Clearing Your Mind Is Impossible – But You Can Do This Instead | Bonus Meditation with Cara Lai

05/05/23 • 7 min

11 Listeners

Not thinking is not the point of mindfulness. We know, shocking! Emotions and thoughts are inextricably linked: know them to know yourself.

About Cara Lai:

Cara Lai spent most of her life trying to figure out how to be happy, or at least avoid total misery, which landed her on a meditation cushion for the majority of her adulthood. Throughout many consciousness adventures including a few mind-bendingly long meditation retreats, she has explored the wilderness of the mind, chronic illness, the importance of pleasure, and a wide range of other things that she might get in trouble for mentioning publicly. In the past, Cara has worked as an artist, wilderness guide, social worker and psychotherapist, but at this point she’s given up on being an adult in exchange for an all-out mindfulness rampage. Her teaching is relatable, authentic, funny and sometimes crass, and is accessible for many people. She teaches teens and adults at Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, Spirit Rock, Insight Meditation Society, and UCLA; ultimately hoping to become as good of a show-off as Dan. And to help people be happier.

To find this meditation in the Ten Percent Happier app, you can search for “Can’t Stop Thinking,” or click here: https://10percenthappier.app.link/content?meditation=e09bcee4-651b-4ca0-84ad-bb1f69eb8a18.

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Not thinking is not the point of mindfulness. We know, shocking! Emotions and thoughts are inextricably linked: know them to know yourself.

About Cara Lai:

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Previous Episode

The Selfish Case for Being Ethical | Eugene Cash

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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Virtue is a tricky topic. It’s often sold to us by religious leaders who are thundering judgmentally, and sometimes hypocritically, down to us from the mountaintop. But from the Buddhist perspective, there is actually a deeply self-interested case for ethics and virtue. The Buddhists are not trying to get you to follow a bunch of very specific rules: they are trying to get you to do no harm because that will make you happy.

This is part two of our series on a venerable Buddhist list called the Noble Eightfold Path. The three middle items on the list all have to do with ethical conduct. They are: right speech, right action, and right livelihood.

Our guest today, Eugene Cash, is gonna talk about this stuff in super practical, non-dogmatic and non-preachy ways. Cash has been a Buddhist teacher since 1990. He's the founding teacher of San Francisco Insight and a senior teacher on the Spirit Rock Teachers Council. His teaching is influenced by many streams of Buddhism— Theravada, Zen and Tibetan.

In this conversation we talk about:

How to make terms such as virtue and ethics more attractive to skeptics
Eugene's case that being ethical is in your self-interest
His idea that kindness can actually be hard-nosed and tough
How the Buddha could be hard on people when it was helpful for those people
How to use right speech skillfully
Why he says that practicing right action all day long is his idea of fun
The technical versus the holistic understanding of right livelihood
The difference between “being present” and “presence”
And what has kept him devoted to the eightfold path for so many years

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/eugene-cash-595

Next Episode

Mike D On: The Value of Failure, the Addictive Power of Adrenaline, and How a Beastie Boy Got Into Lovingkindness

1 Recommendations

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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Today’s show features one of Dan’s personal musical heroes, Mike Diamond — “Mike D” from the Beastie Boys. Their conversation is wide ranging and covers topics from the role of failure in achieving success to Mike’s personal meditation practice. They say, “never meet your heroes”, but Mike D doesn’t disappoint in this smart and thoughtful discussion.

Mike D formed the Beastie Boys with Adam Yauch, aka MCA, in the early 80’s, winning a number of Grammys and spanning a multi-decade career. In 2018, along with his bandmate, Adam Horovitz, Diamond co-authored Beastie Boys Book, which told the story of the band in its own words and reached #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list. A limited series of live shows, in which the two brought stories from the book to life, was captured in the 2020 film Beastie Boys Story.

Content Warning: The content is a little mature at points so take care if you’re listening with kids.

In this episode we talk about:

How Mike reconciles the misogyny of the Beasties early work
The evolution of the band — and how they freed themselves from feeling imprisoned by their own personas
The role of failure in achieving success
The value of taking risks in creative endeavors
Watching his late bandmate, Adam Yauch, find Buddhism, and how that impacted their music
The addictive nature of adrenaline when performing
The role meditation and yoga played for Mike as he tried to calibrate the highs and lows while on tour — and how these practices also now play a role in parenting his two kids
How he works through self-judgment while meditating
How he and the other surviving bandmate, Adam Horovitz, managed their grief in the wake of the untimely death of Adam Yauch
And how a Beastie Boy came to embrace, of all things, loving-kindness

Full Show Notes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/mike-diamond-597