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We Were Made for These Times:
Skillfully Moving Through Change, Loss and Disruption

On-Demand Course

With Kaira Jewel Lingo

Available Now!

Meet life’s greatest challenges with wisdom, resilience, and balance In truth... we were made for these times

Life is always full of change: birth, death; losing and starting relationships; switching jobs; turning pages, and beginning new chapters.

In this moment, our society is facing immense uncertainty, collective disruption, and polarization. What once seemed steady and solid is shifting. So many of us are working through grief and personal hardship. We need new perspectives and tools to help us navigate the difficulty of the present moment.

In this heart-centered course, Kaira Jewel Lingo offers a path to help us meet the individual and collective pain of these times — with open hearts, and clear minds.

Kaira Jewel is a Dharma teacher who has a lifelong interest in blending spirituality and meditation with social justice. Steeped in the wisdom of her mentor Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and her own experiences, Kaira Jewel translates timeless Buddhist teachings into simple, poignant lessons.

In truth, we were made for these times. We already have everything we need.

We Were Made for These Times with Kaira Jewel Lingo

Join this transformative, self-paced course to learn how to:

  • Soothe your strong emotions
  • Nurture a deeper sense of stability in daily life
  • Let go of resistance, and be at peace with what is
  • Stay rooted in the midst of overwhelm
  • Transform habit patterns
  • Cultivate gratitude in the midst of heartbreak
  • Advance your meditation practice and learn new mindfulness skills

Module 1: This Is It: Coming Home to This Moment Just as It Is

We Were Made for These Times with Kaira Jewel Lingo

Navigating times of transition and challenge becomes all the more difficult when we resist or avoid our suffering. In our opening module, we explore coming home to ourselves, when we are unsettled by change and disorder. We learn how taking care of this moment, just as it is, is the best way to take care of the future.

Our meditations include the practices of softening, and resting back into the unknown; entrusting our deep and troubling questions to the depths of our consciousness; and letting go of resistance, by being at peace with what is.

Module 2: Weathering the Storm: Caring for Our Strong Emotions

In this second module, we learn powerful practices of staying rooted and grounded in the midst of overwhelm and crisis. We practice returning to the reality, and safety, of the present moment through intentional, focused belly breathing, and also through walking mindfully, learning to stay connected to the earth in full awareness.

Using powerful teachings from Buddhist Psychology, we also do a deep dive into soothing strong emotions. Mindfulness can help us recognize, accept, and embrace painful feelings with compassion. As we do, our emotion settles down and we can access deeper understanding and insight, and transform our habit patterns.

Module 3: Equanimity and Letting Go

In this third module, we learn about the symbolic eight worldly winds — pleasure and pain; gain and loss; praise and blame; and fame and disrepute — and our true, interdependent nature. Meditating on this nature can help us touch the freedom of non-fear.

We also learn about upeska – equanimity and inclusiveness – and how to cultivate our capacity to see the bigger picture, and to view ourselves and our difficulties with greater understanding.

Module 4: Nurturing the Good and Showing Up Fully

Gratitude is enormously transformative in moments of hardship and a huge booster of resilience and strength. In our final module we explore cultivating gratitude in daily life, including with the children in our lives, and even in the midst of heartbreak.

Then, to close the course, we gather our courage and confidence to meet the difficulties and transitions we are facing. And Kaira Jewel guides us in practicing guided visualizations to move through our challenges and transitions; embodying confidence and peace; and deepening our intentions through compassion for ourselves and others experiencing hardship.

Praise for Kaira Jewel’s Teachings

We Were Made for These Times with Kaira Jewel Lingo

“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

4 Hours of Teachings

High-definition, insightful video lessons from Kaira Jewel will help you to deepen your understanding, and tap into your inner wisdom.

Guided Meditations

Kaira Jewel will help you to deepen your meditation practice with techniques from the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Vipassana lineage.

Pre-Recorded Q&A Sessions

Videos of recorded interactive sessions from a previous live release of this course are also included. Each recording is approx. 1 hour, and is oriented around the themes and practices covered in the week's teachings.

Total Flexibility

Complete this course independently, on your own schedule, at your ideal pace. Watch and re-watch the videos as you please.

About Kaira Jewel Lingo

Kaira Jewel Lingo

Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher who has 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, and 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. In addition to writing We Were Made for These Times: Skilfully Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption (2021), she is also the editor of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children (2007).

Now based in New York, she teaches and leads retreats internationally, provides spiritual mentoring, 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.