How to Train a Happy Mind
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.
Episodes
One of our most popular episodes of all time is our interview with artist and musician Laurie Anderson. Today, we're sharing a new, unedited version with almost a half hour of additional material.
For anyone unfamiliar with Laurie’s work, many people consider her one of our planet’s greatest living artists. Her work spans spoken word and performance, top-charting albums and music videos, digital art, film, virtual rea...
A complete guided meditation session expanding your compassion, stabilizing concentration on the breath, and observing your thoughts.
Episode 3: Guided Meditation: Stabilizing the Mind and Watching Thoughts
Over the past few years meditation has become popular as a way to help reduce stress, be focused at work, sleep better, or simply relax. Yet meditation isn’t just a tool to improve focus or relax, but a way to strengthen the positive qualities we all naturally possess: compassion, kindness, generosity, patience, humor, and finding joy in everyday life.
This episode explores this higher purpose of meditation through the less familia...
In this meditation, we explore the subtle body, the energetic connection between body and mind, through the lens of Tibetan Buddhism. It's part of a broader conversation we've been having about art, embodiment, and Buddhist practice.
Together, we'll gently guide our awareness through the body, connect with the breath, and reflect on how our mind and body are not separate, but deeply intertwined. We'll also explor...
We're in the middle of a small series of episodes right now on Buddhism and art, and this one is about our host, Scott Snibbe. Not everyone who listens to this podcast or who’s read How to Train a Happy Mind knows that Scott's main job for most of his life has been as an artist: one who works mostly with computer software and interactive installations. He often jokes that he used to be a part-time Buddhist, and now he&apo...
In the United States, we celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday this week. It’s a time that brings up a variety of challenges for many people: family conflicts, political disagreements, concerns about overeating, and the painful historical roots of the holiday in colonial exploitation of Indigenous people.
In this episode, we share a private talk and meditation Scott gave to the Train a Happy Mind community last Thanksgiving....
Five years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment (now called How to Train a Happy Mind) to share the rich tradition of Tibetan Buddhist analytical meditation. We take a secular approach to meditation that requires no belief beyond our current understanding of science and psychology. It's based on powerful Buddhist mind training techniques that use imagination, intelligence, and emotions to probe our inner and outer...
In this guided meditation and drawing practice, artist and teacher John Simon Jr. leads us through a series of exercises designed to connect inner awareness with mark-making on paper. Blending Buddhist principles with intuitive art, this session invites you to notice your sensations, thoughts, and environment while allowing your hand to move freely. No art experience is needed, just a willingness to observe, let go, and explore.
On this podcast, we talk a lot about meditation, but it’s far from the only way to connect with the deepest part of yourself and build a stable, joyful mind. There are so many other paths to reach that same inner stillness: spending time in nature, practicing yoga, exercising, making music, writing, or creating art.
For Scott, art was his meditation long before he ever learned to sit in silence. Our friend John Simon Jr. f...
How can we use pleasure in our meditation practice? Buddhism offers specific techniques for meditating on pleasure as a way to deepen our qualities of concentration, fearlessness, loving-kindness, and even our understanding of the ultimate nature of reality.
Episode 85: Guided Meditation on Pleasure
Pleasure is often viewed as a hindrance to the spiritual path, a hotbed of craving and attachment, but what if we told you that pleasure can actually be a positive part of the spiritual path, a portal to love and happiness?
Episode 84: Pleasure and Buddhism: Food, Sex and Netflix on the Path to Enlightenment
In this imaginative and hopeful episode, Rob Hopkins—founder of the Transition movement and author of How to Fall in Love with the Future—guides listeners through a vivid meditation envisioning the year 2030. Drawing on years of community activism and storytelling, Rob invites us to step through a metaphorical door into a future shaped by collective action, resilience, and radical imagination. What might our cities, communities, an...
Rob Hopkins is one of the people doing the most to assure that humanity has a healthy, thriving, and happy future. I was blown away by his new book, How to Fall in Love With the Future, which describes a radical new type of climate activism he's invented. Instead of bemoaning the current state of the world, he invites us to imagine the world we want to live in—that's just around the corner—and then do everything we can to...
This episode turns to one of the most universal human struggles: anger. Scott Snibbe explores how Buddhist psychology defines anger as a delusion: an exaggeration of the negative that blinds us to the good and fuels the wish to harm. Drawing on timeless wisdom, this meditation offers parents (and anyone else who wrestles with anger) practical antidotes rooted in curiosity and compassion.
Host Scott Snibbe offers touching personal stories and a meditation on how to best love our parents and our children using powerful Buddhist teachings and techniques on understanding, listening, and compassion.
Episode 76: Loving Our Parents, Loving Our Children
Join Geshe Sherab for a deeply reflective guided meditation on the emptiness of self—one of the core insights of Buddhist wisdom. Gently explore how the sense of “I” arises, appears, and ultimately dissolves under careful examination. This session invites you to rest in the awareness that the self, as it seems, is empty of inherent existence—opening the door to deeper freedom, compassion, and clarity. This guided journey is perfect...
We’ve reached the last in our series of episodes this year on Buddhism’s six perfections. The final perfection is described as emptiness, wisdom, or insight. These are all ways of naming the indescribable experience of discovering ourselves to be utterly interconnected with all of life, the universe, and everything.
My guest for this profound, but sometimes difficult-to-grasp subject is Geshe Sherab. For those unfamiliar with the ti...
This rebroadcast episode is in honor of the recent passing of Dr. Larry Ward. May his wisdom live on.
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Dr. Larry Ward—student of Thich Nhat Hanh and author of America's Racial Karma—leads a short but powerful breath awareness meditation.
This rebroadcast episode is in honor of the recent passing of Dr. Larry Ward. May his wisdom live on.
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Scott talks with Dr. Larry Ward, a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, and author of America's Racial Karma. His book is about how we heal from the trauma of racism, not just as a society, but in our own minds and bodies. In our conversation, Dr. Ward shares a profound truth: racism is a fiction, but one with very real consequences,...
What happens when you die? No one knows for sure. But the Tibetan Buddhist system describes a precise series of steps that our consciousness may experience as we die, which we can explore in a meditation to probe the boundary of life and death with curiosity and wonder.
Episode 58: What Happens When You Die?
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