Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 612: Can You Get Fit Without Self-Loathing? | Cara Lai

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

It’s an urgent question for so many of us: Can we exercise, can we take care of our bodies, without being driven by shame, self-loathing, or noxious comparison to other people?Our guest today has a unique perspective on this. Cara Lai is a former social worker and psychotherapist who is now a Buddhist teacher. She also used to be a marathoner. But in the last few years, her body has undergone some radical changes, leading her to some hard-won, fascinating, and deeply useful insights about how to strike the balance between taking care of your body and staying sane.In this episode we talk about:Practices for that moment when you’re getting out of the shower, see yourself in the mirror, and engage in a festival of self-judgmentThe surprising things that happened when Cara was forced to stop exercisingA counterintuitive mindfulness practice suggestion for those with exercise routinesWhen and why you should purposely do things you know are bad for youWhy we often resist ‘being in our bodies,’ why that’s OK, and how to lower the bar on this contemplative cliché–without giving it upA body-related Buddhist practice she finds to be totally not usefulFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/cara-lai-612See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. It really has been such an urgent question for me personally. I've been wrestling with for decades, and I suspect I'm not alone on this. Here's the question. Can you exercise? Can you take care of your body without being driven by shame, self-loathing, or noxious comparison

to other people, either in real life or on Instagram? My guest today has such a unique and interesting perspective on this. Carlisle is a former social worker and psychotherapist who is now a Buddhist teacher. She also used to be a marathoner, the type of person who ran marathons and bare feet. She was hardcore. But then she got Lyme disease and her body pretty much went into mutiny mode. And then after that, she got pregnant and had a child. All of this threw her into a really tricky headspace when you're gonna hear her discuss in this

very candid and very funny interview. She's come to some hard one, fascinating and deeply useful insights about how to strike this balance between taking care of your body and staying sane. In this conversation, we talk about some practices she's come up with for that moment when you're getting out of the shower and you see yourself in the mirror and engage in a festival of self-judgment of the surprising things that happened when she was forced to stop exercising, counterintuitive mindfulness practice for people who are regular exercises,

when and why you should purposely do things that you know are bad for you, why we resist being in our bodies, why that's okay, and how to lower the bar on this contemplative cliche without giving it up, and a body-related Buddhist practice that she finds totally not useful. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral. Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Only fans only bad where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music

or wherever you get your podcast. Carl, I welcome back to the show. Thank you, Dan Harris. I'm a huge fan of yours, so it's great to have you back on. I do want to get to this question of the way DJ, the producer of this episode, and in fact, the series has framed this series as can you take care

of your body without hating yourself? Can you do this without lapsing into what somebody poetically has called the subtle aggression of self-improvement? I really want to take a deep dive into that with you and I know that you have a lot to say about it. But let me just start with like kind of a life update because since the last time you've been on the show and since the last time I've seen you, you've had a baby. So how's that going? And maybe you can say a little bit about what impact being a new mom and having been pregnant has had on your relationship to your own body. Oh, tons. Yeah. Yeah, so I had a baby and he's delightful. He is seven and a half months old. And I love being a mom. I didn't think

it was going to be bad, but it's way better than I thought it was going to be, which is pretty cool. But up until having a baby, I was feeling pretty crummy. I think the last time that we did this, I was talking about having lime, and it just got worse after that recording. And then when I was pregnant, it was like very intense. It was kind of like up and down and up and down. And there were definitely days when I couldn't get out of bed. I wasn't really able to work reliably. And I kind of like stopped exercising because I couldn't. You know, I was like trying every possible thing that I could find to heal and find a way out of it. But then for some reason, when I gave birth, everything changed. I was like feeling so much better and not all the way better, but

functional again in a way that before I couldn't think straight because of how bad I felt, and then after he was born, that only could I think straight. I was just like, so in such a state of like ease and relief and love, I think the feeling of love towards the baby helped a lot. So it made your Lyme symptoms improve for at least it was co-occurring. And as I understand it, it also had an impact on sort of how you feel about your body. And I wonder about that because, you know, I've lived with a pregnant person before and it did bring up a lot of, you know, like putting on the weight and then having everybody ask, if you take it off the baby weight and all that stuff, it can, it's pretty intense.

Dude, it's so intense. Yeah, so yeah. How has it helped you? Yeah, well, I remember when I was probably in my first trimester and seeing it wasn't like I had a baby bump yet, but I did like I was getting. I was gaining weight and exactly the places in my body that I've already self-conscious about, like my muffin top and like my little pooch in the front and like my boobs. So like I was looking in the mirror and like watching my mind just scrutinize my body and realizing how absurd it was because my body was doing all these things in an effort to create a human being. You know, I'm like making a human with my body. And so to jump to the conclusion that I'm doing something

wrong, I should be eating so much, I should be exercising more, was just absurd. And how awesome is it that my body is doing this thing and that I don't have to figure out how to do it? It just knows how to do it. Shouldn't that be something that we celebrate instead of get ashamed about? And so I started to really shift in my thinking about my body from that moment on. And then the whole thing you're talking about with people asking, yes, a few people have asked me, have you lost all your weight? And it doesn't offend me because I just think it's funny actually now, because I've done so much self inquiry around this.

I feel like there's this attitude that we're supposed to go back to being the person we were before we were pregnant. And there's no way that I would want to do that. I don't want to be that person again, not that like she was bad or something, but this is better. You know, like I just feel like I've gone through this really awesome right of passage and I'm a mom now. And I should be proud of my mom body. And like, yeah, mom genes should be in fashion. That's super cool that mom genes are in fashion. It is cool to be a mom. Why is it not cool to be a mom? It's like beautiful. This is what creates life. It should be celebrated. So like the question shouldn't be, have you lost all your pregnancy weights? It should be like, how much weight do you still have now?

And so I'll break that, you know? And then like, yeah, just not making it a problem. I was also really surprised when, after I gave birth, my milk came in. Like boobs turn into playboy boobs when the milk first comes in. Like your boobs become What people try to get when they get a boob job which is like interesting to me because like that piece of it

We celebrate and adore and find sexy But the rest of it for some reason isn't anyway. That's that's kind of an aside may not have anything to do with this But well it did give us a chance to talk about boobs it for some reason isn't. Anyway, that's kind of an aside, may not have anything to do with this, but. Well, it did give us a chance to talk about boobs. So, you know, let's celebrate. I know. I, oh, yeah, that's, yeah, I knew you'd be out for that, Dan. Always, always. My dad was a breast cancer doctor, so it's, you know, I come by it, honestly. Oh, good. All right. Well, you can use that in his excuses to talk about boobs more. I don't know if I could get away with it

if it wasn't with you. But so, okay, so you said that you had this insight, a really, I think, if I'm hearing you correctly, useful insight, that there was this bodily provocation, mid-pregnancy of the places you would already been worried about, expanding. And you realize, well, how am I going to judge myself for this? My body is doing this incredible thing. I'm just curious, a lot of people listening to this may not be pregnant. How scalable is that insight?

Yeah, well, it's scalable in the sense that all of our bodies are incredible. And just because we're not creating life with our bodies doesn't mean it's not a miracle in so many ways. There are so many things that our bodies do that we don't understand and that we don't control with our thinking minds. Like, what the hell is the endocrine system doing? How does it know how to do that? And there are more neurons in your brain than atoms

on the planet, I don't know what the actual numbers are, but there's a lot of neurons in your brain. And they're all forming these connections that are very intricate. And there's an intelligence to the body that is way different from our logical kind of intelligence and way beyond what we could comprehend with our thinking minds. And so there are miracles happening in our bodies all the time. And I think we tend to think about our bodies in a pretty shallow way, generally speaking.

We look at our bodies and we judge them based on their appearance. We look at our bodies and we judge them based on their appearance. And it's really sad that that's what we see. And that's the part that we scrutinize because there's so much that our bodies are doing for us all the time. That is so amazing and beautiful and unique to each person. unique to each person. And yet we stand in front of the mirror after taking a shower and we just kind of judge and judge and judge and judge. And what would it be like if we stood in front of the mirror and appreciated how incredible our bodies are and what they do for us all the time, no matter what our level of physical capability is, there's still infinite things that our bodies are doing for us all the time.

Amen. Sounds completely reasonable and sane. And very hard to do given the years and years of cultural conditioning we've all endured and never mind what's been handed down to us through the generations. Yeah. Well, and that's why I think that it's a practice. I think that's why it took something kind of big for me to... I'm not saying that I'm, you know, I don't judge my body anymore, but I think it took a big thing like getting pregnant to make me do some serious shifting around my habits

about how I talk to myself about my body. And so I think it's a practice. An actual practice could be instead of looking in the mirror at all, taking that same time, we would be doing that while brushing our teeth or whatever it is we're doing while standing in front of the mirror. And thinking about the things that our bodies do for us that we appreciate. So that's a practice, and I love it because I have this moment every day, at least the days when I shower, where I'm tallying off and semi-conscious or sometimes conscious of this noxious dialogue that's happening, or maybe it's just a model of that's happening, it's kind of just like an aesthetic critique, you know, based on nothing having to do with actual health.

It's just like, yeah, I don't like the look of my belly, especially as compared to the way it looked 20 years ago. Now, I know that I'm healthy. And yet, that still is happening. And so can I just use that moment as a mindfulness bell to wake up and be like, yes, but the endocrine system is amazing or who knows what the pancreas is up to right now? Yes.

So you could do the thing of thinking about something totally different from what your body looks like. That's one practice. Another practice could be just becoming aware of the fact that you're comparing your body now to the body that you had 20 years ago. And then saying, actually, I'm this person now. What about celebrating that?

Do you wanna be 30 year old Dan? No, like you wanna be you, 50,000 year old Dan and how will I do it? If you wanna be the day that you are now. And there's something different about that, but it's not bad. You know, like culturally, maybe it's bad that you have more weight on your body or whatever it is, or less muscle. But are those your values? No. And like we should celebrate age more than we do, I think. We're really into youth for some reason, and like we should celebrate age more than we do,

I think we're really into youth for some reason and we don't really celebrate getting older at all because I don't know why, but we don't. And I think that we could totally change the narrative around that intentionally. And we can start within ourselves, like wow, actually, I have accumulated a lot of wisdom. My body has done a lot for me.

And it's showing that through time, by the way that it's looking. And there's nothing bad about that. There's something really quite beautiful about this body and what it's had to go through and all the things that it's done for me and the way that it looks as a result. And then another thing I wanted to say is that when you're actually in the shower

before you get out, that too could be a practice of appreciating and caring for your body, like you're washing your body. And you touch each part of your body when you take a shower and you can touch it with care and appreciation and love rather than I don't know usually we just think of whatever in the shower I don't know what you think about in the shower but it's probably dirty and weird. I mean touching your body with love sounds dirty and

weird on one level it kind of reminds me of that old joke about masturbation being sex with someone I love. Oh my god, you said masturbation again. I'm so happy about this podcast already. Did I say masturbation in our last episode? Yeah. Now everyone has to go listen because this is part two. This is sequel. You really bring it out, Cara. I don't know what it is, but you, I mean, I, I mean, I know. I really get you to say masturbation a lot. I'm so good at that.

I just, but nobody can see me, but I'm probably bright right right now. You're the only one who can. But anyway, yeah, while touching yourself with love in the shower doesn't have to be dirty. It can be beautiful and a gesture of respect to the body, which the body is worthy of a lot of respect. And we don't give it that. We tend to just scrutinize it and feel ashamed of it. In preparing for this episode, you had a couple conversations with the aforementioned DJ, DJ Cashmere. That's his real name, everybody. Love that name. Who is

the architect of this series? We're doing about how to get fit and stay sane at the same time. And I see the notes from these conversations, because DJ sends them to me. And in the first conversation, you said something that I loved, and then in the second conversation, you were a little surprised that you had said it, but I'm gonna read it to you because I really liked it.

And you can walk it back or disavow it, or tell me not to include this in the episode. Okay. But after you had this realization while you're pregnant, you came to the following conclusion, fuck everyone for making me hate that part of myself. Yeah, which I think was just a sign or a part of me that felt resentful towards myself for buying into the idea that I should be scrutinizing and hating my body in a very particular way that wasn't mine.

Those are not my set of standards or ideals and those voices made it so that I wasn't really listening to my body and attuning to it and what it in particular needed. And I was just kind of applying these societal rules about how my body should be and how much exercise I should get and what I should be eating. And it made it so that I lost touch with my body and didn't have a good relationship with my body and it's been a long process of trying to come back to a good relationship with my body and it's been a long process of trying to come back to a good relationship with my body and learn how to listen to it in a way that feels caring and respectful and not fearful.

And so, yeah, I guess I have some resentment for all of those messages being there and for me having bought into them. And on some level, actually, it's not an esoteric level, it can sound like a very not Buddhist thing to say because we're supposed to be generating loving kindness for everybody, no matter how difficult they are. What I read into that was really like a spirit of not literally fuck everybody, but of, you know, this is just a really violent thing we're doing to ourselves in this culture by inculcating ourselves with this notion that we're insufficient as designed. Why did you like that? Because it was just irreverent. Is that what you liked about it? Or yeah, I mean, that's what I've liked about you from the first time before we'd ever

even met the first time I saw you give a Dharma talk when I was on retreat and hating being on retreat and then all of a sudden you got up there and you were so irreverent when I was on retreat and a hating being on retreat and then all of a sudden You got up there and you were so irreverent. I was like, oh, yeah, this is what this is about and so yeah I like irreverence So there's that and also I feel that too, you know like I'm wasting so much time Coiled in self-judgment and by the way, we don't live in enclosed systems, you know, so the my Self-laceration has external consequences. I have this very embarrassing story in my mind of having gone to a spin class with my wife and me having said something about

the teacher who was a female, about her body. And totally, it wasn't like sexual, it was more just like a judgy about whether she was thin enough or something like this. It was like five or six years ago. And Bianca rightly was not cool with that. And I was just projecting my shit onto this poor spin teacher and of course making Bianca feel like shit because she was correctly intuiting that I was of course applying those standards to her. And so, yeah, there's just ripples of negativity here. And so I feel some of that resentment too.

Yeah, yeah, no, I can totally relate to this because it's not even your voice saying these things about what your body should look like. It's not even my voice. I don't even know where this came from. And it's such, you're right, it's such an expenditure of mental energy. And it makes it so that we aren't as available

to each other. And we're looking at other people in a very particular way and judging other people or comparing ourselves to other people and spending our time doing that instead of just being with people and being open to them and really listening to them and appreciating their uniqueness. It's pretty deep and that's why I like your your quote. Let's just go back to this exhortation that you've given us, which is to appreciate your body.

Again, easier said than done and with things that are easier said than done, we need practices. We need to do on the regular to counter program to rewire. So what do you recommend on that tip? So I was forced to stop running and I had this thing where I ran pretty much every day up until a few years ago, and I started feeling pretty crappy. You know, I'm a person who is a Dharma teacher, and I go on a lot of meditation retreats, and on a meditation retreat, I would be running every day. And it was almost like I couldn't really feel as present while meditating unless I went for my run in the morning,

which I knew was something that I needed to look at because my ability to be present shouldn't necessarily be so dependent on whether or not I did that in the morning. And there was clearly something that I was not having to feel by going for my run in the morning. I was getting some energy out. I was moving something through so that it would be easier

for me to sit with myself later in the day. And when I couldn't run anymore, I had to sit with all those feelings. And I would not have chosen to do it all at once like that. In a second, I'll share what I think I would have done more of if it hadn't been forced on me like that. But as a result, I had to be with a ton of shame, But as a result, I had to be with a ton of shame, a lot of anger, and a lot of self-doubt. And this idea that I can't really trust my body.

I can't trust my impulses. If I don't do this run, then I'm just going to be lazy and fat. And it's just going to be a slippery slope. I'm going to have no motivation. And I'm going to just be a slab. And so having to confront all those feelings, first of all made me see that I could handle those feelings and that it was okay for me to feel them. And second of all, it made it so that those feelings were not dictating everything

that I did. And I didn't have to act on the belief that I couldn't handle those feelings. And I didn't have to have this idea that I had to get rid of those feelings or control my body, control my feelings in some way before I could move on with my day. And that, to me, is what freedom really is. It's not dependence on circumstances. It's not dependent on what I do or think or say in my exercise regimen. It's the ability to be available and present with whatever is going on for me, no matter what. And so I feel freer as a result of not being able to do my morning run anymore, even though it doesn't look like I'm free because I can't physically do all the things that I used to do, but I actually do feel freer now, not to say that I would have chosen to have

to go through that and not to say that I wouldn't chosen to have to go through that and not to say that I wouldn't go running now if I could run again because I would because I love running. But I think I would approach it more from a place of joy and gratitude than a place of fear and self-ladeneration and not trusting my body. The practice I think that I would recommend for people would be on a day where it doesn't feel like too much of a force for yourself. Don't do your exercise routine when you normally would.

You know, you don't have to make that another thing that you have to force up on yourself, you know, like, no, I can't, I'm no exercising today, you know, because we can approach that with the same kind of really intense attitude. But just gently, like if there's a day where you're kind of on the fence, maybe it's raining, you don't want to go outside and just say, okay, well, actually, what if I make today really about being with the feelings that I would have to feel, if I didn't exercise, and just seeing what that is and really making

a point of sitting and meditating or pausing, taking some time, not distracting ourselves from whatever it is that's coming up for us in that space. I have some follow up questions, but just on a very technical front, just so people remember you used to run marathons, barefoot, some of them, and you were super intense about it, and then you got Lyme, and now you're sufficiently tired and uncomfortable and achy that you can't run anymore. Am I recapitulating the basic facts correctly? Yeah, mostly my knees don't work anymore the way they used to.

And just to put a fine point on this, you're not saying we shouldn't exercise or eat well or anything like that. You're just saying we should look at what's fueling that. Absolutely. We should look at what's fueling that. And also, there's no recipe for wellness that is the same across the board for everybody. We can't even say, generally speaking, that everybody should do half an hour of exercise a day, or everyone should eat this amount of salad a day.

It's different for everyone. I think it's mostly about listening to our body's messages and really trusting that. Because for some people, the right amount of exercise could be just like moving your arm up and down. All bodies are so different. Yeah, and it really depends on what point in your life you're at. My dad just run marathons.

My mom was at avid runner as well. And now they live in an assisted living facility. And so their exercise looks very different. And it's, you know, some of us have able bodies and others of us don't. So I absolutely agree. But again, just to be clear, we should take care of our body no matter

what's going on with the body to the best of our ability. But as you said to DJ, it's healthy to eat well and exercise, but it's not healthy to just be eternally driven by aversion. Yeah, right. It's all, I think ultimately wellness is more about our relationship with ourselves than it is about what our routine is and what our eating habits are.

I think for me at least what I've noticed is that I feel a lot better now, overall. You know, of course my body still has lime and there's still a ton of fatigue, but I wouldn't, I'm saying this out loud now for the first time, because I don't think I realized it until now. I don't think that I would trade what I have now

for what I had when my body didn't have Lyme disease because I feel better on a much deeper level than I did before. I mean, I think there's a reason why the Buddha talked about letting go so much. Yeah. I bet the Buddha never went for runs. I mean, he didn't go for it. Well, he had to walk a lot. I mean, honestly, I'm not being never went for runs. I mean, he didn't go for it. Well, he had to walk a lot. I mean, honestly, I'm not being facetious here.

You know, other than horses, there weren't many other means of transportation. He had taken this vow of poverty or something along those lines. And he walked, I mean, a ton in his life. So he was moving the body. Yeah, yeah, he totally was. It's known about the Buddha that he had back problems, which kind of makes me happy to hear, because there's a part of me that wants to believe that if I just adjust my attitude towards my body and just meditate enough and have the right perfect relationship of mind and body,

then all of my physical problems will be solved. But the Buddha had back problems and he was fully enlightened. There's a way that we can find ourselves kind of sliding into another form of making ourselves responsible for our bodies in a way that we don't have to be through meditations. Like, oh, like if I'm not to run, I'll just meditate all the time.

And that'll be the way that I heal myself. And maybe to a certain extent, that is useful. And that has helped some of my physical stuff. But to make it like, I can fix all my problems with meditation, puts this enormous amount of pressure on me to do that perfectly. And then meditation just becomes the new running. Coming up, Cara, a lie talks about when and why you should purposely do things you know are bad for you. And the relationship between your instincts and your meditation practice.

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When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lin's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. I just want to go back to this question of this balance that I'm hearing. I think you

call for here because on some level, we are responsible for our bodies. I mean, yeah, we're not responsible for every aspect of it. As Joseph Goldstein, the meditation teacher once said, the systems of the body unfold lawfully. We just don't make the laws, which I love. So, yeah, there's so much about our bodies that we don't control. And yet, you know, there are levers we can pull, like eating in a certain way and exercising. And so that's where it becomes tricky. Because how do we exercise our agency in these zones without having that come from a place of aversion or self-aggression? I want to hear what you do with us at some point. It's not good.

But do you want to go first? No, no, no, no, go, you go, please. Okay. I am a huge proponent of trying the things that you're not supposed to do until you really find out why you're not supposed to do them. And you also find out why you wanted to do them so bad. Go eat that whole bag of potato chips, but just really be present for it.

And see what it is that you like about it and what you don't like about it. Or like make yourself go for that run. Make yourself run as much as you want to make yourself run and see what it is that feels good about that and see what it is that you hate about it. But just be really honest with yourself about all those things. We learn through experience. We don't learn through telling ourselves what we shouldn't do, because we never figure out why we should or shouldn't do them that way.

We have to really be there for the results of all of our actions in order to really understand. I think this whole practice is about experimentation and seeing what works and what doesn't work. And we're not going to know that unless we give ourselves the freedom to play and experiment and make it more fun than it. You know, we don't have to do it perfectly the first time. If we could do that, then we wouldn't need to be doing this practice at all. We would already know. And so we're here to just learn.

I mean, I think that whatever year about to tell me about like the 10 sleeves of Oreos you eat in the morning, like I would say do that, but be present for it and just really see what it is that is making you want to do that. Because there's probably a lot of information there for you about needs that haven't been met and trying to meet in some way with the Oreos, but it's not working. It's just funny because on the one hand, I've come a long way. I've done quite a bit of work on both exercise and diet and undergirding all of that. It's just like your attitude toward your body.

And yet, you know, there's such a crust of conditioning on top of this. This is not an easy thing to do. It is multi-year, if not multi-lifetime project in my experience. I'll stop there just for a second. Does that sound right to you? Yes, I mean, it could be, but it could, that's, we don't know. I mean, I mean it could be but it could that's we don't know I mean, I think I we don't know how how long it could be and It could be really short and actually for me having been forced to stop running Was a lot faster it was a there was a big transformation that happened in a short period of time for me with that Which I wouldn't have guessed was possible And even I don't think that it's necessarily the case that just because we spent our whole lives talking to ourselves one

way about how our body is and being negative towards ourselves means that it's going to take that same amount of time to undo that pattern. That's an excellent point. You're which bringing to mind is probably mangling this. So with apologies to Daniel Gilbert who wrote the book, stumbling upon happiness that I haven't read in many, many years. But I believe one of the things he says in there is that people who've had catastrophic accidents, there's like a level of happiness that those people have because the surrender is non-negotiable. So I can see how a set of sudden things happen with you and it led to big psychological slash spiritual advances that are harder with me because I've been lucky and my body is Highly functioning at least to date. Does that make sense?

Yeah totally. Yeah, and you've been lucky in the traditional sense of that word because we think about wellness as like, you know, and of course to some degree, it helps a lot to have a healthy body and that, you know, not to have a chronic illness or whatever. But there's a very deep kind of wellness that I think we're trying to talk about here, which goes beyond all of that. And it's more to do with our hearts and minds and the freedom there. Yes. And I do, you know, just put a pin in it right now before I say more about my own practices. I do want this interview to end or at least to include some really practical steps that people can take to get to that deeper level of wellness. So just pointing

out of the park with that. Yeah. So let's, yeah, let's come back to that. And now let's talk about your habits. Let's unpack unpack. So, you know, right here on this show back in like 2019, I believe, it might have been 2020, I interviewed Evelyn Tribalai, who's the one of the two people who came up with something called Intuitive Eating. And you can hear, if you listen to that episode, we can we'll put a link in the show notes. You can hear my mind changing real time. Because up until that point, I had been incredibly militant about sticking to certain diets

and this sort of punitive deathmarch style exercise regime. They often changed the diets of the exercise regimes, but there was always something, or often something. And she basically read-filled me, you know, like got me to see that I was carrying out other people's agenda, not my own. And like underneath all of that was some aversion and trying to conform to external standards and not listening to my body as the number one source of information. And so I've been working one-on-one with her for years.

You know, I don't have to talk to her that much anymore because my attitude toward food is much saner. And same with exercise, somebody, a friend of mine who's no longer with us anymore, her name is Grace Livingston and she was working for me at the time that I met Evelyn. She passed away, but Grace was the one we introduced me to Evelyn. I think it was a not so subtle agenda of hers. She saw that I had some unhelpful thought patterns

and I behaviors around this stuff and engineered this encounter with Evelyn. And Grace gave me this advice once while she was dying of cancer that I should when exercising, maybe just say the following word in my mind once in a while, which is gratitude. Now, I am, you know, because I'm so allergic to cliche, my initial response to that was like, a, you know, like hashtag blessed. But I, you know, for me, a lot of these practices are just, you know, about getting over myself and just doing the thing that may seem cheesy to me

because these practices work. And so I try when I'm exercising to just, you know, wake up to the fact that it's incredibly lucky in the conventional sense to have this body that does work and to use that to counter program against some of the noxious stuff that's driving me to hit my numbers in any given workout I'm doing as opposed to just enjoying the workout and being grateful that my body's working for now.

Similarly, with food, can I be there and taste the food and notice when my body's full and stop eating then instead of worrying about sticking to some diet. So I'm much better at all of this. And yeah, I still see that, you know, that I can get off my game for any number of reasons and just get back into my old patterns. And so I am better but far from perfect. Yeah. Well, that sounds great. I think it's very funny and cool that you are allergic to what did you call it?

Klee shea. Klee shea and yet you for a living interview meditators and are at high risk for encountering woo woo every turn of your professional career. That to me is like, you kind of are doing the thing of exploring the way that I was talking about exploring. You know, if you think you hate something, then like try it and see why you hate it so much. And but obviously you're attracted in some way to it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be doing this as your career.

And so like, if you like it, then what do you like about it? And what don't you like about it? And anyway, I'm kind of going off in a little bit of a tangent, but it sounds like you've really benefited from doing the work that you're doing and meeting these people through the podcast and all of the explorations you've been doing. And it's gotten under your skin, you know, or it's like really deeply shifted your habits. And that's taken practice on your part too. But your willingness to do that self-examination, I think, is where that all starts. And so you have shifted a bunch of habits because you're as much as you'll make fun of woo-woo, you are willing to look at it and think about it and take it seriously.

Yeah, I think that's 100% correct. Woo-woo, I often take to mean like far out esoteric claims. I actually have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is sloppy sentimentality, bathos. Oh, okay. Yeah, we should separate those two things, yeah. So like you asked earlier, why was I so attracted to your fuck everyone, quote, it's because I like the irreverence on top of the really practical, relatable wisdom that lies beneath the stuff. There's a way in which this ancient wisdom, which feels like totally small tea true to me,

is delivered with a lot of accoutrement and sentimentality that I am not down with. Yeah, and it's extra. It's extra, yes, it's extra. Yeah, it's not at the heart of what was being said there. Yeah, I appreciate you pointing that out because if that extra stuff drives a bunch of people away and isn't relatable for everybody, anyway, I think we're going off a little bit here, but we were talking about you and your habits and how they've shifted.

And so now what's your practice? Or is there one around your eating, your exercise, your body, that kind of thing? For eating, it's intuitive eating. For exercise, it's a little less, I mean, I try to remind myself to be grateful as a way to counter program against the pushing and striving and self-laceration

and self-judging and comparison that is there for me. My only point is that I've done a lot of work and I can feel absent the moment where I'm forced to let go, which is of course coming. I just don't know when. I can feel that it is a multi-year process because the conditioning is so deep in our culture, at least for me. It's not like I can snap my fingers, do these practices that I might lump under

kind of a self-compassion or a friendliness towards yourself. I have not been able to do them for a few years and be able to be like, yep, mic drop problem solved. That can actually be a helpful way of looking at it because it could be that we feel like if it could happen right now and I could be free of all this negative self-talk immediately, then what am I doing wrong? You know, it's so to relax and see it as a multi-year project or process could be a better

way to think about it. But ultimately, the truth is we have no idea how long it's going to take. And that's fine. And we don't necessarily have to think about a timeline at all. But if it helps to think about it that way, then that's probably good to lift off a little bit of the pressure. But also just to be open to what might happen and what new piece of insight might pop up. And oftentimes something might pop up that appears at first like it's an obstacle or

a problem and it could turn it to the start of a really big learning or insight the way the things that happened with my body became really useful for me ultimately. And maybe that's one thing that would be helpful for a lot of us to hear is that when something interrupts our routine that we have around eating or exercising, to be open to that as a potential source of insight. You know, so this, I can't do what I would normally do. So what does that mean that I have to feel now? Or what will I have to do differently and adapt to?

And how might that make me grow? So that could be a daily practice too, like just being open to, because in the past I would wake up and it's like, oh, it's sleeting outside. I better go for my run anyway and just suck it up. And you know, I wouldn't adapt, but what if I was gentler on myself?

I'm like, oh, okay, well, what if I didn't run today? Maybe it would be nice to honor my body's wishes for comfort and not just jump to the conclusion that it's going to be a slippery slope and I'm going to waste away on the couch for the rest of my life. a human species think of ourselves as somehow above nature or that we should be above nature. And it's not true, and it's not bad to be one of the many species of the world. It's not a bad thing to be connected to the earth and to be part of the earth. And it's not a bad thing that we have primal instincts and impulses. Those are all just different kinds of intelligence that we have historically not honored or respected. So my body's desire to be comfortable isn't something that I should be suspicious of.

It's something that is a deep kind of longing for safety and comfort. And it points towards self-compassion in a way that if I listen to it, I can actually develop more self-compassion when I listen to that voice. And I've seen the ways that I was taught to just not trust my instincts. And the more I practice meditation, the more I see not to just not trust my instincts.

And the more I practice meditation, the more I see that this practice is a very instinctual practice. Our instincts on a very deep level are trying to move towards goodness, trying to move towards an open heart, and the most fundamental instincts that we have lead us in that direction. And so practice is all about instincts in that regard. So to not trust our instincts means that we're constantly trying to fend off or get rid of who we deeply are. And we are coming at it from a place of feeling like we're already flawed, and we have to fix ourselves.

But actually, I think that we're getting back to who we really are, and we're learning how to trust that. And we're seeing that actually we don't need to change. We just need to come into ourselves, our full selves. Instead of viewing our lives as this big project of undoing my trauma and we talk about original sin and we have to be constantly fighting against that, I think we could view it in a totally different way that's much more relaxed and trusting of life. Coming up, Cara talks about what our inner drill sergeant is actually trying to do for

us, how deep self-forgiveness can go, and a body-related Buddhist practice that she finds to be completely unhelpful. I have two questions. I'll throw them both out there. You can take whichever one you want. I can remind you of the second one later, unless you want to tackle them both. One is some people might hear what you just said and say, well, doesn't the body respond and the mind respond well to like severe testing, you know, pushing it to its limits. And isn't there a voice in

our head that says, don't do that, you know, sit on the couch, eat the Doritos, take care of yourself. When it actually, it's, you know, it's coming to the ball, dressed up as self-compassion, but it's actually laziness or fear or whatever. And so isn't there that whole area too? And then the other question I have is you're saying all this stuff about like coming into yourself, listening to yourself, getting underneath all this conditioning that's driving us often in an unexamined way toward self-improvement, et cetera, et cetera. But like, okay, yes, that all sounds right,

but how do I do that? Yeah. Those are two big questions. I don't know if either of them is something you want to tackle. Those are awesome questions. And these are both questions that I'm constantly practicing with right now. And so I appreciate the questions, and I won't be able to fully answer them. But what I have learned so far in my practices with this first question about, okay, the body

can benefit from a lot of discipline sometimes. And I think yes, but now that I have a kid, I wouldn't want to say anything to myself that I wouldn't want to say to him. You know, like, if I was telling him that he needed to go for a run or whatever, it would have to be from a place of love, not from the self-fledulating place that it was coming from for me. So if I am going to be really, really disciplined

with myself, if it's coming from a place of not trusting myself, fear, self-hatred, self-doubt, then it's not going to lead to the kind of freedom that I'm seeking. It might do something to shift some things for me, but ultimately, the habit of that way of talking to myself is going to have to be a habit that gets undone, because the means are not justifying the ends there. Does that make sense? Yes. So the body does respond well to pushing it to its limits, and there's some discipline we need. But if the motivation of the galvanizing force is self-hatred, and that's unexamined, then the fruit of the poisoned

tree is going to be poisoned. Yeah, I had this pop up in my head a lot when I was on my long retreat. The Dharma will not let you awaken through self-ladulation. It just doesn't work that way. You can only get so far with awakening through forcefulness, because it's a different kind of energy from that kind of release that we're seeking. The release is much more of a receptive, open, relaxed, softening. If we're pushing, that's the opposite kind of energy.

And so we ultimately will need to release that grip in order to get there. And it was a softening for me when I was still running. It was a softening for me to allow myself to take my run every day. But if I was going to force myself to stop running, that would have been too harsh. So I had to go through a long period of time where I was aware that my relationship to exercise was unhealthy, but it would have been too forceful and too harsh and adding even more stress if I just made myself stop those habits. So we have to kind of gently see where the openings are.

And if first for some period of time we need to allow ourselves to be doing the things that make us feel safe. We just do that. And we live in that place of safety until it feels like there's another opening where we can release somewhere else. Does that answer that first question? Yeah, the summary I gave before I think it still still holds after your clarification that. Yeah, just look at what's underneath, what's motivating you really? Is it because you're grateful that you have this body and you wanna keep it functioning well

so that you can live longer and continue to help other people be happy? Or is it because you're trying to look like the dude on the cover of Men's Health Magazine? Yeah, I am like totally trying to look like that dude. I wish. Okay, and then the second question, can you remind me? Yeah, just, you know, you talked about freedom and liberation and getting out of your head and coming into your body

and aligning with what, you know, nature is driving us toward goodness and all this stuff that can sound like very attractive but also completely unobtainable. Yeah, I think that we all get taste of this all the time. Otherwise I don't know, but I think life would be a lot harder. We all know what it's like to feel safe in our bodies and to trust our bodies because we were all babies. When I look at my baby, that baby does not have any inner conflict about his needs.

Like he is just totally solid there. When he wants something, he knows he wants it, and he makes it clear. And it gets more complicated, the older we get and the more layers of self-judgment that we put on ourselves. But that deep knowing and trusting of ourselves is there. And it's accessible. And we know it because we know that it doesn't feel good to judge ourselves. We feel the pain of that. And we know what that it does feel good to love ourselves. We feel the pain of that and we know what that it does feel good to love ourselves and we feel when that is there too. If we look really closely at the minutia of our movements throughout the day, our mental movements, our physical movements, we start to see that everything that we do and think and say and feel is a movement towards

comfort in some way. Even we shift in our chair, we're trying to alleviate some pain and move towards some good feeling. So, there's this really, really, deeply ingrained habit of loving ourselves there. And even the self-ladulation itself, even the self-criticism, is an attempt to feel better. It's an attempt to latch on to control so that we can feel better ultimately. And it's not doing it for us in the moment, is making us less comfortable in the moment, but the idea is that we will be more comfortable in the future.

So it's trying to help. It's not so much that we have this big beast to contend with that we have to get rid of. It's more that we start to see that the beast is actually trying to serve us. We don't have to come at our experience from a place of total mistrust because it's all trying to help us. There's this really deep kind of forgiveness that's possible and that I've started to really taste in my practice lately. This forgiveness to ourselves for this forgiveness to ourselves for having felt so responsible for feeling bad, for picking up this burden of being responsible for every time we feel bad,

and everything that goes wrong in our lives. And it's not our fault. It's possible to move towards a really, really deep kind of freedom when we start to see that and release that burden of responsibility and to trust ourselves. Okay, so let's get in our remaining minutes here. Let's get as practical as possible. I think we've answered the question, the question that DJs posed, which is, can you take care of your body without hating yourself?

The answer is yes, you can. What are the practices? And we talked about a few practices earlier, like the mummy, you get out of the shower and you're looking in the mirror, but what are some practices that we can do that will continue to kind of nudge us in this direction? The more we can give our bodies attention throughout the day, the better kind attention. So like I said, whenever we move, we're trying to get more comfortable. But if we pay more attention to our bodies during the day, we can see all the times that we're not in our bodies and we're leaning into the future and we're not comfortable. So one practice is to,

as many times as you remember two in a day, just ask yourself, how can I make my body a little bit more comfortable right now? And in that moment, we might see how we've been leaning into the future. I've been sitting at my computer for three hours and I really have to pee

and it would be a really kind thing for me to take a break, look away, look at the window, go to the bathroom. And so we could do that five times a day, we could do that 25,000 times a day. How can I make my body a little bit more comfortable right now? In any given moment, this is a super easy practice to do, and it's super accessible, and it's really nice. Because usually right now, I could like sit back a little bit more and like relax my shoulders a little bit. I can feel like some tension in my feet that I can just kind of soften,

and I can let my body be supported by the chair underneath me. There's like a little bit more holding myself up right now than I need to be doing. And I can just rest back. So that's one. Do you have tension in your body right now, Dan, that you can release? Always. And to say that I like that a lot because one of the contemplative cliches that gets tossed around a lot is getting out of your head and into your body.

And this does that. Yeah. And what we need are reminders, right, to tune into something below the level of thought. And why I think this is deeply relevant to this conversation, and I'll try this explanation, and please correct me here, is that one of the things I believe you're arguing is that if you're listening to your body You can make much sainter decisions about what do I need to eat right now? How much do I need to eat what foods make me feel good? What foods make me feel bad similarly with exercise? You know am I pushing myself to hit some arbitrary number? You know number of miles run and speed at which I've run those miles or whatever or am I pushing myself to hit some arbitrary number, number of miles run and speed at which I've

run those miles or whatever, or am I listening to my body as what types of exercise feel good? What should I do today or the next day? How much exercise do I need to... yes, that cleanse of great cardio workout can feel good and we should indulge. But are we doing it for reasons that have nothing to do with what the body needs? And so if we can just hone the skill of listening to our bodies and you've just given us a way to operationalize the cliche, then we can vector toward more sanity as we navigate our wellness journey or whatever. Anyway, does that all make sense? as we navigate our wellness journey or whatever. Anyway, does that all make sense?

Exactly, yeah, that's exactly. You said some stuff that I wish that I had said. So a good job, thanks. You could just be on this podcast for yourself, Dan. No, I don't know enough. I promise you. Yeah, but you would love just the dance show. Oh yeah, I mean, my whole life is just the dance show.

Yeah, I get to get in bed with the audience of my wife and my son. And they're pretty tired of that show. That's why you have a bigger audience now. And one day we'll get you on the cover and Ben's Health magazine. It's going to be a non-traditional cover. Any other practices that come to mind? Yeah. So one thing I think that's just important for people to know when coming into their bodies or trying to turn inward like that is just there's a reason that we don't do that already.

You know, there's a reason that we're not already just hanging out in our bodies all the time. There are a lot of things happening in our bodies that feel uncomfortable, really bad, out of control, chaotic. There's trauma held in our bodies. There's chronic pain. There's pain that we don't even know about, tension that we're holding. We don't even know about. It's not're holding, we don't even know about.

It's not just a process of like, oh, I'm in my body now, you know, it's wonderful. Everything is just rainbows. And there's a lot going on that is very deeply difficult to meet. And so I just want to name that it's normal if it's hard. And to face the process of coming inward with a deep kind of respect for yourself and appreciation of yourself for even being willing to try that. And even if all we can do is hang out in our bodies for a moment, that's great. You know, and just to celebrate That's great. And just to celebrate the times that we are able to feel our feet on the floor. And to know that if we're feeling our feet on the floor, and that's as far as we're going to go, that that is actually a big deal.

I don't think that we should imagine that we're not really there unless we're feeling all of our body. We can feel every part of our body, all at once, and we can feel our heart, we can feel our heart opening. No, just feeling one place in your body is actually enough, and it can be like the place that's the farthest away from the emotional trigger that you're experiencing. It could be your fingertips, or you could like rub your fingers together, or you could feel your toes and wiggle them. And the reason that that's useful is because when we're in our bodies, we are in the present moment. We're not caught up in thinking. We're not feeding some mental habit. We're here. We have not abandoned ourselves.

We haven't run off into trying to think about a way out. We're here with our body. We don't have to be in the center of the storm. We can be with our feet, and that actually helps to down-regulate our nervous system so that it becomes easier and easier to stay present. And so just touching in and finding a place that's okay to be with cultivates of mind that can be present and that can start to trust that it's okay to come inward. This is an unfair thing I'm about to do because we literally have like three minutes left here. So we might want to cut this, but you know, I had on my list of questions to ask you,

you know, in Buddhism, there are all these practices that try to get us to tune into the disgusting aspects of the body, the flam, the spit, you know, the gurgling of bodily fluids. As a way to help us let go of our attachment to these bodies that we can get so obsessed with, do you find those useful? No. Not at all. Like not even a little bit, but not to say that it wasn't useful at the time. I think that the Buddha lived in a way different culture and people had much different relationships with their bodies than our culture and at this time that we are experiencing. And so that practice was probably pretty helpful for a lot of people. I think that people were attached to their bodies in a much different way. I think we are attached to our bodies too, but it's in more of a negative way than it was back then.

And obviously, I don't know exactly what I'm talking about because I didn't live at that time, but my sense of it is that that practice could be helpful for people who are attached to their bodies in a more conceitful way or more vain kind of way, which is a thing. And it's just not a thing that I experience. So that might be a useful practice for some people, but I think especially for women,

and I also don't want to say that men don't have a difficult relationship with their bodies the same way that women do. It's just, I think women in particular can be focused on with the way that our bodies are. That practice can actually be kind of harmful because there's enough self-hatred and enough disgust for our bodies already going on. And it promotes the idea that that's the way out, that's liberation is to keep hating yourself.

And eventually you'll just detach from the body and float up into the day of a realm and be free. I think I'm talking about a more kind of opposite practice that also points to freedom. And that is embracing and loving and feeling completely at home in our bodies and trusting them. Not tipping into adoring and feeling like our bodies are everything. And when I have a perfect body, then I'm going to be free. Because maybe that's when that practice

of the Buddha would be helpful. But just landing in our bodies and loving them for all of their quirks and faults and the things that we see as mistakes and seeing all of the things in our bodies as fodder for freedom. I love talking to you. It's been too long. You're really a star. I love talking to you. It's been too long.

You're really a star and I'm grateful to you for spending the time here with me today. Thanks, Stan. It's really, really good to be on the show. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Cara.

Thanks to you for listening. Go give us a rating or a review on your favorite podcast player that actually really helps. And thanks most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show, 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davy, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson, DJ Kashmir as our senior producer, I should say DJ has worked ferociously hard on this series. Thank you DJ.

Marissa Schneidermann is our senior editor and Kimi Regler is our executive producer scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of ultraviolet audio and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. We're gonna continue this series coming up on Monday with an interview with Uma Nidu who's a doctor, a psychiatrist, and also a nutrition expert. She talks about the mental health impact of the various foods we eat. Very, prime members.

You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.