Liberating Happiness

The Buddha's Path to Joy

with Nathan Glyde and Zohar Lavie

The path to joy

You may already know that lasting happiness is not found in material goods and enviable experiences. Even so, you'd be surprised at how much joy is to be gained through a program of meditation, inquiry, and action. By the end of this course, you will be in no doubt.


Enroll today to be ready when Liberating Happiness begins on February 10th.

Enroll today

Scholarships are available


The Joy of Compassion

Zohar tells a personal story that shows the joy and wellbeing that comes through compassion.

Features and Benefits

Nathan and Zohar
Expert teachers

Nathan and Zohar have decades of experience leading retreats and guiding individual students on the Buddhist path. They are respected internationally for their teaching and charitable work.

Buddha statue
A tried-and-tested program

These teachings offer new and surprising ways of looking at freedom and happiness. Hundreds of meditators have benefitted from these practices at Gaia House. Now they are finally available in an online course.

Gaia House
Filmed at Gaia House

Gaia House is a beautiful meditation center in Devon, UK. Surrounded by fields and hills, it is the perfect place to deepen in meditation and is served by a thriving community of yogis and teachers.

Zohar Lavie

Zohar's life changed on a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in 1995. "I was backpacking through Asia, and assumed this would be just one more experience on my trip. It ended up transforming my life." Through years of practice and service, she became a much-loved teacher and a member of the Gaia House Teacher Council. Zohar also co-founded the SanghaSeva charity which combines meditation with action to relieve suffering in the world.

Nathan Glyde

Nathan Glyde

In 1997, Nathan arrived at Gaia House to visit a friend. As a young man, impatient to change the world, he couldn't quite see the point in sitting around in quiet contemplation—but he gave it a go. Decades later, Nathan pours his creative talents into communicating Buddhist teachings playfully and serving communities as a member of the Gaia House Teacher Council and a co-founder of the SanghaSeva charity.


Live Q&A Sessions

In addition to the course program, you will have the opportunity to ask questions to Zohar and Nathan directly in two live Q&A sessions hosted on Zoom on the following dates:

  • March 5th, 1pm EST
  • March 20th, 2pm EST




Litter Picking and the Self

Nathan shares a story about how he learned to see the simple act of litter picking differently.

Learn from much-loved teachers

I celebrate, from personal experience, the deep compassion and wisdom Zohar and Nathan express in their meditation teaching and practice, and in their lives.—Caroline Jones, Insight Meditation teacher
Zohar and Nathan are wise and experienced teachers who live and breathe their practice and take it to some of the most difficult places in the world. I always find something new to learn from them both.—Jaya Rudgard, Insight Meditation teacher
Zohar Lavie is a wise and compassionate teacher concerned about the personal and global. Nathan Glyde brings a friendly and pragmatic presence to his teaching and the practice of meditation.—Martine Batchelor, Bodhi College faculty member and author
Zohar and Nathan have decades of deep dharma experience, and of fully walking their talk. Their lives are an expression of their practice and teaching, and I’m delighted to see their wisdom being made available to others through their Tricycle course.—Martin Aylward, Insight Meditation teacher and Co-Founder of the Moulin de Chaves retreat center
I’m delighted to know that Zohar and Nathan are teaching this course for Tricycle. They are a much-loved and appreciated teaching team over here in the UK and Europe and I am glad that through this course more people will have the chance to benefit from their clear, applicable and powerful teachings.—Catherine McGee, Insight Meditation teacher

How the Course Unfolds

This easy-to-use online course is a six-week program of instruction, meditation, and inquiry. Each unit contains around 45 minutes of material to study, as well as contemplative exercises. After the course begins, a new unit will be released each Monday. You are free to study at your own pace, and will retain access to the material ongoing.

You can follow the course on a computer, tablet, or phone.

Unit 1 | Generosity

The Buddha would give his followers the task of bringing generosity into their lives. He would encourage people to find ways to act, to bring good into their own lives and the lives of others. This creates harmony and connection. As we do that, the heart opens. A heart that is open, a sense of harmony: These are good definitions of happiness.

Unit 2 | Appreciation

It can seem pretty hard to be joyful. But if you think about any period of happiness that you've had in your life, was there not a quality of appreciation for something? Most of the time we experience happiness as a moment of appreciating something. Let's just flip that around. Has there ever been a moment of appreciation without an increase in happiness?

Unit 3 | Gratitude

We're going to bring gratitude to a wider range of experience, especially to that which we often overlook: sensations that are neither unpleasant enough to be rejected nor pleasant enough to be held on to. This is a powerful way of liberating happiness.

Unit 4 | Skillful behavior

Our biological and cultural instincts are helpful for survival but not so relevant to thriving as beings, or as a species, or as a planet. But we can shape our behavior in ways that do align with our highest sense of what is beautiful, noble, and worth living for. This, in turn, creates true wellbeing.

Unit 5 | Compassion

Through conditioning, our natural capacity to care may have become limited and constrained. The qualities of heart and mind, known as the brahma-viharas (divine abidings) are vast, immeasurable qualities that we can develop and are often likened to the vast limitlessness of the sky. Compassion, in particular, brings a happiness and wellbeing that may not be immediately intuitive.

Unit 6 | Transcendence

We start where we are, with what we have. We make a path of peace by understanding how suffering is constructed—not so that we can just say, "Wow, what a heavy load," but so that we can put that load down. This is about how we're paying attention and how we bring meaning into our lives through our actions.

The Curriculum

Click the arrow below to see the full contents for all six units.

  Introduction
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  Unit 1: Generosity
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  Unit 2: Appreciation
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  Unit 3: Gratitude
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  Unit 4: Skill and Care
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  Unit 5: Compassion
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  Unit 6: Transcendence
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Supporting inclusion

No one should be unable to access these teachings because of a lack of money. Zohar and Nathan have donated their proceeds from this course to the Gaia House retreatant support bursary. This fund supports practitioners to access retreats and training at Gaia House that they otherwise would not be able to afford.

There will be an opportunity to offer donations, if you wish, to Zohar and Nathan to support their teaching and charity work.

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