Mindfulness Exercises, with Sean Fargo

Sean Fargo
  • 5.0 (73)
  • Mental Health
  • Updated Semiweekly

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 Salzberg, Gabor Maté, Byron Katie, Rick Hanson, Ellen Langer, Judson Brewer)  • Clear takeaways you can use today—in sessions, classrooms, workplaces, and at home Updated 2-3x weekly. Follow the show, try this week’s practice, and share one insight in a review to help others discover the podcast. Explore more resources and training at MindfulnessExercises.com and the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification.

  1. 2d ago

    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 habitual mindset  • equanimity as pausing before defending or striking back  • findings from meditators vs Kripalu yoga practitioners vs controls  • posterior cingulate cortex and networks linked to self-story and empathy  • meditation traditions and gradual awakening as a developmental path  • pandemic and science as real-world examples of stage-like reactions  BECOME A CERTIFIED MINDFULNESS MEDITATION TEACHER  Teach mindfulness with confidence and skill — without self-doubt, fear of judgment, or imposter syndrome. Our internationally accredited certification is for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and helping professionals. Accredited by the IMMA and CPD; endorsed by Gabor Maté and Rick Hanson. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/certification/ NEW HERE? START FREE  Explore 3,000+ free guided meditations, scripts, and worksheets — for your own practice or to share with the people you teach. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/free-mindfulness-exercises/ ENJOYING THE PODCAST? Follow the show in your favorite app and leave a quick rating or review. It takes a moment, and it genuinely helps more teachers and practitioners find these conversations. ——————————————————————————— ABOUT THE SHOW 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 — the show explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work. Each episode offers a mix o...

  2. 5d ago

    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  • returning with open eyes, gentle movement, and renewed curiosity  BECOME A CERTIFIED MINDFULNESS MEDITATION TEACHER  Teach mindfulness with confidence and skill — without self-doubt, fear of judgment, or imposter syndrome. Our internationally accredited certification is for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and helping professionals. Accredited by the IMMA and CPD; endorsed by Gabor Maté and Rick Hanson. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/certification/ NEW HERE? START FREE  Explore 3,000+ free guided meditations, scripts, and worksheets — for your own practice or to share with the people you teach. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/free-mindfulness-exercises/ ENJOYING THE PODCAST? Follow the show in your favorite app and leave a quick rating or review. It takes a moment, and it genuinely helps more teachers and practitioners find these conversations. ——————————————————————————— ABOUT THE SHOW 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 — the show explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work. Each episode offers a mix o...

  3. Oct 15

    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 debate: mindfulness vs loving-kindness. Liam shares why, in lived practice, metta and mindfulness become hard to separate, and how a genuinely loving state naturally carries clarity, meta-awareness, and stability. We also connect this to core Buddhist training, including the Eightfold Path, right effort, and why over-efforting can quietly turn meditation into another achievement project.  We close with real-world integration after monastic life: the shock of stimulation, the value of boundaries, and the “mental diet” idea of curating what you feed the mind each day. If you care about mindfulness, meditation, neuroscience, jhana, and building a resilient mental fitness practice that actually holds up off the cushion, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s stressed, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway. BECOME A CERTIFIED MINDFULNESS MEDITATION TEACHER  Teach mindfulness with confidence and skill — without self-doubt, fear of judgment, or imposter syndrome. Our internationally accredited certification is for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and helping professionals. Accredited by the IMMA and CPD; endorsed by Gabor Maté and Rick Hanson. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/certification/ NEW HERE? START FREE  Explore 3,000+ free guided meditations, scripts, and worksheets — for your own practice or to share with the people you teach. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/free-mindfulness-exercises/ ENJOYING THE PODCAST? Follow the show in your favorite app and leave a quick rating or review. It takes a moment, and it genuinely helps more teachers and practitioners find these conversations. ——————————————————————————— ABOUT THE SHOW 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 — the show explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work. Each episode offers a mix o...

  4. Oct 11

    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 Reduction (MBSR), including evidence that just eight weeks of practice can be associated with measurable brain changes.  We talk about the default mode network and what it has to do with rumination and mind wandering, plus why decreased stress and increased well-being may rely on different brain systems. Then we get specific about pain: mindfulness does not necessarily “turn pain off.”  Instead, experienced practitioners can show more sensory processing alongside less evaluative resistance, which lines up with a major real-world takeaway: intensity and unpleasantness are not the same thing.  From there, we move into fear of pain and anxiety, comparing mindfulness training with a structured exercise and stress education program. Both can reduce stress, but mindfulness shows a unique edge for anxiety and emotion regulation, tied to practice time and to learning processes like extinction and memory for safety.  We end by guiding a body scan you can use as an off-ramp from spiraling thoughts into grounded body awareness. If this conversation helps you, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find it. BECOME A CERTIFIED MINDFULNESS MEDITATION TEACHER  Teach mindfulness with confidence and skill — without self-doubt, fear of judgment, or imposter syndrome. Our internationally accredited certification is for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and helping professionals. Accredited by the IMMA and CPD; endorsed by Gabor Maté and Rick Hanson. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/certification/ NEW HERE? START FREE  Explore 3,000+ free guided meditations, scripts, and worksheets — for your own practice or to share with the people you teach. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/free-mindfulness-exercises/ ENJOYING THE PODCAST? Follow the show in your favorite app and leave a quick rating or review. It takes a moment, and it genuinely helps more teachers and practitioners find these conversations. ——————————————————————————— ABOUT THE SHOW 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 — the show explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work. Each episode offers a mix o...

  5. Oct 9

    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  • connection as biological protection and a lever for wellbeing  • peace as curiosity, allowing and ending the inner battle  • reinforce as encoding small wins into memory with body awareness and mental snapshots  • free starter bundle available at elishagoldstein.com  BECOME A CERTIFIED MINDFULNESS MEDITATION TEACHER  Teach mindfulness with confidence and skill — without self-doubt, fear of judgment, or imposter syndrome. Our internationally accredited certification is for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and helping professionals. Accredited by the IMMA and CPD; endorsed by Gabor Maté and Rick Hanson. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/certification/ NEW HERE? START FREE  Explore 3,000+ free guided meditations, scripts, and worksheets — for your own practice or to share with the people you teach. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/free-mindfulness-exercises/ ENJOYING THE PODCAST? Follow the show in your favorite app and leave a quick rating or review. It takes a moment, and it genuinely helps more teachers and practitioners find these conversations. ——————————————————————————— ABOUT THE SHOW 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 — the show explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work. Each episode offers a mix o...

  6. Oct 6

    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 kindness and returning again  • recognising daily patterns of shallow breathing and rushing  BECOME A CERTIFIED MINDFULNESS MEDITATION TEACHER  Teach mindfulness with confidence and skill — without self-doubt, fear of judgment, or imposter syndrome. Our internationally accredited certification is for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and helping professionals. Accredited by the IMMA and CPD; endorsed by Gabor Maté and Rick Hanson. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/certification/ NEW HERE? START FREE  Explore 3,000+ free guided meditations, scripts, and worksheets — for your own practice or to share with the people you teach. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/free-mindfulness-exercises/ ENJOYING THE PODCAST? Follow the show in your favorite app and leave a quick rating or review. It takes a moment, and it genuinely helps more teachers and practitioners find these conversations. ——————————————————————————— ABOUT THE SHOW 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 — the show explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work. Each episode offers a mix o...

  7. Oct 3

    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-moffitt We explore Mindful Birthing (also known as Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting, MBCP), a nine-week mindfulness-based childbirth education program rooted in the evidence base of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.  Jennifer breaks down the five intentions of the curriculum, why “don’t know mind” belongs in every birth plan, and how mindful awareness can help parents relate differently to fear, uncertainty, and intense sensation. You’ll also hear a brief guided breath and body practice you can return to anytime you feel spun up or disconnected.  We go deeper into the public health side too: perinatal outcomes in the United States, maternal health disparities, the chronic stress of racism, and the growing research linking stress physiology to preterm birth. Then we unpack one of the most practical reframes for labor and life: pain in labor as transformational pain, and how mindfulness can decouple pain from suffering so you don’t miss the breaks between contractions.  If you find this helpful, subscribe, share with a friend who’s preparing for birth, and leave a review so more parents and clinicians can find the show. What’s one moment you want to meet with more presence this week? BECOME A CERTIFIED MINDFULNESS MEDITATION TEACHER  Teach mindfulness with confidence and skill — without self-doubt, fear of judgment, or imposter syndrome. Our internationally accredited certification is for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and helping professionals. Accredited by the IMMA and CPD; endorsed by Gabor Maté and Rick Hanson. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/certification/ NEW HERE? START FREE  Explore 3,000+ free guided meditations, scripts, and worksheets — for your own practice or to share with the people you teach. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/free-mindfulness-exercises/ ENJOYING THE PODCAST? Follow the show in your favorite app and leave a quick rating or review. It takes a moment, and it genuinely helps more teachers and practitioners find these conversations. ——————————————————————————— ABOUT THE SHOW 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 — the show explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work. Each episode offers a mix o...

  8. Sep 28

    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 controversial in Buddhist circles. Rather than “bearing down” on a tiny target like the breath at the nostrils, Liam describes a softer, open-hearted concentration where joy becomes the fuel. He shares why this approach can be especially effective for Western meditators, how it relates to neuroscience and markers like heart rate variability, and why these altered states of consciousness are not about escapism but insight into suffering and its cessation.  Then we get concrete. Liam walks through what metta practice looks like, from sparking the feeling with a memory, to sending kindness to yourself first, to expanding outward until the phrases and images fade and the felt quality of care becomes the anchor. We also break down his Four Rs for distractions, Recognize, Release, Relish, Remain, a simple framework for coming back without tightening your attention or blaming yourself.  If you want a practical mindfulness meditation method you can use on the cushion and in daily life, press play, then subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the practice. BECOME A CERTIFIED MINDFULNESS MEDITATION TEACHER  Teach mindfulness with confidence and skill — without self-doubt, fear of judgment, or imposter syndrome. Our internationally accredited certification is for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and helping professionals. Accredited by the IMMA and CPD; endorsed by Gabor Maté and Rick Hanson. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/certification/ NEW HERE? START FREE  Explore 3,000+ free guided meditations, scripts, and worksheets — for your own practice or to share with the people you teach. → https://mindfulnessexercises.com/free-mindfulness-exercises/ ENJOYING THE PODCAST? Follow the show in your favorite app and leave a quick rating or review. It takes a moment, and it genuinely helps more teachers and practitioners find these conversations. ——————————————————————————— ABOUT THE SHOW 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 — the show explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work. Each episode offers a mix o...

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5
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73 Ratings

About

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 Salzberg, Gabor Maté, Byron Katie, Rick Hanson, Ellen Langer, Judson Brewer)  • Clear takeaways you can use today—in sessions, classrooms, workplaces, and at home Updated 2-3x weekly. Follow the show, try this week’s practice, and share one insight in a review to help others discover the podcast. Explore more resources and training at MindfulnessExercises.com and the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification.

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