Mindfulness for life’s hard inner turns.
Practicing Human is a daily mental health and mindfulness show centered on becoming more skillful with inner experience. Cory Mascara uses brief reflections, bells, and practical inquiry to examine decisions, emotional release, resistance, burnout, grief, and surrender.
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Practicing Human is a daily mindfulness and emotional healing show built around the small, difficult moments where a person can either tighten or soften. Cory Mascara gives each episode a focused question. How does someone make a decision when analysis stops helping? What is the difference between holding pain and ruminating on it? What happens when a life built through control starts to feel exhausting, confusing, or misaligned? The show’s pace is deliberate. Bells often create a threshold before the teaching begins, and the reflections tend to stay close to the felt body rather than floating into general inspiration. Its central interest is relationship: how a person relates to a thought, a sensation, a stuck emotion, a protective wall, a fear response, or a grief that arrives when something familiar falls away. The advice is not simply to think positively or feel everything harder. Instead, the show pays attention to the quality of contact. Presence can release pain, but only when resistance is seen clearly enough to soften. Decision-making can involve thought, but thought is treated as a whiteboard rather than the final authority. Intuition is described as something that emerges through the actual conditions of a life, not as a shortcut around them. Episodes often challenge the reflex to force clarity, predict the future, or bend life into a shape approved by accumulated expectations. They also respect how frightening transition can be. Grief is not treated as proof that something has gone wrong; it can mark the moment a defended pattern is finally giving way. Practicing Human is best for listeners who want concise contemplative support while working through decisions, pain, burnout, trauma residue, or the end of an old identity. It has the intimacy of a guided reflection and the structure of practical inner work.
Made for: The show is for listeners drawn to mindfulness, emotional healing, and practical inner inquiry. It especially suits people navigating difficult decisions, stuck pain, burnout, grief, or a sense that old patterns no longer work.
What sets it apart: Practicing Human stands out by focusing on the subtle mechanics of inner experience: resistance, embodiment, rumination, surrender, and the felt difference between fear and knowing. Its daily format gives contemplative ideas a grounded, practice-oriented rhythm.
Practicing Human is a daily podcast, hosted by Cory Muscara, offering insights and practices into how to live a fulfilling life. Cory pulls on his time living as a Buddhist monk in Burma, his many years as a mindfulness and meditation teacher, and his work in Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A careful guide to the line between feeling pain and feeding it.
Cory Mascara spends the episode teasing apart the difference between holding pain and rehearsing it, then follows that thread into how resistance can show up when someone thinks they are being present with a hard emotion or stuck trauma energy.
Jonquilyn Hill chases one listener question per episode to the experts who can answer it.
Three hosts and psychologist Dr Emily talk vulnerability, therapy, and imperfection with guests.
Fearne Cotton interviews guests like Boy George and Bryony Gordon about mental health and identity.
Dr. Joy Harden Bradford pairs therapy insight with Black TV recaps, maternal health, and history.
Cory Muscara explores the critical difference between releasing emotional pain and inadvertently reinforcing it.
Corey Muscara explores why trying to hold your life together might be preventing you from living the life you're meant to live.
On Practicing Human, Cory Mascara argues that difficult decisions may require stepping away after facts, fears, and pros and cons have been laid out.
Cory Muscara explores the difference between holding an emotion and ruminating, guiding listeners to release pain rather than reinforce it through mindful presence.
Cory Mascara explains how presence can unwind people-pleasing patterns rooted in feeling unlovable.
Practicing Human host Cory Mascara explains how living for approval can function as a survival strategy that weakens access to personal wants and boundaries.
Cory Mascara describes returning from several weeks of travel, feeling scattered while caring for his baby and working, then regaining clarity after spending three focused hours building something on his website.