Can You Get Fit Without Self-Loathing? | Cara Lai
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 21 June 2023
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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-judgment
- The surprising things that happened when Cara was forced to stop exercising
- A counterintuitive mindfulness practice suggestion for those with exercise routines
- When and why you should purposely do things you know are bad for you
- Why we often resist 'being in our bodies,' why that's OK, and how to lower the bar on this contemplative cliché–without giving it up
- A body-related Buddhist practice she finds to be totally not useful
Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/cara-lai-612
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the 10% happier podcast. |
| 0:07.2 | I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:11.0 | Hello, everybody. |
| 0:21.4 | It really has been such an urgent question for me personally. |
| 0:24.3 | I've been wrestling with for decades, and I suspect I'm not alone on this. |
| 0:29.2 | Here's the question. |
| 0:30.5 | Can you exercise? |
| 0:31.5 | Can you take care of your body without being driven by shame, self-loathing, or noxious |
| 0:36.7 | comparison to other people, either in real life or on Instagram? |
| 0:40.9 | My guest today has such a unique and interesting perspective on this. |
| 0:44.7 | Carlisle is a former social worker and psychotherapist who is now a Buddhist teacher. |
| 0:50.3 | She also used to be a marathoner, the type of person who ran marathons and bare feet. |
| 0:54.8 | She was hardcore. |
| 0:56.2 | But then she got Lyme disease and her body pretty much went into mutiny mode. |
| 1:01.3 | And then after that, she got pregnant and had a child. |
| 1:04.7 | All of this threw her into a really tricky headspace when you're going to hear her discuss |
| 1:09.1 | in this very candid and very funny interview. |
| 1:12.8 | She's come to some hard-won, fascinating, and deeply useful insights about how to strike |
| 1:17.9 | this balance between taking care of your body and staying sane. |
| 1:22.8 | In this conversation, we talk about some practices she's come up with for that moment |
| 1:26.6 | when you're getting out of the shower and you see yourself in the mirror and engage |
| 1:30.0 | in a festival of self-judgment of the surprising things that happened when she was forced to |
... |
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