Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Are You Overcomplicating Your Life? | Kaira Jewel Lingo About this episode We're in the midst of an exciting evolution of the overall 10% Happier project. In our quest to make this podcast more actionable – to help you operationalize all the game-changing ideas you encounter on this pod – we're now offering guided meditations to accompany each full episode of the show, available to paid subscribers at DanHarris.com http://danharris.com/. For the month of August, those meditations will come from Kaira Jewel Lingo https://www.kairajewel.com/, a Buddhist teacher who spent 15 years as a monastic in the Plum Village tradition.
In this bonus episode, you'll hear our head of content, DJ Cashmere, in conversation with Kaira Jewel, sharing some of her fascinating backstory. From a communal Christian community in Chicago, to a Zen monastery in the south of France, to making her life as an independent teacher in New York, you'll hear how the thread of "voluntary simplicity" runs through all of it.
Related Episodes:
How To Keep Your Relationships On the Rails | Kaira Jewel Lingo https://www.danharris.com/p/how-to-keep-your-relationships-on-133?utm_source=publication-search
A Buddhist Recipe for Handling Turmoil | Kaira Jewel Lingo https://www.danharris.com/p/a-buddhist-recipe-for-handling-turmoil-73e?r=4o5o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here http://eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-2025!
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hey, gang. It's the start of a new month, so that means we've got a new teacher of the month. You might ask, what is this teacher of the month thing of which you speak? Well, it's really for paid subscribers over at danharris.com. We now bring in teachers of the month to craft and record bespoke guided meditations that come with every full-length episode on Monday and Wednesday. So the idea really is to address what I think is one of the biggest problems in personal growth, which is that you read a great book or you listen to a great podcast and you feel inspired, and then you get just sucked back into the habit patterns of your life. So what I want to do, what my team and I want to do, is have these guided meditations that allow you to pound the wisdom from the
1:03 Dan Harris? podcast conversations into your neurons in an abiding way. We often compare it to the lecture-lab model at universities and colleges, where the podcast is the lecture and the guided meditations are the lab. Okay, so it's August. We've got a new teacher of the month. This time, it's Kyra Jewel-Lingo, a fan favorite. She's been on the show many times. I asked our director of content, DJ Kashmir, to do a kind of background informational interview with Kyra Jewel about her life story, which is a fascinating one. She grew up in a communal religious community in Chicago and then went on to become a nun in the Plum Village Zen tradition, and now she's on her own as an independent Dharma teacher, and she's actually looking to eventually create a retreat center of her own. So before we get into Kyra Jewel's background, I want
1:48 Dan Harris? to tell you that I will be going live on Substack for a meditation and Q&A for paid subscribers on Tuesday, August 5th at 3:30 Eastern. This is a solo live, no guest, but I believe we will be doing a live guided meditation with Kyra Jewel later in the month, so stay tuned for that. But the next upcoming live is on August 5th. Kyra Jewel-Lingo in conversation with DJ Kashmir, right after this.
2:14 Dan Harris? If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission,
2:59 Dan Harris? and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit.
3:44 Dan Harris? And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show.
4:06 Speaker 01 Kyra Jolingo, welcome back to the show.
4:08 Speaker 02 Thank you. It's great to be here again.
4:11 Speaker 01 It's great to have you again. I really always look forward to getting to talk to you on so many levels. It makes me happy. I learned something. The audience learned something. So thanks for saying yes, and thanks for being our teacher of the month this month.
4:24 Speaker 02 Thank you. Yeah, you always ask such good questions.
4:29 Speaker 01 Well, all right, no pressure. Let's see if I can follow through on that. Yeah, I would love to start with giving folks an opportunity to get to know you a bit and hear your story. And if I understand and remember correctly, you actually have a pretty remarkable path to where you are now, right? So you're this sort of eminent beloved meditation teacher, but there's been stops along the way, ranging from, I think, your dad's work with Martin Luther King, to you living in like a Christian commune in Chicago, to a few years spent above a bar in Nairobi, to, you know, a decade and a half as a nun in the south of France. Like,
5:09 Speaker 01 it's quite a story. So do I have those beats right? And can you kind of connect the dots for us?
5:15 Speaker 02 Pretty well. Yeah, so I was born and raised in Chicago, my first part of my life, to an interracial family that had chosen to live in this family religious order, a Christian community that was living and working with the poor all over the world, doing human development, village development work. Yeah, so my dad had worked with Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement as a white southerner, organizing white southerners who were sympathetic to civil rights. My mom, a black woman who grew up on the west side of Chicago in Evanston. They both really
5:53 Speaker 02 had a lot of passion for spiritual seeking and social change. So that was transmitted to me very young. And yeah, as part of our... Time in this community, I spent four years in Kenya, in Nairobi, on the edge of Nairobi, in a slum known as Kawangware, where our community had two stories above a bar. So I lived there for four years and I really appreciated that time. And yeah, then found myself back in Chicago for junior high and then Atlanta for high school. We had left the community by then. After college, felt really drawn to Plum Village,
6:37 Speaker 02 to the community of Thik Nhat Hanh. Because of how I think I grew up in community, I really, throughout my high school and college, I was really, really wanting to find a teacher, wanting to find a community, wanting to find a way of living that made sense to me. Because having been raised in a countercultural community where everyone was living in voluntary simplicity, I remember feeling very young that material accumulation wasn't the way to happiness. That wasn't going to be my way of defining success and well-being. So when we left the community, I found myself very adrift and just like
7:21 Speaker 02 nuclear family living where everyone's out for themselves and trying to make it materially just never felt like anything inspiring for me for like my whole life, to put my whole life into that. So very quickly, like in college, I was like asking these questions of like, gosh, I'm getting a great education here, but I'm not learning about spiritual. Something's missing. So that really led me to Plum Village and to Thik Nhat Hanh. And yeah, I spent 15 years as a monastic and became a Dharma teacher in that tradition. And basically at age 40, decided something else was calling me
8:03 Speaker 02 and felt that I needed to return to lay life. And that's 10 years ago now. So I've been teaching as a lay Dharma teacher and mentor and becoming an author, all these things. A lot has happened in these 10 years that I feel like I have different lives in one life. Yeah, and then I was able to also really delve deep in the insight tradition. And that's really been a gift to be a student and teacher in both.
8:33 Speaker 01 Can you say more about voluntary simplicity? What did that mean? And why did you think it was the way to go? I could imagine someone in your shoes hating that and wanting an Xbox or something.
8:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:49 Speaker 02 This is a bit of a detour, but I think it'll make sense. I was listening to Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, who was talking about, it was kind of just a theory, right? It's not proven, but she was talking about how there are hormones and neurotransmitters that operate when we are really connected and we're deeply embedded with other people who we feel we belong to, and that that's serotonin, right? That when we're really deeply satisfied in the ways humans can be, that's this deep fulfilling kind of happiness and well-being.
9:30 Speaker 02 And she was saying that modernity tricks us into thinking that dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, cortisol, that those things give these quick highs, but then ultimately leave us feeling worse. But that's the promise of modernity, of accumulation, of fame, of wealth, of all the external, right? And this separation from this community and base of belonging, this knowing ourselves to be completely interwoven with the world around us, with the species, right? The air, the water, the soil. And it's addictive, right?
10:13 Speaker 02 We keep going for these hits of pleasure and then... And so that's just one way to answer your question is that I think, you know, it was an imperfect community in many ways, but I felt a sense of meaning and belonging, and that people were doing things that were quite risky. I mean, people left a lot of... My dad got kicked out of his family. For marrying my mom and for choosing this totally incomprehensible, why would you throw all this away? You know, live in this community where you don't get status? You don't earn wealth. And, you know, my mom's family was more understanding,
10:55 Speaker 02 but had a very hard time understanding why she was living this way. So all these people were choosing what can be called downward mobility. There was this real sense of spiritual family. And even today, even though the residential aspect of the community ended in the eighties, you know, there are people who are family to me from this community, who I still connect with regularly and they're like extended family. And we all did this sort of quasi-monastic living together. So for me, the voluntary simplicity was people not earning personal income.
11:38 Speaker 02 So everyone got a small stipend that covered very basic things. And if you worked outside of the community, you gave your money to the community. And many people didn't work outside. They did the work of the community. So everyone got the same stipend. We lived on in-kind donations, so we had not very great food, frozen fish sticks and cardboard fake bacon. Before plant-based bacon was even popular, we were eating that because it was inexpensive. Anyway, but we had amazing experiences where like everyone who was in the sixth grade, we had a sixth grade trip where we went for three weeks camping to the Cascade Mountains.
12:22 Speaker 02 And we did Tai Chi every morning and we had to spend 24 hours on a vigil solo. And I was 12, turning 13, and I like spent 24 hours alone in the wilderness. Like we, you learned things and you, one of the things someone who raised me said was that the teachers, because we went to public school, the teachers always knew who in their class was from this community because they were the ones who kind of communicated the needs of the class to the teacher. Like they were in tune with what the whole class was wanting, needing, and tried to communicate that to the teacher. So like, there were just, a lot of other skills got developed.
13:04 Speaker 02 Because for most of my childhood, I was around at least 20 to 60 kids. And I was only with my parents one night a week for family night. So it was this giving up of material gain and accumulation. But it was also, you know, an orientation to communal living and being with, with others. And every meal would start with a song and a reflection question. And everyone would give some kind of response to that question. And I just remembered, I remembered adults caring what I thought and genuinely asking me things. And like, having real conversations about real things.
13:46 Speaker 02 So the meaning of all that for me was, like, I remember when we lived in Kenya and we lived in a slum. I saw the inequality of how people lived in the US and how people were living in Kenya. I heard about how the US gave its maize that it fed to cows to people in Kenya. And I ate that maize, you know, I liked that maize. It was very chewy, you know? But it was like, all those things were registering. And I remember when I went back to the US, we didn't have a TV in Kenya. All we had was a radio and a tape player, cassette player. And I remember going back and seeing people's homes where there were three TVs in different rooms.
14:30 Speaker 02 And I just remember at eight or nine or 10, just knowing that wasn't necessary. I just know, we lived happily with no TV. And then here you had one house with so many TVs. And just the little girl, me, it was like, why? Why do you need that? That kind of critique, that ability to kind of stand back and question. I think it was because I lived in a community where, where that was the purpose of that organization, was to kind of stand outside the mainstream and sort of say, there are other ways. There are other values, there are other...
15:08 Speaker 02 There are other things to base your life upon.
15:14 Speaker 01 So you've had these distinct periods, living in community, and then, for a while, in high school and college, not. And then, again, in community as a monastic. And then, again, around the age of 40, not. And you just described very beautifully a lot of the upsides of this simplicity and this communal living. But of course, in this moment, you're choosing something a little bit different, at least from the outside looking in, from what I can tell. You're sort of back in the real world. Do you feel like you've been able to find some center of the Venn diagram to bring lessons from all those years of communal living
15:59 Speaker 01 into a life where you have to have a cellphone and pay taxes and all of those kinds of things?
16:05 Speaker 02 Yeah. I think it's a lot harder when you're just two people and a dog in a household.
16:14 Speaker 01 And that's you, that's you right now, two people and a dog.
16:16 Speaker 02 That's me right now, yeah, me and my partner and our dog. And yeah, I think we often have conversations about how much more simple we want to live. And it's so easy to accumulate. It's so much harder. Like, as a monastic, we moved every three months. You had to change rooms, or you were always being sent to different centers. Like, you just couldn't accumulate as much because, well, you only had your bed box to put things in and your desk. You didn't have much space. And it was in our vows that we, you know, we were meant to live very simply. Because we don't have a lot of community around us. If you lived in closer connection with others,
17:00 Speaker 02 you would borrow things more or share. But here, it's like each family's in their own very separate house. And so you have to have everything that you want for yourself. I find it much more complex to live that simply. But it's a conversation we're always having. And the next phase of our life that Adam and I are looking to is really starting a center where we can practice more monastically. We'll live in a house as a couple, but we'll be creating a space for people to come practice engaged contemplation. So meditation, prayer,
17:41 Speaker 02 and how to be really responsive to the needs of the world. And so we're crafting our life now, envisioning it in terms of what we know supports us and what we don't want to carry with us from this house, for example, just how to really keep things simple. And we ultimately see ourselves living out, you know, the majority of our lives in some kind of community where people are coming to practice with us. And whether it's for the day, whether it's for, you know, a few days or a week in deep contemplation, in silence, on retreat.
18:24 Speaker 02 But we'll be sharing more of our lives. We haven't figured it out, but we're figuring it out.
18:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:37 Speaker 01 I want to get to your meditations in just a second, but I do have one more question on this living simply, living communally piece. Listening to you talk, I have to admit, there's, I feel a sense of, I feel a whole bunch of things that aren't necessarily positive. You know, there's like some longing, there's some FOMO, there's some frustration. You know, my wife and I live in a city. We have two kids and we've had brief.
19:07 Speaker 01 Moments of feeling like what it could feel like to live a life closer to the one you're describing. You know, we took the kids on a family meditation retreat to one of Thich Nhat Hanh's monasteries a few months back, and it was this idyllic week, you know, they're running around on a mountain and they're playing with strangers, but it's totally safe and you're not worrying about feeding them five times a day because somebody else is worrying about that and on and on. And when I came back from that, I mean, when I was in it, it felt like heaven. And when I came back from it, it just felt like grief because the conditions of my life are not such that I can, in this moment, you know,
19:50 Speaker 01 I mean, I did, I floated it. I didn't get very far, but I did, you know, a test balloon of like, can we just move to the mountain? But, you know, there's for a thousand reasons we can't right now. And I feel like what I'm hearing you say is that it has been hard to apply these lessons and you're therefore trying to build this fifth chapter that is like an in-between place where you will be more on the land and more in community. And that sounds amazing for you. And I'm selfishly wondering if you have any advice for me or for others who might feel like, you know, drawn in some way, shape or form to some of what you're describing, but, but it feels, you know, inaccessible for whatever reason.
20:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing that. My heart is just so with you and like the, yeah, the contrast of coming back home. And I just really want to say, I think we really need to take the big picture and see that our society isn't structured well.
20:57 Speaker 02 We live in a society where it's very hard for families, for couples, for individuals to get their needs met on all the levels that we need to meet our needs. Like, I think it's helpful to just name that. That's the world we live in.
21:14 Speaker 01 Hmm.
21:15 Speaker 02 Right? And so unless you are in a larger, you know, structure that's going against the stream, it's just not set up for optimal well-being because of how isolated we are. So I think if it softens a little bit the pain of like, why is it so hard to live the way I want to live? It's because we live in a society that isn't set up for that. So it's not personal. It's not something we're not doing well. It's not, you know, it's not like, oh, if I were just more clever, I could figure this out. No. It's just not set up that way for any of us.
21:56 Speaker 02 I mean, that is why I admire my parents and the people that they formed this community with, because that took a lot to decide, you know, I'm not going to march to the beat of modernity completely. And I think there are ways to gather with others and create pockets of resistance. I think we really need to see it as resistance, but really like pockets of resistance where we are asking really hard questions of ourselves. Right? Like, our society sees us as a resource to exploit in this attention economy. We are like being mined all the time.
22:39 Speaker 02 It's actually, you know, very violent, you know? But we're like being exploited every moment. And so how do we, how do we say no to that? How do we wake up to that and not feed into that? Because of our desires, because of we want things faster, simpler, easier. For what? You know? I mean, I think we really need to have some deep ontological explorations of why are we here? What is our lives supposed to be as humans? And be around other people who are willing to have those kinds of courageous explorations with us and hold us, you know, challenge us.
23:26 Speaker 01 I really appreciate your sort of exhortation to start with, you know, just normalizing that that living isn't easy in this world and that that's not a personal failing. And I also really appreciate your sort of fierce clarity around around what it might take to to push back against that. And also want to, before I let you go, you know, one very small way that I think we've been thinking here on Team 10%, thinking about trying to push back against the stream is just trying to come up with realistic ways for all of the folks who listen to the podcast to feel a little more connected to their practice and to each
24:10 Speaker 01 other. And that's why we reached out to you and others this year to try to start a Teacher of the Month where people can feel like someone's holding their hand through their practice and they're doing something alongside others. And, you know, starting tomorrow, I'll be among many thousands of people who have you in my ears in the morning. And so I just wanted to invite you to take a second before we go to just say a little bit about these awesome meditations that you've put together, what that process was like, what you hope people get out of them.
24:42 Speaker 02 Thank you for setting that context up for me because it makes me feel more connected to everybody who'll be listening. So that's, yeah, it was really lovely to be, you know, for you all to sort of share, here are some of the topics we'd like to have the meditations on. So it gave me a chance to also explore new territory as far as, well, for one thing, it just made me realize you could have a meditation on anything. So it's the territory is so vast and that it's fun to kind of stretch and see, oh, how would I do a meditation on?
25:22 Speaker 02 Spiritual friends, or some of the things I had done meditations on already. And so those felt very familiar, like taking care of strong emotions, or you know, how to hold stress, or some fear around making a decision. Or but then like, it gave me a chance also to dig deeper in like, things that I have already offered meditation in before, like the open awareness or choiceless attention. But then to kind of see how other teachers have offered this and kind of blend different styles. So I guess I really, I hope that it, it does feel like we're practicing together and that
26:07 Speaker 02 there's this sense of being accompanied from one meditation to the next. And I think there's some kind of thread between them, which of course will reverberate with the podcasts that Dan does. But um, yeah, I, I really hope that they're helpful and that they allow people to feel that they can expand their heart and leave some of their worries and thinking, you know, let, let go of some of that and just really touch, touch into the goodness that really is here.
26:40 Speaker 01 Well, I'm super excited, but one of the highlights of my week this week was when you sent me the drafts and I got to get a sneak peek and they just, they just really are excellent and appreciate you for doing them and for coming on. So yeah, thank you.
26:56 Speaker 02 Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity.
27:08 Dan Harris? Thank you to Kyra Jewel and also to my man DJ Cashmere. Don't forget, I'll be going live on Substack for a guided meditation and Q and A sesh. It's only for paid subscribers. It's Tuesday, August 5th at 3:30 PM Eastern. And again, a reminder, Kyra Jewel is our Teacher of the Month for August. You can hear her all new companion meditations throughout the month. With your paid subscription over at DanHarris.com. And stay tuned for more bonus content on Sundays from Kaira Jewel, right here on the main podcast feed, including a sneak peek of one of the subscriber-only meditations and a frequently asked questions segment. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili.
27:50 Dan Harris? Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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