Meditate Your Face Off

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 mi...

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 p...

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 n...

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...

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 c...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit caralai.substack.com The 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 i...

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 aske...

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...

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...

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 incr...

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 suppo...

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....

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...

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.”...

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 t...

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...

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 s...

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 incon...

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 w...

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 reall...

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 f...

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...

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 presen...

“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 h...

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 throug...