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
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.
***
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.
***
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?
The idea of past lives may not make sense, and isn’t scientifically verifiable. But still, the question of what we might have been before our conception is one worth asking. Where did I come from?
Episode 57: Where Did I Come From?
Dr. David Kittay stands out as one of the most expansive, intelligent, creative, and warmhearted thinkers of our time. His course at Columbia University, Technology, Religion, Future, is often described as “life-changing” for its exploration of how technology intersects with humanity’s deepest questions. In an earlier conversation with Scott, before the AI boom, he offered insights that felt ahead of their time—making his return no...
We can't believe this is our 200th episode! For this special occasion, we wanted to share a talk and meditation Scott Snibbe offered in our Train a Happy Mind community a couple of weeks ago called “Is enlightenment possible?”
Over the years, Scott's ideas of enlightenment have evolved as he's interviewed some of the world's foremost teachers and scholars of Buddhism like Dr. Jan Willis, Dr. Robert Thurman, Thup...
Today we’re sharing a guided meditation from the wonderful Venerable René Feusi (Scott Snibbe's long-time teacher). Settle in, find a comfortable seat, and let René’s clear, grounded guidance open the warm heart of awareness within you.
Episode #199: The Warm Heart of Awareness: A Meditation with Ven. René Feusi
It turns out that many of the greatest living Buddhist teachers are also some of the hardest to receive teachings from. Lacking ego, they have no need to promote themselves. This is the case with Scott's closest teacher, Venerable René Feusi.
Out of a wish to maintain his solitude and focus on long-term students—and probably mostly out of humility—Venerable René has always declined Scott's invitations to appear on this po...
This 20 minute guided meditation comes from the sequence Scott shares in the How to Train a Happy Mind podcast and book. The stages are based on the Tibetan Buddhist lamrim, which was created more than a thousand years ago by the Indian Master Atisha Dipankar.
Over the past decade, Scott has adapted it to be a non-religious way to transform the mind from states of frustration, craving, and loneliness to states of satisfaction, conn...
Welcome to this guided meditation on accessing joy with Tenzin Chogkyi. In this practice, we’ll take time to settle the body, connect with the breath, and gently open to the feeling of joy.
Episode 196: Joyful Effort: A Guided Meditation with Tenzin Chogkyi
Instead of the episode we had planned to share today, a meditation from Tenzin Chogkyi as part of her beautiful conversation on joy, we're postponing that release by a week. In its place, we're sharing a meditation Scott Snibbe led just a couple of days ago with our Train a Happy Mind community.
This meditation was recorded the day after the United States launched a new bombing campaign in Iran. In response, Sco...
Today's guest is Tenzin Chogkyi, one of our most popular guests, and she's back to talk about another one of the six perfections that we've been talking with other guests about this year. This one is enthusiasm or joyful effort. She talks about not just the Buddhist ideas of enthusiasm, but how to maintain our joy and enthusiasm in life when things are difficult or even when we get too much of a good thing.
Scott Snibbe leads a 10-minute guided meditation that is based on the sequence he shares in the How to Train a Happy Mind podcast and book. Many Tibetan Buddhists do this meditation every day. If you don't have much time or want to start small, this is a good place to begin. It touches on the precious life, impermanence, cause and effect, suffering, renunciation, love, compassion, and interdependence.
"I'll tell you something. I've learned it's hard work to be happy." Brian Wilson
In this special retreat episode, Scott Snibbe guides us through the full path to a happy mind—from appreciating the simple miracle of being alive to confronting our deepest mental habits and reconnecting with our capacity for kindness, meaning, and change.
It’s not a quick fix or a life hack. It’s the whole pa...
Popular Podcasts
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.