How to Train a Happy Mind

A 10-Minute guided meditation on love shows us how to expand our love for our partner and family to a loving-kindness, or metta, that embraces all beings.10 Minute Meditation on Love (Loving-kindness)Support the show

If you want to know what love is, search beyond eighties songs to the wisdom of Buddhist loving-kindness that expands our love to all beings while also deepening our connection to our partner and family. This special  episode on love asks great Buddhist teachers the question of what love is, including Dr. Jan Willis, Ven. Kathleen McDonald, Dr. Rick Hanson, Geshe Tenzin Namdak, and Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche.Episode 52: I Want to Know What Love IsSupport the show

Buddhist teacher and author Wendy Haylett discusses the practice of Naikan and leads an analytical meditation that uses compassion to reflect on our more difficult relationships without judgement.Episode 133: Guided Meditation: Compassion through Looking InsideSupport the show

Wendy Shinyo Haylett is an author, Buddhist teacher, and lay minister with the Bright Dawn Center of Oneness Buddhism. She's the host of the popular Everyday Buddhism podcast where she kindly had me on as a guest last year. Wendy has more than 30 years of experience as a Buddhist practitioner and coach helping people live their personal and professional lives with more mindfulness and resilience. In our conversation, she talks about how Buddhism can help us in our everyday life, from workplace conflicts and intimate relationships to overcoming trauma.Episode 132: Everyday Buddhism: Compassion, Trauma, and Self-Acceptance with Wendy HaylettSupport the show

From the Buddhist, as well as the psychological and scientific perspectives, gratitude and dedication aren’t just polite bookends. The process of feeling gratitude and resolve creates the mental and neurological causes to actually become better people and to better serve the world.Episode 45: Meditation on Gratitude, Dedication, and DeterminationSupport the show

We’ve spent the better part of a year going step-by-step through a modern secular version of the major topics from Tibetan Buddhism’s Stages of the Path, what we call A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment. In Tibetan this sequence is called the lamrim. It’s a series of meditations that progressively move our mind to better understand itself, bring out our best qualities, and create the causes for a happy meaningful life. People who practice the Stages of the Path in the Tibetan style normally review the whole path every day as part of a meditation practice to gradually make its steps second nature. This episode offers a compact summation of the stages of the path as a complete meditation that you can practice every day.Episode 44. Secular Guided Meditation on the Tibetan Buddhist Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Lamrim)Support the show

This guided meditation explores consciousness through a Tibetan Buddhist lens. What does it mean to be aware? Is your mind limited to your physical body? And who is it that observes your thoughts?Episode 131: Guided Meditation on ConsciousnessSupport the show

Dr. Anil Seth has written an extraordinary book called Being You — A New Science of Consciousness. I had a chance to talk to him recently in an event sponsored by Science & Wisdom Live. Dr. Seth is one of the world's foremost researchers on consciousness, and in our interview he touches on defining consciousness from a scientific perspective, whether we have free will, and the notion of reality as a controlled hallucination. He also talks about an art installation called the Dreamachine that he helped create, which can induce profound direct experiences of consciousness.Episode 130: Free Will, Consciousness, & Reality with Dr. Anil SethSupport the show

Who am I? From the Buddhist perspective, there’s a systematic way of asking this question of who you are in the form of a meditation on the ultimate nature of the self, or "emptiness." This meditation is said to be the strongest antidote to our disturbing states of mind and a cause for greater self-awareness, happiness, and connection with others.Episode 43: Guided Meditation — The Interdependent SelfSupport the show

Are you your body? Are you your mind? Are you a collection of thoughts, memories, and neural connections that could be uploaded into a computer to live forever? Or are you an old-fashioned soul? This episode probes the nature of the self using the Buddhist notion of emptiness, searching for the partless, independent, unchanging "I" that ordinarily appears to us, and finding a self that's far richer and interconnected with reality and with others.Episode 42: Who Am I?Support the show