What It’s Like To Do A Year-Long Silent Meditation Retreat—By Yourself | Cara Lai

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Dan Harris, Health & Fitness, Mindfulness, Dharma, Mental Health, Meditation

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2024

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cara Lai has worked as an artist, wilderness guide, social worker, and therapist before becoming a full time meditation teacher. She teaches teens and adults at Spirit Rock, Insight Meditation Society, and Ten Percent Happier.

To find out more about what Cara does, you can go to her website, www.caralai.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 Ofosu Jones-Quartey and Jess Morey, both of whom have been heard on this podcast.

Speaking of podcasts, Cara also co-hosts a podcast called Adventures in Meditating (For Parents), along with Jess Morey and Jon Roberts.

Cara will also be a core teacher for a 14-week residential semester program for youth ages 18-32 this Fall in Marlboro VT. The program is called the Contemplative Semester, and there are many folks who will be teaching who have been in the TPH orbit, including Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jessica Morey, Kaira Jewel Lingo, and more. You can find more info at www.contemplativesemester.org

Related Episodes:

The Upside of Desire | Cara Lai

Can You Get Fit Without Self-Loathing? | Cara Lai

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wundry Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now.
0:05.0	Join Wundry Plus in the Wundry app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:08.0	It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Okay, we've got a bit of an experimental episode today which involves one person's extremely
0:35.6	compelling personal narrative. My guest is the great meditation teacher
0:40.0	Kara Lai who's also a great friend and a frequent flyer right here on this show.
0:45.2	A while back, Karra told me she was going on a year-long silent meditation retreat by herself.
0:53.7	We asked her if she'd be willing
0:56.0	to take some recording equipment with her
0:57.7	to document this experience and she said yes.
1:01.2	That retreat turned out to be way more difficult for Kara than she had been anticipating.
1:07.0	Like, way, way more difficult.
1:09.7	It pushed her to her limits, forcing her to contend with shame, anger, agony, and frustration.
1:16.6	But she documented the thing nonetheless, which was pretty damn brave.
1:19.8	In fact, this whole interview is quite brave. So what you're going to hear today is
1:23.8	Kara coming on here and playing some clips from her experience and then talking
1:29.2	about what happened and how she's thinking about it now because she took some time after the retreat to kind of let the whole thing
1:36.4	settle in before she felt comfortable coming on the show and talking about it.
1:40.8	I want to be clear here before we dive in. Kara's experience of doing a year-long
1:45.4	retreat may sound supremely extreme or idiosyncratic, but many of the things that
1:50.2	she learned are actually directly applicable to our lives in the real world
1:56.4	when we're not on retreat. In other words, I want to assure you that this
1:59.9	conversation is both fascinating to listen to because it's an incredible story and
	...

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