New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- One of the great perils and problems of our age is that we sometimes become too entrenched in our views and attached to being right. According to guest George Saunders, the antidote is something he calls “holy befuddlement.” George Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo , which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English....
Oct 12, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 511
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- It might be hard to find a more annoying cliché than self-love; it can seem empty and inactionable. And even if you could make it work, I think many of us suspect it would lead to complacent resignation or unbridled narcissism. But there is an enormous amount of evidence that self-love, or as the scientists call it, self-compassion, can make you more effective in reaching yo...
Oct 10, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 510
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Are you interested in suffering less? Today's guest, Dharma teacher Pascal Auclair, is going to talk about seven very specific and practical ways to train your mind for reduced suffering by exploring a Buddhist list called the seven factors of awakening, which is a part of the fourth foundation of mindfulness. We’ve talked about a bunch of Buddhist lists on the show before, ...
Oct 05, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 508
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Thoughts are not your enemy in meditation. If you’re getting distracted while you meditate, that’s not necessarily a problem. Thoughts are natural. They’re always going to come. The point is not to clear the mind and to magically eradicate all thinking, the point is to have a different relationship to your thoughts. When we’re not mindful of our thoughts, they march into the...
Oct 03, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 507
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- The Buddha was an inveterate list-maker who gave us easy to remember checklists to help us do life better. One of the handiest lists the Buddha made was called the five hindrances, which is a part of the fourth foundation of mindfulness. This list outlines the five things that mess us up when we’re trying to meditate — or, in fact, when we’re trying to do anything. If you’ve...
Sep 28, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 505
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Most of us come into the world with the suspicion that we are the center of the universe. This self-preoccupation is natural, but it can often lead to unhappiness in the form of rumination, wallowing, comparison, etc. Our guest today, author Karen Armstrong, has a clear proposal for how we can stop living what she calls “artificial” lives and shave down our inborn self-cente...
Sep 26, 2022•57 min•Ep. 504
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers --- Ever have that experience where you catch yourself in a moment of anger, judgmentalism or fear? And, with a wince, immediately tell yourself a whole story about what kind of person you are? How do you stop this from happening or cut it short once it’s already begun? The answer? Mindfulness or having the basic self-awareness to see what kind of mental states are arising so tha...
Sep 21, 2022•59 min•Ep. 502
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Today we’re talking about an often overlooked source of suffering— housework. There are so many ways in which housework can be a bummer. Maybe we’re feeling guilty about the fact that our place is always a mess. Maybe we’re driving ourselves crazy with obsessive cleaning. Maybe we have relatives who are overly critical about the state of affairs in our home. Maybe gender pol...
Sep 19, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 501
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- In this previously released episode, Malcolm Gladwell responds to backlash he received over his belief that working in an office—and the collaborative creative environment it can offer—is in your best interest (and in the interest of others). We also dive deep into some of the important themes featured in the seventh season of his podcast Revisionist History , including: kin...
Sep 16, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 486
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Is it possible to be happy no matter what happens? Today we’re going right to the source of what makes us unhappy to learn how to disarm and disable potential suffering before it owns us. Everything that comes up in our mind is either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. In other words, with everything we experience, we either want it, don’t want it, or we don’t care. In Buddhi...
Sep 14, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 500
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Jessica Nordell is a science and culture journalist who has written for the Atlantic and the New York Times. She earned a B.A. in physics from Harvard and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her new book is called The End of Bias, A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias. Photo Credit: Leslie Plesser In this episode we ta...
Sep 12, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 410
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- It’s such a common desire to get out of our heads — to escape the nonstop, mostly self-referential chatter, the habitual storylines, the ancient resentments and the compulsive self-criticism. Many of us take elaborate and even drastic measures in this regard like self-medication, shopping, tech addiction, and so on. But there’s a much healthier option that is readily and per...
Sep 07, 2022•55 min•Ep. 498
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Emotionally immature people (EIP’s) are hard to avoid and most of us, if not all of us, have to deal with them at some point in our lives. These interactions can range from mildly annoying to genuinely traumatic, especially if the emotionally immature people in question are our own parents, which is true for an awful lot of us. Today’s guest, clinical psychologist Lindsay C....
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 497
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- In the last couple of years, many people have been extolling the virtues of something called the "Enneagram" but—what the hell is it? On today’s show, longtime dharma teacher, Susan Piver, is here to demystify it. As she explains, the Enneagram is a tool that allows people to figure out their personality type and says it has been one of, if not the most important, tool in he...
Aug 31, 2022•54 min•Ep. 495
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Most of us talk all day long. We speak to each other, we type at each other, and of course, we talk to ourselves internally. Talking and listening is a key part of what it means to be human and It’s very hard to be a successful person if you can’t communicate your ideas and listen to and understand other people. Today’s guests, Mudita Nisker and Dan Clurman, are here to expl...
Aug 29, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 494
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- At times, self-improvement can seem like a never-ending hallway filled with limitless shame and insufficiency. So when something as simple as the breath falls into this category, it seems only natural to meet that news with some resistance. Our guest today, James Nestor argues that many of us, of all things, are breathing incorrectly but that by fixing our breathing, it can ...
Aug 24, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 492
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Most of us worry about money sometimes, but what if we changed the way we thought about our relationship to finances? Today’s guest, William MacAskill, offers a framework in which to do just that. He calls it effective altruism. One of the core arguments of effective altruism is that we all ought to consider giving away a significant chunk of our income because we know, to a...
Aug 22, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 491
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- In this episode from our archives, psychologist Kelly McGonigal dives into her book The Joy of Movement and practical steps on how to develop healthy habits. Kelly McGonigal, PhD, is a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University, and a leading expert in the new field of “science-help.” She is passionate about translating cutting-edge research from psychology, neu...
Aug 17, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 219
Since the start of COVID-19, more people are working from home, and with that, more people have strong opinions about whether or not it’s the best route to take. In today’s episode, Malcolm Gladwell responds to recent backlash over why he believes that working in an office—and the collaborative creative environment it can offer—is in your best interest (and in the interest of others). We also dive deep into some of the important themes featured in the seventh season of his podcast Revisionist Hi...
Aug 15, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 486
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Today’s episode looks at one of the hardest Buddhist principles to grasp— the notion that the self is an illusion. Many people get stuck on the misunderstanding that they don’t exist. They look in the mirror and say, “Of course I exist. I’m right there.” And that’s true, you do exist, but just not in the way you think you do. Today’s guest, Jay Garfield explores this notion ...
Aug 10, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 487
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- The idea of loving people no matter what— no matter how obnoxious or unacceptable their behavior is can sound simultaneously treacly and downright impossible. But today's guest Father Gregory Boyle talks about the practicality of this idea by showing how the concept of loving no matter what can be used as a tool— not to condone bad behavior but to help see people as doing th...
Aug 08, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 489
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Oftentimes Buddhism can take a tough love, no nonsense approach to happiness by saying, if you want to be happier, sometimes you need to face hard truths. In today's episode we’re going to talk about a Buddhist list called The Three Characteristics. These are the three non-negotiable truths about reality, which you have to see and understand in order to be happy. Granted, wh...
Aug 03, 2022•59 min•Ep. 484
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- These days, the word mindfulness has become a buzz phrase but very often people don’t know what the word actually means, much less how to practice it. One simple definition of mindfulness is the ability to see what’s happening in your mind without getting carried away by it. The benefits of doing so are vast and profound— from decreased emotional reactivity to being more awa...
Aug 01, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 483
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- There are so many benefits to mindfulness with one of the biggest being the cultivation of more self-awareness. This cultivation can lead to identifying the unhelpful mental habits that can develop over the years. Today we’re going to talk to Carol Wilson who offers very clear and practical ways that Buddhist meditation can help us turn down the volume on our unproductive me...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 481
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Many of us may have a reflexive reaction when we notice we’re feeling down: we want it to go away. Maybe we think something is wrong with us and we automatically self medicate in any number of ways. But how do we square this with the fact that many of us may also really like sad movies and music? And making things even more complex, how do we compute the fact that the univer...
Jul 25, 2022•59 min•Ep. 480
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Sit in meditation for a few minutes and you’re likely to experience pain, either physical or psychological. Hang around the meditation scene for very long, and you are likely to hear the expression, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” And that’s what this episode is all about— boosting your pain tolerance through meditation. Because pain really is inevitable, but ca...
Jul 20, 2022•50 min•Ep. 366
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- We all have long-standing painful patterns of behavior or inner storylines that can cause us to react disproportionately or inappropriately to everyday events. Today's guest, Dr. Radhule Weininger, has a term for this. She calls them longstanding recurrent painful patterns or LRPPs. Weininger is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and teacher of Buddhist meditation and...
Jul 18, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 478
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Today we’re gonna tackle one of the best known contemplative clichés: being in the present moment and inhabiting the now. The present moment seems to be a state we aspire towards, but are rarely given practical information about how to actually achieve. But today’s guest, Matthew Brensilver offers just that— practical information on how to achieve being present. We also expl...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 476
Often, when you’re afraid of something, the best advice is deeply counterintuitive, not to mention inconvenient: to turn toward the source of your fear. Today we’re going to talk about the fear of confronting your own past with our guest Sarah Polley. Polley is an Oscar nominated filmmaker and actress who recently wrote a new book, called Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory . In her book, she explores the relationship between her past and present and how the two are in c...
Jul 11, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 475
New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. Depression is a debilitating problem both on an individual and a societal level and it has only gotten worse during the pandemic. According to the World Health Organization, depression is now one of the leading causes of disability on the planet. Our guest today Dr. Samantha Boardman is going to talk about what she calls the opposite of depression— something called positive psyc...
Jul 06, 2022•39 min•Ep. 473
