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

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Practical tips to stop judging yourself, chill out about exercise, and start taking better care of your body – from a Buddhist teacher who learned the hard way.Description: 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-787Other Resources Mentioned:The Upside of Desire | Cara LaiThe Anti-Diet | Evelyn TriboleAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. We're going to talk today about whether you can exercise, whether you can 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. This is part of a series we've been running this month

called Get Fit Sanely. This is actually the third time we've done this series. And to conclude this run of episodes, we actually want to take one of the episodes we ran the first time we did this series and bring it back because we loved it and we got such a great response to it. My guest is Kara Lai, and Kara has a very unique perspective on all of this.

She's 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 in her bare feet. I'm serious about that. She was hardcore. But then she got Lyme disease and her body kind of went into mutiny mode. And then she got pregnant and had a child and all of this kind of threw her into tricky headspace when you're going to hear her discuss in this very candid and often very funny interview. She's come to some hard-won, fascinating and deeply useful insights about how to strike this balance between taking care of your body or getting fit and staying sane.

In this conversation, we talk about practices 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-laceration, the surprising things that happened when she was forced to stop exercising, a counterintuitive mindfulness practice for anybody who exercises, when and why you should purposely do things you know are bad for you, why we often resist being in our bodies and why that's okay and a body-related Buddhist practice that she finds to be totally not useful. But first some BSP.

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And I'm Alice Levine and we're the hosts of Wondry's podcast, British Scandal. In our latest series, Michelle Mone, we tell the story of a woman from Glasgow who left school at 15 and devised an idea. A next level bra that remoulds the cleavage. An uplifting story which gives you a real boost. I hate myself. She moved from business to politics and when Covid hit, says she knows a great company to supply PPE. And the company, PPE Medpro, made millions of pounds of profit from the contract. Oh, and a lot of the equipment was unusable.

Oh, a minor detail. And having said that she had nothing to do with that profit repeatedly, she then goes on national television and says that HONOR children are actually in line to receive nearly £30 million as a result of it. To find out the full incredible story story follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondery Plus. Carl, 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 this 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 wanna 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 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

Lyme 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, not 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, or 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, have you taken off the baby weight and all that stuff. It can, it's pretty intense. Dude, it's so intense.

Yeah. So, 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 in exactly the places in my body that I'm already self-conscious about, like my muffin top and like my little pooch in the front and like my boobs. And so like I was looking in the mirror and 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. I'm 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 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 rite of passage and I'm a mom now and I should be proud of my mom body. And like, yeah, mom jeans should be in fashion.

That's super cool that mom jeans 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 celebrate 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 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.

Cause 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 kind of an aside, may not have anything to do with this, but the rest of 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 that. I know. Yeah, that's, yeah.

I knew you'd be down 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 news to talk about boobs more. I don't know if I could get away with it Oh, good. All right. Well, you can use that news to talk about boobs more. I don't know if I could get away with it if it wasn't with you.

OK, 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 had already been worried about expanding. And you realized, well, how am I going to judge myself for this? My body's 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 like more neurons in your brain than like 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. 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. 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 nevermind 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 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 a 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 maybe it's just a monologue 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. Yeah.

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 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 want to be 30-year-old Dan? No. You want to be you, 50,000,000 year old, I don't know how old you are. You want to be the Dan 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 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. You know, like you're washing your body and like 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 a sequel. You really bring it out, Kara. I don't know what it is, but I mean that as a compliment. I know, I really get you to say masturbation a lot. I'm so good at that.

Nobody can see me, but I'm probably bright red right now. You're the only one who can see me. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, well, 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 of conversations with the aforementioned DJ, DJ Kashmir. 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, 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 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 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 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 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? 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. 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 closed systems, you know. So 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 inappropriate. It wasn't like sexual. It was more just like a judgy about, you know, whether she conformed, 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, you know, 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, it's just 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. It's I don't even know where this came from. And it, it's such, you're right. It's such 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. So that's why I liked 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 shit we can 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 when 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. 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 lot of 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, you know, just be a slob. 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 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-flagellation 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 don't have to make that another thing that you have to force up on yourself. 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. 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

every body. 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 at what point in your life you're at.

My dad used to run marathons. My mom was an 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. Of course my body still has Lyme 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've 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. He didn't go for... Well, he had to walk a lot. I mean, honestly, I'm not being facetious here. 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 like 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 sliding into another form of making ourselves responsible for our bodies in a way that we don't have to be through meditation. It's like, oh, like if I'm not gonna 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, Karla Lai 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. I'm Mike Bubbins. I'm Ellis James. And I'm Steph Guerrero. And we're convinced that our podcast, The Socially Distanced Sports Bar, is going to be your new favorite comedy podcast

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-♪ Before we get back to the show, just a reminder about the Healthy Habits course over on the 10% Happier app taught by Kelly McGonigal and Alexis Santos. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps. 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 wanna hear what you do with this at some point. It's not good. But do you wanna go first? Yeah, you tell me. No, no, no, no, 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 should and 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 gonna 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 you're 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 you're 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 is 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 think we don't know how know how, how long it could be. And it could be really short. And actually for me, be 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 gonna take That same amount of time to undo that pattern. That's an excellent point You're which bringing to mind is and I'm 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 like catastrophic accidents, there's like a level of happiness that those people have because the surrender is non-negotiable. As so I can see how a set of sudden things happened 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, and 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 want to 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 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 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, might have been 2020, I interviewed Evelyn Tribolet, 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 change in real time. Because up until that point, I had been incredibly militant about sticking to certain diets and this sort of punitive, death march style exercise regime. They often changed the diets of the exercise regimes, but there was always something or often something.

And she basically red-pilled 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 who 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 behaviors around this stuff and engineered this encounter with Evelyn. 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, Oh God, 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 I'm 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, like 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, I'm much better at all of this and yet I still see that I can get off my game for any number of reasons and just get back into my old patterns. 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? Cliche. Cliche, 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 on 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, 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 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 t 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, you know, 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, cuz 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?

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 a 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 into 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. to that as a potential source of insight. 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 and 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. Another thing that I realized throughout this process was that we as 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 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, Kara 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. Hey, y'all. It's your girl, Kiki Palmer, your favorite quadruple threat, actor, singer, dancer, and my new role, podcaster. My podcast Baby This Is Kiki Palmer is blowin' up y'all, cuz every episode I bring on an

icon. Like when John Stamos and I talked about internet trolls hating on Disney adults, or when Jordan Peele explained why we love scary movies even though the world is already creepy as fuck. Tune in to learn a little and laugh a lot, cause your girl keeps it real. Listen on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenpann.

And in our series Legacy, we look at the lives of some of the most famous people to have ever lived and ask if they have the reputation they deserve. In this series, we look at J Edgar Hoover. He was the director of the FBI for half a century. An immensely powerful political figure, he was said to know everything about everyone. He held the ear of eight presidents and terrified them all. When asked why he didn't fire Hoover, JFK replied, you don't fire God. From chasing gangsters to pursuing communists to relentlessly persecuting Dr. Martin Luther King and civil rights activists, Hoover's dirty tricks tactics

have been endlessly echoed in the years since his death. And his political playbook still shapes American politics today. Follow Legacy Now wherever you listen to podcasts. 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 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? How do I do that? Yeah. Those are two big questions. I don't know if either of them is something you wanna 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 practice is 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-flagellating 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, if the galvanizing force is self-hatred, and that's unexamined, then the fruit of the poison tree is going to be poison. 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-flagellation. 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. And the release is much more of a receptive, open, relaxed softening.

And so 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 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. Yeah. Does that answer that first question? Yeah. The summary I gave before, I think it still holds after your clarification that you just look at what's underneath, what's motivating you really? Is it because you're grateful that you have this body and you want to 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. Oh, 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. 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 that it does feel good to love ourselves. And we feel when that is there too. If we look really closely at the minutiae 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-flagellation itself, even the self-criticism is an attempt to feel better. It's an attempt to latch onto control so that we can feel better ultimately. And it's not doing it for us in the moment, it's 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 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 DJ's 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 moment 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 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 to 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 out 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 sit back a little bit more and relax my shoulders a little bit. I can feel 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

saner 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 listening to my body as what types of exercise feel good? And, you know, what should I do today or the next day?

You know, how much exercise do I need to, yes, that cleanse of a 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 could 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? Exactly, yeah, that's exactly. You said some stuff that I wish that I had said.

So good job, thanks. You could just be on this podcast by 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 go to 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 of Men's Health Magazine. It's gonna 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. 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 just the process of like, oh, I'm in my body now. 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 wanna 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 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, you know, we can feel every part of our body all at once and we can feel our heart and we can feel our heart opening and 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. You know, 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 downregulate 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 a 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 wanna cut this,

but I had on my list of questions to ask you. In Buddhism, there are all these practices that try to get us to tune into the disgusting aspects of the body, the phlegm, the spit, 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. No. 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're 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 a 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, how that's liberation is to keep hating yourself. And eventually you'll just detach from the body and float up into the deva 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 gonna be free. Cause 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 and I'm grateful to you for spending the time here with me today. Thanks, Dan. It's really, really good to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

Thanks again to Kara. If you want to find out more about what she does, you can go to her website, karali.org, where she's got some online meditation classes, including one called Meditate Your Face Off. She also has a monthly class for parents, co-led by Afosu Jones-Courté and Jess Mori, both of whom have been on this podcast. Speaking of podcasts, Kara also co-hosts her own show called Adventures in Meditating for Parents along with Jess Mori and John Roberts. You can find that over at AdventuresInMeditating.com.

Oh, and one other thing, she's going to be a core teacher for a 14-week residential semester program for people between the ages of 18 and 32 this fall in Marlboro, Vermont. The program is called the Contemplative Semester, and there are many people who will be teaching as part of this semester who are in the 10% happier orbit, including Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, the aforementioned Jess Mori, Kyra Jewel-Lingo, and many more. Applications are due on July 15th, and you can find out more at ContemplativeSemester.org. I'll put a link in the show notes.

But before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. We get additional pre-production support from my guy, Wombo Wu, an old friend of mine. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. We get additional pre-production support from my guy Wombo Wu, an old friend of mine. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our managing producer.

And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Summer is here and adventures await. Wondery and Tinkercast are teaming up to bring you a summer of wow with new episodes of your favorite podcasts. Go on an epic adventure with Portuga the pirate as she takes a road tripping adventure across

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