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...

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.com
• Book: mingtonggu.com/book
• Instagram: @chicenter
• Facebook: Wisdom Healing Qigong
• YouTube: @WisdomHealingQigong
• LinkedIn: Mingtong Gu

If you’ve ever felt like you’re living from the neck up, grinding through life while your body trails behind, this conversation is a reset.

We sit down with Master Ming Tong Gu, Wisdom Healing Qigong teacher and author of Coming Home to Embodied Awakening, to talk about a truth that sounds simple but changes everything: your body isn’t a problem to solve, it’s the place you come home to.

We go deep into what “exile from the body” actually looks like, from Ming Tong’s own story of growing up in rural China with decades of asthma, scoliosis, and chronic pain, to the way many of us chase happiness through external achievement, relationships, and constant self-improvement.

From there, we name what’s making disconnection worse right now: post-pandemic isolation, screen addiction, and the rising existential pressure of AI.

If machines can process information faster than we can, what makes being human meaningful? Ming Tong’s answer is grounded in embodied awakening: the human body lets us directly feel life, including joy, grief, love, discomfort, and the mystery of being here.

You’ll also get a short guided initiation meditation (hand on heart) you can do immediately, plus practical frameworks for somatic healing and mindfulness: a reframe of suffering as disconnection and liberation as return, and the “Three A’s” for working with pain, stress, and emotional overwhelm: acceptance, activation, and appreciation.

If you care about mindfulness, nervous system regulation, Qigong, trauma healing, and genuine connection in the age of technology, this is for you.

Check out Mingtong’s book and explore his teachings, then subscribe, share this with a friend who feels disconnected, and leave a review so more people can find the path back home to their bodies.

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...

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, not what we want.

Melvin's new book: With A Single Breath

From there, we zoom out to the bigger question of impact. Melvin explains why “Capital B” Buddhism, as an Asian religion in the modern West, may remain limited in reach even when its teachings are profound. We talk about the secular mindfulness movement associated with Jon Kabat-Zinn, and why evidence-based mindfulness meditation has become a powerful, modern contemplative tradition that millions will actually try. Along the way we explore how mindfulness connects to universal human longings: awareness, compassion, and insight that improve mental health, relationships, and the way we show up in society.

The heart of our conversation is a challenge and an invitation. Instead of treating mindfulness as a stress tool or focus hack, Melvin argues it’s time for the mindfulness movement to take a “next step” and offer a complete path of transformation, including the depth people used to seek in religion, without the baggage that turns so many away. If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find these conversations.

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...

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 guaranteed “healing experience.” Instead, he focuses on the quality of the container: how the retreat is presented, how safety is supported, and how much permission people have to be exactly as they are. We dig into disorientation and why losing normal time and place cues can be unsettling, even when you are physically safe. Scott also breaks down how the autonomic nervous system can interpret being alone in the dark as a survival threat, and why normalizing fear, sadness, anger, or restlessness can be more helpful than trying to transcend them.

We also explore a subtle but powerful idea: belonging often feels more urgent than authenticity. When we expect to do a retreat “the right way,” we can unconsciously hide the parts of our experience that do not match the story. This conversation is for anyone curious about darkness retreats, sensory deprivation, mindfulness practice, somatic awareness, nervous system regulation, and what real integration can look like after intense stillness.

If this resonates, subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend who’s retreat-curious, and leave a review so more people can find these conversations.

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...

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 toolkit for building meaning through action. Dr. Demartini shares the seven questions he used to design his own path, from naming what you would love to do to planning for obstacles and extracting value from whatever happens each day.

We also explore “holy curiosity”, information theory, entropy, and how asking better questions can reduce bias and help you see a fuller truth rather than getting stuck in polarised opinions.

Finally, we connect mindfulness and meditation to the nervous system: seeking and avoiding can drive intrusive thoughts, fear loops, and even insomnia.

Dr. Demartini explains mindfulness as loving awareness, not romance or infatuation, but the capacity to hold both sides at once and integrate what you’ve disowned.

If you want a clearer mind, steadier emotions, and a more sustainable relationship with purpose, press play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s overgiving, 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...

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 happens before, during, and after you use a platform. That one shift can reveal the difference between technology that is genuinely nourishing and technology that is merely sticky. He also unpacks the interface illusions baked into modern apps: what “friend,” “match,” “views,” and even “AI conversation” really mean, and why those metaphors can distort how we experience connection.

From there we get practical. Jay explains “fight design with design” and shows how to use friction and absence in your physical space and your home screen, without shame. We also challenge the false idea that online relationships are automatically fake, exploring how higher-bandwidth communication like audio and video messages can make digital connection more authentic and reciprocal.

If you want mindfulness-based strategies for phone addiction, healthier social media habits, and a calmer relationship with tech, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who is struggling with their screen time, and leave a review, what is one app you want to redesign your relationship with?

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...

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 Western practitioners who live in the head
• jhana explained as stable, blissful metta awareness and why it matters
• a practical way to start metta by sparking a warm feeling and expanding it outward
• the four Rs: recognize, release, relish, remain
• using tension in the forehead and head as biofeedback for craving and distraction
• mindfulness and loving-kindness as inseparable as practice matures
• right effort as moving from unfit states to fit states rather than forcing concentration
• reintegration after disrobing, boundaries, and building a “mental diet”
“I highly encourage everyone listening to check out Liam's book and to contact Liam for trainings and coaching.”
“I encourage everyone listening to check out FitMind, the book, FitMind the app, FitMind the Programs, FitMind the Teachings.”
“I recommend [the Mindfulness Exercises program] to all the listeners, if they're not already a student of yours.”
“I just encourage us all to practice to continue along this path together.”

Book: https://a.co/d/0eOlYnpM

FitMind.org

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...