Mindfulness Exercises, with Sean Fargo
bySean Fargo
EducationSelf-ImprovementHealthFitnessMentalReligionSpirituality
Mindfulness and meditation for everyday life — and for the people who teach it. Expect grounded guided meditations, evidence‑informed tools, and candid conversations with leading voices in the field.Hosted by Sean Fargo — former Buddhist monk, founder of MindfulnessExercises.com, and a certified Search Inside Yourself instructor—each episode blends compassion, clarity, and real‑world application for practitioners, therapists, coaches, educators, and wellness professionals.What you’ll find:• Guided practices: breath awareness, body scans, self‑compassion, sleep, and nervous‑system regulation • Teacher tools: trauma‑sensitive language, sequencing, and ethical foundations for safe, inclusive mindfulness • Expert interviews with renowned teachers and researchers (e.g., Sharon...
Episodes(40 episodes)
Why Your Brain Stops Taking Everything Personally
We talk with Dr. Sara Lazar about why mindfulness meditation can feel life-changing beyond lower stress and how that shift maps onto stages of ego development and perspective taking. We connect equanimity to measurable changes in meaning making and to brain regions tied to the narrative self, compassion, and self-referential processing. • why stress and anxiety scores miss the deeper “new perspective” change • Piaget-style stage shifts as a model for psychological growth • ego development from egocentric to world-centric views • perspective taking and meaning making as the core stage change • sentence stem testing as a window into hab...
Published: Oct 21, 2026Duration: 24m 58s
A Guided Initiation Meditation For Coming Home To Your Body
We guide a simple hand-on-chest meditation with Master Ming Tong Gu that helps us feel the truth of our own existence beyond stories and labels. We leave with a deeper sense of gratitude, wholeness, and reconnection to the body as the place where life is actually experienced. • welcoming Master Ming Tong Gu and naming healing beyond the physical • setting up a safe, simple posture for practice • repeating three truths that anchor embodied mindfulness • feeling sensation directly without mental labels • exploring the inseparable relationship between body and soul • sensing energetic connection with earth, universe, and life around us...
Published: Oct 18, 2026Duration: 5m 19s
What If Love Is The Whole Path
Your meditation practice might be giving you a clue you keep missing: it can be felt in the head. Sean Fargo sits down with Liam McClintock, founder of FitMind and author of “FitMind: Four Steps to Lasting Bliss”, to talk about a surprisingly concrete way to track craving, distraction, and ease through subtle sensations in the forehead, face, and skull. We dig into how the body works like a biofeedback device, and why “release” is less about controlling thoughts and more about relaxing the system so awareness can open again. From there, we go straight at a popular d...
Published: Oct 15, 2026Duration: 35m 6s
Dr. Sara Lazar: How Mindfulness Changes Pain And Fear Responses
Pain is inevitable, but the brain’s “this is unbearable” reaction is more flexible than most of us realize. Harvard neuroscientist Dr. Sara Lazar joins us to unpack the neural correlates of equanimity and to answer a question many meditators quietly carry: does mindfulness meditation actually protect us from pain and fear, or does it just change the story we tell ourselves? We dig into what equanimity really means, why it is not indifference, and how an open heart can coexist with calm, clear discernment. We walk through compelling mindfulness neuroscience from Mindfulness-Based Stress Re...
Published: Oct 11, 2026Duration: 33m 29s
Small Internal Pivots That Can Calm Your Nervous System Today
We talk with Dr Elisha Goldstein about how tiny internal shifts can calm chronic stress, change our choices and strengthen emotional longevity. We break down the 4R method and explore why peace can feel like simply being with what is here. • introducing Dr Elisha Goldstein and Tiny Shifts • chronic stress as the background “water” we stop noticing • the 4R method: recognise, release, refocus, reinforce • release as lowering physiological load and conserving energy • refocus as choosing responses that support sleep, nutrition and exercise • emotional longevity as emotional health for the long run and a driver of healthspan...
Published: Oct 9, 2026Duration: 16m 7s
Permission To Wiggle Counts As Meditation, with Jennifer Moffitt (Mindful Birthing)
Jennifer Moffitt guides a short mindfulness practice that begins with movement and ends with a calmer, clearer connection to breath and body. We focus on permission, presence, and a gentle way to return when the mind wanders. • settling into breath and body awareness as a quick reset • letting the body wiggle or stretch before stillness • taking “no permission needed” seriously as a somatic cue • feeling contact points to ground attention • using the breath as an anchor in the present moment • noticing pauses and cycles without changing the breath • responding to distraction with kindne...
Published: Oct 6, 2026Duration: 4m 15s
Mindful Birthing
Birth has a way of destroying our best-laid plans, and that’s not a personal failure, it’s reality. We sit down with Jennifer Moffitt, a midwife who’s attended over a thousand births and now serves as Director of Community Partnerships and senior faculty at Mindful Birthing, to talk about what actually helps when control slips away: mindfulness, embodiment, and self-compassion you can practice before labor ever begins. https://www.eomega.org/people/jennifer-averill-moffittWe explore Mindful Birthing (also known as Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting, MBCP), a nine-week mindfulness-based childbirth education program rooted...
Published: Oct 3, 2026Duration: 41m 19s
Metta As Mental Fitness
Jhana gets talked about like a remote mountaintop experience, but Liam McClintock argues it can be trained with a surprisingly human doorway: love. I sit down with Liam, founder of FitMind and author of “FitMind: Four Steps to Lasting Bliss,” to dig into how metta (loving-kindness meditation) can unify the mind, stabilize attention, and reveal the subtle mechanics of craving and the sense of self. If you’ve ever felt like meditation turns into effort, strain, or self-criticism, this conversation offers a different route. We unpack what jhana means in Liam’s tradition and why the term can be co...
Published: Sep 28, 2026Duration: 14m 28s
How To Come Home To Your Body, with Mingtong Gu
If this conversation stirred something in you, Master Mingtong Gu’s book Coming Home to Embodied Awakening is a beautiful next step. Order at mingtonggu.com/book and receive a free bonus collection of video teachings.Website: mingtonggu.comBook: mingtonggu.com/bookInstagram: @chicenterFacebook: Wisdom Healing QigongYouTube: @WisdomHealingQigongLinkedIn: Mingtong GuFor a free chapter of Master Mingtong Gu's book, "Coming Home to Embodied Awakening,” click here:https://chicenter.pages.ontraport.net/t?orid=282356&opid=2If you’ve ever felt like you’re living from the neck up, grinding through life while your body trai...
Published: Sep 24, 2026Duration: 41m 43s
How A Police Reporter Found Mindfulness And Helped Share It With Millions
Mindfulness can calm you down, but what if that’s only the entry point? I’m joined by Melvin McLeod, longtime editor at Lion’s Roar and a co-founder of Mindful Magazine, to talk about the side of mindfulness most people don’t hear about: the part that refuses to flatter us. Melvin shares the moment he was a young police reporter in Montreal, opened a Buddhist book, read a single paragraph, and felt a deep recognition. What he sensed wasn’t escapism. It was integrity, a promise that genuine practice would tell the truth and give us what we need, n...
Published: Sep 20, 2026Duration: 12m 19s
Darkness Retreat Basics
Turn off the lights and the mind gets loud fast. Sean Fargo sits down with Scott Berman, founder of Sky Cave Retreats, to explore what happens when you spend days in complete darkness with no phone, no screens, no books, and none of the usual ways we keep ourselves busy. Sky Cave’s earth-sheltered cabins in southern Oregon are built to be fully blacked out and almost totally soundproof, creating a rare form of solitude that can feel nurturing, confronting, or both.Scott shares why he does not frame darkness retreats as a heroic endurance test or a...
Published: Sep 16, 2026Duration: 9m 27s
The Myth Of Selfless Service
The fastest way to burn out in helping work is also the most socially praised: chronic self-sacrifice. We sit down with Dr. John Demartini, world-renowned human behavior expert and creator of the Demartini Method, to untangle the guilt-ridden “shoulds” that many mindfulness teachers, coaches, and caregivers carry and replace them with a practical principle: sustainable fair exchange. Service is real, but reward is not a moral failure. When giving and receiving are balanced, purpose becomes energizing, relationships stabilize, and your work stops feeling like a slow leak.From there, we move into a toolki...
Published: Sep 12, 2026Duration: 24m 37s
Mindful Tech Habits
Your phone is not the villain, and you are not weak. The real challenge is that modern technology is designed inside the attention economy, and it quietly trains your mind through cues, metaphors, and frictionless defaults. We talk with Jay Vijarthy, founder of the mindfulness-focused UX design studio Still Ape and author of Reclaim Your Mind, about how to build digital wellbeing without turning your life into a constant willpower battle.We start with a deceptively simple practice: awareness. Instead of jumping straight to hacks like deleting apps or nuking notifications, Jay shares how to notice what...
Published: Sep 7, 2026Duration: 28m 25s
Return To The Belly
Your mind can think its way into knots, but your body already knows how to come home. Sean Fargo sits down with longtime Qigong teacher, Taoist meditation guide, and author Solala Towler to explore a simple, practical reset: bring attention down into the belly. We talk about the lower dantian as the foundation of Taoist practice, and why “understanding” the Tao is less about collecting ideas and more about doing the breathing, movement, and stillness that changes how you live day to day.From there we wander into story and source. Solala shares the legendary tale of Lao...
Published: Aug 27, 2026Duration: 28m 50s
Fit Mind: From Neuroscience To Monkhood With A Four-Step Path To Lasting Bliss
We catch up with Liam McClintock, founder of FitMind and author of “FitMind: Four Steps to Lasting Bliss,” on how his neuroscience background and years as a Buddhist monk reshape what “mental fitness” really means. We focus on metta as a heart-based training that supports mindfulness, reduces over-efforting, and offers a clear method for returning to the present through the four Rs. • why ordaining as a monk becomes a way to simplify life and deepen practice • shifting from retreat as a sprint to meditation as a full lifestyle • metta as the core training for many Wester...
Published: Aug 21, 2026Duration: 59m 29s
What If Reclaiming Your Mind Means Reclaiming Your Tech
Your feed can feel like reality, until you notice how quickly it makes you tense, reactive, and certain. We sit down with Jay Vijarthi, a mindfulness teacher, designer, and technologist, to unpack what’s really happening when algorithms shape our attention. We talk about filter bubbles and echo chambers, but we keep coming back to a more actionable truth: attention is still primary, and mindfulness gives us tools to work with it directly. A big highlight is Jay’s concept of “false urgency,” the manufactured pressure baked into headlines, notifications, email subject lines, and even well-intentioned marketing. We dig in...
Published: Aug 17, 2026Duration: 10m 48s
Susan Piver On The Heart Sutra And The Real Point Of Sitting
Meditation gets marketed as a calm-down button, a focus trick, or the ultimate self-improvement tool. Then you try it and discover your mind did not get the memo. Sitting with us is Susan Piver, Buddhist teacher and author of Inexplicable Joy on the Heart Sutra, to name what’s actually happening when we practice and why the usual promises can miss the point.We talk about the misconception that meditation is mainly self-help. Yes, it can help in measurable ways, but Susan argues the deeper shift is learning to see reality clearly and to relate to the wo...
Published: Aug 14, 2026Duration: 9m 46s
How Small Emotional Pivots Break Stress Cycles
Your calendar is packed, your phone never stops, and somehow your body still thinks every moment is an emergency. We sit down with clinical psychologist and mindfulness teacher Dr Elisha Goldstein to talk about his book *Tiny Shifts* and the practical reality behind emotional steadiness: you do not need a new personality or a perfect morning routine, you need a reliable way to access your skills when stress hijacks your brain.We break down the “emotional loop” that drives reactivity, shutdown, self-criticism, doomscrolling, and those “not this again” moments. Elisha explains how thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and actions...
Published: Aug 11, 2026Duration: 31m 5s
Five Keys To A Deeper Mindfulness Practice, with Melvin McLeod
Mindfulness is everywhere now, but the way we talk about it can feel strangely small: a tool for stress, a way to focus, a better “hack” for busy lives. I sit down with Melvin McLeod, editor-at-large at Lion’s Roar, co-founder of Mindful Magazine, and a practitioner for over 40 years, to make a bigger claim that stays grounded in reality: mindfulness can be a complete path of living in a secular, evidence-based world.Melvin's new book: With a Single Breath: The Complete Path of Mindfulnesshttps://a.co/d/0aIwcRC6We trace how modern...
Published: Aug 7, 2026Duration: 43m 19s
A Grounded Eyes-Open Meditation With Susan Piver
Your meditation doesn’t need better willpower, a quieter mind, or a more “spiritual” seat on the floor. With renowned meditation teacher Susan Piver, we practice a clear, grounded approach to mindfulness meditation that starts where your body already is: feeling your weight land, sitting upright with dignity, softening the belly, and letting the jaw and shoulders finally unclench. If you’ve ever wondered whether a chair “counts,” you’ll love her reminder that it does.We also explore eyes-open meditation in a way that feels surprisingly gentle. Susan shares how to cast the gaze down, let vision mix wit...
Published: Jul 31, 2026Duration: 11m 50s