Sustainability, Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Politics, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero · One Planet Podcast · Mia Funk

WISDOM OF HAPPINESS - Heart-to-Heart w/ DALAI LAMA - Conversation w/ Director Barbara Miller

·44 min·2 clips

The Dalai Lama says the 21st century will not be easy because of fear, anger, hatred, and global warming.

Mia Funk discusses "Wisdom of Happiness" through the Dalai Lama’s long-running call for compassion, nonviolence, and self-confidence. The conversation treats happiness as more than a private mood, linking it to the health of communities and the state of the planet. Fear matters here. She returns to the Dalai Lama’s reminder that people draw lines around nationality, color, and religion, and she frames the film around the possibility of widening the idea of “we.” The discussion also moves into climate language, because the Dalai Lama’s warning about global warming is presented as part of the same moral picture as anger, hatred, and indifference. The point holds the thread. The film’s outlook is not built on denial, but on the idea that the mind can be trained, emotions can be understood, and negative states can be reduced instead of obeyed. She describes the Dalai Lama’s confidence that people can change their minds and learn to work with anger and hatred. She also returns to the role of his mother, whom he has called his first guru of compassion. That family origin gives the film a grounded human center. The conversation then moves to suffering, and to the insistence that happiness does not require pretending suffering is absent. Mia Funk reflects on how the film resists the advertising logic that promises a perfect life and instead asks viewers to stay with reality more honestly. She also notes that materialism can pull people further away from who they really are. Education becomes the practical bridge. She says one of the film’s goals is to bring these ideas into schools, where children and young adults can learn how to handle fear, anger, and hatred before those emotions harden into habit. She describes school materials already being developed and used. The film has been shown in Switzerland to more than 100 school classes, and she points to the way young viewers respond when they realize they are not helpless. That response matters because it shifts the conversation from abstract hope to a teachable, lived sense of agency. The episode closes by holding together a large and simple claim: compassion can be learned, and that learning has consequences for the future of people and the planet.

As heard by us

Compassion, global warming, and a steadier way of being human.

The episode treats happiness less as a private feeling than as a public responsibility. It moves from compassion and nonviolence to the harm that fear, anger, hatred, and the split between "we" and "they" can do, then ties that outlook to global warming and the duty to protect a…

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Why you'd press play

When you want climate urgency framed through compassion instead of alarm.

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