How to Train a Happy Mind

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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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?

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I want to tell you a story about birth and death and infinity. We’re all born and we’re all going to die, but I don’t know how many of you have ever felt a connection to infinity. I want to tell you about the time in my life when I felt this connection to infinity every day. And I also want to tell you about how I lost it, and whether it’s possible to get it back again.

Episode 56: Birth, Death, and Infinity

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Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo is one of the very first Westerners to become ordained into the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. She is best known for having lived in a remote cave in the Himalayas for 12 years. In this 10-minute  meditation, she offers us the invitation to cultivate moment-to-moment inner awareness - the essence of meditation practice.

Episode 93: Cultivating Our Inner Awareness with Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo - 10 Minute Meditation

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Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo is one of the world’s most revered Buddhist teachers and one of the very first Westerners to become ordained into the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. She is best known for having lived in a remote cave in the Himalayas for 12 years. She spoke with us about the role of women in Buddhism from a historical and contemporary lens, the nature of mind and simple, powerful ways to meditate in the modern world.

Episode 92: Wisdom and the Path for Women with Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo is a fully ordained tibetan buddhist nun in the Drukpa Lineage of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. She is an author, teacher and founder of the Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, India. She is best known for being one of the very few Western yoginis trained in the East, having spent twelve years living in a remote cave in the Himalayas, three of those years in strict meditation retreat and for having made a vow to attain Enlightenment in the female form - no matter how many lifetimes it takes.

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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)

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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 Is

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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 Inside

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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 Haylett

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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 Determination

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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)

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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 Consciousness

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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 Seth

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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 Self

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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?

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Last year I had the privilege to participate in a dialogue on compassion with my teacher, Venerable Sangye Khadro who is also well known by her Western name Venerable Kathleen McDonald. Venerable Sangye Khadro is the author of How to Meditate and Awakening the Kind Heart. She's a very active Buddhist teacher and a fully ordained nun, which is the highest level of ordination for a Buddhist monastic.

It was wonderful to hear her share wisdom on this topic, touching on many practical ways to deal with everyday pain and conflict in our lives using this universal antidote of compassion. This talk was organized by the Foundation for Developing Compassion and Wisdom, which shares similar goals to A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment in offering non-religious ways for anyone to benefit from Buddhist wisdom.

Make sure to stay tuned until the end of the episode for a short but moving meditation on compassion led by Venerable Sangye Khadro.

Episode 129: Compassion with Ven. Sangye Khadro and Scott Snibbe

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This is a very special episode in which I had the chance to introduce two of my heroes: Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman and science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. They shared a lively conversation together that you now have the chance to eavesdrop on (with their permission).

In their dialogue, they talk about when violence is legitimate in situations like the Tibetan or Ukrainian invasions, their personal relationships to the Dalai Lama, and how we might make Kim Stanley Robinson's fictional climate solutions from his latest novel The Ministry for the Future start working in real life.

In this intimate conversation between two people who have wanted to meet each other for a long time, Robert Thurman and Kim Stanley Robinson also speak frankly about their politics and their ideas, both for saving the planet and for simple mental health in a world that's filled with climate and social emergencies. As Kim Stanley Robinson put it, "spiritual and political advice."

I hope you enjoy their conversation.

Episode 128: Kim Stanley Robinson and Robert Thurman: Climate, Politics, and the Dalai Lama

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The Buddhist understanding of how things exist, called emptiness, breaks objects down into parts, causes, and a mind that bundles them into the illusion of a solid, singular, unchanging entity. When we apply this analysis to an iPhone, we see that it is made up of almost all the elements in the periodic table, and is connected to thousands of hours of hard labor and the entire history of our civilization, planet, and universe.

Episode 39. The Interdependent Nature of Reality

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Buddhist teacher Emily Hsu leads an analytical meditation that explores the inner landscape—texture—of the mind and the differences between constructive and unconstructive mental states.

Episode 127: Guided Meditation: Exploring the Texture of the Mind 

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I've known Emily Hsu since she first started teaching Buddhist philosophy and meditation at the Tse Chen Ling Center for Tibetan Buddhism 15 years ago in San Francisco. She's a lucid, humble, and kind teacher who speaks from both deep education and rich personal experience.

Emily Hsu completed the seven year FPMT Masters Program at Institute Lama Tzong Khapa in Italy in 2004—a condensed version of the Tibetan Buddhist Geshe studies curriculum—which qualifies her to teach subjects normally taught only by Tibetan Buddhist Lamas. She served as the resident teacher at California's Ocean of Compassion Buddhist Center and has spent long stretches of time in solitary retreat deepening her practice.

Emily and I got together in person recently to talk about the Buddhist view of the mind, navigating disturbing emotions, and how to understand reality.

Episode 126: The Buddhist Understanding of the Mind with Emily Hsu

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Objects around us ordinarily appear as if they are solid, singular, and separate from us. However, both science and the Buddhist understanding of reality show us that as we examine things more closely, they exist far more subtly and richly than they appear. This meditation focuses on an object most of us have strong feelings toward—our smartphone—breaking it apart into its myriad parts, and giving us a meditative glimpse of how it truly exists.

This episode is the second in a series exploring the Buddhist topic of “emptiness,” or how things exist through parts, causes, and the minds that perceive them.

Episode 38: Meditation on How Things Exist

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The Buddhist view on reality, called emptiness, combines the awe of scientific knowledge with the inner, experiential knowledge that comes from meditation and critical reasoning to arrive at a feeling of interconnectedness. The first in a seven-art series on Buddhism's view of dependent origination looks at how objects exist using the example of that most modern wonder and addiction, our smartphone.

Episode 37: How Things Exist

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Buddhist counselor Richard Prinz leads an analytical meditation on equanimity to develop compassion, introspection, love, and non-attachment for teenagers and their parents.

Episode 125: Meditation on Equanimity for Parents and Teens with Richard Prinz

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Teenagers face a unique and overwhelming set of problems today, from climate change to social media to isolation induced by the pandemic. Richard Prinz is a marriage, child, and family counselor who has worked as a teen counselor in the Cupertino, California public schools for over 20 years. He's also a longtime Buddhist practitioner and a good friend of mine who served as the director of the Vajrapani Institute Buddhist retreat center in Boulder Creek when His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, came to visit in 1989.

In our interview, Rich and I talk about some of the powerful ways parents can transform their own minds to better help their teens, as well as helping teens to transform themselves. Even if you're not a parent or a teen, I think you'll find Rich's wisdom inspiring and offering practical ways to deal with difficult emotions and the world's problems.

Episode 124: Parenting Teens with Buddhist Counselor Richard Prinz

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A guided meditation on “universalizing,” a Tibetan Buddhist mind training technique for transforming our everyday problems and pleasures through love and compassion.

Episode 32. Guided Meditation: Universalizing our Problems and Pleasures

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

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One of the most powerful Tibetan Buddhist mind training techniques is universalizing, a practice that transforms everyday pains and pleasures into profound meditations. From arguing with the family to stuffing yourself with a delicious meal, life’s problems and pleasures can bring anger, guilt, and sadness. The meditation technique of “universalization” transform our everyday experiences of pleasure and pain into engines of love and compassion.

Episode 31. Universalizing: Transforming Pain and Pleasure into Love and Compassion

Three years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

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Francesca Hampton leads a loving-kindness meditation suitable for both children and adults alike that helps the mind become calm, loving, and clear.

Episode 123: Guided Meditation for Kids

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Francesca Hampton is a writer and lifelong Tibetan Buddhist practitioner who's written a wonderful new children's book on meditation for kids called Leo Learns to Meditate. As a parent myself, I've found it hard to find resources like these, so if you are a parent, I think you'll get a lot out of this episode.

Even if you're not, I think you'll find Francesca's advice on meditation—that comes from a lifetime of experience—useful in your own practice, as she talks about how to cultivate concentration and loving-kindness, why meditation can sometimes feel boring, and how to keep our meditation light, joyful, and fun.

Episode 122: How to Teach Children Meditation — Francesca Hampton

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A 15-minute guided meditation on compassion: the wish to take away others’ suffering.

Episode 29. Guided Compassion Meditation

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

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Compassion is starting to rival mindfulness as the next most popular up-and-coming form of secular meditation. But what is compassion? Compassion, from the Buddhist perspective, is not just empathizing with others’ suffering, but actively wishing to take it away.

Episode 28. What Is Compassion?

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

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As we enjoy the pleasures of our Thanksgiving meals in the U.S., this guided meditations shows 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 emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality.

Episode 85: Guided Meditation on Pleasure
Episode 84: Pleasure and Buddhism: Food, Sex and Netflix on the Path to Enlightenment

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Professor Robert Thurman, who the New York Times calls “the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism” is back in this week's episode to talk about his wonderful new book Wisdom Is Bliss. Learn why the Buddha was an educator and scientist, not a religious prophet; and why Buddhism isn't a belief system, but a direct experience that reveals the pure beauty and joy of reality itself.

Episode 121: Robert Thurman: Wisdom Is Bliss

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A guided meditation on love, or loving-kindness, the expansive form of love wishing happiness not only to friends and family but to all beings everywhere including our enemies. In the language of Buddhism, metta or maitri.

Episode 26. Guided Meditation on Love

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

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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?

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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Rob Preece leads a Buddhist tantra meditation on Green Tara. This powerful feminine figure is an emanation of our own potential for compassionate, wisdom energy.

Episode 120: Tantric Meditation on Compassion and Wisdom

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Author and pyschotherapist Rob Preece shares his extensive knowledge on the sensitive topic of Buddhist tantra, the importance of the body in Buddhist practice, how exercise and nature relate to tantric practices, the role of sex in Vajrayana Buddhism, and how we embrace our different dimensions of gender in meditation and  everyday life.

Rob Preece is the author of many books bridging the Tibetan Buddhist tradition with Western psychology, including The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra, The Wisdom of Imperfection, The Courage to Feel, Preparing for Tantra, Feeling Wisdom, and Tasting the Essence of Tantra.

As a working psychotherapist, Rob merges Jungian and Buddhist approaches to the mind with his patients. For the past 40 years, Rob has also led many meditation retreats in Europe and the United States. As a father of two sons, experienced thangka painter, and a keen gardener, he tries to ground Buddhist practice in a creative, practical lifestyle

Episode 119: The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra with Rob Preece

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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 Equanimity

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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 despise.

Episode 22. Spiritual Democracy

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

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Susan Piver leads a breath-awareness meditation on being your authentic self, connecting with yourself through watching your breath and thoughts to open up and discover who you are. This meditation is part two of our interview with her on her new book The Buddhist Enneagram.

Episode 118: Being Yourself with Susan Piver

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Bestselling author Susan Piver is a powerful Buddhist teacher who shares her wisdom and guided meditations weekly through her Open Heart Project and community. Her new book is The Buddhist Enneagram in which she helps us understand how differently each of us sees and understands the world. Through her unique Buddhist take on the Enneagram's nine different personality types, Susan shares how understanding our differences can lead to deeper and more compassionate connections with our partners, colleagues, and everyone we encounter, transforming our difficult emotions into pure expressions of our basic goodness.

Episode 117: Understanding Our Differences with the Buddhist Enneagram

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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 - Renunciation

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

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What do The Matrix and Jerry Seinfeld have to do with renouncing suffering? Renunciation, the determination to be free, self-compassion, letting go of suffering—in Buddhism these are all the same thing.

Episode 17. The Red Pill of Renunciation - Embracing Reality As It Is

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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Venerable Amy Miller leads a Buddhist meditation for healing anxiety. This practice helps you create a safe mental space, reconnect to the positive, and relax your body through breathwork and thought-replacement.

Episode 116: Healing Anxiety with Buddhist Mind Training

Venerable Amy Miller is a Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher who's managed several Buddhist retreat centers, including the Vajrapani Institute in California and Vermont's Milarepa Center. She's the co-author of Buddhism in a Nutshell, and currently a resident teacher and board member at Land of Medicine Buddha in Santa Cruz. 

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Buddhist nun and teacher Venerable Amy shares how we can practically manage anxiety, depression, and other difficult emotions with Buddhist meditation and mind training techniques.

Venerable Amy Miller is a Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher who's managed several Buddhist retreat centers, including the Vajrapani Institute in California and Vermont's Milarepa Center. She's the co-author of Buddhism in a Nutshell, and currently a resident teacher and board member at Land of Medicine Buddha in Santa Cruz. 

Episode 115: Transforming Anxiety, Depression, and other Difficult Emotions with Ven. Amy Miller

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A clear-eyed meditation on suffering: both what suffering is, and the mental source of suffering in our delusions of attachment, anger, and self-centered ignorance. We practice the antidotes to these delusions, giving us tools for a more balanced, less self-centered view of our experience that offers sustained stability and happiness through life’s challenges and desires.

16. Guided Meditation: Letting Go of Suffering

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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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 suffering, its causes and antidotes, with a modern twist.

Episode 15. Am I More Important Than Everyone Else in the Universe?

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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Dr. Mark Westmoquette leads a Zen Buddhist meditation to help navigate conflict in your daily life. He uses the story "Cutting the Cat in Two"—a famous Zen koan—to lead the practice and illustrate the importance of embodiment and shifting one's perspective.

Episode 114: “Cutting the Cat in Two”: A Guided Meditation for Dealing with Conflict

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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Dr. Mark Westmoquette is an astrophysicist who became a student of Zen Buddhism and yoga. Now an author and meditation and yoga instructor, Mark has written a new book called Zen and the Art of Dealing with Difficult People.

In this podcast episode, we talk about this meaty topic of how to deal with difficult people who Mark calls 'troublesome Buddhas,' from our boss to our partner to world leaders and that person who takes your parking space.

Episode 113: Zen and the Art of Dealing with Difficult People with Dr. Mark Westmoquette

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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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.

112. Guided Meditation on Finding Refuge in the Mind

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

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What do you do when you’re alone? When you’re anxious, lonely, or afraid, when you feel strong craving? What do you turn to? In this episode we look at where our mind runs when we feel pain, when we don’t feel balanced or whole. We’ll examine the Buddhist view on this subject that reveals a deep source of strength and support within our own minds accessible to each of us any time we need it.

14. What Do You Do When You're Alone?

Two years ago, we created A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment 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, and gradually moving up to cultivating boundless compassion for all beings and understanding the ultimate nature of our inner and outer realities. Over the next year, interspersed with new interviews, we are re-releasing updated versions of these topics.

If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott.

🙏 Help us stay ad-free

📲 Follow us on socials