How to Train a Happy Mind
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© 2024 How to Train a Happy Mind
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The How to Train a Happy Mind podcast brings meditation to modern people hungry for happy, meaningful lives. Each week, host Scott Snibbe and his guests share powerful mind training techniques that go beyond mindfulness to harness our intelligence, emotions, and imagination. Learn how to build a happy mind, fulfilling relationships, and a better world through a secular approach to meditation that is based on modern science and psychology, yet grounded in the authentic thousand-year old Tibetan Buddhist tradition of analytical meditation.
How to Train a Happy Mind is a project of the nonprofit Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment. Our host, Scott Snibbe, is a twenty-five-year student of Tibetan Buddhism whose teachers include His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Snibbe is the author of the popular How to Train a Happy Mind book, and leads meditation classes and retreats worldwide infused with science, humor, and the realities of the modern world.
252 Episodes
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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?Support the show
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 everyon...
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 Support the show
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-o...
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 HillisSupport the show
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 EquanimitySupport the show
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 desp...
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 ChichesterSupport the show
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 f...
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...
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 - Renunci...
What do The Matrix and Jerry Seinfeld have to do with renouncing suffering?Episode 17. The Red Pill of Renunciation: Embracing Reality As It IsFour 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, an...
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 coupl...
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 MuseumSupport 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 a...
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 ...
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 AngerSupport the show
Several years ago, I read Venerable Thubten Chodron's book, Working with Anger, and I found it quite inspiring. A couple of months ago, her schedule finally allowed time to speak with me. We talked exclusively about anger, what it is, why it's harmful, and how we can work with anger in ways that heal relationships, rather than destroy them. She touches on anger's role in some of the most challenging situations, like gender bias and war protests, and how we can deal with these situations coura...
Tenzin Chogkyi talks to Scott Snibbe about his new book, How to Train a Happy Mind, at the Medicine for Nightmares bookstore in San Francisco.Episode 164: Tenzin Chogkyi & Scott Snibbe Medicine for Nightmares SF How to Train a Happy MindSupport the show
What do you do when you’re alone? When you’re scared, anxious, lonely, afraid, or feeling strong craving? In our guided meditation, we explore the Buddhist view on refuge and how to find a deep source of strength and peace within our own minds.Episode 112: Finding Refuge in the Mind—A Guided MeditationSupport the show
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