Meditate Your Face Off

Cara Lai

Guided meditations, talks, and the occasional naked surprise; from a contemporary (and iconoclastic) buddhist perspective. caralai.substack.com

  1. 27 Aug

    Are you eating your feelings?

    Above is a guided meditation to find emotional freedom through eating. Below is me reading the essay that follows: Most of us have a rather complicated relationship with food. We want it, it soothes us deeply, but it also makes us feel out of control. Most mindful eating instructions tell us to eat slowly, carefully, and just to notice the sensations of eating. Chew a single raisin 100 times before swallowing, simply noticing all the textures and tastes. This guidance can sometimes lead us to believe that eating mindfully requires us to feel no emotion when we eat. Rather than behaving like a starving, rabid jackal— we try to turn ourselves into a proper Victorian lady being stared down by a governess. It’s a high bar. Giving up, we go back to eating while standing in front of the fridge. The common approach to eating meditation treats eating like it’s emotionally neutral, when in fact, most people are experiencing some degree of anxiety, shame, or dissociation while eating. Why else would we compulsively distract ourselves from the pleasure of eating with reading, scrolling, working, or planning what we’ll do after the meal? We can trace this all the way back to being in the womb, when we were completely enveloped by another person’s body, which kept us safe and nourished. And when we were separated, our life could only continue through nourishment in the form of mother’s milk, or something that mimicked it. Warm food from our caregivers was what kept that sense of safety, belonging, nourishment, and love flowing through us, reassuring us that we were protected in this life. A nursing newborn can easily melt into a deep state of ecstatic serenity. So naturally, when we’re feeling lonely as adults, we reach for a cookie. But what we really want is a hug. On some level, we’re all just longing to crawl back up into the womb. But on top of that primal link, there’s social baggage. Our bodies are scrutinized by societal standards of beauty, and our ability to sculpt our bodies into perfection becomes a symbol of our worth. Body regulation becomes a public performance of control, which makes eating meditation feel exposing rather than calming. So we're stuck: food promises the safety we've always wanted, but so does having control and a hot bod. We can't have both. When we eat, we’re simultaneously feeling deeply comforted, and totally out of control and gross. We’re desperate for something, but feeling very conflicted about it. Eating is not just a pleasurable or neutral act, it’s loaded with all kinds of baggage and associations with our lovableness from as far back as we can recall. Of course we try to distract ourselves while we eat. You can’t just selectively feel only the good without the bad, so checking out becomes the workaround. Meditate Your Face Off is made possible because of you! To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Eating meditation, reframed Expect it to be hard. If you're noticing painful or unpleasant feelings, you're probably doing it right, not wrong. Usually what happens is we aren't enjoying the food, or we’re having a hard time moving slowly, and then we think we’ve failed. If we know it’s normal to encounter some hard s**t while eating, it gets easier to lean into the experience. And the more we lean in, the more insight we have. And the insight can be very, very freeing. Allow yourself to eat at a pace that feels natural, or at a pace that supports you in paying a bit more attention to the experience. Widen your attention while you eat, to include your emotional sphere. What are you feeling in your belly, or your chest, or your throat? Notice any tension, any places that don’t feel relaxed or open. No need to dig or unpack anything mentally, just bring your attention to more of your body, and make space for it to feel however it might be feeling. Turn towards it as if it’s a small, scared animal that just wants to be safe and loved. And there’s no need to do this for an extended period of time. Even just a couple seconds of tending to your body in this way can lead to insight. If you come to the end of the meal and you realize you were lost in thought the whole time, it’s the perfect time for insight. People usually don’t want to pay attention to the moment when something is over, especially something we’ve been looking forward to all morning, and believing (however unconsciously) would bring lasting satisfaction. Sit with the feelings of fullness, comfort, disappointment, regret, restlessness, or whatever it is you might have gotten used to avoiding by getting up and doing something else at the end of a meal. Just sit there for a few seconds and feel those sensations directly. All the while, use something to ground yourself. Look out a window, feel your feet on the floor. Don’t push yourself to stay with hard stuff when you’re feeling overwhelmed, but also know that you’re probably capable of staying with these feelings for longer than you realize. The more we practice like this, the more parts of ourselves begin to come home to something that can actually offer real safety and love. We can’t really rely on food, a perfect body, or a sense of control, for the safety and love we are seeking. But we can rely on mindful awareness itself. Mindfulness is not a muscle we can flex, it’s a substrate that holds us in loving attention, much like a womb. The love and connection we’ve been longing to return to has been waiting for us all along, right here in this very moment. So, as you eat, see if you can feel into a presence of love that is holding you in all of the complicated and painful feelings that can come up. The little kid inside you that’s scared, the desperation for control in this uncontrollable world, the lonely quest for safety and belonging in a harsh environment. Feel the earth beneath you. It is holding you. This food is the earth’s message: there is abundance in your life, you are supported, you are needed. You didn’t need to earn it, and you certainly didn’t have to have a hot bod to deserve it. Daylong Retreat with Matthew Brensilver On September 6th, join Matthew “Ol’ Dirty” Brensilver and me for a raucous, nerdy, hands-on look at ambition and self-compassion — in meditation and in life. This is our annual daylong retreat, where I publicly roast Matthew and then field a wave of people rushing to his defense. He keeps coming back for more. Online and in-person at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Awakening for Average People On September 20th, I’ll be offering a mini online retreat on one of my favorite topics: Getting free while being regular. This retreat is about how to make real progress towards awakening in the midst of every day life. Don’t let the idea that you need to be on retreat all the time or ordain in order to get free get the best of you! Meditation for Introverts I was recently on a podcast called The Introverted Leader with Greg Weinger, a podcast for quiet professionals who want to rise in leadership without pretending to be someone they’re not. This conversation was real, fun, and useful. I offered a pretty applicable demonstration of how mindfulness works in real time, without having to do a formal sit. Thanks Greg for having me! 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

  2. 14 Aug

    You've really let yourself go

    Ironically (or perhaps just on point), I wrote a lot of this post while eating chocolate cake. Scroll to the end for a bonus recording of a Meditate Your Face Off class on this same subject. Above is a guided meditation to help you appreciate your body for the miracle that it is. Below is me reading the essay that follows: I used to exercise every day. I’d run five or seven miles, stretch, and do a 20 minute ab workout. I also did things like run marathons, thru hike the hundred-mile wilderness, and ride my bike across the country. I could tell myself I was taking care of my body, that it was all a part of being a healthy, well-rounded person, but really, I just hated myself. Exercise can be a wonderful thing. It feels good, keeps us healthy in body and mind, and breaks harmful addictive habits. But we can also use exercise as a way to avoid our feelings. I’d much rather get high on adrenaline than feel the deep shame and anxiety I’d have to feel if I just hung out with myself. So, I’ll run away from my feelings. Literally. Mindfulness calls on us to pay attention to our bodies, and allow our bodies to be exactly as they are. For me, this ended up forcing me to look at the ways I was trying to beat my body into submission. I was trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to force fat to become muscle, sucking my belly in, scrutinizing my body in the mirror. I was also aware that my awakening was connected to loving my body, but I didn’t know exactly how to get there. I started by letting my belly expand a little bit on the cushion, and then later in public. It took a lot of courage to do this, especially since my belly really likes to stick out. Someone even asked me if I was pregnant (I wasn’t). Big belly practice bumped me up against a lot of the shame and fear I was avoiding by doing exercise and controlling what I ate. But then Lyme disease made the choice for me. I felt so terrible that I had to stop exercising altogether. Naturally, this was terrifying for me. But not only did I get a chance to really see the feelings motivating my exercise routine, I got to tune in way more deeply to my body’s actual needs. Our bodies are so much more than the box of societally imposed perfection that we try to stuff them into. There are countless complex systems at play that we can hardly fathom— did you know there are neurons in your gut? And now that I’m a mom, now that my body has performed the astounding magic trick of bringing life into this world, I find it tragic that we view belly fat as ugly. My belly wants to be squishy and big, and is often serving as a comfy pillow for a little person. And the more I let it hang out, the freer I feel. My body had been yearning to be loved and appreciated for all it was constantly doing to keep me alive and safe, or at the very least, to be left alone. And all I was doing was judging it and trying to control it. And that’s really what all of this boils down to: having a body is out of control. Bodies are highly sensitive. They are at the mercy of the innumerable unpredictable forces that govern life on this planet, and all the willpower in the world can’t prevent us from getting sick and dying. The brain, too, is out of our control. Our brains are governed by the animal instinct to stay alive, and if we think we can use our minds to crush our bodies, something inevitably rebels and we end up covered in Cheeto dust, feeling defeated. Meditate Your Face Off exists because of your support! To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Illness taught me what willpower couldn’t. And for each of us, nature will win over willpower. But the lesson that nature teaches us is that surrendering to the truth and power of nature is better than fighting a losing battle for our whole lives. It’s often the case that the things that befall us— illness, injury, and dying— are the best, most effective ways to free the mind. If we choose to stop fighting and pay attention. So, what to do? You don’t have to throw out your whole exercise routine. I started by pausing or meditating before and after I felt the urge to exercise, before deciding what exercise would really feel good that day. And some days I would replace exercise with meditation, just to see what I’d have to sit with. And it’s ok to not change your routine, but just to focus on how it’s making you feel. And then, at some point, you may find yourself wanting to do more of what feels good, and choosing that over what you think you should be doing. Inhabiting your body more and more means feeling all the feelings: the pleasant ones and the unpleasant ones. The more you turn towards unpleasant feelings, the more you’ll see that it can be ok to just feel them and not act. Soon, you’ll find yourself patiently listening to all of what your body is saying. Then, you can act from a place of love rather than a place of fear. Aside from noticing what feels bad, you can also focus on what feels good. Instead of scrutinizing your body in the mirror after a shower or while you brush your teeth, close your eyes or look out a window, and lovingly appreciate all the things your body does for you. It turns out you’ve had the most loyal friend keeping you company through thick and thin, for your whole life. I don’t work out anymore. At least not intentionally. I do the unplanned exercises of getting up from the floor while holding a 22 lb baby, and a steady flow of housework and yard work. Who knows, maybe going for a mindful ten minute walk is more effective for maintaining good health than running ten miles in a state of self-hatred. I like to think so. And maybe I’ll feel like exercising again one day, but for now, being constantly clambered over by two young children is quite enough physicality for me. I keep listening to what my body wants and needs, and I try my best to honor it. I still eat way more chocolate than my body wants to be eating, and I definitely don’t get enough sleep, do enough stretching, or drink enough water. But I love my body so much more than I ever have, and am grateful every day for what it does and has done for me, for the way it always tells me how things are going physically and emotionally, how it lets me pick up and hug the people I love and be hugged back, and for the simple fact that, at least for this brief time on earth, I have the privilege of inhabiting it. The Buddha famously said that this fathom-long body has everything you need to wake up. He didn’t say that sexy bodies get to wake up. He meant your body, exactly as it is. Online Classes This post was the theme of a Meditate Your Face Off drop-in class this past week. I offer these drop-in classes several times a month. They’re a great way to connect with your practice, a group, and with me; and they’re free to join. Below is an audio recording of that class, which also happened to be our 100th Meditate Your Face Off class(!!). It starts with a short talk, followed by a meditation, then a portion of the q&a that followed. More on exercise, body image, and awakening: If this topic interests you, I talked about it with Michael Easter, author of the New York Times bestseller The Comfort Crisis, in a chapter of an Audible Original called Embrace Discomfort. I also talked about it with Dan Harris in an episode of the Ten Percent Happier Podcast called Can You Get Fit Without Hating Yourself: 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

  3. 30 Jul

    Stop trying to keep your s**t together

    If you want a pithy, artistic version of this essay, scroll to the end for the poem. Above is a guided meditation that supports being with the unresolved. Below is me reading the essay that follows: We don’t like things to be unresolved. In fact, it’s arguable that we spend most of our time and energy resolving things that we have deemed to be unresolved: clearing our inbox, putting things back where they belong, addressing conflict or tension with other people. We live in a world that is constantly unresolved, where things are always falling apart in some way. To quote Joseph Goldstein, “you don’t do anything, and your house or apartment gets dirty.” Rarely do we question whether there’s anything to do about this other than try and keep our s**t together all the time. But the dharma points to a new possibility. What would it be like to be ok with a moment that feels unresolved? If you think about it, much of humanity’s dysfunction can be traced back to an inability to hang when things are unresolved. When we sense a problem, we feel like we can’t relax until it’s solved. So we either ruminate about it until we’re an anxious mess, or we go out into the world to find a solution. Someone misunderstands us, and we must set them straight as soon as possible. Or consider how conflicts between nations escalate — each side unable to tolerate the ambiguity of an unresolved threat, so every provocation gets answered immediately, each response justifying the next, until de-escalation starts to feel impossible. These days, when something breaks, rather than going without that item even for just a week, people can buy another one on Amazon and have it delivered the next day, leading to massive amounts of energy and resource consumption. But if you’re like me, what comes to mind when I consider simply sitting with the unresolved is an image of my home filling with clutter and grime; my kids yelling obscenities at me while covered in mud and poop; colleagues, friends, and students losing all faith in me or having no support as I stop responding to their needs. So I’m not making a case for shirking responsibility or giving up, but rather a new quality of attention. What would it be like if we could be ok with the feeling of things being unresolved? To get to this, we start by noticing what exactly is happening when we feel compelled to start or finish a task— anything from cleaning clutter to telling someone off to buying something online. We might notice a leaning forward, a momentum that is taking us out of the present moment. A kind of strain, a stress. Dukkha. We don’t want to be interrupted and we want this thing to be done— so that we can relax. Speaking of interruptions, your support makes a huuuuge difference. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. One underlying assumption is that we are alone with this problem, and that we are somehow burdened with the task of resolving it on our own. If I don’t do something about it, something bad will happen. I am responsible for fixing this and there’s no other way it could be resolved. But the dharma tells us that we are not alone at all, and that all the problems we think are ours alone to deal with are much broader and more nuanced than our minds make them out to be. In fact it’s often the case that by doing nothing, the problem resolves itself. If I don’t set someone straight after they yell at me, by not fueling their anger but rather letting it be, they’ll be given space to feel their own feelings a bit more, and tension eases. The other underlying assumption here is that we can’t be ok until this task is done, until this problem is solved. That the problem is more important than anything else, and is worth turning away from this moment for, worth sacrificing our peace for; worth sacrificing our awakening for. Without mindfulness, these assumptions go unnoticed and unchallenged. But with just a short mindful pause, we get a life-changing glimpse into a mind that is caught in some erroneous and very painful beliefs. In pausing and sitting in the unresolved, we can finally have space to touch into the tenderness associated with feeling alone with all these problems. And we can begin to re-center ourselves around our true priorities. Lately, my baby girl Rumi has been just on the cusp of walking. She can take a step or two on her own, but mostly she’s been spending her time finding something to hang onto— a chair, a stool, my legs— and balance herself while she wobbles around. She often corners me while I’m in the middle of some task, like washing dishes or getting dressed, grabbing my legs and knees so that if I were to move away, she’d fall down and cry. I’m frozen in the middle of the kitchen holding dirty dishes or a handful of chopped zucchini until she moves on to another activity, or decides she needs me to pick her up. This is an excellent chance for me to hang out with myself while I’m caught in the belief that I can’t be ok unless this task is finished. How could I feel complete when I only have a bra and socks on? So I look inward, and I notice the feelings, and I begin to bring some tenderness towards my current state. Ah, here it is, the belief that I’m at a shortage of time, that there’s too much to do, what if I can’t get it all done and be a good mother to these kids? Here too is the belief that I have to rush through this task so I can pay better attention to my kids, so that later I can just relax and play with them, and eventually actually be mindful. There’s actually physical discomfort happening, that I’ll let go of once I give myself permission to relax. So much pain that I hadn’t seen. Then I remember that getting dressed isn’t nearly as important as getting free. I’m already exactly where I want to be: waking up in this moment. And then, I notice Rumi down below me, learning to walk. Shaky and balancing, she’s completely present, all while focused on accomplishing a task. I’m sort of wobbly too, as I try to put my pants on without knocking her over. In some ways, we are learning to walk together. If you find yourself interrupted in the middle of a task today, can you treat those interruptions as cues to be with the unresolvedness of your own awakening — prioritizing that over whatever task felt so urgent? What would it be like if you stopped postponing your peace for a time when things feel more resolved? What would it be like if you made it your whole practice to be with the unresolved, to watch things fall apart while you hold your heart with compassion? It is from this place of present compassion that we find clarity about how to act with kindness, clarity about what is really worth doing. In the grand scheme of things, everything is constantly falling apart. If we wait until things are resolved, we spend our whole lives just trying to keep our s**t together. We might have moments where things are finally figured out— all the emails are answered, the bills paid, the garden weeded. But invariably, something will slip out of place. Someone gets injured, the dinner on the stove gets burned, the car breaks down: all while dust bunnies are gathering in the corners of every room in the house. And if everything is constantly falling apart, and that’s just the way things are, maybe that’s also perfect. If our sense of completion does not depend on outside circumstances at all, then things are already whole and complete, impermanence and all. Stop delaying your peace. Go all in on this moment. Everything, right now, is already resolved. Sit back and marvel at its fleeting beauty. * * * Not Knowing If she thinks she cannot bear the unresolved, she forever runs towards what is not. She believes in her limitations, builds a desperate reality on a road with no end, and misses most of life. For this world is made of unresolved mystery ever poignant because we care. If it were otherwise it would cease to be. But if, standing still she holds her uncertain heart, she drops into her limitlessness and right there she lives fully. 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

  4. 15 Jul

    The Ecstasy of Awakening

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit caralai.substack.com The paid version of this post has an extended guided meditation. Paid subscribers can also scroll to the bottom of the essay for an additional recording of a dharma talk on this subject, which was originally given for the Burlington Dharma Collective on July 13th, 2026. If you can’t afford a paid subscription and want one, message me and I’ll give you one, no questions asked. Above is a guided meditation that uses pleasure and desire to help you awaken. Below is me reading the essay that follows: Summer is in full swing here in Vermont. Apple trees are already getting heavy with fruit. Wildflowers have suddenly doubled in height and come into brilliant bloom. Ponds are teeming with frogs and salamanders; the air is filled with insects and birds and a cacophony of song. Our daughter Rumi, at ten months, is positively bursting with squishy, adorable joy. Several times a day, a well of aliveness suddenly springs up through her and she squeals and shakes with delight. Both of our kids can often be found crawling all over me and each other— it seems as though life is attempting to consume me from all sides. Meanwhile, I meditate. I think about, study, and practice the Dharma. What was it that the Buddha said about all this life? Didn’t he say that suffering is caused by birth? That to be alive is to suffer? And to be free we need to become dispassionate, to stop the cycle of birth and death, to stop being born at all? The last lines of the Metta Sutta: The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision, Being freed from all sense desires, Is not born again into this world. As I sit with myself, looking from out from the porch upon the ecstasy of summer’s orgasm, I can tap into both sides of this. Being alive, for me, does not feel all that great. My body still feels the effects of a long-term illness, there are thorny knots inside of me that I live with all the time. I am constantly aware of a deep sorrow, an anticipatory grief: my children will grow up, not want affection from me, move away, have lives of their own. Everything that I love will one day be parted from me. Admittedly, at times, I have found myself using practice to escape life. It’s easy to do when you find yourself bereft of pleasure. And too often, the Dharma has been interpreted in ways that enable escapism, leaving the dirty work of meeting life’s basic needs to the laypeople, while monastics escape into a celibate meditative bubble. But it turns out, avoidance is also suffering, since it takes work to constantly run from your experience. What was the Buddha really trying to teach us about dispassion, about the end of birth and death? Why should I become dispassionate? Should I seek the end of the cycle of life altogether, simply because death is a part of it? Meditate Your Face Off made possible by everyone’s generosity! To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. In his teachings on dispassion, the Buddha was not trying to get us to stop enjoying life. He was trying to say something like: “Can’t you see? The pleasurable things in life you believe to be so wonderful, are not so wonderful after all. They are impermanent, fleeting, ungraspable; they’ll never make you happy.” He didn’t stop there. He also said that there was a much deeper kind of pleasure available to us, one that is not fleeting, that is indeed satisfying. What we feel in a moment of pleasure is not simply the fear of its passing and the craving for more. We also experience a moment of pure presence. A moment of deep connection to the ultimate pleasure. Something that is untouched by the birth and death of this fleeting world. A mind, however briefly, undistracted. A momentarily pure heart. We could call it awareness, presence, enlightenment. We could call it love. All pleasures point to this ultimate pleasure. Even the pleasure of something as trivial as a cupcake. It’s just that we don’t notice that the pleasure is emanating from this place of oneness. We are tricked, distracted by the cupcake, thinking that the pleasure is somehow inside the cupcake, when really it’s inside us. The awakened mind was here for a brief moment, using a cupcake as its excuse to appear. The Buddha spoke of this type of pleasure: that of the undistracted mind. He said it was not to be feared, that it was to be cultivated. And in fact, human life is the optimal realm in which to cultivate it. If all pleasures point to the awakened mind, we need not fear any of them. We get to use pleasure to lead us to awakening. The trick is that you actually have to practice. Don’t use this essay as your excuse to indulge blindly in everything you want. When you feel something pleasant, pay attention. Feel it fully. All of it. Notice the places that you suffer around that pleasure, before, during, and after. Surrender completely to the pleasure, but also to the stress, the yearning, the guilt, or whatever else comes up. Stay awake for the whole experience, even if it gets hard. You will see where you get squirrely, avoid things, distract, fall asleep. Stay present, keep feeling, and the mind will recognize the fear, the clinging, how it makes no sense to cling to something so fleeting. The mind will notice that it’s not really about the sex, or the puppy, or the cupcake, but rather about a quality of attention and the opening of your heart. You will find yourself porous, awake, alive. Ultimately, stopping the cycle of birth and death is not about dying permanently, or avoiding your life. It’s the opposite. It’s about not abandoning your life in this moment, in favor of some other, more tantalizing future moment. It’s about being alive right now, and letting life flow through you completely. No matter what stage of life you’re in, whether you’re teeming with life like our little Rumi, or feeling things slow down: don’t stop living fully. Life and all its pleasures are leading you towards the ultimate pleasure of being fully alive. Fall in love with this moment of life, and you will release yourself into the bliss of awakening. Seeking Childcare Whenever I teach a retreat, someone has to take care of the baby. Nowadays, we have to find double the childcare, since Huck stays at home and Rumi comes with me. It’s expensive! I’m looking for someone with some amount of skill/experience, who’d be interested in offering dāna (i.e. volunteering), by taking care of a sweet baby while I teach. Your housing and food would be covered, and you’d get to hang out with a group of cool Dharma teachers. There are three retreats this year that I’m in need of childcare for: * Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (Barre, MA): August 24-28th * Spirit Rock (Woodacre, CA): September 8-14th and December 6-11th. If you’re interested or want more information, please send me a message: Daylong Retreat with Matthew Brensilver Matthew and I are, once again, attempting to teach the Dharma together. Join us online or in-person at Spirit Rock on September 6th for this Daylong retreat. It’s about the balance of self-compassion and determination, which is currently one of my favorite subjects. Residential Retreat at Spirit Rock Another retreat I’m teaching with an incredible teaching team: Oren Jay Sofer, Yong Oh, and devon hase, September 8-14th. It’s a Brahma Vihara retreat, which means we’ll be practicing with the qualities of the awakened heart. If you don’t know what that means, no worries—it’s basically just another way of learning not to suffer. Dharma Talk: Enlightenment is the Ultimate Pleasure The following is a dharma talk based on the above essay, which I gave at the Burlington Dharma Collective on July 13th, 2026.

  5. 2 Jul

    The Inheritance

    This post is based on a dharma talk that I gave at a teen meditation retreat last week. Above is a guided meditation, below is a recording of said dharma talk: Everyone feels somehow dissatisfied with how they were raised, even people who loved and respected their parents and caregivers. There was too much judgment, anger or maybe even violence; not enough love, support, or attunement. While it might be easy to resent our parents and caregivers for what they did not provide, raising kids is an insanely difficult job. And many parents, maybe most of them, are not well equipped to do it. They try their best, but with limited resources. Our parents were harmed by the suffering of their own parents, and are still children in their own way. They haven’t been able to fully mature because they themselves didn’t get enough love. And as hard as they may have tried not to recreate that dynamic with us, they end up doing it anyway. What is a parent’s job, though, really? Because if our parents aren’t perfect, it means they’re not equipped to give us the nonjudgmental unconditional love we expect from them. Maybe it’s reasonable to expect them to love us and keep us safe. But perhaps it’s also their job to challenge us: to pass on the suffering of their parents, and their parents before that, because it’s our turn now to transmute it. As we become caregivers to our own hearts and minds, we see that we are just stewards of the family lineage of suffering. Looking back, might you see ways that the suffering of the people who raised you helped you understand the world in a unique way, helped you really know what suffering is, helped you find compassion, and come closer to knowing what love and support feels like? Why are you reading this essay today? Maybe it’s not an accident that you stumbled into meditation, dharma, and the kind of work that turns hatred into love. Maybe it's not an accident that you arrived here, with this particular inheritance of traumas, memories, and circumstances. Maybe you can use it to free yourself and everybody around you. Meditate Your Face Off is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I inherited so many good qualities from my parents. But I also inherited their pain, and their particular patterns of greed, aversion, and delusion. I want these patterns to stop with me. I don’t want to pass them on to my kids. And I don’t want to pass them on to everyone else in my life. But I don’t want to stop there. Being a steward of our parents’ suffering is not about suppressing our reactivity so we don’t cause harm— that would mean we were somehow too broken or wounded. Instead, being a steward of our ancestral suffering positions us perfectly to meet a particular set of challenges in our lives and the world around us. How has the pain your parents passed on to you been useful for your awakening? How has your learning from that pain been helpful to people in your own life? Are there places you haven’t healed from your childhood? If so, what are those wounds teaching you? We are caregivers to our own hearts and minds. When we turn to ourselves with the loving attention we didn’t get from our parents, we heal ourselves, we give ourselves the love we’ve been seeking, the love that heals us, that makes us whole, and gives us the sense of safety needed to be loving and generous to everyone around us. When we see that we can give ourselves what we’ve been seeking from our parents, we start to release them from the expectation that they give us what they simply did not have. When we meet ourselves with the loving attention we’ve always sought externally, we begin to heal ourselves in a very deep way. In the end, you are the only one who can really see and be with all the parts of yourself. Release someone else from responsibility for your pain and meet yourself with the love you’ve been longing for. Or rather, feel for the love of kind awareness that is waiting for you to rest back into it— all around you and within you in this present moment. This is how we set ourselves free. Two Percent with Michael Easter I was recently on this excellent podcast with my friend Michael Easter, where we talked about the chaos in the world and some ways to reframe it in your mind. If you don’t know him already, his substack is great. Check out the episode here: Young adult retreat at Spirit Rock Join me, Vinny Ferraro, and Matthew Brensilver for this retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center for 18-32 year olds, August 4-8th. When the three of us get together, it gets weird fast. But in a good way (we hope). 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

  6. 16 Jun

    Meditate the s**t out of that MF

    Above is a guided meditation to help you find the gumption to be mindful all day long. Below is me reading the essay that follows: Back when I was in school to become a psychotherapist, I was in the thick of high achieving young adulthood— running barefoot, biking 10 miles to and from my field placement, even in subzero temperatures. And of course, striving for academic perfection. Most graduate programs pile on a workload that is essentially impossible for one person to successfully complete while also taking care of themselves by doing things like sleeping, and this one was no different. I was hell-bent on doing it all, and doing it well. And I did— graduating with a 4.0 GPA. (For the record, over a decade later, that perfect score has been utterly useless to me, except as a bragging point for this essay.) I also wanted to make sure that I was keeping up with my meditation practice, so I meditated for 2 hours a day— once in the morning, and once in the evening. I never missed a day. And I was completely miserable. I was depressed, anxious, fighting intensely with James, and all that time on the cushion felt like it was doing nothing to help my mental health, let alone getting me across to the further shore. This was the beginning of a lesson for me about the value of integrating practice into your whole life, and what it can look like when you get complacent on your path, confining your practice only to your time on the cushion. By meditating for two hours a day, and forgetting mindfulness the rest of the day, I was giving myself permission to hang out in default mode (which for me was striving, overachievement, and being hard on myself) for the bulk of my life. The two hours that I “meditated” became two hours spent daydreaming instead of actually noticing what was happening. A lot of high achievers like myself can be led to believe that their determination and drive is an unfortunate obstacle to their liberation. And so we end up restraining, beating back, and trying to tame or even destroy our own ambition and perfectionism. But the Buddha actually used the word perfection to describe the experience of enlightenment, and the quality of determination (or resolve) is one of the ten perfections of the heart, to be developed for awakening. So ambition and perfectionism actually do have a place on the path. It’s just that to apply that kind of ambition to meditation practice requires some fine-tuning. Otherwise you’ll be taking a jackhammer to your miniature Japanese Zen garden. Here are a few ways to take full advantage of your sense of determination: 1. Gentle Persistence We often use our determination in a way that is too heavy-handed. We go hard, and then, exhausted, we tap out. We train for a marathon, and then get drunk after the race. We diet, and then we binge. We sit for an hour in the morning, and then we stop being mindful for the rest of the day. Instead of going hard on the gas and then getting depleted, what’s needed to fully take advantage of our determination is gentle persistence. Now that I have two young kids, I can no longer meditate for two hours a day, let alone get five minutes to myself in the bathroom. So I’ve been forced to integrate practice into my day in every way possible. This is where an ambitious nature comes in very handy. How many moments can you find today to notice your body? When there’s down time, can you use it to do nothing instead of check your phone? What if you pick one or two activities that you do regularly, like brushing your teeth or waiting at a stop light, and turn them into your meditation? Pepper your day with mini-moments of mindfulness, and being present will become easier and easier as your in-the-world practice gains its own momentum. Meditate Your Face Off is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 2. Just learn one new thing To invoke my own natural sense of curiosity and add more intrinsic motivation to practice, I like to ask “what insight might come if I stay present right now?” This is often useful if I notice my mind being particularly slippery: wanting to get lost in thought or to engage in some addictive or unhealthy habit. Regardless of whether I end up reaching for my phone or filling my mouth with whipped cream from an aerosol can, can I learn something from it? What if I pause and feel my body right before I do it? What if I slow that activity down? And if I do, what new insight might I have into that habit, why I do it, what it’s helping me not to feel, what need I’m trying to meet? 3. Notice Doubt Doubt, especially in the form of “I can’t do this” may be the greatest force in tricking us into not practicing. We think we can’t, so we don’t try. Doubt tells us that this situation is too hard to be with, that we personally are not good enough at mindfulness to be with it, or that mindfulness itself is somehow flawed or not the right tool for the job. Look for the thought “I don’t think I can do this” and ask, “what would happen if I try?" This brings me to number four: 4. Be mindful when it’s hardest We could view moments where we’re triggered the way we might tackle some personal challenge that we enjoy, like climbing a mountain or beating the boss at the end of a Super Mario level. Whenever it gets hard, see if you can turn it into a game: can I stay present, even through this? This doesn’t mean you have to stare directly into the hardest part of what’s happening, in fact being with something soothing is often the way to go here— feeling your breath, your feet, looking out a window. Find what helps you stay with yourself, rather than the habitual self-abandonment that we tend to do when we’re having a difficult moment. I have had insight just as transformative from practicing this way in my regular life as I’ve had from all those long meditation retreats I’ve done. Life throws us challenging situations, sometimes so challenging that we lie awake at 3AM asking why does God hate me? But maybe God doesn’t hate you. Maybe these situations are all here because we’re actually ready for them, like we’ve played the game so well that we’re finally ready to face the boss. And the boss is here to help us awaken. * * * This is just a sampling of ways that ambition can be our friend on the path to awakening. There are many more. What are some ways that your ambition or perfectionism has worked for you in your practice? Please share them in the comments below. Your ambition is not in your way. It is actually what will help you to find your gentle persistence, to pause in the times that it’s hardest to pause, and to keep learning and loving in the face of all that life throws your way. The thing you've been trying to fix about yourself is exactly what you need to awaken. So go meditate the s**t out of that motherfucker. 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

  7. 2 Jun

    The healing power of generosity

    Above is a guided meditation to help you find your authentic generosity. Below is me reading the essay that follows: A few days ago, I picked my son Huck up from nursery school. When we arrived at home, he had a complete meltdown. Nearby birds cried out in alarm and took flight as he screamed and flailed in my arms, demanding snacks, to watch a show, to go to a playground. He’s three, so this is normal, but still painful to witness. I sat outside with him and his baby sister in the grass, waiting for things to calm down. But after 10 minutes, the storm was showing no signs of passing. I brought him into the house for a change of scenery, and there he spotted a pair of toddler-size rubber cleaning gloves I had bought for him. “Are those my size?” he asked, his tears evaporating. He proceeded to clean two toilets, the shower, and the kitchen sink with extreme delight, asking, “what else can I clean?” There’s a parenting book that I love called “Hunt, Gather, Parent” by Michaeleen Doucleff, about how to raise helpful kids. A main point of the book is that children have an innate drive to feel useful and belong. They naturally want to be functional members of their family team, and Western parenting tends to inadvertently suppress that drive by excluding kids from real work, underestimating their capabilities, and intervening too much with their contributions. I believe everyone has this innate drive to belong and to help. I might even argue that our purpose in life is to help each other. If we’re not serving this purpose, we become depressed, sick, or have our own version of a toddler meltdown. Doucleff says if a child is misbehaving, give them a job: “When a child breaks rules, acts demanding, or seems ‘willful,’ their parents need to put them to work. The child is saying, ‘Hey, Mom, I’m underemployed over here and it doesn’t feel good.’” If your mind is misbehaving— feeling selfish, demanding, or mean: look for ways to be generous. In Buddhism, generosity is not just a side practice. It’s the main event. The Buddha typically taught generosity to people before he taught them how to meditate. That’s because it’s the most palpable way of letting go— letting go being the key to dissolving attachment, which is the cause of suffering. If you consider what it is to cling— to hold on tightly, to keep for oneself, to feel insecure, separate, to believe that what you’re clinging to is required for your safety and well-being— to be generous is the exact opposite of that. It’s connection instead of separation, the relief of letting go. It comes from trust and a sense of safety, of having enough. Generosity is really just another word that means “the end of suffering.” Meditate Your Face Off is made possible by lots of generous people. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Huck was “misbehaving,” but his misbehavior was just a manifestation of some kind of anxiety. Maybe he needed more love after being put in school for a few hours and then coming home to a mom whose arms were full with his sister and dad gone for the week. Maybe he was having withdrawal from the stimulation of school. Whatever it was, there was some kind of contraction in his heart. What made him feel better was feeling helpful, having a purpose. Generosity softened everything. Generosity is also physically healing. After years of chronic Lyme disease that was only getting worse, trying endless healing protocols that never seemed to help in the slightest, there was one thing that finally began to shift the dial dramatically for me. It was taking care of a baby. Focusing on the welfare of someone else did something to shake everything up for me, to shift the hyper-focus of attention from me and my ailing body to someone else, to give me a purpose. I’m very aware that most people have the opposite postpartum experience than I did, and the last thing I want is for anyone to blame themselves if they went through postpartum depression. Maybe postpartum depression is a manifestation of the rigorous transformation that tears through our soul as the person we once were dies and we are reborn into parenthood. But that’s for another post. And I can’t quite explain why things went the way they did for me. What I can say is this: I have endless things to do for other people at this stage in my life, far more than any one person can handle skillfully. And sometimes I do find myself holding it with aversion, focusing on the unfairness of it all, seeing it as a trap that I’m caught in, and letting that fuel a sense of inadequacy, bitterness, and hopelessness. But I can also realize I’m feeding my demons, feel how it’s impacting my heart, my body, sickening me further, and then choose a different way. Every time I wash the dishes, clean up a poop accident, and listen to my partner’s struggles after having my own chaotic day of toddler and baby meltdowns; I can do it while connecting with a sense of love, compassion, purpose, and joy. In a moment of chaos, instead of languishing in the feelings of inadequacy, overwhelm, and resentment; I can feel for where letting go is ready to happen. I can feel for what’s mine to do, draw from the love that wants to be shared, and give. To practice this, don’t look towards the ways you feel obligated to give. Look for where you naturally feel called to give, even in the tiniest ways. You don’t have to give anyone a smile if you don’t feel like smiling, but maybe it does feel good to give your dog some scratches behind the ears. You don’t have to sign up to make food for that meal train if it’s just too much, but maybe you feel like folding some laundry with love, Marie Kondo style. Keep finding tiny acts of generosity that feel good to do, and let them pepper your day. Not only will this be healing for your body and mind, it will guide you into your purpose. If you’re in a moment of overwhelm, unstick your mind from ideas about what you could or should be doing, and just pause for a few beats. Give yourself permission to do absolutely nothing. Then notice if any inspiration arises for what might be yours to do in that moment. It might be as simple as being a calm presence in the room. The human heart wants to give, and when we let it, it opens up and heals us, body, mind, and spirit. If you found this helpful, check out this drop-in generosity class that I offer. It’s just a half hour, freely offered, and it’s usually pretty fun. All are welcome. Meditate Your Face Off on Spotify and Apple Podcasts You may have noticed that I’ve done some re-branding. This Substack has a new name, Meditate Your Face Off. Talks and guided meditations are also now available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Yay! 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

  8. 19 May

    Determination without self-flagellation

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit caralai.substack.com Meditations and talks from this Substack are now available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, as a Podcast called Meditate Your Face Off. Scroll to the end of the post for links to that, and for the upcoming Parenting as the Path class this Wednesday. Above is a guided meditation on how catch self-doubt as it tricks us out of the present moment, and to stay present anyway. The paid version of this post begins with the same guided meditation, but ends with a dharma talk based off of this essay which I gave for Big Heart City a few days ago. I highly recommend the talk— and if you can’t afford a paid subscription and want one, just message me and I’ll give you one, no questions asked. Below is me reading the written essay that follows: In Western mindfulness teaching, there’s a ton of emphasis on being gentle on yourself. In a culture founded on independence and productivity, a lot of us tend to push ourselves way too hard, so when we go to meditate, we end up berating ourselves into the present moment. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t work— hence the emphasis on gentleness. But being gentle on yourself is not what this post is about. It’s about the opposite: determination, persistence, and consistency; even when things get hard. Why? I think our gentleness has curdled into capitulation— and now our feelings are running the show. Do you ever use self-care as an excuse to not practice? Do you ever tell yourself that you’re too ADD, too traumatized, or that you’re just not the type of person who can seriously meditate? Do you find yourself highly particular about the situations or people with whom you meditate, or taking action as a way of avoiding turning inward? How might these things actually be self-doubt in disguise, telling you you can’t do it, and keeping you from realizing your full potential? Here are some excuses that self-doubt fabricates to keep us from practicing: Excuse #1: I don’t have time If there’s anyone who gets this one, it’s me. I take care of a toddler and a baby almost full time, keep our family fed and maintain our home, all while piecing together a full-time job as a Dharma teacher. My husband works long hours, is on the volunteer fire department, and is away on business trips at least one week per month. I manage all this by hiring childcare for a couple hours each week and getting help from neighbors, but also staying up late writing dharma talks, recording guided meditations, and finding time for “formal practice” in the middle of the night while nursing the baby. So yeah, I understand being too busy to meditate. But I also know there’s a part of myself that likes to stay busy, because it means I get to avoid certain feelings. We get high off of staying busy, and then when there’s nothing to do, we don’t know how to cope. Just because you don’t have 20 minutes to yourself during the day to sit quietly, doesn’t mean you can’t be mindful. No matter how busy you are, there are approximately one gazillion little pockets throughout every day when we could turn inward, but we typically choose to distract ourselves, check some trivial thing off of our to-do list, or numb out. Where is your mind when you’re driving, or at a stoplight, or waiting in line? When you’re eating? Sitting on the toilet? What about while you brush your teeth, or when you’re in the shower, or even while you’re triggered by something? How many of these moments get filled with daydreaming, planning, checking your phone, or being lost in an opinion about how things should be otherwise? Cumulatively, we might reclaim hours each day by tending to these moments. And that makes a huge difference in our connection to ourselves, to our deeper desires, to our life. So the next time you sit on the toilet, you might have the pleasure of noticing how it actually feels to poop. You’re welcome. Excuse #2: I shouldn’t just be sitting here, I should be doing something There’s too much going on in the world for me to be just sitting here. I need to be out there. Doing something. If you choose to do without attending to your inner world, what will your doing informed by? Before you go outward to do something, have you gone inward and done the practice? If not, whatever you do will still be driven by the same forces of fear, rage, and guilt that all the hallmark of the very problems we are trying to address with our actions. You might already understand intellectually that coming inward is an essential aspect of outward action, but what actually stops you from doing it? When we do restrain ourselves from the impulse to do something, whether its writing to our senator or cleaning the toilet, we tend to encounter a belief that this moment is unbearable. Things are so f****d up and we need to change them before we can hang out in this moment. Which brings me to Excuse #3. This substack is made possible by the generosity of many. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It really makes a difference! Excuse #3: This situation is whack This moment is a dumpster fire and it needs to change before I can be with it. Everything that’s happening in the world today is out of control, untenable. I feel unsafe in this place, unseen, my access needs are not being met, my identities are not being represented. These are real concerns that have helped shape societies, communities, and meditation spaces to be more inclusive, but if we believe that the world around us needs to be fully accommodating our specific needs before we can practice, we’ll never get around to actually practicing. And sometimes the excuse that this place, these people, these conditions aren’t right— is just a sneaky way that the mind tries to avoid being with something it’s not wanting to feel. Embedded in the line of thinking that we have to a complete sense of safety and belonging before we practice, is the false premise that being mindful requires a prerequisite of homeostasis. The circumstances need to be stable in order for the mind to settle. To some degree this is certainly helpful. And I’d never make the blanket recommendation that you should never try to adjust a situation to feel safer if that’s an option. But what I’m referring to here is situations that are out of our control, that are just going to be tough or unresolved, at least for the time being. And it turns out that most moments are like that. What we’re encountering is our discomfort with not having control. So we reach for our phones or we go into our heads, where it feels like we have some agency over what’s coming into our sensory experience. Nearly all moments feel unresolved. Many are just plain awful. Put less energy into trying to alter them, and more energy into opening to them (and your feelings about them), and your whole life will open up to you. Ultimately, the idea that you have to change a situation before you can be with it is based on the belief that you yourself are somehow flawed, and ill-equipped to exist in this moment. Enter excuse #4: Excuse #4: I’m uniquely broken I have too many neuroses, too much trauma, anxiety, depression, ADHD, I’ve done too many terrible things, I'm too neurodivergent. It’s my self-care to distract. I just can’t do it. If you think your life is f****d up, check out the story of Patacara. In short, she rebelled against her parents, eloping with someone they disapproved of. A few years later, her husband, toddler, and newborn die in freak accidents; then she goes home to find her parents dead too. She went crazy. And then she found the dharma and became an arahant. There’s a modern version of this story, too. A woman named Dipa Ma lost two of her three children when they were very young, and her husband. Devastated and desperate, she became determined to find a way out of suffering. She committed herself to practice and persisted, not in spite of the trauma, but because of it. She was a real person who even taught at IMS, and was said to be fully awake. Buddhist literature is packed with stories about people getting enlightened from unlikely or impossible circumstances. For some inspirational reading, check out Aṅgulimāla, Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed, and Sopāka. This practice has worked on millions of people from all walks of life, to whom the craziest s**t has happened. Do you really think you’re so uniquely broken, and in so much pain, that you are exempt from the possibility of freedom? I submit that it’s highly unlikely that you are that special. And besides, you’ll never know if you don’t try. I’m not trying to shame you. I’m trying to empower you. Naming our diagnoses and issues can be relieving and indeed helpful in finding self-compassion and embracing our uniqueness, until the label becomes used as fuel for our self-doubt. Watch for when self-compassion turns into it’s near-enemy: self-pity. You’ll know because compassion feels open, good, healing, and onward-leading. Self-pity feels small, stuck, contracted and repetitive. I’m also not trying to say that you shouldn’t act skillfully and take care of yourself. But it’s important to pay attention to whether something is actually acting in your deepest interests, or if it’s postponing your awakening, keeping you stuck in the belief that you are helpless and hopeless. *** All four of these excuses have the same thing driving them: self-doubt. And there's one quality that serves as the antidote. The case for turning inward In Buddhism, the quality needed to bring some balance back into the self-doubt epidemic is one of the ten Pāramis (perfections of heart): Determination. Determination is also one of the character traits that is prized in our culture of independence and productivity, and it’s a baby that should not be thrown out with the bathwater. Determinat

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About

Guided meditations, talks, and the occasional naked surprise; from a contemporary (and iconoclastic) buddhist perspective. caralai.substack.com

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  • Creator
    Cara Lai
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    42
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Cara Lai
  • Show Website
    Meditate Your Face Off

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