Buddhism Beyond Belief with Susan Piver
Buddhism Beyond Belief is a podcast from Susan Piver, a 30 year student of Tibetan Buddhism and founder of the Open Heart Project, an online meditation community with close to 20000 members.
With Susan as a friend and guide, we will look at traditional teachings like the four noble truths and the six paramitas–but not from an academic standpoint. Rather, we will talk about how to make it all personal and relevant in everyday life.
This podcast is not about Buddhist doctrine. It’s about how anyone can bring the profound wisdom of the dharma into their real life: at home, at work, and in love. The foundation for it all is meditation as a spiritual practice, not the latest life hack. Let’s go beyond the science and celebrity testimonials to discover the true power of meditation which is not based in self-improvement but in self-discovery.
Episodes
76 episodes
The Whole Buddhist Path in Four Sentences
In this episode, I look at The Four Dharmas of Gampopa, four short sentences I've recited as part of my daily Buddhist practice for more than thirty years. Together they sketch the whole path: connecting my mind with t...
Your Space Shapes Your Mind
How we arrange our outer world can have a surprising effect on our inner state. In this episode, I talk about how creating an environment of stability, simplicity, and respect for objects can help us meet a difficult world with more confidence ...
Pacify, Transform, Discover: A Buddhist Guide to Difficult Emotions
How do we work with strong emotions when the world feels frightening, divided, and uncertain? I look at three Buddhist approaches to difficult emotions: pacifying them, recognizing them as gateways to compassion, and discovering the wisdom w...
Conversation with Samuel Bercholz, founder of Shambhala Publications and my meditation teacher, Part Three
In Part Three of my conversation with my longtime teacher and spiritual friend Sam Bercholz, we talk about the strange and wonderful ways teachers can enter our lives, and how meditation can help us become more receptive to what is already h...
Conversation with Samuel Bercholz, founder of Shambhala Publications and my meditation teacher, Part Two
In this episode, I continue my conversation with Sam Bercholz. We talk about bringing the dharma into the modern West without reducing it to either cultural imitation or scientific validation. We discuss the three yanas, emptiness and fullne...
Conversation with Samuel Bercholz, founder of Shambhala Publications and my meditation teacher, Part One
I talk with my longest time spiritual friend, Samuel Bercholz, founder of Shambhala Publications and author of the new book,
Three Ways to Work With Heartbreak: Part Three
Heartbreak can make our usual strategies for managing pain useless. It can also show us what is true about being human: everything changes, everything ends, and love is precious because it cannot be held onto. In this episode, I look at ...
Three Ways to Work With Heartbreak: Part Two
When heartbreak is overwhelming, the instinct is often to make it stop. But what if the practice is not to fix what we're feeling, but to learn how to be with it? In this episode, I continue looking at three ways Buddhism offers us a path th...
Three Ways to Work With Heartbreak: Part One
Heartbreak is something we have the tendency to want to get rid of as quickly as possible. But some heartbreaks cannot be “fixed” or hurried. In this episode, I look at how Buddhist teachings can help us when heartbreak has a life of its own...
Learning is Remembering: The Outer, Inner, and Secret Teachers
How do we recognize a true teacher? In this episode I talk about the outer teacher, the inner teacher, and the secret teacher. Along the way I share a story from teaching the Heart Sutra, reflect on an unexpected lesso...
Meditation: An Act of Rebellion
It's no secret that many forces are competing for your attention, especially online. Some are noble and righteous. Some are not. Trying to track it all is...exhausting.The need for boundaries around our hearts and minds has never been mo...
How Do You Help Someone Who is Dying?
This is a shorter episode, recorded while my family and I accompany my mother through hospice care. I reflect on an instruction I received when I first learned to meditate: resting more fully on the out breath than the in breath. As I prepare t...
What is Emptiness?
What does "emptiness" actually mean in Buddhism? It is one of the most misunderstood teachings, often taken to mean nothingness or the absence of meaning. In this episode, I discuss emptiness through the Zen koan "Mu," a personal story of heart...
Four Reminders that Deepen Spiritual Practice
This week I share one of the central teachings in Tibetan Buddhist practice: the Four Reminders that turn the mind toward the dharma. I had a recent conversation with Lama Sonam Rinpoche who said to me multiple times in the course of a...
How to Live as a Mystic
It’s episode 60! A perfect place to reach a summation of my new book, Inexplicable Magic: Meditation for Mystics which posits that meditation is not ...
We Dream on Behalf of Others: Presence, Agency, and Staying Sane
This episode picks up on the sixth principle of spiritual practice from my new book, Inexplicable Magic: Meditation for Mystics: We ...
The Inexplicable Magic of Cleaning Up After Yourself
“The first rule of magic is containment,” said the great Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way and many other books. This points to the idea that the world we live in changes the way our minds and hearts work. The ...
The Importance of Spiritual Boundaries
The spiritual path asks you to open up, and the more you do so, the more you feel everything: your tenderness, things you’ve been avoiding, your deepest longings. It’s important to stay open to all of this but being open takes judgment. I know ...
The Wisdom of a Broken Heart
In this episode, I explore one of the most persistent misunderstandings about meditation: that it is supposed to make you feel better. From my experience, meditation does not numb heartbreak or smooth out emotional life. It opens us more ful...
The Way is Personal
In this episode, I reflect on a recent meditation and writing retreat where participants explored grief, heartbreak, violence, loss, and the experiences that shape us most deeply. I talk about why the personal is not an ob...
Ritual Sustains Spiritual Practice
In this episode, I explore why spiritual practice becomes sustainable through ritual, not force. I share the story of a month-long meditation retreat where I discovered an unexpected sense of ease in both meditation and writing, and how that ex...
Starting Over: Meditation for Mystics
In this episode, I reflect on a recent conversation in the Open Heart Project sangha about scientific research on meditation. Yes, meditation can improve brain function and mood. But if we stop there, we may miss the point.Ther...
Do Buddhists Pray?
Here is a new episode after an unexpected pause. I’m moving to a new house and that has stirred disorientation, emotional complexity, and a break from familiar patterns. The truth is, I just didn’t know if I had anything of use to say. Also, I ...
Recap: The Noble Eightfold Path
In this episode, I bring all eight steps of the Noble Eightfold Path together. This teaching is a way of living, not a project of self-improvement. This is about how we relate to experience and how that shapes suffering or freedom.Hig...
The Noble Eightfold Path: Step Eight: Right Samadhi
This week we arrive at the final step of the Noble Eightfold Path: Right Samadhi, often translated as concentration or absorption. If the earlier steps help us see clearly and act with intention, this final step gathers the mind into a unifi...
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