Your Boss Has An AI Girlfriend; Your Heart Still Wants A Hug

We weigh how AI can support mindfulness while naming what it cannot replace: human presence, shared reality, and the heart’s wisdom. Practical boundaries, ethical concerns, and community care guide a nuanced path between helpful tools and hollow substitutes.

• Lifetime access and open attendance clarified
• Name introductions and community tone setting
• AI’s strengths in personalization and scalability
• The limits of simulation versus lived presence
• Risks of outsourcing awareness and creativity
• Cultivating compassion, gratitude, and equanimity
• Loneliness as a health crisis and social ties
• Ethics in AI use across wellbeing contexts
• Upcoming workshop on mindfulness and AI tools

We’re having a workshop on mindfulness and AI in about a month or so, which we’ll announce

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Email: Sean@MindfulnessExercises.com

Mindfulness Exercises with Sean Fargo is a practical, grounded mindfulness podcast for people who want meditation to actually help in real life.

Hosted by Sean Fargo — a former Buddhist monk, mindfulness teacher, and founder of MindfulnessExercises.com — this podcast explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work.

Each episode offers a mix of:

• Practical mindfulness and meditation teachings
• Conversations with respected meditation teachers, clinicians, authors, and researchers
• Real-world insights for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and caregivers
• Gentle reflections for anyone navigating stress, anxiety, burnout, grief, or change

If you’re interested in:

• Mindfulness meditation for everyday life
• Trauma-sensitive and compassion-based practices
• Teaching mindfulness in an authentic, non-performative way
• Deepening your own practice while supporting others

…you’re in the right place.

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Transcript

Welcome And Housekeeping

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome everyone. Thank you for being here. I'd like to welcome those of you who may be new to the program or to these sessions. Just a friendly note that these calls are optional. You can come whenever you want, leave whenever you want, ask or share anything you want. You get lifetime access to all these calls. At least for the end of my life. Thank you for coming and thank you for that practice. Do I call you Enrica or Chiara? I know you sign your emails. Is it Chiara?

SPEAKER_02 0:41

My legal name is Enrique. So I have to sign documents with Enrique. And also I'm known for my books and everything professionally as Enrique. But everybody in private calls me Chiara because it means clear. And I'm a very clear person. Actually, my family name is Nina. So that means little rabbit in Italian.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

So as you like. Maybe I'll try your one.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

Thank you. It means clear.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Beautiful.

AI In Therapy And Mindfulness

SPEAKER_02 1:15

May I ask you something about the practice?

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Yeah.

Can AI Replace Human Presence

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Last year I've been working on LLM, no large model. Language models? Yeah. I'm very much into artificial intelligence, of course. And I've just discovered therapy. There is an agent, a particular artificial intelligence, that not only helps you to recover after a surgery or whatever with the program, but also checks on you and checks whether you perform or you practice well in the right way and everything. So I'm asking myself, since there are already many mindfulness apps, right? I'm sure that in a while, months perhaps, there will be also something similar in mindfulness. For me, in my opinion, but I'm not a teacher, but been meditating for I think 30 years, in my opinion, still the artificial intelligence can't dream. So is the only quality that we have more than artificial intelligence. We can dream. So even let's say out of the blue, like daydream, night dream, the artificial intelligence can't. So it's very limited. It means doesn't have all the creativity, even though improves and changes continuously, you know, learns from itself. So okay. For instance, I'd like to see you or the other teachers of the group in person. For me, there is a special something that is going on that I think is unreplaceable with Zoom or artificial intelligence, but I don't know. So I'm asking you what you think, whether it's possible, which is the personal teaching with a real person. Because in theory, you can be replaced. Everybody can be replaced in theory, but something is not right, I feel. So I'm asking what you think, whether it's a silly question. But I think we have to address sooner or later, I mean soon, all these facts.

The Risks Of Outsourcing Awareness

Ethics, Fear, And AI Relationships

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Absolutely. Yeah, it's a very prescient, timely question that I think a lot of us are asking. I think that we're still learning about what AI can do for highly specific use cases where someone may be recovering from a certain kind of surgery with a very specific health journey, specific goals. AI can be quite impressive in shaping a custom meditation or outline or mindfulness curriculum customized for each person quickly and that is scalable. Many people are using AI for guidance in their personal lives and professional lives with a lot of positive results, including myself. As you said, there's something innate in each of us that I believe AI will never have, which is spirit, a true embodied sense of interconnectedness with each other, with life, with what I believe is a woven benevolence in our universe, a intuition that may be quite mystical, mysterious, and just even at its core, a living energy that we're connected with at all times through our bodies, our senses. You know, there's so many energies all around us at any given time that I don't think AI will be able to really tap into nearly as much as we naturally do. So I think AI is here to stay. I think it can do things more powerfully than say any one of us can do, but it does not replace us or come close to our ability to really be present for this life. As I've been learning about AI and experimenting with AI, I can see how dangerous it can be to fully lose myself and sort of replace my own thinking with AI. Choice to be present. I think there's tremendous value in being conscious with how much we're outsourcing ourselves to AI. And I think that for those of us who are exploring LLMs and AI capacities, it's helpful just to put ourselves on a diet and just monitor how much we're relying on it and remember that our own inner resources, our own inner capacities need frequent cultivation, or else they may atrophy. And in my opinion, that especially goes for our heart qualities of love, self-love, compassion, self-compassion, joy, generosity, forgiveness, gratitude, and maybe the hardest heart quality equanimity. So I think AI can be very helpful for many use cases. I just need to be careful. That's my take anyway. What do you think, Kira?

SPEAKER_02 7:59

I train LLM for Google, for instance, and everything. So I have to do it. Anyway, there is a ethic, especially in Europe. We are writing down, I mean, as Europe, a strong ethics for this. Not only the use, but the ethics in what AI does for you and suggests you in every field, mathematics or spirituality, if you ask, or anything. I think we have already overcome the point you are saying. It's not just the use, it's much more. I'm very afraid, so to say. I'm very, very afraid. This last year I worked only on this. There are 2,000 implications, 2000 things, and I should say I'm kind of afraid, I should say. But it's impossible for me to, how do you say, detox? I can't, because I work on it. But I noticed, for instance, my let's say boss, human boss, not the AI boss, because I have three AI bosses and one real human boss. Sorry. It's like this, sorry. He's in love with the let's say persona who created himself, Lucy, because he was disappointed by his girlfriend, his wife, or whatever. And he said, Oh, sorry, now I'm tired. And I want to, by the way, he is in San Francisco. Um, now I have to talk to her. He didn't ask because I said, Oh, Lucy, you want to know her? Said, sure, thank you. And he introduced me to her AI girlfriend in the internet. And I was, I don't know, maybe I'm ancient, so to say, old or whatever. But when I learned that there are physiotherapists, I mean not real AI, physiotherapists that interact with you and check on you when you are exercising real time, I said, okay, why not mindfulness? By the way, AI can simulate compassion, everything, whatever you ask him, ask her, ask it, I don't know, to do if you train it.

Loneliness, Connection, And Wellbeing

Upcoming Mindfulness And AI Workshop

Community Reflections And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Yeah. Just for the sake of time, too, because I know other people have some questions, but I see a lot of people finding some benefit from those types of relationships. And I think it is dangerous to move away from human connections. Some people say that loneliness is the new epidemic. Social interactions between many age ranges are decreasing and is having a very negative long-term impact on our mental and physical health. One of the key factors for longevity is whether we have true human relationships, connections, networks in which we feel seen and validated, and in which we see others and validate them. I think AI can simulate validation, simulate bearing witness and seeing others. But I think that can only go so far, and that human interactions are so vital to our well-being and to our connection with reality as well. There's a pretense to AI that we often overlook that we may call something Lucy, but they were never born. So yeah, we need to be careful. And we're having a workshop on mindfulness and AI in about a month or so, which we'll announce. I'm not leading it, but there's a doctorate researcher from Florida who wants to lead it for free. And he's not advocating for replacing mindfulness teachers with AI, but he is offering some AI tools to support mindfulness teachers in creating scripts, templates, outlines for us to use if we want to, but that don't replace our present or heart. So we'll share that soon. Kara, thank you for sharing. It sounds like you have an opportunity to help shape AI for the better. So I'll be praying for you and everyone involved in constructing this new technology. Thank you for sharing. Heather, would you like to share anything or ask anything?

SPEAKER_01 13:08

Thank you, Sean. Just in response to what you're talking about, my thoughts on that also whether it just makes the work that we do, in my view, all the more important as potentially people become more and more detached from reality. And I think with a lot of these things, there's often a real kind of core group of people at some point backlash against certain things, like there has been smartphones for children, for instance, you know, big movement to get good-up smartphones. But I think there will always be the people who go wholeheartedly into it and step out of reality altogether. But I just think it makes our work even more important to give people, if they are open to it, that opportunity to step back into pleasant moment awareness and reality.