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The meditation I’m leading today is a 20 minute guided meditation of the sequence I share in the How to Train a Happy Mind podcast and book. The version I shared earlier in the podcast and book is about 40 minutes, and many people have asked for a shorter version of it, so here it is!

The stages are based on the Tibetan Buddhist lamrim, a sequence created more than a thousand years ago by the Indian Master Atisha Dipankar. Over the past decade, I’ve adapted it into a non-religious form that transforms the mind from states of frustration, craving, and loneliness to states of satisfaction, connection, and meaning.

We lead live meditations like this every Sunday in our Train a Happy Mind community, which you can join for free or by donation. There’s also an archive there of over a hundred meditations I’ve led for the community over the past two years.

Introduction to the meditation

Scott Snibbe: Settle yourself into meditation posture. Cross-legged on a cushion or on a chair with your feet flat on the floor.

Set your right hand over the left in your lap. Palms up with the tips of your thumbs touching. Eyes half closed, your head tilted down. Then let all the parts of your body relax.

Set a motivation for meditating today to create the causes for a fulfilling life; to bring happiness to the people around you and to bring about a better world.

Then for a moment, bring your attention to your breath as it comes in and out of your nostrils or with the rise and fall of your abdomen. If other thoughts, feelings, or perceptions intrude as you focus on your breath, just let them pass by. There’s no need to push them away or to bring them closer.

The preciousness of life

If you’re listening to this, you woke up today alive in a body that’s really a miracle when you think about it with its capacity to think, create, communicate, and express.

If you’re relatively healthy, if you have access to clean water, if you can read and write, you are more fortunate than billions of people on earth. Even more so if you have a place to live, money in the bank, a job, family, friends,

What can you accomplish in these next 24 hours? What’s most important? To do things that give your life real meaning and fulfillment, and be a source of comfort, help, and joy to those around you.

You’ve also found an interest in going beyond mere survival to probe the deeper questions of existence.

What responsibility do you have as a being that took 4 billion years to evolve on a planet that may be exceedingly rare, thriving with life among billions of other stars and galaxies?

Impermanence

Then look more deeply into what it means to be alive. Everything about you is constantly changing: your body’s organs, blood rushing through your veins, the signals of neurons zipping every which way, trillions of cells, millions dying each second, millions newly born uncountable atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon.

To be alive is to change in every instant.

Become aware of the room and the land around you. All of it. Also changing and decaying instant by instant.

Then look inside your mind. Thoughts and feelings flash by: happiness, sadness, yearning, fear, pain, revulsion, joy,

That your mind is constantly changing, means that almost anything is possible and you can choose how to steer it.

Mental cause and effect

Everything humans have achieved, agriculture, medicine, democracy, space flight, all of these started in the mind. Yet we often lose control of our minds and let anger and craving overtake us to gain control over your mind. Start by simply becoming aware of what appears in it. You can watch your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.

You can name them without being overcome by them. Try to see which bring happiness and which bring unpleasantness.

Think of one good thing you did in the last 24 hours and rejoice in it. Then think of one thing you regret from the past 24 hours.

It didn’t come outta the blue, but stems from a long chain of influences and habits reinforced every time you repeat them.

What could you have done instead of the thing you regret? How could you have handled the situation better?

Now determine to act that way when it happens again consider that your nature is fundamentally kind, wise, and generous; that disturbing states of mind are fleeting and can be let go by emphasizing our good.

That with each thought and action, you transform your mind.

Forgive yourself for anything you regret. Let go of guilt or shame and accept that change happens slowly.

Refuge

Then let yourself move on with a clear mind and a heart open to others.

Your ability to change not only means you can steer your mind toward greater good, but also that you even have the potential of a Dalai Lama or a Martin Luther King Jr.

We all have the seeds of kindness, compassion, and wisdom. Mental disturbances like anger, craving, pride, and jealousy are fleeting and shallow. Whether you fully believe this or not, find refuge in your own inner goodness for a moment and in anyone you admire who embodies it.

Find refuge in your capacity to change and in everyone else’s capacity to change for the better, in the chance to be compassionate toward others and to learn from our conflicts.

Suffering

The root of our mental pain lies in three delusions, so strong they’re called the three poisons, attachment, anger and ignorance.

Simply becoming mindful of these disturbing mental states, labeling them and understanding them is a huge step toward eliminating the pain they cause us.

With attachment, you perceive an object that pleases you, a delicious treat the touch of someone’s body, some status in the world. Then your mind externalizes that pleasure. You can’t be happy without it. You must get it now and keep getting it.

Attachment exaggerates the capacity of people, objects, and experiences to bring lasting happiness. When you get the object of your attachment, do you feel completely satisfied? Even if it feels good at first, does it last?

What if your satisfaction comes not from getting what you want, but from being momentarily free from craving?

Anger is when something unpleasant occurs, but then you go beyond that to project exaggerated negative qualities onto the thing itself. With people, this often causes you to exaggerate so badly that you fail to see any good in them at all and even wish to hurt them.

Think of someone you’re angry with right now to see if this is true.

Notice how exaggerated your state of mind is.

Doesn’t this person do many good things too? Don’t many others care for them? Wouldn’t harming them only cause more pain in the world?

The delusion of ignorance is feeling separate, disconnected from the people and the world around us. It builds illusions of strong opposites: good and bad. Delicious and disgusting. Me and you.

Ignorance turns into self-centeredness as you start absurdly to think that you are a little bit more important or less important than everyone else in the universe.

Can you see through this delusion to reveal your interdependence with the world around you? To see that you’re one among equals in a world of constantly changing interconnected bodies, minds, and nature?

Renunciation

In letting go of the causes of suffering, do we need to renounce sensual pleasures, relationships, conflicts about causes we care about?

True renunciation doesn’t mean giving up small pleasures like ice cream or hikes in the woods, or even giving up big ones, like making love to your partner or enjoying family and friends. Renunciation is letting go of the delusions of attachment, anger, and self-centeredness that we wrap around pleasant and difficult experiences.

These keep us from genuinely enjoying life’s pleasures and weathering its pains.

If you imagine yourself free from craving, might everything in fact feel better? Without neediness and resentment, wouldn’t your relationships be healthier and deeper?

Imagine seeing everything as it truly is: changing, impermanent, with multiple truths from multiple perspectives, with the long view that a happy, stable mind is more important than being right or wrong, winning or losing.

Love, compassion, and equanimity

When you renounce your self-centered delusions, your heart starts to soften. Your compassion grows. The first step into love and compassion is a practice of equanimity. Think of a friend, enemy and stranger, side by side in front of you. See how these labels come from, seeing only how much they matter to you.

When you step out of your own perspective and look from theirs, you become equals. Each of you wants to be happy and none of them want to suffer.

Now look at how others see them. To some, they’re a dear friend to others, an enemy, to many more a stranger.

And relationships change. Remember your friends who turned into enemies or strangers. Remember how your friends and enemies were all once strangers? You may even have an enemy who turned into a friend.

Even before considering love and compassion, how amazing would the world be if we simply treated each other equally?

Then we advance to love, wishing others to be happy, granting them not only their basic, but everything anyone could wish for.

Start with the people you care about. Wish them all the material things they need: money, shelter safety. Wish that they are loved, and find the causes of a meaningful life.

Now imagine your enemies: specific ones from your life, and ones from the greater world. They want to be happy too. And they only cause harm because of their delusions. Tragically, mistakenly believing that hurting others will somehow make them happy.

Wish your enemies happiness, and even that you might be a cause of their happiness, because if your enemies were happy, they’d also stop harming others.

Then imagine doing the same for everyone else on the planet, offering them everything, material and mental. They need to be happy.

Now think about the different ways your friends, family, colleagues suffer and wish for them to be free from their suffering.

Imagine the hundreds of millions who also suffer through illness, financial problems, grief, conflict, injustice, mental illness, and wish for them to be free from their problems too.

Extend your compassion to include those facing poverty, violence, racism, political oppression, being enslaved, or sexually exploited.

Wish for everyone in the world to be free from all this awful suffering.

Then bring your mind to your enemies. They also face problems with their mind, health, relationships, money. They don’t want to suffer. Wish for them to be free from suffering too.

Now recall all the kindness and good that your family, friends, and colleagues accomplished. Also rejoice in all the good they enjoyed and feel that they deserve it.

Think about people you don’t know but admire in the world. Take a moment to rejoice in the great things they accomplished today.

Without feeling jealous or spiteful, try also to see the good in your enemies, the praise they received, their achievements, wealth, warm relationships, whatever good they did today.

The interdependent self

Now try to discover who you are at the deepest level. Remember a time you were criticized or felt strong anger or craving. This activates the exaggerated sense of self that feels separate and self-centered.

Move through the parts of your body like you did earlier while meditating on impermanence. Do you find this self anywhere within your body?

Move to your mind and search there for yourself. Do you find yourself in your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions, your urges?

Search for yourself now, in awareness itself, the place where those mental factors appear. Does this space feel big or small? Bright or dark? Are you in some small corner of it or everywhere at once?

The mind can also appear as moments of consciousness that come and go. Are you any one of those moments? Are you all of them or simply awareness diving forward into each new one.

You do exist, things do exist, but only as labels that your mind applies to collections of parts. Everything comes together through endless chains of causes and effects, including you who don’t exist in a solid, unchanging separate way that makes you feel lonely, needy, unsatisfied.

You function perfectly well as a tumbling collection of parts without a center, in fact, better than when you cling to a solid, separate, frustrated self.

Interdependence means that you’re alive, changing, and interconnected with everything and everyone else in the universe. Your smallest, harmful, or beneficial acts have lasting impacts on the world and your mind.

You can feel and express love and compassion.

By imagining the heroic arc of these stages of the path, you’ve increased the strength of beneficial mental habits, and so we dedicate that all the good from this meditation result in kindness, insight, and joy as you go through your day and make the world a more compassionate, just, and beautiful place.

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