How to Train a Happy Mind

NYT bestselling author and Buddhist meditation teacher Susan Piver shares her Four Noble Truths of Love, a framework anybody can use for deeper, more fulfilling, and more connected intimate relationships.
Susan Piver is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say "I Do", the award-winning How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, and Start Here Now: An Open-Hearted Guide to the Path and Practice of Meditation. Her new book is The Four Noble Truths of Love: Buddhist Wisdom for Modern Relationships, which we talk about in our interview. She is a founder of Lionheart Press and a renowned meditation teacher who leads the Open Heart Project, the world's largest online only meditation center. Learn more about her at susanpiver.com.
Episode 88: Four Noble Truths of Love with Susan Piver

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

Support the show

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 familiar technique of analytic meditationthat uses stories, thoughts, and emotions to steer our minds toward happiness, meaning, and benefiting others.
Episode 2: What Is Meditation?
Four 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 will be re-releasing newly recorded versions of these talks and meditations.

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

Support the show

We cling to things as if they won’t change, but change is the nature of reality. When we embrace impermanence, we prepare ourselves for big changes, and are able to let go of our fear and anxiety to become more fully present to those around us, to make the most meaningful choices day-to-day, and to more deeply appreciate life’s fleeting pleasures.
Episode 9. Embracing Impermanence
If you're enjoying our podcast, please leave us a rating or review in the iTunes App Store

We’ve just launched a new online community where Scott Snibbe leads weekly live meditations for the topics shared in our podcast and How to Train a Happy Mind book. Anyone is welcome to join for free or by donation. Visit our new community website at trainahappymind.org to sign up, take classes, attend special events, and meet fellow students.

Support the show

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.
Episode 16: Guided Meditation - Letting Go of Suffering
If you're enjoying our podcast, please leave us a rating or review in the iTunes App Store

Support 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 Equanimity

Support the show