Ep. 616 – The Truth of Emptiness with Susan Piver
Mindrolling with Raghu Markus
Be Here Now Network
4.7 • 543 Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Carried by a discourse on The Heart Sutra, teacher and author Susan Piver joins Raghu to explore the truth of emptiness.
Grab your copy of Susan’s book: Inexplicable Joy: On the Heart Sutra
This week on Mindrolling, Raghu and Susan chat about:
- Practicing The Heart Sutra with only one syllable: ahh
- The truth of emptiness through recitation of non-truths
- Understanding emptiness as bliss, not as voidness
- The commitment to self interest that many westerners experience
- Releasing the ego as the first step towards embracing emptiness
- Being both empty and luminous at the same time
- Thinking of emptiness as complete interconnection and fullness
- Susan’s psychedelic experience: staying in the present, being in the womb of bliss
- The six transcendent actions and how they all spring from generosity
Check out this free, downloadable translation of The Heart Sutra from Plum Village
“You’re empty of separate existence. Your parents, their parents, their parents, if someone ate a different sandwich a thousand years ago, you wouldn’t be here. Emptiness could just as easily be called fullness, completely connected.” –Susan Piver
About Susan Piver:
Susan Piver has an international reputation as an exceptionally skillful meditation teacher. She teaches workshops and speaks on mindfulness, innovation, communication, relationships, and creativity. Susan has been a student of Buddhism since 1995, graduated from a Buddhist seminary in 2004, and was authorized to teach meditation in 2005. In 2012, she founded The Open Heart Project, the world’s largest online-only meditation center. Susan is also a New York Times bestselling author. Her most recent book, Inexplicable Joy: On the Heart Sutra, is now available. You can keep up with Susan on Instagram or on her website.
Join Susan for a 5-day Kripalu meditation retreat this November
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, everyone, it's Rago, and I'm back with Mind Rolling, and Susan Piper is my guest today, and welcome. |
| 0:19.0 | Welcome, welcome. |
| 0:24.0 | Oh, thank you. I'm so glad to be here it's nice to know you and re-know you yeah we just figured out that we knew each other from the record business you know a few |
| 0:31.2 | decades ago which is always a sort of a charming thing to realize you know after. I mean, I started thinking, Susan Piver, |
| 0:40.9 | I know her somehow. And then Tommy Silverman, you know, it's just unbelievable. |
| 0:45.4 | That's so funny. Hi, Tom, if you're watching. We know you. We're talking about you. |
| 0:50.4 | Yes, we'll have to reconnect with him. So, Susan has been teaching meditation for many, many years and has a wonderful satsung, |
| 1:04.5 | or sangha. |
| 1:05.6 | We have to switch over to the terminology of Buddhists, Open Heart. |
| 1:12.3 | Project? |
| 1:13.1 | Project, yeah. |
| 1:14.8 | And has written a number of books. |
| 1:18.1 | The latest one is Around the Heart Sutra. |
| 1:21.3 | And I want to talk about that, too. |
| 1:23.5 | But before anything, we need to know, how the heck did you even think of this stuff you know |
| 1:29.8 | I tell people I was a teenager how did I start thinking of it I was absolutely miserable |
| 1:36.0 | absolutely unhappy and uh that led me to investigate a little bit of curiosity and a little bit of suffering and you mix it all together and then stuff happened. |
| 1:50.8 | Meanwhile, what about you, Susan? |
| 1:54.0 | Yeah, stuff happened for sure. |
| 1:59.0 | And I, excuse me, everything about my path and my practice, I think it's safe for me to say is I've fallen |
| 2:10.2 | backwards into it. I wasn't looking. I didn't decide to do anything. I mean, I was always interested in spiritual things. |
| 2:19.8 | It was always a big reader, even when I was a child, little, like six, seven, eight. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Be Here Now Network, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Be Here Now Network and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.