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 Sainly. This is actually the third series we've been running this month called Get Fit Sainly.

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 one, 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.

...