balance
2. The near enemies of equanimity: indifference, control, adding on, and acting out
3. How stillness, silence, and essential self-care support steady love
4. Practices like flexible attention, remembering enoughness, and “being the calm” you seek

Share this episode with someone who could use steadier love this week.

Suggested Next Episode:

You can also enjoy Diana's related Bonus Meditation: Equanimity

Related Resources

Get enhanced show notes for this episode

• Become a Wise Effort Community member
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Order my book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, and receive special bonus gifts.
• Want to become more psychologically flexible? Take Diana's "Foundations of ACT" course.

Diana's Events

• See Diana at an upcoming event

Connecting With Diana

• Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Leave a 5-star review on Apple so people like you can find the show.
• Follow Diana on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Diana’s website.

Thanks to the team, Craig and Ashley Hiatt, and Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join The Wise Effort Community.

The Wise Effort Community exists to help people keep doing the work — applying ACT and contemplative practice to a real life — long after the book is closed, the workshop is done, and the retreat is over. The thing they're buying is sustained, guided practice with me and with each other, so the insights don't evaporate.

The Wise Effort Community is your guided home for ongoing Wise Effort practice — monthly live teaching with me, a weekly practice rhythm, an on-demand library, and a community of people doing the work alongside you. Also, sustaining members get “Member’s Special" early access and special pricing to Diana’s In-Person Events, including Diana’s gatherings, courses, programs, and retreats.

Wise Effort Community

This breathwork and guided meditation session, led by Dr. Diana Hill, is part of the Diana's weekly Sangha community. This meditation guides a mindfulness practice beginning with “butterfly breath" and then invites listeners to rest attention on calming sounds arising from silence, adopt a stable and open posture of equanimity, and notice the natural steadiness of breathing. Listeners are asked to inquire inwardly what part of themselves needs tending to, meet sensations or emotions with steady love, and ask what that part wants them to know, responding with “I hear you, I see you.” The practice emphasizes being the spacious “prior condition” that holds sounds, feelings, worries, and others’ pain with presence, and offers three anchors to return to when off balance: breath, body/posture, and heart.

Suggested Next Episode:

You can also enjoy Diana's related talk--Episode 188 Secret Sangha: Equanimity.

Related Resources

Get enhanced show notes for this episode

• Become a Wise Effort Community member
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Order my book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, and receive special bonus gifts.
• Want to become more psychologically flexible? Take Diana's "Foundations of ACT" course.

Diana's Events

• See Diana at an upcoming event

Connecting With Diana

• Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Leave a 5-star review on Apple so people like you can find the show.
• Follow Diana on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Diana’s website.

Thanks to the team, Craig and Ashley Hiatt, and Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

Are you doing “all the right things” and still feeling like happiness keeps slipping through your fingers? In this episode, Dr. Diana Hill talks with Yale psychology professor and The Happiness Lab host Dr. Laurie Santos about the biggest mind traps that block joy—and the small, research-backed shifts that help you feel better in real life. Together, Diana and Laurie unpack why mind-wandering, hedonic adaptation (getting used to the good), and comparison quietly drain wellbeing—and how practices like mindfulness/savoring, treating negative emotions as helpful signals, radical acceptance, and “time affluence” can bring you back to what matters most.

Key takeaways you’ll learn in this episode:

1. The three biggest “happiness traps” (mind-wandering, adaptation, and comparison) and how to work with them.
2. Why chasing “good vibes only” can backfire—and how to redefine happiness as flourishing.
3. How to use negative emotions as signals (like a dashboard light) instead of problems to eliminate.
4. Why more money and achievement often don’t move happiness much—and what tends to help more (sleep, friends, free time, and presence).

Press play, then share this episode with a high-achiever friend (or anyone feeling stuck in the comparison spiral) who could use a science-backed reset on what actually creates joy.

Related Resources

Get enhanced show notes for this episode

• Become a Wise Effort Community member
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Order my book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, and receive special bonus gifts.
• Want to become more psychologically flexible? Take Diana's "Foundations of ACT" course.

Diana's Events

• See Diana at an upcoming event

Connecting With Diana

• Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Leave a 5-star review on Apple so people like you can find the show.
• Follow Diana on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Diana’s website.

Thanks to the team, Craig and Ashley Hiatt, and Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

Mentioned in this episode:

Tell the Truth Salon Series

 You are invited to join me live in person or streaming online here in Santa Barbara to Tell the Truth Salon Series. This is something that I have been dreaming up for a while now. I want us to gather in person, online, and have real conversations, unedited, unscripted, with people who are change-makers in our world, but also to uncover our own inner truths. drdianahill.com/salon

Tell the Truth Salon Series

Do you keep getting stuck in the same fights or feeling rejected in your relationship? In this episode of The Wise Effort Show, Dr. Diana Hill shares an evidence-based talk on the science of “wise and fierce” relationships, then follows with a conversation with athlete and entrepreneur Gabby Reece about what helps partnerships last.

Diana draws on relationship research and her clinical experience to explain why conflict isn’t the main problem—repair is—and on what predicts relationship satisfaction: commitment, appreciation, responsiveness, and sexual satisfaction. She also discusses research on sexual frequency and how motivation matters more than frequency (“getting it on” vs. “getting it over with”).

Diana offers a practical exercise to help listeners “put down the broom” of rigid stories: write your story about your partner and their story about you, identify the “negative truth,” then (1) create disconfirming evidence by noticing what contradicts your story about them, and (2) do something that proves their story about you wrong. In the conversation, Gabby describes how respect, emotional honesty, daily connection rituals, and sustaining momentum—along with supporting each partner’s individual passions—strengthen her decades-long marriage to Laird, and they discuss reframing intimacy bids and avoiding complacency.

Listen and share this episode with someone you want to strengthen a relationship with.

Listen and learn:

1. Why repair after disharmony matters more than avoiding conflict
2. The key relationship ingredients identified across 43 studies: commitment, appreciation, responsiveness, and sexual satisfaction
3. What the research suggests about sex frequency and why “getting it on” vs. “getting it over with” changes satisfaction

Related Resources

Get enhanced show notes for this episode

• Become a Wise Effort Community member
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Order my book, Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most, and receive special bonus gifts.
• Want to become more psychologically flexible? Take Diana's "Foundations of ACT" course.

Diana's Events

• See Diana at an upcoming event

Connecting With Diana

• Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Leave a 5-star review on Apple so people like you can find the show.
• Follow Diana on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Diana’s website.

Thanks to the team, Craig and Ashley Hiatt, and Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

Mentioned in this episode:

Tell the Truth Salon Series

 You are invited to join me live in person or streaming online here in Santa Barbara to Tell the Truth Salon Series. This is something that I have been dreaming up for a while now. I want us to gather in person, online, and have real conversations, unedited, unscripted, with people who are change-makers in our world, but also to uncover our own inner truths. drdianahill.com/salon

Tell the Truth Salon Series