8 Week Course:

 Tuesday, September 23, 30

 October 7, 14,21,28

November 4 & 11

6:30-8:30pm

Online Only | Tiered Pricing

Based on his popular book, How to Train a Happy Mind, this series of twelve evening classes with Scott Snibbe offers a relaxed tour of transformative meditations that help bring out your best qualities, manage life’s challenges, deepen your relationships, and build a better world.

Each of the practices you’ll learn in this course is derived from the Tibetan Buddhist lamrim “stages of the path,” a series of analytical meditations highly refined over the centuries. This lesser-known form of meditation complements the more popular mindfulness meditation by using stories, emotions, and critical thinking to actively steer the mind away from frustration, craving, and loneliness and toward happiness, connection, and satisfaction.

Designed for ordinary modern people curious about how to live meaningful, happy lives, this course requires no prior knowledge of Buddhism, as each topic naturally prepares you for the next: from life’s preciousness and impermanence to compassion and the interdependent nature of reality.

Committed Buddhists have also found the How to Train a Happy Mind sequence valuable because it brings a modern approach to age-old Buddhist topics while honestly exploring questions about karma, rebirth, and other realms of existence that come up as Westerners learn the Buddhist path.

Class 1 

What Is Analytical Meditation?
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 joy. Learn the difference between stabilizing meditation (or mindfulness) and analytical meditation, the active type of meditation that uses stories, thoughts, and emotions to steer your mind toward its best qualities.

What is the Mind?
Science still has no agreed definition for consciousness or mind. But through meditation, we can subjectively explore the mind. What is the mind? If the mind is our thoughts, then who observes those thoughts? How can we transform our mind toward happiness, presence, and connection?

Class 2 

The Preciousness of Life
It’s easy to take our life for granted: our relationships, possessions, health, and mind. This session contemplates the miracle of existing at all, from our place in the universe’s 14-billion-year evolution to the simple joy of another 24 hours alive.

Embracing Impermanence
“Every moment is new” is one of the simplest and most powerful Buddhist teachings. We tend to cling to things as if they won’t change, but change is the nature of reality. By embracing impermanence, we prepare ourselves for big changes, let go of fear and anxiety, and even enjoy life's pleasures more fully.

Class 3 

Mental Cause and Effect
Science understands physical causality, but what about the mind? This session explores how habits, evolution, and conditioning shape us—and how we can take conscious control of our thoughts and behaviors.

What Do You Do When You’re Alone?
When faced with fear, loneliness, or craving, what do we turn to? This session reveals an inner refuge within our minds, accessible at any time for strength and support.

Class 4

Am I More Important Than Anyone Else in the Universe?
Our subtle belief in our own special importance is a source of suffering that unfolds as anger, craving, and indifference. This session unpacks the illusion of ego, helping us find a lightness in life that lets us enjoy pleasure when we have it, be content when we don’t, and accept life’s inevitable pain.

The Red Pill of Renunciation
Like Neo in The Matrix, we face a choice: stay in old patterns of anger, craving, and selfishness or free ourselves from their grip. This session explores the courage to let go of harmful attachments, the real cause of our suffering.

Class 5

What is Love?
Love, in the Buddhist view, is simply the wish for others to be happy—free from attachment or expectation. This session introduces mind-training techniques to expand love and compassion, including universalizing, which transforms any moment of pleasure or pain into an opportunity for greater compassion.

Class 6 

How Things Exist
How do things exist? In your mind, out in the world, or somewhere in-between? This session explores interdependence through both Buddhist logic and modern science, revealing the fluid, interconnected nature of reality. Even our smartphones—composed of elements from across the universe—serve as a profound meditation on interdependence.

Class 7

Who Am I?
Are you your body? Your mind? A collection of thoughts, memories, and neural connections that might one day be uploaded into a computer to live forever? This session explores the illusion of a separate self and how breaking through that illusion reveals our deep interconnectedness with all beings and nature itself.

Class 8

A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment
In the final session, we integrate the insights from all classes into a single meditation—the mind, life's preciousness, impermanence, cause and effect, refuge, renunciation, compassion, and interdependence. Taken together, this sequence fosters the mind’s highest qualities, leading to a life of wisdom, connection, and purpose.