Cara Lai

Cara Lai is a meditation teacher, artist and writer living in Hinesburg, Vermont, with her husband and their two small children. Before turning fully to the dharma she worked as a wilderness guide, a social worker and a psychotherapist, and she has spent a large share of her adult life on retreat, including a full year alone in a cabin in Colorado that began in 2020. She is authorised to teach in the Theravada insight lineage through the IMS and Spirit Rock teacher training.

Her teaching is frank, warm and often funny, aimed at making practice feel workable for people with busy, messy lives, especially parents. She leads retreats at IMS and other centres, has taught teen retreats for Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, and records guided meditations for the Ten Percent Happier and Hatch apps. Online she runs small dana-based classes: Meditate Your Face Off, on the basics of Buddhist practice in real life; a short class on generosity; and Parenting as the Path, co-led with Ofosu Jones-Quartey. She shares free meditations, talks and essays through her Substack, and designs the illustrated shirts and mugs in her shop, with all the money raised passed on to Buddhist Global Relief and to Inward Bound Mindfulness.