Meditate Your Face Off

Above is a guided meditation about listening to yourself and your needs, letting your experience come to you instead of messing with it and constantly trying to make it different/better. Below is me reading the essay that follows:When it comes to sex, some of us are like dogs. You can pet them all over, vigorously and with no warning, and they’ll love every minute of it. Others are like cats. A cat’s trust must be earned. You have to approach slowly, gently, come in from the edges. Eventually, once you’ve been invited in, the cat will soften and purr and splay out deliciously, and then you can pet that pussy to your heart’s content.As a society, we’re dog-forward. We like dogs a lot: they’re outgoing, they never reject us, we never have to feel a drop of shame or insecurity around them. They soothe the fragile part of us that just wants to be liked, to be adored. When it comes to sex, we value canine energy, and feline energy feels more mysterious, less comfortable. It hurts our feelings if we try to pet a cat and it rejects us. But instead of trying to understand it, we’ve rejected it entirely and treat it like a dog. This causes major harm.So if there was one piece of sex advice I could give, it’s that you can’t pet a cat the way you pet a dog. If you understand this, a whole world of pussy will open up to you. And I’m not just talking about in the bedroom, I’m talking about in relationships of every kind, including with yourself. What if you feel your way, gently, with pauses, listening, just wanting to get to know what you’re feeling? What things are you approaching roughly, the way you might approach a dog, that actually need to be approached like a cat?Online Dharma talk with Big Heart City: May 15thI’m excited to be giving another talk at my buddy Vinny Ferraro’s sangha: Big Heart City. It’s late for us east coasters: 10:30pm-12am Eastern Time. Hope to see you there! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit caralai.substack.comThe full length version of this meditation is for paid subscribers. If you can’t afford a paid subscription and want one, please message me. I’ll give you one, no questions asked.This is a sleep version of the meditation from the post Let your heart be closed. A way of honoring anxiety instead of trying to relax it away. Enjoy, and rest well.

Above is a guided meditation to encourage a natural response to pain or discomfort. There’s also a sleep version of this meditation, How to sleep when everything is f*cked, for paid subscribers, meant to give you permission to feel whatever unresolved feelings you’re having at bedtime. If you can’t afford a paid subscription and want one, send me a message and I’ll give you one, no questions asked. Below is me reading the essay that follows:No matter how many times we hear the instruction to “let things be just as they are,” we still find ourselves using meditation as a way to change what we’re feeling. It’s a hard habit to kick. That’s why when there’s tension, emotional or physical, sometimes I find it extremely helpful, to not just allow myself to feel it, but to double down on it. Lean in. Enter the tension. Let yourself hate whatever you’re resisting. Say “f**k this!”When I do this, something relaxes. I find I’ve been restraining myself from having a natural reaction to pain. I think I should be able to relax it away, so I’ve been trying to pry my heart open to something I hate, before I’m ready.Here in Vermont, everyone’s excited for spring. But I love to savor these early stages, when buds are just beginning to form, how they start to grow and bulge with potential. When we get teased with warm weather followed by snow squalls. People are so desperate for warm, green, sunny days that they collapse in despair when we have yet another cold, dark, April day, thinking spring will never come. And yet, it always does. The birds come back, the flowers open up, millions of leaves explode in shocking, lush glory: one can hardly take in the magnitude of the change. What happens if you open to this unresolved, uncomfortable, fucked up moment? Feel your feet on the ground, let your attention be wide and receptive, and open to the tension completely. It might not become less painful, but you’ll see that the pain has so much more dimension to it than the resistance to it was allowing you to see. It’s a bud with potential for exquisite beauty.Don’t pull your petals open before they’re ready. Let your flowers open on their own time. They will, and they don’t need you to “help.” Lean into the place you’re at right now— you will come into full, exhilarating bloom. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

The above is a guided meditation on how to get instant perspective on what really matters. This is the second of two posts born out of a conversation I had on the Money, Meet Meaning podcast:The following audio is me reading today’s essay (my son Huck gives us a cameo at the end):There’s a man named James Howells who, in 2013, mistakenly disposed of a laptop hard drive containing the private key for 8,000 Bitcoin in the Docksway landfill in Newport, Wales. He’s spent the subsequent thirteen years of his life devoted to getting into the landfill to get it back. The Newport City Council has repeatedly refused permission to excavate the landfill, citing environmental concerns including dangerous gases, methane, asbestos, and toxic leachate. Howells assembled a team of specialists, secured funding from a hedge fund, proposed using AI, drones, and robotic dogs to find the drive; and sued the city council. All so that he can have a chance at getting it back. The chances of actually finding it, and that it’s in-tact enough to retrieve the information he needs, are over 3,000 times less likely than winning the UK National Lottery jackpot.Although this is an extreme example, we do things like this all the time. I once spent over 40 hours trying (unsuccessfully) to get reimbursed by my health insurance company for a $2500 charge. It was a non-trivial amount of money, but I still questioned my own motivations and the underlying beliefs that might be driving these (often fruitless) efforts.When I felt into it, there was some flavor of “I can’t let them take advantage of me” happening. There was also the belief that I was somehow responsible for advocating on behalf of all the people out there who are being taken advantage of by our broken healthcare system to benefit the wealthy. As I talked about in my last post, I’ve been caught in believing that my well-being is highly correlated with the amount of money that I have. And beneath all of that, there’s the fundamental feeling of mistrust of the world at large, that I’m not safe in this life and I have to take it upon myself to cling to stuff to stay protected. This is what’s known as unwise view. The first factor of the eightfold path is Wise View. It means seeing things clearly as they actually are, rather than through the distorting lens of our wishes, fears, habits, and conditioning. Having wise view means that we understand that all things are impermanent, that suffering is caused by clinging to things that are impermanent; and besides, there’s no solid self there that can be protected by all that clinging in the first place. If you don’t have wise view, all of your subsequent pursuits are not rooted in this wisdom, and so you end up doing a bunch of stuff that’s not in line with your best interests.After having these insights into my own unwise view, I decided to do something that felt risky. I decided not to spend any more time on the phone with my health insurance company. I was not meant to spend my life that way. Call me what you will, but I choose to believe that if I spend less time focused on protecting my assets and more time trusting that the universe has my back, my life will be better for it. I’d probably lose money, maybe a lot of it, and yes, the big corporations would “win.” But I was already losing. It’s time to cut our losses. There are things we’re all doing that we know are making us miserable, and are not serving our highest purpose. We’re staying in a fight, a habit, a relationship, a mindset, or an activity not because it serves us but because we’ve already invested in it. What if we lean into trust, take a leap of faith, and intentionally change some of our fear-based habits? Stop digging through that pile of garbage to find your Bitcoin and start living, now.The practical invitation is to slow down or pause in any given moment, and to check: how do you feel right now? Is what you’re doing something you actually, really, want to be doing? Don’t force yourself to stop, keep doing it, just a little bit slower, and notice how it feels to be doing it. Maybe invite some ease into your body as you go. Include more of what’s happening in your sensory experience, and also in your emotional world. Let it all be here, just as you might do in a formal meditation session. Immediately, you’ll get some perspective on the endeavor, and you’ll suddenly have a choice. Ultimately, there are actually no sunk costs. There is instant insight that happens right then and there, especially in situations where we feel emotionally invested. Immediately, we pivot from sinking our energy into the things that don’t serve our highest purpose, and land squarely on our path.James Howells claims that he feels alive and engaged in his quest, and maybe he does. Nothing says alive quite like spending thirteen years elbow-deep in a landfill.Your support is a huge help! To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Online Mini-RetreatWho say that the only people who get to wake up are the ones who have the resources to be on retreat all the time? This mini, at-home retreat is meant to upend this way of thinking, and expose how your life is exactly what you need to awaken.April 19th, 11am-3pm through IMS Online. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

The above is a guided meditation to help you move from scarcity mentality, to abundance mentality. Below is me reading the essay that follows:Scroll to the end of this post for a cool podcast called “Money, Meet Meaning” where I talk about my relationship with money, and how scarcity mentality has shifted towards abundance as I’ve deepened in practice. This article comes from that. I’d love to hear your comments in the chat — feel free to share your own relationship with money and any insights or edges you’ve bumped up against when it comes to money:Most of us have a fraught relationship with money. We’re afraid of not having enough, we want more than we need, we associate it with happiness and well-being; and as much as we hate to admit it, a lot of what we do is motivated by it. Why? We believe that well-being can be found externally, and money is the best way we’ve found of taking control, or at least having a sense of control, over our external reality. If you’re cold, you can buy a space heater. Better yet, buy a house in California. If you’re sick, you can pay for treatment. If you’re bored, you can buy a phone (or really, buying anything new will do the job of temporarily suspending boredom). If you’re uncomfortable in any way, we’ve devised a way for you pay money to get the thing that will change how you feel.Most of us were trained from a young age not to follow our passions, but to earn money. Kindergarten used to be mostly play-based, now most kids are expected to be able to read by the end of it. Arts and humanities programs have been defunded in favor of STEM classes, not because more kids are passionate about math and science, but because STEM has a clear “this leads to jobs” narrative. When I was in grade school, there was a lot of pressure to get good grades, but it was rare for anyone to explain clearly to me why we had to learn what we were learning. (This was a problem for me, which eventually led to my current state of affairs as a deadbeat dharma teacher.) It’s hard to stay motivated when you have little or no meaningful connection to the stuff you’re learning.And if you really look into why we educate kids the way we do, it usually comes down to money. Get a good education, get a well-paying job, earn a lot of money. And live happily ever after? This is a very shallow (and misguided) vision for the younger generation that could use an update. What if we teach kids to follow what they’re passionate about?Deep down, none of us is actually passionate about money. Money is just a concept— pieces of paper, a number in a back account. What we really care about are things like joy, health, and connection. It’s true that some degree of financial or material security is important to get our basic needs met, to maintain a sense of general well-being. But for many of us, money is a concept that’s gotten wildly conflated with our deepest longings and passions. And if we believe that our happiness depends on something in the material world like money, we’re going to suffer. Because like everything in the material world, money is impermanent, unsatisfying, and not in our control.What the dharma points to is that lasting well-being and peace is possible, but we have to look within, not at the material world. Everyone ends up learning the quadratic equation and memorizing capital cities, but what if it were more important to teach kindness, compassion, and generosity in school? The problem is that most of us don’t realize that those things are possible to teach in any way other than by invoking fear and shame. We tell kids they should share and be kind, and we punish them if they don’t.But the Buddha taught that kindness and generosity are intrinsically motivated. It feels good to be generous. In fact, he said that one experiences joy three times in a single act of generosity: in the thought of giving, the act of giving, and in the memory of having given.Turns out, if we pay attention to how we are feeling before, during, and after an act of generosity or an act of violence, that’s how we learn how to share and to be kind. Because it feels good to share, and it feels bad to cause harm. Mainstream society doesn’t realize this, so we come to the end of our ability to teach about kindness and generosity right around kindergarten or first grade.If we believe our happiness depends on something impermanent and unsatisfying (money, anything you can buy with money, other people’s behavior or opinion of us, anything in our sensory experience), we’ll continue to have a scarcity mentality. But if our happiness can come from giving and sharing, there will always be enough. In this way, there’s an abundance of joy available to us. And when we dwell in a mentality of abundance, we want to be generous, and thus begins a virtuous cycle that leads to a real, lasting satisfaction. Imagine how the world would be if we realized that happiness came from generosity instead of from getting and having. We’d stop competing and start sharing. Our pursuits wouldn’t leave us in a state of deprivation, but in increasing states of joy, abundance, and connection. How might you still be following the model of material success we were trained for in grade school? What endeavors are you pursuing that have nothing to do with your best interests? You get to put those down now. Rest your weary bones and regain your strength. Reclaim your power, your passion. Begin to trust that there is enough, and a world of abundance will open up to you. Real Awakening in Modern Life: Upcoming Online Mini RetreatHow could it be that the only people who get to wake up are the ones who have the resources to be on retreat all the time? This retreat is meant to upend this way of thinking, and expose how your life is exactly what you need to awaken.Join me on April 19th, 11am - 3pm ET. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s post came out of a short talk I gave over the weekend. That is available to paid subscribers here. If you can’t afford a paid subscription and want one, send me a message and I’ll give you one, no questions asked.Above is a guided meditation. Below is me reading the essay that follows:I was sitting with a group of friends at a retreat I was teaching this week and one of them was an incredible musician. She’s really, really talented and I adore her music. Someone else in the group began to showcase some songs he had created using an AI music generator. The songs were good… annoyingly good. And my musician friend was very upset about this.That’s right, AI is coming for your job. Not just your job, but your ideas, your unique contribution to the world, maybe even your purpose in life. At least, this is what we fear.All this AI generated content has really gotten me reflecting on creativity and where it comes from. When we have creative inspiration, are we really the ones generating it? There’s strong evidence that new ideas belong to no one: we’ve seen it again and again throughout history. Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn independently worked toward the discovery of nuclear fission at the same time as Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie in France. Darwin and Wallace were developing the same theory of natural selection simultaneously. Bell and Gray both filed telephone patents on the same day in 1876. There are countless examples of the same idea arriving in different places at the same time.Which raises a real question: who came up with them?If you look at how thoughts actually work — how inspiration actually works — you can see pretty quickly that you’re not doing it. It’s just happening. Spend thirty seconds watching your mind and you’ll see that you are not in charge of your thoughts. Thoughts come and go whether we want them to or not, much the way sounds arrive in our ear. And even when it feels like we’re the ones doing the thinking, if we look for the one who is doing the thinking, she can’t be found.So are you really the one who came up with that creative idea, or any idea for that matter? What if ideas don’t come from us, but through us? What if we’re just vessels, and when we open wide, universal creativity pours through?Your support helps tremendously. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.In order to open like this, we have to trust. We have to shift from a scarcity mentality to an abundance mentality. We have to stop competing with each other and start working together. We stop needing to be the one who had that idea, and merge with collective consciousness.Do you feel threatened by the thought of not taking credit for your creative ideas, or for anything that you accomplished? Is your livelihood, your purpose, or your identity challenged?Three years ago after my son was born, my friend Ofosu Jones-Quartey (Born I) and I were teaching a mindful parenting class, and he said something I’ll never forget. He said “Parenting is the ultimate renunciation. My life is for you now.” As I gave birth to my daughter a few months ago, I felt my entire body, heart, and mind; lurching with pain-pleasure ecstasy, back into that wondrous fertile void. The place where all creation comes from. My practice has become one of giving myself over, more and more, in service to others (especially my kids).Letting go of our sense of self into collective consciousness, reentering that stream, is not a loss. It’s what tears down the barriers of separation and competition that keep us from loving each other and working together towards creative solutions for the big problems of the world.When we release the need to protect our sense of self, it’s not that we stop having a purpose — it’s that all the painful parts of needing to have a purpose fall away. We’re left with an open heart which is no longer lonely. We’re ready to help, because all the energy that was going into fear and contraction is now available to love.I’m not saying everything about AI is good. AI has tremendous power, much like nuclear power. Nuclear power had the potential to give us an abundant, low-carbon source of energy for centuries, but its development was shaped from the start by fear and geopolitical competition rather than a shared commitment to human welfare — and we're still living with the consequences. So I can’t say whether AI is inherently good or bad, but what I do know is that if we approach all this change with deep fear and mistrust, and then double down into our sense of competition, we’ll never have the openness of heart needed to use it as a tool for good.I’ll circle back to something I said in my last post: what if this is exactly what should be happening? What if we meet the enormity of change that this technology is bringing with open hearts, and use it for good? What if AI is the instrument through which humanity finally thinks as one — pooling centuries of insight and compassion into something powerful enough to meet the world's deepest wounds?Again, I don’t know. What comes next is beyond anyone's knowing. But the quality of attention we bring to this moment shapes everything that follows. Trust creates conditions that fear never could.This gateway to the Vessel for the Universe— Open and stand back --- Who is writing this? It comes from the Fertile Void We all want creditMany thanks to Robert Kovar (and the universe) for these haikus which, he/the universe wrote. The first was in response to the talk that I gave on this subject over the weekend, the second came to him while he was on retreat, before that talk was even written. Mic drop.Upcoming Retreat at Omega Institute with Ofosu Jones-QuarteySpeaking of creativity, I’ll be teaching a retreat May 31st - June 5th with one of my favorite artists, who was mentioned in this post. Ofosu Jones-Quartey (Born I) and I will be teaching a retreat on radial self-compassion, and Ofosu will be offering sound baths. When Ofosu and I get together it gets weird pretty fast, so we’re excited for this one. Here’s the voice note Ofosu just texted me about it:Parenting as the Path meets todaySpeaking of Ofosu, we’ll be teaching our Mindfulness/Parenting class together online this afternoon, Tuesday March 17th from 4-5:30pm ET. We’ll be talking about anger, irritation, and impatience (yes, we have lots to talk about with this one). Whether you’re a parent, a caregiver, you’re parenting curious, or you just figuring out how to re-parent yourself, please join us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

Above is a guided meditation. Below is me reading the essay that follows:An online sangha that I join occasionally recently invited me to teach for them, and here’s what they asked for:We would like you to talk about a phrase that you often use in your online classes. Variations of this phrase: “What if you are supposed to be right here right now?” or “What if you are exactly where you are supposed to be?” or “What if you are meant to be exactly where you are?”It has sparked some discussion in our group around what is the meaning of the phrase; the use of words like ‘meant/supposed to be’ feeling like a predetermined destiny; and if there is any basis for the phrase, your meaning of it, and why you choose to say it, that is based or found in Buddhist teachings.The mind has this relentless habit of being at odds with reality, constantly insisting that things should be otherwise. It’s exhausting. I’ve found it to be helpful to challenge the nagging, persistent belief that what’s happening shouldn’t be happening, in a very direct way. What if what’s happening right now is exactly what should be happening?I know. It sounds like a crazy thing to suggest, especially given what’s unfolded in the past few days in Iran. But humor me for just a bit.The Buddha talked often about how we live in a reality of causes and conditions, and how each moment is composed entirely of them. Everything you do and experience happens as a result of a series of events that came before this one. This moment is the culmination of countless, infinite causes and conditions. So you might say that it’s all happened in order for this moment to take place. That is why this moment is so important to pay attention to. Because everything has led to this.And not only that, this moment is all that there is. There is nothing else which exists, and therefore nothing else could possibly be happening except this. So yes, this is indeed what should be happening. The next time someone asks you how you’re doing, you can confidently say “I couldn’t be better.”Yes, it seems that saying “this is supposed to be happening” conjures a sense of pre-destiny, or that there’s some divine being who has planned all of this intentionally. I’m not trying to say that, but I’m also not not trying to say that. I don’t know whether or not there is a God or if things are somehow predetermined. But I do think it’s healthy to keep an open mind about these things. The skeptical Western mind often defaults to atheism or nihilism, but that’s just as unknowable as the theory that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.Now, the opposite of “this is what’s supposed to be happening” would be “this shouldn’t be happening.” If the statement “this shouldn’t be happening” leads to instant suffering, and its opposite leads to freedom, does it actually matter if there’s no scientific evidence that can tell us which statement is true and which is false? We can see in our own experience that one leads to suffering, and the other to freedom. So why not follow the one that leads to freedom?If you’re worried that you’ll end up blindly believing in some false reality, then I get that. But the Buddha never intended for us to stop somewhere and let our minds set up camp and calcify around some belief. Quite the opposite. He said ehipassiko: come, see for yourself. Keep noticing what contributes to suffering, and what brings it to an end. See for yourself how clinging to any belief leads to suffering. This is not about getting stuck in a belief at all, it’s about real-time experiential understanding of the unfolding moment. “What if this is supposed to be happening” is not a belief, but an invitation to stop living in a world of beliefs about what’s happening, and just touch reality directly.Your support makes a huge difference. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.As for whether or not what’s happening right now is good or bad, none of us humans can really be the judge of that. We don’t have nearly enough perspective on the universe to know how the daily happenings of our little world are correlating to the big picture. In the 14th century, the bubonic plague killed roughly a third of Europe’s population, arguably the biggest catastrophe in Western history and unambiguously horrific. But in its aftermath, the feudal system broke down, survivors inherited concentrated wealth; the Catholic Church, which dictated what you were allowed believe, what you could read, whether or not you were destined for hell, and who would be in charge— lost much of its power. People began to question authority and explore other reasons for things besides theological ones; and the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution unfolded. As the farmer said in the parable of the horse, “Who knows what is good and what is bad?”And yet, the mind still constantly thinks it knows what’s good and what is bad, and continues to be at odds with reality nearly all the time. For the most part, we’re in agreement that this is the only way to deal with pleasure and pain. All day long, our minds point out how things should be otherwise: That shouldn’t have happened. People should know better. We should have more of this and less of that. And of course our go-to when we find out that a war has broken out or that someone we love has died is not “this is what should be happening.” But the truth is that this is indeed what’s happening. “This is supposed to be happening” is not to excuse harmful behavior or to wish suffering upon anyone. It’s simply a way of helping us land more fully in things just as they are, including in our own emotions and reactivity. It is only then that we can start to be available to the moment. To give our whole selves over to it instead of being constantly at odds with it, which drains us of all of our energy and potential to help.Possibly the most insidious of excuses for why what’s happening shouldn’t be happening that the mind comes up with is that what’s happening is somehow in our control, and therefore our responsibility. The illusion of control has us feeling an unbearable kind of helplessness. How incredibly painful it is for us to believe that we ourselves are somehow responsible for nothing bad ever happening. And how totally unfair. When we see that we’ve been blaming ourselves, that we’ve been carrying the burden of responsibility for way more than we are capable of managing, something in us softens. We get in touch with a deep kind of vulnerability that is underneath all the pressure we’ve been putting on ourselves to make things right. We get in touch with how much we really care. So do you see how the belief that “this shouldn’t be happening” really means “I am somehow broken”? And how “this is exactly what should be happening” ends in you being perfect just as you are?What if, for example, you don’t feel like you belong in this world. And what if you shouldn’t feel that way? Because maybe you actually don’t. Maybe you are wildly and gloriously other-worldly, from another dimension entirely. And if you felt like you belonged here, you wouldn’t be questioning anything, searching for freedom, or feeling the full spectrum of pain and pleasure. This feeling you’re having of not belonging, or this rage, or this terror, or confusion, maybe it’s exactly what you should be feeling, because all of this human experience you’ve been having is truly novel, wild, and uncharted— and now, having acknowledged that, you can really, finally, live.I don’t know, but I do like to keep an open mind. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

Above is a guided meditation. Below is me reading the essay that follows:I discovered something about anger and awakening during my years as a psychotherapist and dharma teacher. When invited to turn inward and examine anger itself, people (myself included) become defensive. One has to be very careful in their wording, in how the invitation is given, so as not to induce shame, or even more rage. You walk a razor’s edge. Question anger, and you risk being accused of victim-blaming, excusing harm, or siding with the perpetrator. Anger wants the spotlight outward. It resists introspection. It will generate endless reasons not to be examined.I also learned a thing or two about this during my year-long retreat, the first three months of which I spent in what felt like a constant state of rage. At 3am, I’d wake up hot, my heart racing, and I’d have to get up, pace, yell, go outside and scream and walk blindly around on the trails in the dark. If anyone had suggested that I sit down, close my eyes, and notice my breath— I would have punched them in the face. Luckily there was no one around.I knew I was supposed to be sitting with my feelings, turning inward in some way. But every time I thought about doing that, my mind and body would utterly rebel. How dare anyone recommend simply siting with this feeling. The thought of doing so would make me think, Here we go again with the patriarchy telling women to sit down and shut up.It’s true: Women have been told to sit down and shut up for a very long time. We live in a society that worships the masculine. We believe that doing, getting, and competing for what you want is the way to be, and that simply existing, listening, and receiving is too soft, too feminine. So whenever I teach about anger and hatred and how harmful it is, and how helpful it can be to look at the anger directly, our feminine side gets particularly triggered. My feminine side has been told to bite her tongue, to suck her belly in, to not express anger, for long enough. I’ve been told to look inward, to see how I’m responsible for my own pain, to not have needs or preferences, and to never complain. If I express a need or make a request, I’m a nag. If I get angry, I’m a b***h. No matter how carefully I try to word my request, no matter how many “I” statements I make, anything other than silence and suppression is attacked.Because the feminine has been suppressed for so long — and because anger in women has been especially policed — we have a collective chip on our shoulder around anger, regardless of gender. Feminine power is so suppressed that it’s ready to blow. And when it erupts, it often takes the corrupted form of rage, which turns out to be reactive, inefficient, and rarely effective at getting our deeper needs met. Instead, it feeds the same cycles of helplessness, conflict, and separation.How do we get free from the cycle of suffering? There is a place where masculine and feminine energy are in balance. Awareness: the field of kind attention that holds all of our experience. Like the vast sky that holds the sun and the moon, mindfulness itself always has this balance of firm alertness and soft receptivity. This is the Middle Way of the Buddha. We can work with anger in a way that neither blocks it nor lets it run the show. I call this honoring the anger. Give it the space to exist, to expand, even to move your body and have you yelling and flailing, but do this so that you can feel it, observe it, understand what it needs and wants on a deeper level, not have it take over you completely. Once anger is seen in this way, it finally conveys the message it has to offer, and it stops consuming us.Your support makes a huge difference. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.In the midst of rage binging on retreat, it became clear that sitting still wasn’t the only way to be mindful, and that if I really wanted to practice with anger, I had to work with it on its own terms. To some degree, I had to let the anger be in charge. I let it fly through the empty space of awareness. And while I let it move my body and rip through me and my tiny cabin as rants and screams, I also began to catch glimpses of insight. I noticed that there would be a stab of shame, followed by anger towards myself, and then a full hour of rage at someone else. Truly, I was angry at myself. How could I have been so weak, so stupid, as to let this happen to me? It appeared that the anger was simply trying to prevent something bad from ever happening to me again. And upon recognizing this, there was simply pain. I connected with the initial event, the moment where I got hurt, and the words “that was really hard for me” came through as I began to cry. Compassion.This insight has utterly transformed this pattern for me. What started as suppressed anger that then became repetitive rage benders, has become an easy access point for self-compassion. Compassion is a feature of mindfulness. It’s a caring quality that both listens and wants to help. A perfect balance of yin and yang.The next time you’re angry, see if you can let the anger be held in this field of mindful awareness. Widen your attention. Make space for the anger to breathe, move, clench, explode. Perhaps you will see the backbends the anger does to try to get you to not look directly at it, to try to hook you into its story, to try to get you to figure something out, to punish, to be right, and to be somehow responsible for never getting hurt ever again. These hooks are what keep us stuck, how anger keeps itself alive and holds us back from transformation. Keep feeling the whole of what’s happening, feel for the space of awareness that holds it all. It is much, much bigger than the anger. Be with this moment, just as it is. Don’t try to change it or make it better. This is all that there is. In the space of awareness, everything is ok.Anger has held us hostage. As long as anyone can remember, we’ve been using anger as a tool to make the change we want to see in the world. We’ve been arguing on its behalf, tricked by it into believing that this time, it will work. That it’s the best tool we’ve got. But have we gotten to more peace that way? We are more divided than ever. People across political lines can’t even stand to be in the same room anymore.What we’re really arguing for when we make a case for anger, is for more doing, yang, masculine energy– when what’s really needed is yin. Feminine, receptive, listening. We’re so addicted to anger and to yang in general, that when someone suggests this, it’s immediately attacked. How could sitting quietly possibly be useful at a time like this? I’m certainly not trying to say that the feminine is better than the masculine. It’s just that things have been off balance for a very long time, and we are in desperate need for more feminine energy.Watch what happens when you apply this honoring, receptive, feminine listening to the forces of hatred in your own mind. You will be shocked at how powerful it is, and how immediately it can connect you to the field of mindful awareness all around you. It will change you, and then it will change the world.Upcoming Online Daylong Retreat with Nico HaseOn March 14th, I’ll be teaching a daylong retreat with nico hase. We’ll explore the profound freedom that comes through letting go, addressing the question what if freedom isn’t about having more, but needing less?The day will begin with an hour of conversation and an opening talk around the theme. We’ll then sit and walk for four hours in lightly guided practice, before reconvening for a closing talk and further dialogue.nico hase lived in a monastery for six years before earning a PhD in counseling psychology and becoming an Insight Meditation teacher full time. He currently mentors mindfulness teachers, teaches online and in-person retreats, and speaks with students in one-on-one sessions. He and his beloved life partner devon are the authors of How Not to Be a Hot Mess: A Buddhist Survival Guide for Modern Life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

This article is based off of a dharma talk I gave this past Monday for the Burlington Dharma Collective. That talk is available to paid subscribers here. If you want to access it but can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll give you one, no questions asked.This post is about love. And when I talk about love, I’m also talking about mindfulness, because mindfulness is synonymous with love. To really allow something to fully be just as it is, and to stay present, nonjudgmental, and curious with it through whatever pain and wonder it undergoes, is to love.As we try to bring mindfulness off the cushion and into our real lives, into facing the current events of the world, our kindness and love are easily challenged. Hatred has a sneaky way of hiding covertly in our motivations. It can even hide behind the guise of love.Last weekend I went to write a dharma talk at a coffee shop in Burlington, and on the window in huge letters were the words “F*CK ICE.”I understand the sentiment there, but I don’t find it very helpful. There’s hatred behind those words. There is also love in there somewhere, there is care for the people who are being murdered, deported, separated from their children, their mothers and fathers. But love, real love, does not divide us. It erases lines in the sand, it doesn’t draw more of them. “F*CK ICE” draws lines.While it is indeed subversive to publicly renounce ICE when there’s clearly danger in doing that, what would be even more subversive would be to try to love the people you disagree with, the people you hate, and who hate you. Whether it’s the ICE agents, the lawmakers or the politicians, the person with the signs in their yard across the street from you, or the person in your family who is estranged or causing division. To listen, or find patience, or try to understand their histories, their stories, where they came from, why they are doing what they are doing. How might they be like me? Because if we really want to get to the root of the problem, we would not be subverting each other, we would be subverting hatred itself. And we cannot do that with more hatred. It doesn’t work that way. We can only do that with love.“Hatred never ceases with hatred, but by love alone is healed”-the BuddhaWhen I say love, I don’t mean a valentine’s day card, I mean whatever the beginning of love might look like for you towards someone who really bothers you. Maybe it’s just looking at them from a distance, seeing that they are a human, that they were once a baby. Maybe it’s understanding that they, too, feel pain, and are just trying to feel ok. Maybe it’s seeing that they were badly wounded at some point in their lives, and their harmful behavior is how they’re coping with that. That they don’t know better, otherwise they would do better.What if you watched some of the video footage of violence and pretended to be the one who is the offender, looked at them thinking “that’s me”? Or “that’s my child”?Hatred is sneaky, and can masquerade as love. We call it “fierce compassion,” misusing that term to justify our hate-motivated actions. It feels good to be angry, it feels like protection. And the energy of anger can indeed be quite useful for boundary setting, for standing firmly in knowing that we deserve to be treated with respect and care, for standing up for what is good, for what is right. But anger also burns. It burns people around us as it burns our own hearts.Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. When we’re mindful of anger, we honor it, we listen to all of what it has to say - the love behind it says that people deserve to be treated with care and respect. The pain behind it burns. When we’re mindful of anger, we don’t shame the anger away (that’s also just more hatred), we tend to the whole of the experience, and naturally the mind keeps the assertive, protective energy behind the anger (because that part feels good), and leaves behind the part of it that wants to cause more harm (the part that feels bad). Through experiential understanding, the mind lets go of the suffering and keeps the love.For me, the tricky place of trigger tends to be when people have the same political beliefs as me, but they’re trying to make change from a place of hatred. There’s another message behind that sign, to everyone who hates ICE: you belong here. You’re part of our tribe. Sometimes, the more entrenched we get in our beliefs, the more we feel a sense of belonging. For some people, it might never have been about the ideology, it was always about having a safe place to belong, a family who will protect us. We are social creatures, and we’ve survived this long by depending on each other for support. Political parties and ideologies are like tribes. The other side of the “you belong here” message of the sign is that if you disagree, with this sign, then you are definitely not part of our tribe. You do not belong here. And also, perhaps, F*ck You.This bothered me, but when I break it down, it’s not hard to understand that we all want to belong somewhere, or that we feel excruciatingly helpless in the face of all this horrendous violence, and we just want to do something about it. Writing F*CK ICE in big letters satisfies that need on some level. So I almost wanted to say “f**k this coffee shop,” but I caught myself. My red flag was the irritation, the subtle sense of self-righteousness as I stood in line. I felt a tightening in my chest and throat. I noticed it and realized what was happening. Anger. Burning me. My practice has to be to keep locating love as my north star. So I say yes to the anger, yes, of course I am irritated seeing something that I think is contributing to the problem. I’m afraid that in our efforts to protect, we’re going to incite even more violence. There was love behind my irritation, a desire for peace. But I don’t need the the self-righteousness. That is actually separating me even more from others, and from the deep grief within me that needs to come out, that needs to mourn my own state of confusion and pain. It’s more of the very problem I am irritated at.Hatred is like a disease that wants to replicate itself. It infects us and then tries to infect everyone we touch. It keeps itself alive by convincing us that it is justifiable, that it is, in fact, love. When we’re angry, we want to hurt other people, inciting anger in them. But love works the same way. It wants to spread, to multiply, to fill all the hearts it connects with. When love connects with hatred, it manifests as compassion and begins to heal the anger. Grief arises, connecting us all in our shared pain.Mindfulness is love. It’s nonjudgmental attention to whatever is happening. That is the subversion that’s needed to change the trajectory of violence. Change can happen, and place of leverage is right here in our own hearts. When we lead with love, love is what influences every interaction we have. That’s what spreads. Not hatred.We must stop believing in the power of hatred and advocating on its behalf to solve the problem of hatred. Time to believe in love.I realize this post might bring up some strong feelings, so I wholeheartedly welcome your honest comments below. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

This article and meditation are offshoots of a talk I gave last week for the Bozeman Dharma Center. That talk is available to paid subscribers here. If you can’t afford a paid subscription but want one, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I’ll give you one for free, no questions asked.I keep hearing people say they’re overwhelmed because of “you know, everything that’s happening in the world.”To put it bluntly, no s**t. Of course you’d be overwhelmed if you feel like you have to deal with everything that’s happening in the world. But problems are only overwhelming if we feel like we are alone with them, and responsible for dealing with them by ourselves.At first glance, we might not realize we’ve been feeling so alone and wholly responsible for the world’s problems. But when we pay attention and start to unpack what comes up when we hear about what’s going on in the world, we may or may not notice some of the following:First, you feel like you should keep up with the news to be a good citizen, a good person, to do your part. But while you read about people starving in Darfur, you realize you’re drinking a nine dollar Starbucks drink. Then you keep trying to read about what’s happening in Ukraine, but you can’t focus because your mind is randomly trying to figure out how you’re gonna get your kids to their after school activities on the day of your important meeting. At some point you find yourself switching out of our news app entirely to do more research into which mattress firmness promotes optimal sleep health. You realize you’re doing this and feel like a terrible person, so you put a few things in your Amazon cart, buy them, and call it a day.Perhaps we feel guilty about the level of privileged distraction we’re steeped in, so we punish ourselves by getting consumed by shame and guilt. Maybe we donate some money to the World Central Kitchen, but we don’t let that stop us from feeling as guilty as possible for the rest of the day (or the rest of our lives), and then doubling down on the very habits that we feel guilty about.As we bury our heads in the quicksand of shame, we find ourselves in an endless cycle:obligatory news intake → overwhelm → avoidance → shame → obligatory news intakeIf we can recognize this cycle, we start to notice where we exit the present moment. We read the news and and it’s deeply unpleasant. We react with fear, and whole host of other mental and emotional strategies avoid the unpleasant feeling we just encountered. Distraction, control, shame, anger. The key point of possibility in the cycle lies between the contact with the news, and the reaction to it. This is where we normally launch into reactivity/distraction of some kind, rather than stay present with how we are feeling in the moment. The Buddha tried to point our attention to this place of potential, saying that we can recognize something as being simply an unpleasant, in-the-moment experience, before reactivity arises, and thereby prevent ourselves from landing in suffering. When things are uncomfortable, don’t abandon yourself. Stay, care, listen. You’ll learn that you can trust it. You’ll learn that there’s another way to meet a moment that is unpleasant: with compassion.But instead of staying, we hold ourselves apart from the things that normally give us comfort. We don’t let ourselves enjoy the warmth of our home or appreciate the food we have to eat or the good people and things in our lives. We feel guilty about it. No wonder we get overwhelmed.You can’t fix the problems in the world by yourself, so stop reading the news as if all the problems you read about are yours and yours alone, and as if you don’t already have your own problems at home. You also won’t do anything to help anyone on the other side of the world by feeling guilty for not having the same problems as them. You can’t save someone from drowning by throwing yourself in the water and drowning with them. Someone has to be on higher ground. If you’re not drowning, then your job isn’t to drown yourself, it’s to stay resourced, and to find out what your way of helping is. And by the way, your way of helping will be something that you actually want to do, not just something you feel like you should do.As you absorb the news, instead of holding yourself apart from what’s good in your world, stay connected to it. What do you feel in your body? What’s happening on an emotional level? Whatever you find, stay with it. Feel the fear, the sorrow, the guilt. Don’t turn your back on yourself in these moments. Use your body to hep you stay connected. What is actually happening right here, in this very moment? Come out of your head and into your body. Find things that soothe you. Let your hot cup of coffee comfort you, the view out your window soften you, your feet on the floor ground you. Notice when your mind starts to churn about what you should be doing to get away from these feelings of fear, when it tries to single-handedly solve the problems of this gigantic world. And reconnect with your (very localized) sphere of influence. It turns out, one of the best things you can do to address the problems of the world is not add to them. So many of us are trying to help, but we’re coming at it from a place of shame, depletion, helplessness, or rage. The situation goes from bad to worse, and the cycle of suffering continues. How can you lead with love today, or just right now? What is yours to do, that you want to do, from a genuine place of care?Daylong online retreat for parents & caregiversJust because you’re taking care of someone doesn’t mean you can’t wake up. Maybe it’s actually helping you wake up faster. Find out more and do some practice with other parents/caregivers and myself on this day of celebration, commiseration, and meditation. February 14th through the Bozeman Dharma Center. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

Another meditation on this theme is available to paid subscribers here. If you can’t afford a paid subscription, you can always message me and I’ll give you one for free, no questions asked.One of my current practices is to say yes to as many gifts and generous offers as I can. It’s harder than it seems, our culture being so into self-reliance.Last week I came home from two weeks away with my three month old, Rumi, to a freezing house that smelled like garbage. Turns out, our boiler and fridge had both broken, which meant no heat or hot water and a fridge full of rotten food. My husband and son were still away for a couple more days, so I texted our neighbors to tell them what was going on. Within minutes, someone came over carrying two heavy space heaters. The next morning, someone else came by to take Rumi back to her house so I could be free to take care of business. Just when I was starting to tackle the disgusting job of cleaning the fridge, another pair of neighbors showed up and cleaned the entire fridge for me. I barely had to lift a finger. Meanwhile, someone from the fuel company showed up on a Sunday and fixed the boiler, without charging me the weekend rate. That night, the same neighbors who cleaned the fridge had me and Rumi over for dinner and a shower. The neighbors who gave us the space heaters brought over a mini-fridge and informed me that our broken fridge was almost brand new (we didn’t know since we moved in just over a year ago), and is probably still under warranty. Sure enough, we’re getting a free repair.As this all unfolded, I had two distinct feelings: gratitude and guilt. I don’t recall anyone ever teaching me to feel bad whenever I’m given something, but that’s the mindset we’re programmed to adopt as a culture. You shouldn’t feel worthy of gifts, and if you do, you should at least act like you’re not worthy. Say thank you too many times when you get something, don’t make it seem like you deserve it. Better yet, don’t accept the gift at all. Figure it all out by yourself without anyone’s help.But there was a reason that the Buddha taught generosity before he taught people how to meditate. It was because it’s the most basic act of letting go one can perform. As a culture, we may be pretty good at giving, but we’re terrible at receiving. And receiving is necessary to bring an act of generosity to completion. Our sense of guilt and unworthiness repeatedly blocks acts of generosity that could be helping us all share and connect.The woman who cuts my hair is from Vietnam, and she told me that when she moved to this country and had a baby, she was floored by how much harder it was to raise a child here than it was for her sister back in Vietnam. Where she’s from, you can just drop your kid off at the neighbor’s house for the whole day if you need to go do something, and no one thinks twice about it. I asked her if she ever feels guilty, or like she owes people things after getting that kind of treatment, and she said no: because everyone’s always helping everyone. It’s normal.It’s not that we don’t want to live in the kind of culture that has this kind of generous flow. It’s that we feel too guilty and unworthy to buy into it. When it comes to guilt, you can’t win. No matter what you do, guilt always finds a way to make you wrong and bad. I think I’m doing the right thing by practicing the receiving end of generosity, but then I feel guilty for receiving all that love. If I say no to someone’s offer, I feel guilty for blocking their generosity.Guilt is not a helpful guide, yet we typically let it serve as our conscience. We base our choices on what will make us feel the least guilty, not on what generates joy or love.This meditation is meant to help us stop using guilt as our guide, and start using love.Authentic Activism Mini-Retreat OnlineThis Sunday I’ll be offering a half day of practice and reflection oriented around engaging with the world from an authentic place. Activism doesn't have to be a drag. In fact, it definitely shouldn't be. Click below to find out more and register: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

Do you find yourself in limbo a lot? Are you hovering between one thing and the next? Maybe you never really chose a distinct career, or landed firmly in a relationship, or maybe you move around a lot. Do you have a love-hate relationship with meditation? Do you find yourself in the middle of other people’s disagreements? Do you dabble in things but don’t follow through? You might have issues, but you might also just be a bridge.What’s a bridge? It’s the word I’m using to describe someone who is meant to dwell in the spaces of uncertainty, creating connection between the ultimate reality of wisdom and compassion; and the relative reality of day-to-day life. It could be someone who creates a pathway between enlightenment and samsara, or between the mind and the body, or between groups of people. A bodhisattva is a kind of bridge.Bridges are necessary to bring things into balance. Without them, the head and the heart are disconnected; masculine and feminine energies fight with each other instead of working together; we’re either ruled by our emotions or totally disconnected from feeling anything. Without bridges, we’re stuck in the world of suffering with no way out.Babies are bridges between the human realm and whatever wild unborn realm they recently emerged from, so they’re constantly falling asleep to revisit that unborn realm of the unmanifested, then bringing in some of that pure love energy to the human world where it’s much needed.Dan Harris, who might hate being associated with the woo-woo of that last paragraph (sorry, Dan), is a bridge. He’s bridging the gap between skepticism and mysticism, between the mind and the body; making it possible for people who believe mostly in logic to free their minds. Dan, you’re dong a great job (IMHO).Your help makes a big difference! To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Some people who read this newsletter might be a bridge between the Buddhist monastic world, and the lay world. You might sit meditation retreats but not ever want to shave your head and give up all your possessions. The lay world needs you to bring all that good wisdom and compassion you unlock when you go on retreat, back home with you. And the monastic world needs it’s cloistered bubble to be popped every now and then, to bring it back in touch with the real world.If you’ve ever found yourself uncomfortable or insecure about the fact that you haven’t committed to something in your life, or because you’re always in some kind of middling role, maybe you don’t have to feel weird about it anymore. Maybe you’re meant to be there, in that awkward in-between space, so that you can translate or transmit some message from one place to another, so that you can be a vessel of connection that brings things back into balance. Maybe when you just commit to being nowhere, it’s not awkward anymore: it’s awesome. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

The subtle underlying message that we’re constantly fed is that the material world can make us happy: money can in fact buy happiness; if you meet the right person and fall in love, you’ll live happily ever after; if you get the right degree and find the right career, you’ll feel satisfied in your life. Most of what we’re teaching our kids in school is ultimately geared towards being financially successful as individuals, and economically competitive as a nation. Hence the focus on STEM and the defunding of the arts and humanities. We don’t have AP classes in generosity, patience, or emotional attunement because those things don’t directly lead to any kind of material accumulation.Seeking happiness within is extremely countercultural. Humans have been trying to find happiness outside of ourselves for as long as anyone can remember. But the seismic shift in understanding we are called upon to make in this practice is that it is not possible to find real peace in the material world. In Buddhism, this is Wise View: the first of the Eightfold Path. Whenever we depend on the material world for happiness, that happiness is fragile because the world is not in our control, and besides, it’s constantly falling apart. We might get the lover, the family, the job, or win the lottery; but none of it lasts. Everyone and everything dies or is separated from us at some point, so if we hang our hat on it, we’re screwed. Big downer, right? Wrong. The only reason the Buddha pointed this out is because there’s a real kind of happiness that’s possible. One that’s not dependent on the material world, not dependent on something that’s going to fall apart and disappoint us in the end. It’s a deep kind of contentment that is alive and well within us, all the time.Your generosity makes a big difference. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The rebellious teenager in me loves how subversive this practice is. We don’t have to conform to society, quite the opposite. In fact, it doesn’t take much observation to recognize that if we go the same direction that everyone else is going, we’re not going to end up living happily ever after. The next time you find yourself comparing yourself to someone else, remember that you’re not trying to conform. Your’e trying to do something completely new and different from what most people are doing, so if you feel like a black sheep, then that’s probably a good thing.Every moment that you turn away from the getting and having of the outside world, and instead listen to the gentle wellspring of contentment within yourself, you are moving towards your highest peace. For some readers, that last sentence may be annoying. A gentle wellspring of contentment within is the opposite of hard core. It’s too feminine. But idolizing the masculine is just another way that wrong view— the culture of getting, accumulating, and competing for happiness through the material world— tries to assert itself.Now what?Stop and take a look around. What are you doing that you’re not choosing to be doing? How might you be caught up in a collective momentum that has you barreling headlong towards dissatisfaction? You’ll start to see that all around and within your own mind, there are forces that are haggling for your attention, trying to trick you into thinking you’re not ok right now and that if you watch this ad, buy this thing, or get this done: you’ll be happy. When can you decide for yourself what you want to pay attention to, what is really worth your time, and what truly matters? Now.Keep making choices that rebel against the culture and a habit of mind that promises a dream that cannot come true. More and more, you’ll develop a taste for the present moment. Eventually, it will be normal for you to find this moment more compelling and delightful than any million-dollar ad can make a cheeseburger look. Even as you read this, feel into what’s happening right now. The way the light hits the dust particles, the tingling in your feet, the sound of the wind. What was once trifling and mundane has become abundant richness in your life. This is where your deepest peace lives: wake up to it. It’s not too late to change the world. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

The paid version of this meditation starts with a short talk, and can be found here.When I was a kid I remember looking at adults and thinking “I hope that never happens to me.” Adults never stopped to play in the snow or build pillow forts or even pick their noses (at least not publicly— everyone reading this, you know you pick your nose in private). To many adults, snow is just a big fat inconvenience. Once in a while you see an adult rolling in the snow or goofing off in it, but it mostly happens when they’re paying with kids.I distinctly remember being in my late teens when the magic started to slip away. The times when I was too excited to sleep on Christmas eve were quickly fading from memory. Snow? It was nice, but I wasn’t gonna bother myself with getting cold and wet in it. I felt the seriousness of life creep in all around me. More and more I would wake up feeling anxious and alone in the world.When I was 26, I had gotten into meditation, and I was in a coffee shop on a snowy day in New Hampshire reading a book called A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle. I came to a line that said, “what if this life was just a dream?” And in that moment, I woke up within a dream, the dream of my life. I suddenly felt no fear, and the entire world was light, magical, full of love and connection and possibility. I was playful, open, free to explore and do and embrace my life without fear. Like a child again. For a while, every day felt like Christmas.Eventually it all changed very suddenly. My freedom slipped away and I panicked as all my anxiety rushed back in. I needed to understand how whatever that was had happened, how to get it back. That was when I discovered meditation retreats. Sitting in prolonged meditation with others and hearing the Dharma helped me understand what had happened to me. It’s been a wild ride since then, but the essential lesson I keep coming back to is this: every moment is a miracle. I can let the habit of distraction hold me apart from that freedom, or I can choose to rest in the miracle of this moment. Look outside. And while you’re doing it, drop your attention down out of your head. Stop thinking about what you’re supposed to do today, about whatever runaway train your head has you trapped in, and open to the newness of this moment. Just for right now, free yourself of whatever you’re supposed to be doing. You can do whatever you want. Let the world hit your senses as if for the first time. Look at how beautiful it all is, how your life is a miracle, how it all might just be a dream.The mind might start to worry again: but I have s**t to take care of! Maybe. But can you stay in touch with the miracle while you take care of that s**t? Can you keep some sense of perspective? You can. The world is always trying to shake you awake with how miraculous it is. Let yourself delight in it.Mini Retreat: Liberation through Deep RestI’m teaching a micro retreat that’s all about rest as a path to liberation. It’s online with New York insight, this Thursday December 18th, 6:30-8:30pm ET. Please join us! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

Your generosity makes a huge difference. Thanks so much for reading, for your practice, and for your support.From time to time, I spend an entire day not talking. It’s not the same thing as going on a silent retreat, because I’m still living my normal life. But it brings just as much insight.Because of having to notice, rather than act on, every impulse to speak, I’ve seen some major trends in why I open my mouth. Here are a few:* awkward silence feels unbearable* trying to take care of somebody else’s feelings* wanting people to like me* wanting people to think I like them (sometimes even if I don’t)* trying to be noticed, to be somebodyAll of that comes from a place of uncomfortable contraction, not a place of openness and ease. And staying silent though it all forces me to notice the contraction come and go. If I’m in normal speaking mode, I don’t notice that much of my speech is driven by the desire to get rid of an uncomfortable feeling in my body, the belief that I can’t be ok unless I fill the silence. It’s a pattern that repeats itself again and again, all day every day, unless I check this impulse to speak.If I notice the impulse to speak and don’t act on it, it’s uncomfortable at first, but by the end of a day of doing this I feel a huge relief. I can be at ease and content without having to speak or do anything at all. Contentment isn’t the only thing you’ll get. You’ll also get to finally listen. Like, really listen, and hear what other people have to say, learn more about their perspective. It turns out when you’re not constantly inserting your opinion, assessment, or counterpoint, it becomes a lot easier to let someone else exist, to get curious about them, and to love them— even if you disagree with them.You don’t have to be silent all day to experience this ease. Just start with this one meditation, and see how much space you can stop filling with words today. Create silence, then rest in it.My practice in silence was largely inspired by a book by an incredible man named John Francis, who took a vow of silence for 17 years. In that time, he earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, a Ph.D. in environmental studies, and taught as a professor at a university. His book is called The Ragged Edge of Silence.All Online Classes Resume Next WeekMaternity leave is 480 days in Sweden, which is starting to make a lot of sense to me. But I did tell myself I’d start teaching these classes again in December since I love them so much, so starting next Tuesday with Parenting as the Path, all three of these online classes will resume. These classes are for anyone interested in meditation and Buddhism, whether you’re a beginner or you’ve been practicing for a long time. I typically lead a guided meditation, give a short talk, and then we have some group discussion. We have a great little community going and all are welcome to join our shenanigans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

This guided meditation is meant to help you make it through the upcoming feeding frenzy of a holiday, and still love yourself (or at least not hate yourself). For more guidance on eating mindfully, you can check out this guided meditation that I did for Dan Harris’ Substack: When You Want to Eat Your Feelings.In meditation, people are always telling us to be present in our bodies. But it’s really not so simple, and in fact it can be excruciating for some people to be in a body when shame and body image come into the picture.I’ve done plenty of work to enter some of the most blocked-off parts of my body, to explore the places where shame seems to be the most alive, and I’ve found that it’s those very places where all my intuition and power lives, too. Sometimes I wonder if mass idolization of the flat belly was Māra’s way of keeping samsāra alive, because the more I unbutton my fly (or just take my pants off entirely) and let myself completely hang out, the more fully alive and awake I become. Your support makes a huge difference. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I suppose an important caveat here is that I’m not trying to get everyone to manspread on the subways. There are times when our happiness will be entirely about attuning to the needs and desires of others, and to see how profound a source of generosity and joy it can be to be a presence of non-harm in this way. But this kind of attunement is not in opposition to the you do you, boo of it all. In fact, being more yourself frees up the energy necessary to direct your attention and attunement to other people. Since you are no longer eating yourself from the inside, you are free to love again.I was on a call the other day with a couple of amazing people, Matthew Hepburn and Madeline Klyne, and we were planning a retreat. They’re both dharma teachers too who have done ridiculous amounts of practice. I told them about my life, which feels on the brink of explosion right now as my husband James and I both have too much on our plates, and how our hands are too full of babies to hold each other, and that I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten what color his eyes are. Both people on the call spontaneously offered to pay for a babysitter so that we could go have a night off together. They all but insisted on it. This means two nights of just the two of us, something that, in my sleep-deprived stupor, hadn’t even occurred to me to try to arrange. This is what happens when you learn to love yourself. You feel more available. In being available, you’re always looking for ways to give. You get creative with generosity. And ultimately, you feel abundant, free, loving, and content— and everyone you bless with your presence feels all of that too. So thank you, Matthew and Madeline, for loving yourselves enough to bless me. How can you be generous this Thanksgiving week? Please feel free to share your ideas in the comments below, and hopefully we’ll all get inspired to explode out of our corsets with generosity.Online talks (very soon), and the return of online classes (!)Today: Sunday, November 23rd online with Community Meditation Center of NYC 10:30-12pm ETTomorrow: Monday, November 24th online with the Durango Dharma Center 7:30-8:45pm ETI’ll resume teaching regular drop-in classes on December 10th. These typically consist of a short talk, a guided meditation, and some time for group questions/discussion. To find out more, click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

After a couple requests in the subscriber chat for more on how to stop doing stuff, this is what came through. The paid version of this meditation starts with a short talk and is available here.My son asks me to play trains with him and I do, but I’m preoccupied with writing a mental grocery list, I’m glancing at my email, or I’m side-eyeing the crusty spaghetti under the dining room table. I find myself trying to accomplish something mentally all the time. In my defense, there is a lot of multitasking I have to do as a mom of two small children. But while I drown in a sea of trifling agenda items, I miss my life.To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Either way, I think you’re great.My practice involves asking myself this question a lot: What do I have to feel? In this case, what do I have to feel when I rresist the impulse to constantly do? Here are a few things I feel:* Fear and anger from feeling out of control: that I will get to the end of the day and my home and my mind will be chaos* Shame, because my sense of self worth is linked to my productivity* Churning and tension in my body that feels unbearable at first glance With all of this comes the belief that I have to get rid of these feelings in order to be ok, and the shortcut to getting rid of them is by doing a lot of stuff externally, not just sitting with my feelings.But the other question I ask myself a lot is how might this problem actually be useful for awakening? How might accomplishing things all the time actually be functional when it comes to the Dharma? Every energy, thought, mood, feeling, impulse— all of it could be folded into our awakening process, all of it has a place. In fact, a couple of the Buddhist Paramis, or ten perfections of the heart leading to awakening, are about industriousness and doing. Vīrya (energy); and Adhiṭṭhāna (resolve). And Kwan Yin, the goddess of compassion, is often portrayed with a thousand arms so she can do s**t, or half seated as if she’s about to get up and kick some ass (the ass of suffering, that is). The “doing” in this case becomes focusing more intently on the present moment, exploring this moment with curiosity, keep watching suffering as it tries to take over, how it hurts, how it is healed. Keep noticing what’s happening now, and now, and now. That churning in the body may seem unbearable at first glance, but the more I become present with it, the more I see that it’s not only bearable, it’s interesting. It’s always changing, it has a lot to say about what I’m feeling, needing, wanting. And it takes some amount of energy and determination to stay present in this way with something so challenging. The very energy that, until now, has been scattered in all directions as I tried to adjust what was outside of me to make what is inside of me feel better. When we channel that energy, that resolve, all that doing; into the present moment, it leads to awakening. It’s the most productive thing you can do.Thanks for your practice. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.If you’re not sick of me yet, here are a few upcoming events:Monday, November 17th in-person in Burlington, Vermont 7-8:30pm ETSunday, November 23rd online with Community Meditation Center of NYC 10:30-12pm ETMonday, November 24th online with the Durango Dharma Center 7:30-8:45pm ET This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

This guided meditation starts with a short talk meant to help clarify the concept of not-self in Buddhism. It’s a pretty good guided meditation, but if you read all the way to the end of this article, you’re in for a real treat.When our first child, Huck, was born, someone saved the umbilical cord for us, shaped it into a heart and used a dehydrator to dry it out. I had it sitting on a windowsill for a couple of weeks before I noticed that it had gotten a little moldy (sorry if this is grossing you out). When I saw it my first response, as is typical for me, was shame. How disgusting and embarrassing, this fleshy piece of me sitting out growing mold! But then I realized that it wasn’t exactly part of my body. I mean– was it even mine at all? Was it Huck’s? Where does the mother’s body end and the baby’s body begin? Somewhere on the placenta? Halfway down the umbilical cord? When I realized this, something new happened. The shame got confused, lost. I could be ashamed on my own behalf, but not for Huck. That’s not how shame works.Shame can only exist when it has a self to be ashamed of. When the concept of me starts to break down, shame stops having a home to keep itself alive.Your help really matters. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The concept of not-self in Buddhism calls for us to see that there is no separation between ourselves and the world. Your body does not belong to you. It was inherited from your ancestors. It’s also constantly renewed and altered by what goes into and comes out of it. At what point does the food you eat turn from something separate from you, to part of you? Your thoughts are not yours either. As much as it seems like you’re doing the thinking, in reality, thoughts come and go in the same way that a sound does. There’s no one back there controlling them.When you start to see how blurry the lines are between yourself and the world, you’ll also see that shame cannot stay alive. You are intrinsically a part of this world. Maybe we could say that the opposite of shame is belonging. So when we break down the notion of the self, what we find is non-separateness. In other words, belonging. In other words, love.Cutting an umbilical cord is only a symbol of a separation that does not exist. The illusion of separation happens so that we can experience the contrast of suffering, see through the illusion of separateness into the truth: that we were never separated in the first place. Then we get to learn the ecstatic bliss of uniting once again. You don’t need someone else’s body to melt into if you want to experience this bliss. Let your body melt into the world around you and you will find complete and utter love and belonging.Thanks for reading. Huck and I wanted to share this musical number to sum it all up:I’d love to hear how this landed. Please share your thoughts! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

This guided meditation, which I offered during the IMS Nature Sangha this past week, was inspired by the mayhem in the news, the chaos of parenting by myself last week while James was away, and the tomfoolery of my own mind.Your help makes a huge difference. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.To be mindful is to see the naturalness of the present moment. To see that it is part of nature, that it has an essential place in the fabric of the universe.What makes it hard to see something’s naturalness? When it threatens us in some way, when we fear it - we view it as something out of place, wrong, bad, that shouldn’t be happening. We judge it, we deny it. In short, we react to it with greed, aversion, and delusion.Everything is nature, but ignorance makes it hard to see the nature in everything. Someone irritates us and we call them an a*****e, because people shouldn’t behave that way. We get sick, maybe seriously ill, and of course this is not how we should be feeling . . . right? Then we read the news and obviously this war, hunger, injustice, pain— none of it should be happening. And perhaps the most insidious of these, and maybe also the root of all of it, is thinking that we ourselves are broken. There’s something wrong with me, I am wrong, I am bad, I’m not equipped to handle this life, I should be different, better. I don’t belong.But imagine if we could look at the news, or even at something terrible that happened to us or a loved one, and see it as something that should be happening. That might be an offensive thing to suggest, especially if we’re talking about the death of a young person or the tragedies of war. It’s not to encourage harm, but just to acknowledge what’s real. It should be happening simply because, well, it is happening. And the sooner we let what’s happening happen, the sooner we become available to be a presence of love and care.We have no idea what should be happening and what shouldn’t. From our limited vantage point, we only have a very small window into the wild world of the infinite universe. How could we possibly understand why things happen the way they do? And besides, it’s not necessary to see all that. All we need to see is that it feels good to allow things to be the way they are, and it feels bad to resist them.Seeing the nature in all things may be one of the most impactful things we can do for the world. Only through seeing naturalness are we able to approach things with love. And it is love that soothes the pain of the world and brings lasting transformation.If you want more on this subject, you can read an article I wrote recently for Lion’s Roar magazine about mindfulness in nature here: https://www.lionsroar.com/mindfulness-and-nature/Your generosity is a Big Deal. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Parenting as the Path meets tomorrowOur online mindfulness class for parents & caregivers, will meet tuesday, October 28th, at 4:30 ET. Thanks to some helpful suggestions in the subscriber chat this past week from a few parents, we’ll be talking about what Ofosu Jones-Quartey (Born I) playfully dubbed the “two wings of parenting”: Guilt and Shame. If you want to make it but can’t, the great news is that we have partnered with IMS, and the recordings of these classes are being made available on the IMS website. You can find the link to the recordings, and the registration for the upcoming class, here:Lama Rod Owens is a powerful human and a kindred spirit in b******t-free awakening. I’m honored to be able to say he officiated our wedding here in Vermont before he got super-famous, back in 2018. He’ll be coming to give a talk for our Sangha, the Burlington Dharma Collective, in Northern Vermont, on November 11th. Please join us!Thanks for reading! To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

“I don’t have time,” I tell my friends, “to do anything anymore.” When I’m not taking care of a kid, I’m cleaning something, when I’m not doing that, I’m trying to stay on top of my emails, when I’m not working, I’m trying to catch up on sleep. But I conveniently fail to remember the 45 minutes (or was it an hour and 45 minutes?) I spent on my phone today, reading reviews for electric toothbrush heads on Amazon, looking at old photos, and asking AI questions like “does Raffi have kids?” and “is it normal to pee every hour?”The truth of it is, I’m compulsive and hooked when it comes to technology. Maybe most of us are. And it’s understandable: our phones are used for just about everything these days-- getting around, socializing, staying informed, entertainment, banking, shopping-- you name it, we have it at our fingertips. Plus, most of the internet is designed to hook us. Ever heard of the infinite scroll? If you haven’t, ten bucks says you were considering Googling it until you read this sentence. Because there’s so much available and so many things pulling our attention, we can’t even focus on one task at a time. We thought having this handy little gadget would free up more time, but instead it sucked us into rabbit holes of fail videos and Dr. Pimple Popper (I know you want to Google that one, and I dare you to) for hours on end. The time we used to spend staring out the window, petting the cat, giving our loved ones our full attention, or just doing nothing and being ok with it, has started to dwindle.Our attention has been commodified. It’s being bought, sold, and profited off of, with questionable benefit to us. And what most of us don’t realize is that our attention is our power. Where we put our attention can set us free, or it can imprison us. This is actually something the Buddha taught. He said “That which one frequently thinks about and ponders upon, that becomes the habit of the mind.” The Buddha taught that when we focus our attention on unhealthy thoughts, such as greed, hatred, and delusion, suffering becomes our default mode. And when we choose to focus on thoughts of well-being— generosity, kindness, and wisdom— freedom becomes the way we roll.Your generosity helps so much. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This doesn’t mean you should never look at your phone again. I myself have enjoyed splendid binges of The Good Place and Stranger Things, especially while in the throes of chronic illness, being 9 months pregnant in 90 degree heat, and just general existential misery. Sometimes we need a place to get away from the relentlessness of the human experience. It’s not to say that technology is all bad, of course it’s not. It connects us, shares information and creativity, and is full of brilliant things and vital information. The question is, when is it contributing to your highest happiness, and when is it hindering it? We won’t know unless we pay attention.If we pay attention to our real-time experience while using our devices, we can immediately interrupt our default mode by simply becoming aware of more of what’s happening. How does your body feel when you’re comparing yourself to someone else on social media? How does it feel when you’re happy for someone? How does it feel when you’re reading the news or watching TikTok?Are you aware? What does your body feel like? Right now as you read this, can you feel your breath coming in and out? Can you feel your hand holding the phone? Can you take in the rest of the space that you’re in, around the screen?Notice what it feels like to not be on your phone, vs. what it feels like when you’re on it. Ask yourself, is this what I really want to be doing right now? The answer might be yes, and that’s ok. There’s no right answer, the point is to tune into what you’re feeling, and start to make the choice YOU want to make, instead of letting the internet make the choice for you.But also… let’s be honest: we’ll probably find ourselves repeatedly choosing to get lost in technology rather than feel our breath or notice how something is making us feel, and there’s a reason for this. There was a reason we reached for the phone in the first place. There are things we’ve been purposely distracting ourselves from, and that we’d prefer to stay far, far away from and ignore, perhaps indefinitely. There’s often a lot we’re not wanting to feel that’s happening right now, and it feels better to numb out on this device than it does to face those feelings.But I think (and the Buddha would probably back me up here) that real freedom would mean that there would be nothing to be afraid of feeling, and that all of it could be held in compassion and wisdom. So as we keep turning towards the whole truth of what’s happening while we reach for that little vibrating rectangle, we might start to find that a new kind of interest starts to build. What is it that I wasn’t wanting to feel? What would I have to feel if I didn’t keep playing Candy Crush right now? Can I feel that feeling, even if just for a moment or two? Slowly, we’ll start to build some confidence that we can, in fact, face those feelings. That we do have what it takes to be with ourselves, to meet this life with compassion, and to be present for it.When we stop running from ourselves, we can get more and more interested in the fullness of who we are. We might ask, what else could I be doing with my time and energy that would feel better, more alive? How can I give my gifts to the world? I bet if the Buddha were alive today, he would have loved watching cat videos, but he would have loved teaching people how to wake up even more than watching cat videos.Thanks so much for your attention. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

Another version of this meditation, along with a very short talk, is available to paid subscribers here.When I published my last post after giving birth to my daughter, about love and how it makes me face the truth of impermanence, how it hurts so much to love this hard; The Buddh-i$h Investor shared this quote by Jan Frazier, from her book When Fear Falls Away:How this idea used to run through me like a knife: Time was always running, running out. Mortality was the dark underside of every loveliness, every pleasure. I could not look at the beautiful world without feeling its terrible brevity. I could not touch my tongue to life without tasting death...Whatever made me think I needed the threat of annihilation to make me love, to wake me up?...Now it is no longer so. Now the lovely sky takes me into it...The loveliness of the sky is forever. I am forever. I no longer hold back from loving it: I will not lose it. I am the sky….The more I walk the path, the more I question any belief that elicits fear. And perhaps it’s easy to believe in fear when we hear some of the Buddha’s teachings without practice or out of context. It’s hard to hold a smile on your face when you’re told to to frequently reflect on the fact that “I will be separated from everyone and everything that is dear to me.” But the point of all of this is not to focus on all the bad things about life until we just stop giving a s**t about any of it. The point is to stop suffering, Now. So the buddha offered that, and all the hard truths about life, not to make us feel bad or afraid, but actually to make us feel good.Your generosity is a Big Deal. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.My practice with anything I encounter on the path— if it’s in my mind, my life, or in the teachings, is to focus on it until the mind can be with it without the warping effect of fear. And that’s when I can find the places of freedom that Jan Frazier talks about so eloquently in the above quote.My son is probably at peak cuteness right now. In fact, his cuteness factor is likely diminishing these days as his cheeks lose their chub and he learns how to pronounce words correctly. Not long now before his voice changes and he’s all “I hate you, Mom, I wish I was never born!” I could stop there and live in the belief that I need this very sweetness in order to love, that there will only be pimples and teenage angst to look forward to; or I could be with this moment of who he is, and see that fear is painting an imaginary picture of a reality that does not exist. All that there is, is now. And what is happening now? I’m sitting by a window on a gorgeous autumn day in Vermont, a new baby asleep on my chest as I ponder the freedom that is possible in this life, as I feel it in real time.The closer you get to what’s happening right now, the less it makes sense to save any room for fear. Because the story fear tells is not real, and it brings only suffering. Fear closes us off to what’s happening now, preventing us from seeing the abundance that is all around us, abundance that is calling us to fall in love with the moment, with our lives.What beliefs do you carry that require fear as their sustenance? Here’s a fun game: any time you notice a thought or belief that makes you feel bad, pause. Focus on what’s happening right now. Sensations, sounds, thoughts coming and going. Don’t go in and analyze the belief, just be with the reality of right now. See how it is all held in love. How this moment of dream-like, ever-changing, beautiful existence flies in the face of fear. Grief may well still be there. But grief feels different here in this infinite space of love. Good, and not scary.In the space of this pause you’ll find a vaster, more eternal version of yourself. You may start to see how the belief changes from one of fear and despair to one of blissful contentment. Not only is everything not fucked, it’s more than we’ve ever dared to dream of.Many thanks to my dear Jan Frazier and to The Buddh-i$h Investor for helping me remember this essential part of my practice. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

Your generosity really makes a difference. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.My life is full of abundance right now. Love is everywhere. Just when I think my heart can’t possibly hold more love, my son spontaneously says “Mom? I love you.” This, as my newborn falls asleep on my breast and the smell of my husband cooking us a delicious dinner fills the air around us. And I think I might burst into tears. It’s partly because of the fact that I just had a baby and there is measurable abundance in my life, and you could also chalk it up to hormones, but it’s also because of how much I’ve worked to open my heart (hey—this stuff really works). Either way, it seems impossible to love this hard without it hurting.One of the biggest takeaways for me from the daylong retreat with Jan Frazier a couple of weeks ago was that pain and bliss are two sides of the same coin. This is what childbirth is, what falling in love is, what it is to be alive. You cannot know love without touching loss, without being harassed by the truth of impermanence: All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.That is one of the “five subjects for frequent recollection” in Buddhism, and I can’t seem to shake it. So I guess I’m doing a good job with that frequent recollection part. And maybe we all are, every time we love. Maybe it’s impermanence that makes love so poignant, so precious. Maybe that’s just one of the many ways that love helps us all get free from suffering.Parenting as the Path meets this TuesdaySpeaking of parenting, heads up that our Parenting as the Path class will meet this Tuesday, September 30th, from 4:30-6pm ET. While I may make an appearance, Ofosu will be taking the lead on this one. The theme will be about being a kind and compassionate witness and presence to ourselves and our children. This class is held on Zoom and registration is free. Even if you’re not a parent or caregiver, and maybe you just want to re-parent yourself, you are most welcome. If you want to make it but can’t, the great news is that we recently partnered with IMS, and the recordings of these classes are now being made available on the IMS website. You can find the link to the recordings, and the registration for the upcoming class, here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

I’m 39 weeks and 6 days pregnant and I’m taking this opportunity, at one day before my due date, to re-write and re-post this one from a few months ago. I never shared this one widely since it’s a bit specific to motherhood, but here I’ve made it a bit more accessible. This guided meditation is meant to help you find your fertile void. No matter how you identify, we all have a place inside us where things are created. A place full of the best kind of emptiness: where possibility exists and new life is born. I’ve heard that a Zen master once said that Zen is for men because men can’t get pregnant and have babies. In other words, the experience of pregnancy and childbirth is so loaded with awakening power that everyone who doesn’t go through something like it basically just has to work on it. It’s all too easy to get the idea that whatever challenge we’re dealing with is in the way of our awakening. How could I possibly be mindful when I feel this horrible? How can I possibly practice when my addiction is this bad, or when my life is as messy as it is?But the more I walk the path, the more things that feel like insurmountable obstacles turn out to be the best teachers, perfectly tailored for my deepest awakening potential. Even the most traumatic experiences— especially those. The only thing stopping us from insight is that we think we can’t practice in these conditions, so we don’t try. Oh, and we think that “trying” means bearing down, when it often means softening.Your generosity really helps! To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.In my first trimester of this pregnancy, I felt like I was about to vomit, all day, every day. It was extra excruciating because I also had to follow a toddler around all day, every day. A toddler who loved to use me as a trampoline while I was lying on the couch, trying not to barf. I went on a meditation retreat at the for eleven days during that time. I mostly slept and did lying down meditation, but this came to me one evening:Pregnancy makes you porous. One whiff of some unwanted smell feels like you’ve suddenly eaten the thing— the scented candle, the spoiled milk, the bacon grease— whatever it is, it feels like it’s in you. That’s just the beginning. Food goes down, and comes back up, quite readily. Things flow easily emotionally too - you cry when you watch The Office. The world pours in through all your senses, a relentless bombardment that can’t be blocked or shut out. Nausea happens because your typical guard gets ripped down as you are forcibly shoved towards nonresistance, while still trying to claw your way out. Despite your clawing, life begins to move through you in double time. And at some point the time will come when you are faced with the inevitable moment of fruition, the one that all that opening was finally heralding you toward. Your body becomes a gaping portal and you explode and implode, all at once, as one becomes two. We always talk about the beauty of uniting, but what of separating? As the vacuum of the universe transforms your body fully into a fertile void, you will never be the same again. In the excruciation of birthing, your mind can no longer dwell anywhere other than this moment. There is no escape from the crushing vice-grip of the present, except the release of surrender - of losing yourself in it, of dying to the pain and beauty of it all. Your life is not about you anymore. And that is the mother of all freedom.When things feel impossible, give yourself over to the pain. Let your being be smushed by the bear hug of your dharma. This is happening, not because you did something wrong, but because you are so lovable and so capable of awakening that the universe deemed you worthy of it.Thanks to everyone for your readership and for your kind and encouraging messages. I look forward to sharing insights from the fertile void when I return.love,Cara This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

For those of you who didn’t know, I’m approximately 39 weeks pregnant right now (traditionally that’s out of 40). Which means this baby could come at any moment, maybe even as I write this post. I don’t have a clear plan for my maternity leave, but if you find me absent, re-posting old material; or if we’re all unlucky, audio-clips from my labor— don’t be too surprised.On that note, this guided meditation is about slowing down. We live in a world that rushes around a lot. Our culture loves to be caffeinated, productive, and efficient. The more ‘conveniences’ that enter our lives to save us time, the more ways we find to fill that time with other stuff.We do not often stop to assess what exactly it is that we are rushing towards. What is driving me to be so efficient, to get so much done? It feels good to get a lot done, to be productive, but why? Is it because when I’m productive, I feel like I’m not a failure in the eyes of society? Is the stuff I’m doing stuff that actually what matters, to me? Or is it someone else’s idea of achievement, of success? And what about when we can’t be productive? Do you feel at all down on yourself when you don’t get a lot done?Your generosity really helps! To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.If we are only worthy of love if we’re getting s**t done all the time, then we’re all fucked. Because at some point, we’re going to get sick, old, and eventually, the ultimate failure: death. Some of us have to learn how to slow down the hard way. Lyme disease is what did it for me, and it has been the best teacher that I’ve ever had, that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Maybe the next time your agenda get’s thrown out of whack because you get sick, injured, or some other unfortunate turn of events comes to pass, you can take it as a sign from the universe, a lesson in slowing down.Sometimes the universe does this. It forces us to have perspective on things. It tries to shake us awake, saying, “is this thing you’re rushing around trying to do actually worth sacrificing your peace for? It’s time to stop and notice the abundance of this moment.” The more I practice, the less I can justify sacrificing my peace for.Maybe you’re the kind of person who really likes to take their time, to move slowly, to savor things. But you live in a world where you’re constantly being bombarded by emails, texts, tasks, and demands. It feels like the only way to keep up is to run. But actually, no one can make you rush. That’s all you. You can still move slowly, if that’s what’s important to you. People in your life will learn that if they want to hang out with you, they’re going to have to stop running. Maybe even lie down.Or maybe you’re not the slow type. Maybe you have a bunch of exuberant energy and you just get a lot of s**t done with it. Well, let that actually come from a place of your own enthusiasm, and check to see if there’s something you’re not wanting to feel when you can’t move quickly. See if you find it difficult to pause, and why it’s difficult.We probably all have some combination of a slow poke and a hyperactive child inside of us, so we’ll all get to practice with both of these. But no matter what your type or what state you’re in, what I want for us all is to be here for this moment— not to miss the sunsets, the way it smells after it rains, the way it feels to swallow a bite of food. If we are always rushing to make everything right with the world, we forget to actually experience it. Even as the world seems to be falling apart, it is always beckoning us home to be present with it, to love it, to live. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

A different and longer version of this meditation is available to paid subscribers here.A lot of my formal practice time is spent watching my mind grapple with things it doesn’t want to be happening, watching myself pry my own white-knuckled fingers off of myself. I’ve found lots of different ways to stop doing stuff in practice and in life, including (but not limited to): having compassion for the doing, noticing the emotion that’s driving the doing, looking directly at what exactly it is that I’m trying so hard to do something about, exaggerating the doing, ignoring the doing entirely and just feeling my feet on the ground, directing all my energy into cleaning the s**t out of the bathroom, and spending all day watching Netflix.It could be argued that the entirety of this path can be boiled down to moving from doing to receiving. To finding more balance of yin and yang, in a world that is severely addicted to yang. Your generosity matters a lot. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I’m not saying we should just stop doing everything and turn into useless, TV-watching blobs. The kind of non-doing I'm talking about goes deeper than that. We stop doing stuff on a really, really deep level. This kind of non-doing calls upon us to fully face the things that we fidget around and to confront them. We get to put down all the ways we avoid the things we don’t want to feel, and just feel it all. THAT is radical non-doing.Engaged. Not abandoning yourself though something difficult. Not trying to fix it, but simply listening, curious, wanting to understand, caring, willing to stay, willing to help, but not helping from a place of fear or aversion. The only doing that happens comes from a place of love, compassion, and wisdom. Before you read the rest of this, the disclaimer is that it’s important to allow yourself to move away from something if it feels intuitively wrong or like a violence to yourself to hold your attention there. We’re not trying to re-live or reinforce our trauma. That being said:I want you to know that you can drop into your body and identify that thing that is so unsettling, the thing you think you can’t tolerate, and gently hold your attention there until something clicks and your realize that you can actually handle it. That you don’t have to operate from a place of busyness, of doing and trying and becoming. That contentment is here if we are willing to turn towards ourselves and sit with what we once thought was un-sitwithable. Because then something starts to shift. Because up until this point we’ve either been avoiding, running away, acting out from our anxiety, or grappling with it. We start to see that it was a subtle violence to ourselves to be with ourselves in order to change ourselves. And we start to see that we don’t have to abandon ourselves either. We can just stop. Put down all the doing - and doing comes in the form of distraction, of trying to fix what’s wrong, and even having strong views and opinions about things. What if we stop wasting our energy? Fold it in, so that it all goes towards our staying power. We simply stand, holding our hearts, in the moment, and watch what happens. We gain confidence. We see that we can handle it, that we can simply watch as the mind tries, and we can hold our own hand as we tear up and feel the helplessness, the hopelessness, the fear as it comes in waves, and then it fades. And what’s left? Sensation. Thought. That feeling we were trying to get rid of, we see that it was so dependent on the grip we had around it. And suddenly it starts to shift and move. Because as we loosen the grip, it is free to finally move as it wanted to move, to express what it wanted to express, to get tighter and bigger or shrink into a tiny ball - it had something to say and we weren’t letting it, because we were so afraid. But it turns out, it just needed to be seen, to be felt, and that was enough. And confidence grows. We were not given anything in this world that we are not capable of meeting, that we weren’t capable of using for our path, for our growth, for our freedom. You can do this.You will never find out how powerful you are if you keep running away from yourself. You will never find out how capable you are if you keep fidgeting away from the moment. You will never be fully alive if you spend your whole life fidgeting. Stop. Stay still. You can. You will be set free. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

This guided meditation is meant to help you let your face fall off, to get in touch with what you’re really feeling, and to be totally yourself— whether people like it or not.I have a friend who doesn’t laugh unless he actually thinks something is funny. If he doesn’t like you, he doesn’t pretend to. He smiles only when it feels worth the effort, which means most of the time he looks like he’s kinda mad at you. This might not sound like a big deal (maybe you know someone like this too), but it is to me. I feel inspired by that degree of shamelessness.We do a lot of things out of obligation to others, to protect someone else’s feelings, or to keep up appearances. Our culture, and maybe our biology, has us focused on other peoples’ feelings and needs as our way of protecting our own feelings and needs. I can’t be ok unless you’re ok. As a result, we lose track of ourselves: what we want, what we need, and what we’re feeling in general. What if we stopped doing things out of obligation, and only did things when we genuinely wanted to, when we truly felt called to? What if every time we helped another person, gave a gift, or did something kind, it was because we wanted to and not because we felt like we were supposed to or were considering what other people might think if we didn’t? Not only would this be a far more authentic and joyful way to live, it would also make it easier for people to trust us. My deadpan-faced friend is one of my closest and easiest friends, because of the trust we have. When he laughs, I know he’s not pretending my joke is funny. And when he doesn’t smile at me, I’m not offended at all, in fact I’m delighted to be included in his unmasked inner world.Your generosity means a lot. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The thing is, we don’t tend to trust ourselves when we have strong feelings, or any feelings other than wellness. Quite the opposite, in fact. We think we’re about to lose control, we worry what others will think if they find out we’re unhappy. But all of our feelings, including the unhappy ones, are wholly entwined with insight, wisdom, intuition, and compassion. If we don’t allow ourselves to feel, if we dismiss all of our needs and desires as second to other peoples’, we stop being able to give what’s ours to give. We rob ourselves of our own potential, and our own delight in life.Some years ago, I made it a practice of disappointing as many people as I could for an entire month. I flaked out on lunch dates, missed deadlines, left dirty dishes in the sink. I stopped doing many things I didn’t want to do. This required me to get in touch with what I was actually wanting to do, instead of focusing on other peoples’ expectations of me. I even backed out of a job the day before it started, because I realized I was going to be completely miserable, that I never wanted that job in the first place, and that I had only taken it because it was what I felt like I was supposed to do. A LOT of people were disappointed in me. And it was one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. Finally, I started including my own preferences and needs in my decision-making, which meant I made way more decisions that were in line with my deeper purpose. Working that job was not going to help me thrive in life, it was going to sap me of my energy, energy I could direct in far better ways. And disappointing all those people didn’t actually cause them harm, it freed them up to take care of some things that were never mine to take care of, or to find someone who was a much better fit than I for the job.Around this same time in my life, I was on a meditation retreat, and in the middle of it I felt my face fall off. I hadn’t realized that the muscles in my face were frozen, keeping my face composed in a way that contorted it into some semblance of looking permanently hunky dory. And what a relief it was to drop it, and just let the fullness of my resting b***h face shine forth like it has always wanted to.I cannot reiterate enough that this path is not about pretending to be anything or anyone. It is about complete honesty about who you are and what you’re feeling. When you let your face fall off, what you find is that underneath all that hiding, that pretending to love, is real, actual love.What if you disappointed as many people as you could today, this week, or this month? Not to be a jerk, but to get clear about your feelings, your needs, to put down the strain it takes to pretend to be someone else, so that you can finally be yourself? You will discover who you really are, what you really want; and ultimately find that you are a far more awesome and loving force of nature than you ever imagined. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

My husband told me that if I post this, I’m going to lose some of my audience. It seems I just can’t help myself. If you don’t want to read the word “butthole” one more time, I’d advise you not to continue. You have been warned.If you skip the main article and scroll to the bottom, you’ll find a couple upcoming events, one for parents and one for young adults and you’ll still avoid all the buttholes (except the three I’ve somehow managed to fit in in the first few sentences of this post).My almost 3-year-old son was sitting on his little potty recently and, mid-poop, exclaimed “Oh no, I can’t do it!” and wanted to hold my hand.This kind of thing happens to everyone, except as adults, instead of asking for help during our most vulnerable moments, we get all embarrassed and we try to make sure no one finds out. When I was in my early 20’s I tried to attack all my fears. Every time I noticed that I was afraid of something, I would just do it. This meant that I did things like run marathons barefoot, ride my bicycle across the country, and polar plunges every day in the New England winter.I was living near Boston at the time, and I got a job at an outdoor education center in the Catskills. So naturally, I decided to ride my bicycle there. Without a cell phone, with all my stuff packed on my bike, in February. There was a website at the time (which apparently still exists) called couchsurfing.com. So I planned to stay on the couches of strangers for a couple of the nights on my trip to my new job. I trained throughout the month of January, taking long rides through the snowy, grey landscape of Massachusetts. It was very, very lonely.Your generosity makes a huge difference. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I planned to depart before dawn one cold February morning, and the night before I left, my dad asked me if I was scared. I realized that I was, and at the same time, I began to have the realization that all the confrontation of my fears I had been doing was really an attempt to avoid my biggest fear: vulnerability.I thought about that quite a bit on my lonesome bike ride, which in my memory was quiet, grey, and relatively uneventful. I arrived unscathed, but with a plan.Like all my other fears, I confronted this one head on. After a few weeks of getting to know my co-workers, I started playing a game called Naked Surprise. It’s what it sounds like. You get naked, and you surprise people. Most people were down for it, so we all started naked surprising each other in a glorious expression of vulnerability.It wasn’t long before naked surprise wasn’t enough for me, and so naturally, I started “butthole surprise.” Again, pretty much what it sounds like. As you might imagine, it wasn’t as popular as naked surprise. So if that weirds you out, you’re not alone. But like it or not, everyone has a butthole, we just don’t like to talk about it (let alone look at it).The truth is that we’re all, essentially, s**t-shows. We just get better at hiding it as we grow up. What if it was ok to be kind of a disaster, or at the very least to not be perfect?This liberatory practice is calling for us to stop trying to hide the wild, uncivilized naked toddler within all of us that we so badly wish expose. The one who wants to have a real reaction, to cry, to have a tantrum, and to hold someone’s hand while they poop.Perhaps the suggestion of letting yourself go sounds confusing at a time when the world seems to be going to s**t. But when we get more real about the mess we truly are, the resulting humility is what allows us to see the humanity in each other. To acknowledge that it is fear that is driving the hateful acts in the world. And ultimately, the effort to hide our vulnerabilities does little to benefit us, other than save face. When we’re expending all of our energy trying to contain or hide ourselves, we have nothing left to give, and we stop being real.If we could all just be a little bit more vulnerable, it would give everyone permission to do the same. We all get to come out of hiding, only to find that indeed, everyone has a butthole.Thanks for your kind attention, and your generosity. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Next Tuesday, August 26th at 4pm ET, Ofosu Jones-Quartey (Born I) and I will be teaching Parenting as the Path online. The topic will be vulnerability, and how it’s ok to be your true self, or to not know what you’re doing as a parent. If you want to make it but can’t, the great news is that we recently partnered with IMS, and the recordings of these classes are being made available on the IMS website. You can find the link to the recordings, and the registration for the upcoming class, here:The Contemplative SemesterLast fall I was a full time faculty for a program for young adults called the Contemplative Semester. There’s nothing quite like this program, and it’s something I wish I could have done as a young person. It’s happening again in the spring of 2026, and if you know of anyone between the ages of 18-25 who might be interested, please share this with them:The Contemplative Semester (CS) is a three-month immersion in mindfulness meditation, community living, and nature connection for 18-25 year-olds. Nestled in the foothills of Vermont's Green Mountains, the program runs February 1 to May 8, 2026.CS is structured around:* A holistic curriculum that integrates Buddhist and other contemplative wisdom, meditation, Nonviolent Communication, nature connection, and contemplative discernment.* Four week-long meditation retreats taught by highly experienced Buddhist teachers, providing participants with dedicated time for introspection and growth.* Community living based on collaboration and shared ethics, fostering a supportive environment for personal and collective transformation.* College credit optional, offering up to 12 credits for an additional fee.* CS is an educational non-profit sponsored by the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

This guided meditation is to help us rest deeply, embrace this moment and how we feel about it, and then be moved to act from a place of love rather than fear.We hear the words “accept” and “allow,” and we think we are being instructed to get stuck in acceptance, that we just have to come to terms with the cards we’re dealt in life, that it’s all kind of a bummer. That real freedom is being content with a shitty situation and never improving upon it. But why do we get so much satisfaction out of this incredible F**k That meditation by Jason Headley? Where’s the place for having strong opinions, hating something, wanting something, or doing something in the world?We don’t really want to stop at acceptance. We want to do something with ourselves, we want to have something unique to contribute, we want to help, to grow, we want to be an integral part of this world.This path doesn’t stop at acceptance. We use acceptance to move forward and live life in the ways we are meant to live into it, give the gifts we were born to give. Ultimately, acceptance takes us to our wildest dreams. The thing is that we just don’t exactly know what our wildest dreams are yet, because they’re so beyond what our little brains can fathom, that we aren’t exactly capable of dreaming that big.Your generosity makes a huge difference. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The reason that mindfulness instruction says to simply listen, relax, soften, is because through that softening, we shift out of fear and into love. And love is where we stop fighting with the constraints of reality. It’s where we get start to be involved in our lives in a meaningful and effective way, to be creative, to do what is uniquely ours to do in the world. We give ourselves over to the moment, simultaneously letting the moment move us, while offering something new to it. This is how we get to live fully.What is happening right now? How does your body feel? What is your mind doing? Your heart? Drop out of your ideas and expectations of what should be happening, and connect directly with what is. What if you didn’t have to wait to feel better or to become some imaginary, idealized version of yourself? Stop waiting to find contentment somewhere else: your existence is enough. Rest. Then let yourself be moved from this place.There is a different kind of intelligence at work in your life beyond your thinking mind. You can see this when you look at how your life has unfolded. There's so much more at play than your own plans, ideas, and sense of control. Look at the plans that you had for your life. Now look at what actually happened. Most of what you’ve learned and who you’ve grown to be, has little do do with the plans you had for yourself. We don’t know the lessons we need to learn. Letting go into the flow of life means you finally let life move you to the very places, you come to realize, you’ve been wanting to go all along. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

I wrote this article for the Ten Percent Happier Newsletter back in 2023, and thought I’d revive it since I’m currently teaching back-to-back retreats at Spirit Rock and this feels really relevant right now. All my homies who just made it out here for the family retreat: you know what I’m talking about….This is my eighth or ninth attempt to sit down and write this article. Every time I go to write it, I get interrupted by an important text, my kid wakes up from his nap, or I suddenly realize that I can’t remember the last time I took a shower, and that feels more important than writing the article which, ironically, is supposed to be about how we can embrace interruptions as a part of our mindfulness practice.Until my son was born, I had the luxury of taking long, uninterrupted baths, binging on Netflix to my heart’s content, and even— wait for it— reading an actual book. Now, a typical morning looks like me cooking scrambled eggs while making sure my kid doesn’t pull all the condiments out of the pantry, but too late, he already spilled the olive oil and the dog is licking it up and all the while I’m trying to have some semblance of a conversation with my housemate, who kindly points out that the eggs are burning. I read a quote recently that said, “to be a parent is to be constantly interruptible.” My friend Khalila puts it more bluntly, saying: “being a mom is getting right back up again after you just sat down.”But it’s not just parents who get interrupted constantly, it’s all of us. With technology, communication has proliferated in a new way, so that rather than sitting down and having one long conversation, we have 45 different conversations taking place in little bites over the course of a few hours. And even if you aren't a heavy tech user, we live in a world full of people moving at a fast pace with squirrel-like attention, and this frenetic energy makes most of us constantly interruptible.Your support is what makes this possible. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Being interrupted is not usually thought of as a positive experience, unless the interruption is more exciting or pleasing to us than the task at hand. And the experience of being constantly interrupted is definitely not something most of us would welcome. That’s why some of us find it to be such a relief to practice meditation, or to go on meditation retreats, where the whole setup is designed to give us as few interruptions as possible, and to make it so that we can sit down and never have to get back up again. While this setup is helpful in many ways, it can lead us to believe that minimizing interruption is an essential to a good meditation practice.Interruptions can be welcomed as a part of our mindfulness practice. It looks good in writing, doesn’t it? Or let’s try this one on: interruptions can be used to help us be happier. As outlandish as these claims seem, I can actually attest to being happier overall despite (or perhaps because of) my current heightened state of interruptibility, and I think this has everything to do with my practice of embracing interruption.If we look closely, we can see that the problem isn’t so much the interruption, but rather our relationship to it. When we’re at odds with the interruption, whether it’s being pulled away from the book we’re reading, or something more serious like an injury, we suffer not because of what happened, but because of how we’re relating to it. When we think things need to be a particular way in order to be ok, we perpetuate the belief that we can’t really handle life. The more I practice, the more I come to define real freedom as increased flexibility. Or, as my friend Jess Morey describes enlightenment, an “infinite window of tolerance.” And if it’s a game of expanding our window of tolerance, we might even play with welcoming life's interruptions as a mindfulness bell, something to break us out of our old habits or ruts, and expand us somewhere new.Embracing interruption doesn’t mean you have to follow every phone notification and advertisement that pops up. In fact, simplicity and renunciation lend themselves to happiness. I’m talking more about finding a place of receptivity and nonresistance to the interruptions we can’t avoid, the ones we find ourselves at odds with. Paying attention in this way actually makes us more aware, so that we actually have a choice when we are impulsively following every distraction.Try this: Go about your meditation expecting to be interrupted. Instead of just jumping back to the anchor when you find the attention has wandered, be open and curious about where you’ve found yourself. Linger there and see what’s unfolding. You can choose to go back to your anchor if and when you’re ready, or not. Stay open and curious about where the attention naturally goes.And if you don’t try that, definitely try this one: Go about your day expecting to be interrupted. Instead of jumping back to your routine when something unexpected happens, stay awake, receptive and curious about what might happen if you open fully to the interruption.I do a weekly cold plunge with a group of women in a frigid river in New Hampshire. It’s a great interruption to my normal routines, one that blasts me into another dimension and made me feel connected to something much bigger than myself. It makes me open to other interruptions in my life, so that I can stop feeling annoyed when my son pulls all the clothes that I just folded out of the drawer, and start seeing the world through his fresh, playful eyes. I could expend more energy on the frustration of not getting things in order, but if instead I embrace the wholeness of this moment, I get to welcome in the delight, love, and countless toddler mouth-fart sounds that come with my current state of affairs. If we can recognize an interruption as the universe’s way of shaking us awake and into the present moment, every unexpected event and obstacle can become something that brings us to life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

This guided meditation came out of a recent Meditate Your Face off class. The audio dharmette from that class is available to paid subscribers here.I spent a stupid amount of time on my year-long retreat back in 2020 in a state of rage. Fury so strong that it would wake me up at 3 am, so hot and bothered that I’d have to get out of bed, pace, and scream; sometimes until the sun rose. Yes, it was a lot.And it was horrible. So deeply painful that I could barely observe it, despite the fact that the whole point of my being there was to observe my feelings.Even so, I learned a lot about anger. I learned that it needs a lot of quiet listening, a lot of space to exist, to breathe, to run wild and to express itself. I learned that its connected to shame, and also to fear, and to vulnerability. That it comes up when I’ve been harmed, there to protect me, that it’s always trying to keep me safe. But one of the most interesting and useful things I learned about anger was that, when it came right down to it, the person I was the most angry with was always myself. Because how could I have let this happen to me? I was too soft, too weak, I didn’t stand up for myself enough, I didn’t have enough boundaries.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.There’s a weird comfort in being angry with yourself, because it means you might still be able to have control. It means you may still have a shot at not getting hurt. But what we don’t tend to look at is how much pain we are already in from the anger itself. Maybe we think pain is better if we’re the ones responsible for inflicting it on ourselves. But pain is pain. Causing pain now to prevent pain later sounds as crazy as it is, but we do it all the time.If we know that when we’re angry, we’re really just angry at ourselves, this brings a whole new dimension to all of the things we get angry about. If I’m angry at my son for purposely doing the opposite of what I’m asking him to do, maybe I’m really angry at myself for not knowing what to do, or because I’m afraid that I might not be a good mom. I might even be angry at myself for being angry at all— isn’t a good mom supposed to be patient and constantly loving?And if I’m angry when I read the news, angry at the people in charge, the people who voted for the people in charge? Maybe I’m really angry at myself because I think I should be doing more to help this fucked up world but I don’t know what to do and I feel helpless. Maybe I’m mad at myself for enjoying a life of comfort and privilege while other people are suffering. But to look at my own shame is far too painful, so I’d rather get angry at everyone else. At least then it feels like I’m doing something about it and not just feeling more and more like the very privileged, useless political leaders that I’m so mad at.In case you didn’t know, you’ve always been trying your best to not get hurt. Maybe you haven’t stood up for yourself or yelled when you felt like yelling, but maybe it was because you were afraid, or trying not to hurt someone, and maybe the fear and restraint was also trying to protect you and other people from getting hurt.How do we work with anger skillfully? There’s so much to say here, but for me, a big part of it is about making space for it to exist. Not judging it, because that’s just more aversion. I’ve also found it important to allow myself to express it, to experiment with it, and to not have a right way of dealing with it. Permission to try different things and see what works and what doesn’t, all with the intention of balancing spacious allowing with non-harm. Slam a door? Punch a pillow? Scream? Cry? Yell? Expressing my feelings, but using words that aren’t blaming or judging or condescending in any way. It’s an art. And we can learn the art by trying different things and seeing what happens.I’ve come to have a lot of respect for anger. It’s shown me parts of myself that are powerful, fearless, and beautiful. These are things I get to see when I allow the anger to flow, to see the depth that lies beneath it. Beneath the anger at another, and beneath the anger at myself, there’s often a feeling of helplessness. Meeting that helplessness tends to be what happens just before we cry, mourning the fact that we don’t have control. And then there’s peace. Underneath all of it is a deep kind of peace that’s been there with us all along. Because all along, we’ve known that we don’t have control, that we’re vulnerable, and that that’s okay. That it is, in fact, awesome.To not have control means we don’t have to be so responsible for life going the way we think it should go. To not have control means we get to see where life could take us, where it’s been wanting to take us. Your life has been wanting to take you to new places that you’ve never experienced before, to a kind of freedom that is way, way freer than having things go the way you think they should go. It’s time to let go. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

The above is a guided meditation, meant to bring some TLC to impulsive ignorance.In our everyday understanding of the word privilege, we tend to think pejoratively. We say the privileged are ignorant. Ignorance is seen as a quality that people get to have because they are so privileged that they don’t have to consider other people’s feelings. So they turn a blind eye to pain, injustice, suffering— in service of their own comfort, wealth, power and status.We forget that ignorance is actually a state of suffering, not a real privilege. We also forget that having a certain social status, political power, and material resources are also not real privilege. What do I mean by real privilege? I like to think there’s a deeper definition to that word, one that goes beyond the social justice context of modern times. If privilege is a special condition granted to an individual or group outside the norm — then understanding where real happiness comes from and how to walk the path towards it (in brief, having access to the Dharma), might be the most profound kind of privilege.Socio-political power, status, and wealth do not inherently lend themselves to real freedom. Real power, real resource, is wisdom, love, and mindfulness. It is understanding what the cause of suffering is and what leads to its end. That is real privilege. So we cannot expect the ones who have “privilege” as it’s conventionally defined (political leaders, billionaires, cisgendered heterosexual educated upper-middle class white men) to make real strides towards goodness in the world, because they don’t necessarily have true privilege.The Buddha taught that human life has the perfect conditions for awakening: just the right balance of pain and pleasure. In the animal realm, you’d be way too lost in your suffering. In the heavenly realms, there’s so much pleasure that you can hardly peel yourself away from the awesome sex, food, psychedelic experiences, or whatever it is they’re doing over in the deva realm. And not only is it ideal for awakening, being born a human is exceedingly rare. In fact, the Buddha gave an absurd but very illustrative metaphor to explain exactly how rare it is to be born a human:Monks, suppose that this great earth were totally covered with water, and a person were to toss a yoke with a single hole there [. . . ] And suppose a blind sea-turtle were there. It would come to the surface once every one hundred years. Now what do you think: would that blind sea-turtle, coming to the surface once every one hundred years, stick its neck into the yoke with a single hole? (SN 56.48)Your chances of being born a human, according to the Buddha, are the same as the chances of that random turtle poking its little head up right through the single-holed yoke in a water-covered planet for its centennial breath of air. So yeah, looks like you made it pretty far. And not only did you make it all the way to human birth, you also found this path of practice. Not to mention that you’re reading an article about Buddhism at this very moment. Now that is privilege.If we keep expecting the ones with the wealth, power, and status to make real change in the world, if we stay frustrated and bitter and afraid, we’ll never step into our own power. We’ll never get to see that we, humans who have come to understand and care about suffering, are the ones who are positioned change the world for the better. And we’ll never stop the tide of fear and hatred and transform it into love, which is what this path is all about.The first step to stopping the tide of greed, hatred, and delusion in the world is not blaming or shaming— that’s just adding more hatred and thus creating more of the same. The first step is finding where we can start to love.Where can you stop hatred today? Where can you begin to love? Look into your mind and see where hatred enters it. Does it flicker when you’re reading the news? Does it seep in when you disagree with someone? Is there a category of people that you have not yet learned to include in your heart? It’s ok. This is what fear looks like, this is how the heart protects itself. Don’t judge yourself, that’s just more hatred. Love begins when we try to love ourselves for not knowing how to love, and for wanting to learn.I wrote this article based off of dharma talk I gave in the Spring of 2024 at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, which you can hear by clicking below.And here are a couple of updates and reminders: This Monday July 21st, at 6:30pm PT, I’ll be giving a Dharma talk online through Spirit Rock Meditation Center.I’m excited to be teaching a daylong retreat with my dear friend Matthew Brensilver (aka Ol’ Dirty Brensilver) on July 27th. As you can see, even ODB was once an innocent young child, just like any of us. This retreat will be online and also in-person at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

Paid subscribers can hear the audio dharmette that accompanies this guided meditation.There’s an old adage in Buddhism that says “Whatever is in the way, is the way.” Essentially, whatever you think is dumb, annoying, bad, wrong, or terrible, that (sorry to say) is the way to freedom. Not around it, not away from it, but through it.This is not to be confused with making yourself love what you hate. As a person who's supposed to be a “on the path” and emanating love and compassion or whatever, instead of letting myself feel annoyed by someone or deeply disturbed by something, I can get frustrated with with myself for feeling that. And then I pretend that I'm feeling something else, like I'm okay with something that is totally whack.If we have a meditation practice we might think we’re supposed to pretend to feel calm all the time, like having strong feelings is bad and if we pretend we don’t have them, we eventually won’t anymore. This usually backfires and we end up exploding, being passive aggressive, or emotionally constipated.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Mindfulness is the opposite of pretending not to feel anything. It means opening to things exactly as they are, not trying to change them, get rid of them, or fix them. And this includes our own reactivity, pain, or confusion. And when we can make enough space for our reactivity to exist and spread out a little, there’s a lot to learn.Anger, for example, comes up when we feel violated or threatened in some way. It always points to how we deserve to be treated with love and respect. If we dismiss the whole experience of anger, we don’t get to see how much it’s born out of care, how it’s rooted in love, in compassion. And then we don’t set the boundary of protection it’s trying to help us set.“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously”-Prentis HemphillWhen you hate something, it’s a sign of life. It’s a sign of love. It means you can still feel pain and that you still care.And yes, anger wants to cause harm, so we need to take care with how we use it. We listen to the root of the anger, we connect with the love there, and we try not to cause further harm with the energy it brings. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel it. It actually means we feel it completely. We let anger flow through our bodies, we listen to the meaning behind the thoughts it elicits, we stop blocking it internally so that it can stop living in us and dictating what we do. Anger tells us that something cannot be tolerated for one more second, but rarely is it possible to actually stop the target of the anger so immediately. And so, we feel helpless. The urgency anger imparts upon us is based on the premise that a situation which in reality is far out of our control, is ours alone to deal with. And worse, that it’s our fault for allowing this to happen in the first place. It’s here that we start to see that at the root of most anger, we are truly angry at ourselves. I try to single-handedly take down the patriarchy on a regular basis. I’ll be doing the dishes for the fifth time in a row, and then suddenly I’m picking a fight with my husband, but really I’m picking a fight with myself for having the same problems as my mom and her mother before her. If I had been stronger, better, more assertive: I wouldn’t be in this situation. Anger, no matter how much we believe it’s the ticket to safety, poisons us.Because it’s not your fault that things are the way they are. Everyone is doing the best they can with the resources they have. And as soon as you can realize that, you can stop punching yourself in the gut every time something bad happens in your life, or in the world. And then you can stop letting anger, helplessness, or fear dictate how you move about, and instead see clearly what is yours to do and be totally available to do it.Sometimes all that’s yours to do is stop adding fuel to the dumpster fire of pain and confusion that seems to be burning all around and inside. Sometimes it just means breathing through something hard. Being kind to someone who wasn’t expecting it. Come closer to your locus of control, and love everywhere you can (which sometimes is just the squirrel out the window). That’s enough.Next time you’re full of rage, or fear, or grief, you have some degree of curiosity and balance of mind, and you have a little time to just be with that feeling, try allowing the feeling to fill your body. Put your attention on the physical sensations of the feeling, and make a lot of space for it to live and breathe and move around. Get into the fetal position, pace around, or get into your car and scream. Let the feeling express itself, and listen to the deeper message it has for you. It’s not your job to contain it, just to listen and learn.The best thing about letting ourselves have our feelings is that it’s a huge relief. At first it may feel scary, because we’ve often stopped letting ourselves feel them. We think we can’t handle them or we’ll push people away. But when we discover that it’s not our job to change what we’re feeling, that we’re not wrong or bad for having them, and that our feelings are actually useful and rooted in love? Aaaah. Turns out you’re the right person, at the right place, and at the right time.This article was born out of a talk I gave at Spirit Rock Meditation Center a few months ago.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

The woman pictured below has changed my life and my practice, and today’s audio dharmette and guided meditation was inspired by my time with her. This September, for the first time in many years, Jan Frazier will be teaching and sharing about her experience in person. For more information on that retreat, you can scroll down past the little article or click here. I read Jan Frazier’s book, “When Fear Falls Away” last fall, which is essentially Jan’s diary after she had a sudden, unexpected, and irreversible awakening experience. Jan didn’t have any particular spiritual practice, nor did she really understand the concept of enlightenment, or so it seems from her book. And it wasn’t until nine months after her awakening that she connected the dots that what had happened to her was called “Enlightenment.”To put it lightly, Jan’s book was mind-blowing for me. While reading it I was flooded with memories of the time in my early 20’s when I first started practicing, a time when I felt extremely alive, connected, and joyful for no reason— a little like tripping on mushrooms for several straight days. People and things were literally glowing all around me, and I felt in love with the world. Reading Jan’s book made me realize how serious and long-winded my practice had gotten since that time. I’d been operating under the belief that enlightenment was way too far out of reach for me, and I was practicing that way too. I wasn’t looking for freedom now, I was playing a long game. But I didn’t need to be.After I read her book, I found out that Jan was living just a few miles away from where I was living at the time in southern Vermont, and so I reached out to her and she generously invited me to her home. Jan Frazier is very understated. She is a tiny woman living in a little cabin in the woods with her cat. Her porch is sprinkled with birdseed; quotes, photos, and other keepsakes brighten the dim interior, which is modestly furnished and comfortably untidy. She offered me some tea and we sat together. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I told her that I wasn’t sure what to say. That I just felt like collapsing into her arms and crying. It was a full-body experience to be with someone so realized. I could feel her freedom wafting all around her and spreading into my cells. This was even while she talked about having a body, at 70 years old, ridden with chronic pain, and even (or especially) while she told stories about sitting next to her husband on his deathbed, or her son’s horrible car accident.To give you an illustration of what it’s like to be Jan, here’s an excerpt from her book, When Fear Falls Away:“Imagine this: whatever has weighed on you suddenly no longer weighs. It may still be there, a fact in your life, but it has no mass, no gravity. All that has ever troubled you is now just a feature of the landscape, like a tree, a passing cloud. Every bit of emotional and mental turmoil has ceased: the entire burden, some form of which has been with you as long as you can remember. A thing familiar as your closest friend — as much a part of you as the language you speak, the color of your skin — is utterly, inexplicably gone. Into the startling emptiness flows a quiet joy that buoys you morning, noon, and night, that goes everywhere you go, into any kind of circumstance, even into sleep. Everything you undertake happens effortlessly. You are happy, but for no reason. Nothing bothers you. You feel no stress. When a problem arises, you know what to do, you do it, and then you let it go. . . . Because your equanimity is disconnected from anything in your outer life, you know that no matter what challenge you are handed — for the rest of your life — the peace will sustain.”In other words, imagine being unfuckwithable. This is what’s possible. She tried to impress this upon me - that it’s not only possible, but in fact inevitable. She talked about time, and how my thinking on eventually getting to enlightenment was starting from a faulty premise; there is no such thing as “later,” only now. Now is when my freedom is, and it is also all that there is. Freedom. Now.I spent a fair portion of my time with Jan in tears, gazing into her eyes, feeling embraced by her quiet presence, and hoping to let her freedom in so deeply that it became my own. I felt uncharacteristically unselfconscious around her, because there was no judgment but only love emanating from her being. She was the embodiment of the complete and utter freedom that I so long for. And here she was, reassuring me that enlightenment can happen for anyone—even if you don’t even know what enlightenment is.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Jan Frazier was just a regular person, with a regular life. She was a mom who didn’t even meditate and was having chronic panic attacks, and now she’s completely awake. She would probably be content to simply stare at a wall for the rest of her life. In fact, she told me that if she wanted to, she could just settle into bliss for as long as she wanted to. I asked her why she didn’t do that all the time, and she said this: “because I love life, and I love people, and if I did that I wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere and see the people I love or do things I love without hurting or killing someone.” It turns out, being free doesn’t make you float away from life, it makes you embrace life even more; even if you are in terrible pain, even as the ones who are most dear to you die.Since my time sitting with Jan that day, my practice has become infused with ease and trust. It reminds me of a more innocent time in my practice, when everything was new and fresh, and I hadn’t adopted the idea that freedom meant a lot of work. I was much more interested in this moment, and all the beauty and perfection to be found in it, no matter how mundane. In those early days of my practice, I could look at almost anything, soften my body and my eyes, and wonder at it’s suchness. My nervous system has relaxed and there’s something in me that knows that everything is okay. More than okay.There’s nothing quite like sitting with someone with that depth of freedom: I’d never experienced anything like it from any other teacher. So to share this with the world, Some friends and I have been organizing a daylong for Jan to teach. This is the first time she’s offered something like this in eight years, and she’s delighted to spend the day with us at Potash Hill in Marlboro, Vermont on September 6th, 2025. Please join us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guided meditation comes with an audio dharmette available to paid subscribers, from an online meditation group that I led for the Insight Meditation Society on 6/23/25.My husband told me my butt turned inside out when I was giving birth. Sorry to start with something so graphic, but I really can’t help myself sometimes, and giving birth is just one of those things that I think should be talked about more, in all its gory detail. It’s wildly transformative to have your body become a portal for another life, and it happens all the time, so we get weirdly casual about it. But make no mistake: there’s nothing casual about your butt turning inside out.There’s also nothing casual about what’s happening right now in the world - in the climate, in Washington, the hunger, the wars that are ongoing and the ones that are erupting. The world’s butt is turning inside out, and it’s all very scary for many people. But if we were to look at all of what’s happening without judgments or labels, we might be hard pressed to find an accurate adjective, devoid of judgment, assumption, or opinion, to describe what’s happening. So to put it bluntly, what’s happening right now is change.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Some people might be triggered hearing me refer to what’s happening simply as “change.” Maybe it seems like I’m trivializing it or distancing myself from it. You might say, “it’s not just change, it’s bad and wrong. Feel how hot it is outside - are you even paying attention? The world is not just changing, it’s imploding, it’s ending, it’s getting destroyed, everything is going in the wrong direction and it’s all our fault, so stop sitting on your ass and calling it ‘just change.’”Admittedly, I do have a tendency to emotionally distance myself from difficult things. I can definitely be the avoidant type. So those accusations may have some truth to them, but equanimity does not need to mean detachment. Equanimity involves seeing a bigger picture, and letting that support us in connecting even more deeply with what’s happening. Because if we’re being honest, in the grand scheme of things we really don’t know what is good and what is bad. However we judge it, it’s simply what’s happening. As I write this it’s 97 degrees here in northern Vermont. Yes it’s easy to feel how god awful that feels at this very moment (especially at 6 months pregnant - bringing a child into this world?) and think “this shouldn't be happening.”But you know, a lot of things are deeply unpleasant, but that doesn’t mean they are bad or that they shouldn’t be happening. Going for a run can be unpleasant, so can moldy bread, teenage hormones, and your butt turning inside out. But these things aren’t all bad, and many of them are an important or essential part of life (penicillin came from moldy bread. Oh, and everyone came from childbirth). It’s just that when we are not familiar with something and it’s unpleasant, it’s very easy to jump to the conclusion that it is bad. And as a result of labeling it this way, we do not stay curious or open, and we miss an opportunity to open to something new, to let the world open us.Maybe it’s true that what’s happening isn’t just change, but more specifically transformation. And maybe that’s what has us so freaked out. It’s not just your average winter-spring-summer-fall on repeat, it’s a metamorphosis. And maybe there’s no going back. But the point of this path of practice is not to just get used to the kinds of changes we’re familiar with. The point is complete and utter transformation from rigidity, into infinite capacity for the limitless change of the universe.Everything that’s happening, when met with kind, curious attention - can be used for awakening, both for ourselves, and for the world. The same can be true for what we’re witnessing in the world. We don’t need to have a solution, or even any clue what to do. Sometimes just allowing ourselves to be moved by the movement of the world is the path. To feel it, to learn from it, to let it show us our edges — our fear, our resistance, our exhaustion — and then to soften, just a little, in the direction of curiosity.Curiosity is a powerful tool. Sometimes it’s out of reach — and that’s okay. Taking care of ourselves is essential, too, and not just a break before the real work starts. But when curiosity is available, even just remembering the possibility of it, it can crack open a new path. When we read the news, or feel the rising heat, or get knocked sideways by grief or anger or overwhelm, we can ask:What am I feeling right now?What story am I telling about what this means?How is that story shaping my experience?What if I don’t actually know what this means?What if I let myself wonder?Curiosity invites us into the truth that we don’t know. And in that not-knowing, we become much more available. The energy that was once being expended on worrying or freaking out can now be used for other things. To care. To learn. To help. To change. To wonder.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Even our assumptions — that things are only going to get worse, that this pain will last forever, that there’s no way through — those are just stories. And they often leave us less resourced, more withdrawn. When we soften into I don’t know, we open to new possibilities. We stay connected. We become part of the transformation, rather than collapsing under it. This path is not about managing in the face of change. It’s about transforming completely in the face of change. So when the world transforms, we let it transform us. That’s why everything can be used for awakening.Even the things that feel impossible. Even the things that break our hearts. Especially those.This path is not just about change, it’s about transformation. If you keep showing up with curiosity, the world will transform you. And you might just find that turning inside out butt-first was exactly what you’d been wanting all along. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caralai.substack.com/subscribe