Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

Search Sangha Live

Growing the Good: Cultivating Courage, Clarity, and Care

On-Demand Course

With Kaira Jewel Lingo

Available Now!

Nurture the goodness within you – and in the world around you

Even in the most turbulent of times, we can take refuge in one truth: We choose the seeds we water in our lives. Only we can nurture the qualities that help us stay clear, courageous, and connected – both for ourselves and for our communities.

In this four-module course, senior Dharma teacher Kaira Jewel Lingo offers a grounded and accessible exploration of the Four Wise Efforts, a foundational framework in the Buddhist tradition that teaches us how to prevent unwholesome states from arising, befriend and transform those that have arisen, cultivate wholesome states not yet present, and enlarge the goodness already within us.

Drawing on key elements of Buddhist psychology, insight practice, the Engaged Buddhism movement started by her teacher, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and her decades of teaching across diverse communities, Kaira Jewel guides us in working with our own minds – and our collective life together – by tending the seeds of our mental and emotional states.

This course weaves individual, relational, and collective practice. Through teachings, guided meditations, reflective exercises, and a social movement ecology framework, you’ll explore how tending your inner garden becomes an act of resistance – one that nourishes not only your own well-being, but the communities and world you care about.

By grounding our attention, stabilizing our hearts, and nurturing the goodness in ourselves and others, we can meet the challenges of our moment with resilience, wisdom, and a vision of the world we truly wish to grow.

This course was previously run live. It is now offered as a self–paced programme that you can work through as your daily life allows.

Across the four modules, you’ll learn how to:

  • Create supportive conditions that prevent harm from taking root
  • Meet difficult emotions and patterns skillfully, reducing unnecessary suffering
  • Cultivate and sustain wholesome states in yourself and your community
  • Transform unwholesome states and what no longer serves
  • Apply personal cultivation to meaningful action in your community, supporting collective care and the world you wish to grow

Module 1 - Choosing Which Seeds to Nourish

In the first module, Kaira Jewel introduces us to the Buddhist psychology concepts of mind and store consciousness, offering a framework to understand how mental states arise and pass.

You’ll learn selective seed watering – choosing which thoughts and habits to nourish – and explore mindful consumption in daily life, from media to relationships.

We’ll reflect on the truth that pain is inevitable, suffering is optional, and practice avoiding the “2nd arrow” of unnecessary mental suffering. Individually and collectively, we’ll consider how to create conditions that support well-being and prevent unwholesome seeds from taking root in our lives and communities.

The mantra for this module is: “Don’t water what doesn’t need to grow.”

Module 2 - Composting What Does Not Serve

In our second module, we focus on embracing and transforming difficult states when they arise.

We’ll explore the role of manas, the part of mind that clings and ignores moderation, and how these patterns show up both individually and in groups, so we can respond skillfully.

Practices will include self-forgiveness, forgiving others, and staying with the trouble – facing challenges directly and with compassion, while letting go of reactivity. You’ll learn tools to transform unwholesome seeds already sprouted, and we’ll also discuss ways communities can support each other in letting go of harmful cycles.

The mantra for this module is: “Feel it, befriend it, release it.”

Module 3 - Growing the Wholesome Seeds

In this module, Kaira Jewel invites you to consciously nurture qualities you wish to strengthen: joy, clarity, courage, belonging, and equanimity.

We’ll explore how small, daily acts can water these seeds and help them flourish in your life, your sangha, and your wider community. We’ll also reflect on how cultivating these seeds in ourselves and our sangha can translate into intentional compassionate engagement in the wider world.

Practices will include gratitude, reflection, and intentional cultivation, both individually and collectively.

The mantra for this module is: “Water what you want to grow.”

Module 4 - Keeping the Glow Growing

In the final module, we focus on stabilizing and deepening wholesome states that are already present.

We’ll examine ways to create structures and habits that help goodness endure, individually and collectively, so that clarity, courage, and care continue to grow over time.

You’ll practice embedding ease, clarity, and compassion into your nervous system and daily routines while supporting others in sustaining these qualities.

The mantra for this module is: “Marinate in the goodness and share it generously.”

Praise for Kaira Jewel's Teaching

“Kaira Jewel is insightful and supportive. Her teachings have been immeasurable in their benefit to me.”

“I’m deeply grateful for Kaira Jewel’s teachings and the presence she brings to her classes. She holds space with powerful compassion, integrity, and levity.”

“Kaira Jewel is a kind, compassionate and wise teacher. I enjoyed her talks, insights, group exercises and kind group facilitation. I highly recommend her as a teacher.”

On-Demand Course Details

Teaching Sessions

Each module is a full teaching session with Kaira Jewel: a grounded dharma talk on the Four Wise Efforts, a guided meditation, and an extended time in which she responds at length to participants' questions. Watch them at your own pace, and return to them whenever you wish.

Your Course Space

The course is yours to keep. All four modules live in your own course space on our platform, together with the resources for each module — the slides, a journaling assignment, and a guided meditation — so you can move through the material in your own time and come back to it as often as you like.

Reflective Exercises

Kaira Jewel offers an inquiry practice alongside each module — selective seed watering, mindful consumption, self-forgiveness, and intentional cultivation. Each is provided as a journaling assignment beneath its module, so you can work through it in your own time or with someone in your life.

Kaira Jewel Lingo

Lifetime Access

All teachings, meditations and question-and-answer sessions are recorded, captioned and archived in your course space. The video recordings are permanently available for you to come back to as many times as you like in the future.

About Kaira Jewel Lingo

Kaira Jewel Lingo

Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in blending spirituality and meditation with social justice. 

Having grown up in an ecumenical Christian community where families practiced a new kind of monasticism and worked with the poor, at the age of twenty-five she entered a Buddhist monastery in the Plum Village tradition and spent fifteen years living as a nun under the guidance of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. She received Lamp Transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh and became a Zen teacher in 2007. She is also a teacher in the Vipassana Insight lineage through Spirit Rock Meditation Center. 

Today she sees her work as a continuation of the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh as well as the work of her parents, inspired by their stories and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King Jr. on desegregating the South.
 
Kaira Jewel is the author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption (2021) and co-author of Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation (2024). She is also the editor of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children (2011).
 
Now based in New York, she teaches and leads retreats internationally, provides spiritual mentoring to groups, and interweaves art, play, nature, racial and earth justice, and embodied mindfulness practice in her teaching. She especially feels called to share the Dharma with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, as well as activists, educators, youth, artists, and families. 

Click here to learn more about Kaira Jewel Lingo.