Cara Lai is awesome. That’s the first thing to say. She is humble and real and willing to explore a heated topic without having any easy prepared answers. Backtrack! Cara is a dharma teacher, artist, Mom and former therapist. These days she mostly teaches meditation retreats and a fun online drop-in class called “Meditate Your Face Off!” (Jeff: Be still my heart.)

Our subject is the shitstorm happening on planet earth – in the Middle East, the Ukraine, the US, and other hot spots – and whether everyone should be speaking out. We recorded the episode back in May 2024; things are no less urgent today, seven months later. People have very strong opinions on these issues, and very strong opinions both about what should be said, and who should be saying it.

We talk about things like:

* How we can approach polarizing conversations

* What role anger and shame play in how we relate to each other

* How mindfulness and compassion might move us in a different direction

Cara’s guided mindfulness practice comes late in the episode, at 34 minutes. It’s a compassionate inquiry into what’s happening for us – in this moment – that we feel we can’t bear. “It’s hard to have a heart,” she says. In learning to stay present with our own experience, we also learn to stay present with others, even those we disagree with. The episode ends with a conversation about belonging, trust, and sharing our unique gifts with the world.

Thank you Cara!

LINKS

* Cara’s website: caralai.org

* Cara’s Podcast: adventuresinmeditating.com

The Afterparty

Where Tasha and Jeff chat about global culture, neurodiversity, and the privilege of living in this time. What new creative responses to the world’s challenges are waiting to emerge? That, friends, is the true promise, which Jeff immediately degrades in the final two minutes, when he curses and asks for money and then gargle-chokes on some grapefruit LaCroix bubbly water. The whole denouement is exceedingly stupid and immature and should have been cut – but! –well, it made Tasha laugh very hard. And that’s what matters.

AND NOW: SOME EXCITING NEWS!

We’re stoked to announce our first Mind Bod Adventure Squad Retreat. It’s an opportunity to get wild and embodied and very present with us.

It’s going down at the Omega Institute, June 8-13, 2025. We love our community and want to practice with you IN PERSON. Come explore!

REGISTER HERE

K, That’s all for this week. Thanks for tuning in!

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

In this episode we welcome Caverly Morgan, former Zen monk and author of The Heart of Who We Are. Caverly is also the founder of Peace in Schools, a teen-centered mindfulness curriculum for teens.

We jump right into it with a discussion of how teens very naturally want to challenge many of the culture’s bogus assumptions – in her words, teens “are on fire with wanting to dismantle what’s not real.”

We start with a beautiful breath practice that Caverly uses in high school classrooms. “Dental-mental floss”: back and forth through the center, expanding and grounding.

From there, we discuss goodies like:

* the primacy of subjective experience* letting go of the need to find the “right way”* shifting towards what works for your situation and what helps you suffer less* the role of lineages and teachers* the joys of many practices … and how none of them may even be going anywhere!

The Afterparty (Watch at www.mindbodbpod.com)

In this week’s party time, we wax excitedly about concerns that are close to our hearts, which is to say WEIRD SPIRITUAL S**T. We discuss whether there is a universal direction in the contemplative path, one true in all cultures (if so, what might that be?). We talk about how different practices are designed to address different problems or needs, and how these change from culture to culture, person to person, and even - within each person - week to week and moment to moment!

NB: there’s a lot of thumbs up emojis in this… Tasha’s macbook was going berserk and apparently fervently agreeing with everythign we said 👍🎉 Enjoy!

*The Afterparty will move behind the paywall in January! For real this time! Become a paid subscriber to continue being privy to these strange discussions…

Let us know in the comments how these practices landed for you!

K, That’s all for now. Thanks for tuning in!

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

Well, this one is cool. It may change your meditation practice and – if you stay with the inquiry – your life. You’d hardly know how ambitious it is though, from our guest Kevin Schanilec’s humble, deadpan delivery.

Kevin is a long-time Buddhist practitioner from Seattle who has formalized a process for seeing through what Buddhists call “The Ten Fetters.” The fetters are fundamental (mis)beliefs we hold about how the self and world exist. Most of us don’t even realize they are beliefs – we are unconsciously inside them, which causes us to suffer in all the usual human ways.

What’s wild is that we don’t have to live according to these beliefs. With practice and commitment, we can learn to let go of each one and experience a corresponding drop in suffering and an increase in fulfillment. And Kevin shows us how…

For the purposes of this episode, we focus on the 4th and 5th fetters: desire and ill will – aka, our human compulsion to act on our various likes and dislikes. Kevin’s guided practice tries to show us that in our present experience, there is actually no inevitable reason to react to anyone, or anything.

If we are quiet and open and curious, we can follow the chain of reactivity back, and find out, as weird as it may sound, that nothing in our direct experience actually kicked it all off. We don’t have to react to anything. For Kevin, this is a freedom worth cultivating. In his words, “we get off that rollercoaster of extreme highs and extreme lows,” and start to respond to life in a more sane, effective, and compassionate way.

We get into all this and so much more! Kevin has such a refreshing perspective on the normalcy of the whole self-realization process.

Jeff says: “I now do this practice all the time – maybe more than any other Mind Bod Pod practice – and it works for me, every time. I have less reactivity in my life in general, and I consider this practice central to that.”

So give it a shot! You can also find other inquiries on Kevin’s website.

LINKS:

* Kevin’s site: simplytheseen.com* liberationunleashed.com

The Afterparty (go to www.mindbodpod.com to watch!)

In this Afterparty, Tasha and Jeff talk about how Kevin’s logical style of spiritual inquiry can be a great fit for the Western mind. They also talk about how there are many other ways and paths. And then they talk about what it means to be your own teacher: How we need the traditions and experienced guides to go deeper, but ultimately we are the ones taking care of ourselves and directing our path.

Then, to quote the AI they asked to summarize this Afterparty, “Tasha and Jeff conclude with a lighthearted reflection on the elusive and omnipresent nature of enlightenment.” 😅

Let us know in the comments how the fetters practice landed for you!

K, That’s all for now. Thanks for tuning in!

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

Today we head off the rails and into the spiritual undergrowth, where the wild things are. Our guest is Diana Piruzevska, aka Neon Dreamer – psychic, medium, healer. Yup – all that! Not her choice - at least not at first…

Skeptics might scoff at these intuitions, experiences, and capacities, but that doesn’t change the fact that they kept happening to Diana and have always happened to some of her older family members. After years of battling it, she’s come out the other side and embraced her witchy Macedonian heritage. Diana now shares her talents with others via her radio show and her professional healing practice.

For her guided meditation, Diana takes us through a grounding and opening breath practice that she uses with clients before a session. Then, to demo what her psychic process is like, she does a reading for Tasha, sharing out loud what she’s noticing about Tasha’s neat and orderly brain.

Diana talks about what it feels like to lock into a client, to get an embodied feeling for their experience. Sometimes it’s very visual, other times more kinaesthetic – she unpacks the whole creative thing for us, leading to a lively discussion on doing magic on creepy dudes, trauma and disembodiment, and how others can navigate the stormy waters between mental illness and spiritual insight.

Enjoy!

LINKS:

* neondreamer.com

* IG: @neonandroid

* Substack: Neon Dreamer

* Spiritual Emergence Network

The Afterparty

In this here Après le Part-AY, your hosts discuss why women and people of colour have higher incidences of empathy and intuition, how hyper-masculinity shuts the whole thing down, and then … a bunch about neurodiversity, since that’s their thing right now.

Let us know in the comments how your witchy psychic vibes are doing these days!

K, That’s all for now. Thanks for tuning in & see you again in 2 weeks (we’re still doing biweekly episodes until life slows down a bit!)

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

Welcome Tim Hwang, an occupational therapist in New York City's public school system. Tim’s specialty is teaching mindfulness to young people with “disabilities classifications” - Autism, ADHD, and so on. Some of these teens are into the practice, some are bored by it, and some are highly resistant to it. And that’s what we get into!

Tim, Tasha, and Jeff all have experience teaching meditation to young people, so there’s much insight-sharing and general tomfoolery. Unsurprisingly, Tasha and Jeff revert to their rebellious teen selves when Tim starts guiding them in his GROW practice - an acronym that means Ground, Relax, Open, Warm (the heart).

Good times! This episode is for anyone interested in supporting young people - whether you’re an educator, a parent, or a teen yourself.

We get into:

* emotional regulation

* customizing meditation for neurodiversity & ADHD

* how to use “five-finger breathing” to calm down

* the role of community,

* and how teens can find their own unique pathways to practice.

Tim - thank you, friend! And to all teens: feel free to ignore everything we say and do it your own way 😅 One-finger breathing!

Then join us for The Afterparty video! And let us know in the comments at www.mindbodpod.com how you liked the GROW practice!

K, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

This episode is a transmission, no doubt about. Our guest wandered out of the Ontario forest and is here to challenge how we think about ourselves and meditation and nature and agriculture and the old crafts and a lot more. Welcome, Steven Martyn, founder of The Sacred Gardener School.

While living alone in the bush - mediating, surviving - Steven came to understand meditation as a form of hunting for the origin of thoughts, looking for the “I within the I.” His relationship to nature changed. More intimate, more connected to nature’s gifts. He found the old ways of agriculture, of grafting, of building – all of them sacred practices. And now he teaches this in his forest mystery school.

For our first guided exercise, we go back to being little kids and receive blessings from our elders, our ancestors. “There’s so much animosity and stress out there these days, we need to take care of our little child,” says Steven.

For the second exercise — near the end of the episode — we practice seeing the natural world in a way that may push us out of our idea of being a small, separate self.

We talk leadership, authority, hierarchy. Steven describes the power of the group at his school and how he helps participants move deeper into their relationship with nature.

Lots of good stuff – maybe life-changing if you let it in!

Then join us for The Afterparty (at www.mindbodpod.com), where your hosts discuss the natural world and plunging nondual fuckery unto infinity. Then we talk about losing connection to the blissful interconnectivity of nature, talking to plants, Jeff’s discarded book ideas, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Let us know in the comments how your bond with nature’s going these days!

K, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

Welcome Eileen Laird, author of Healing Mindset. This episode, we target autoimmune disease and the role that the mind-body connection can play in reducing pain, increasing resilience, and living a more vital life.

There are over a hundred different autoimmune conditions — from rheumatoid arthritis to lupus to Grave’s disease to multiple sclerosis and more — one in ten people have an autoimmune condition worldwide. Stress makes the condition worse… fortunately, this also works in the other direction! In moments of overwhelm, we can learn to send an anti-inflammatory cascade back through the nervous system.

And that’s what we practice today! Eileen guides us in a soothing meditation of self-compassion, both working with pain and befriending the body.

In our discussion afterwards we explore:

* how to work with pain and find safe places in the body

* the relationship between sensitivity and autoimmune conditions

* how to notice early warning signals

* how Eileen supports herself via daily routines

* and much more…

Take the practice for a spin and tell us in the comments how it went!

Eileen, thank you for writing your book and for supporting so many people through your incredible podcast.

LINKS:

* Healing Mindset Book

* The Phoenix Helix Podcast

Toby Sola is founder of the Brightmind Meditation app and an old friend of Jeff’s. In this episode, we chew on some tasty mini-meditation snacks – yum yum!

We get all Jedi-mind and try splitting our attention between chatting and meditating. Finally, we explore an inventive and beautiful practice of nurturing our own sense of trustworthiness.

All of these are ways of highlighting the basic creativity of meditation, how we can mix and match the core skills to build practices that work for us.

We chat about so much more! Like:

* What’s the minimum amount of meditation for stress relief vs more enduring transformation?

* How is one view of meditation and practice limiting?

* How do we work with cringe moments?

* And so on, and so forth, unto infinity!!!!

Take these practices for a spin in your own nervous system, then join us for the official Afterparty, and tell us how it went!

K, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️