Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

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The next time you’re stressed, act like a gazelle

April 13, 2021 by Jeremy Mohler

This will sound wrong to your modern, capitalist ears, but it’s true. Relaxing the body relaxes the mind far more than the other way around.

School didn’t teach us this. The stories our society tells about success and happiness don’t reflect it.

We’re told that thinking is king. That rational thought is more valuable than emotion. That more information — more data — is always better.

But that just doesn’t line up with the science of how the body works.

Some 80 percent of information that travels between the mind and body goes from the body to the mind.

Drawing a line between something we call the“mind” and something we call the “body” might even be unhelpful. Researchers studying the digestive situation have been discovering more and more connection between the brain and the gut.

Just look at animals. “When death appears imminent,” writes the psychologist Peter Levine, “all mammals instinctively enter an altered state of consciousness.”

Like when a gazelle goes limp — “plays possum” — just before it’s caught by a chasing cheetah. “What that means for the [gazelle] is that it will not have to suffer while being torn apart by the cheetah’s sharp teeth and claws.”

Many of us humans do the same when we’re overwhelmed emotionally or stressed out.

We freeze. Our stomach muscles tighten and shoulders pull up. Our face scrunches and neck tenses.

Our body is trying to protect us from some imminent danger. Even if the danger is somebody on Twitter.

It doesn’t take a big cat to get us there. Sometimes it’s extreme trauma, like war, a near-death experience, or sexual abuse. But often all it takes is a passive aggressive text from a friend. A tweet by a QAnon-believing white supremacist. Someone driving aggressively on the highway.

Sometimes we fight back. We fire off a tweet or flip off the driver.

But because so many of these little traumas occur throughout the day, we mostly just keep things inside.

We stuff down our anger or sadness or fear because we have to get to work or pick up the kids from school or watch the next episode of that show everyone’s talking about.

“Trauma is not just the result of major disasters,” writes the psychiatrist Mark Epstein. “An undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life … Our world is unstable and unpredictable, and operates, to a great degree and despite incredible scientific advancement, outside our ability to control it.”

Throw in capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy — the social systems we live within — and the trauma turns up to 11. Violence and harm are all around. Yet we’re just supposed to keep going, showing up to work, paying the bills, doing, doing, doing.

But the gazelle can teach us.

“When it is out of danger, the [gazelle] will literally ‘shake off’ the residual effects of the immobility response and gain full control of its body,” Levine writes. “It will then return to its normal life as if nothing had happened.”

That “shaking off” is the key. It’s how the gazelle discharges all the energy that built up as it tried to escape the cheetah. Once that energy has moved through its body, it can move on with no stress.

Traumatic symptoms — like a tensed-up stomach — aren’t caused by the traumatic event. They’re caused by all that unreleased energy. It stays trapped in the body and wreaks havoc on our muscles, organs, and nervous system.

“Many war veterans and victims of rape know this scenario only too well,” writes Levine.

They may spend months or even years talking about their experiences, reliving them, expressing their anger, fear and sorrow but without passing through the primitive ‘immobility responses’ and releasing the residual energy, they will often remain stuck in the traumatic maze and continue to experience distress.

In other words, the body is a doorway to feeling less stress and anxiety.

Regular exercise can release built-up tension. Yoga has been shown to reset critical brain areas that get disturbed by trauma. Meditation relaxes parts of the body that have tensed up due to overthinking.

Even taking a short break and feeling your feet on the floor over the course of a few deep breaths can help take the edge off.

This all doesn’t mean that thinking — the mind — isn’t helpful.

We need our minds to make decisions, plan, and otherwise navigate the world. Having more information to make a big decision isn’t always helpful. But having the right information is.

And sometimes, we need help feeling safe enough to relax the body and let go of trauma. That’s where talk therapy comes in.

“For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety,” writes psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. “Being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart.”

But the next time you feel stuck, scattered, or lost, remember the gazelle. Go for a walk, do some dancing, stretch a little. Remember that shaking it off is far more effective than trying to think your way to feeling better.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. I’m here to help you be more mindful about work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe to my weekly email here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation can transform your life.

Photo by Edsel Adap.

Mindfulness stops the habitual patterns that rule your life

April 6, 2021 by Jeremy Mohler

When was the last time you felt triggered by someone you love? What about the last time you treated someone in a way you now regret?

What did it feel like in your body? What was going through your mind? Can you remember?

Maybe your shoulders pulled up. Maybe the muscles around your eyes scrunched. Maybe your stomach balled up in a knot.

Maybe you can’t remember your body because you were so lost in thought.

What you were experiencing was a deep-rooted pattern that started when you were little. And you’re not crazy or weird or bad for experiencing it.

“It’s an everyday experience,” writes the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. “At the subtlest level, we feel a tightening, a tensing, a sense of closing down. Then we feel a sense of withdrawing, not wanting to be where we are.”

The tragic irony is that we tense up and withdraw when what we’re really after is connection.

This tension only adds to the disconnection. It cuts us off from what’s actually happening in the present moment. What’s happening in our body. What we’re truly feeling emotionally.

As the disconnection builds, we try to get connection back in the ways we know so well. Ways that seemed to work when we were young.

We people-please, get quiet, boast about ourselves, you name it. We try all kinds of ways to get someone else to make us feel good and loved and attended to. To make us feel connected.

When the connection won’t come, we turn to drastic measures. Some of us get passive aggressive. Others straight up pick a fight. Some of us numb out with things like drinking and overeating. Others just give up and walk away.

Again, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Your emotional patterns are built into your nervous system. You can’t help it.

As a kid, there were moments you lost connection with your parents and other caregivers. These moments were pivotal to the development of your young brain.

Because you were little, you were afraid you might lose the connection forever. You tried all kinds of ways to get attention. You watched how adults reacted to you. You learned over time what worked and what didn’t.

The problem is our emotional patterns are kid patterns. The stories that fuel them are extreme and rigid. “They better give me attention right now or I’ll be alone forever.” “If she isn’t happy then I’m not happy.” “If I don’t have a drink, I’m going to explode.”

Life isn’t really like that. It’s fluid and changing. There are ups and downs, moments of connection and disconnection. It can’t be controlled. Other people can’t be controlled.

But as a kid, you lost trust in life’s ebbs and flows. You forgot that connection would eventually come back. That connection — love — is right here, right now in the present moment. Every present moment.

As Björk sings in “All is Full of Love”:

You’ll be given love
You have to trust it
Maybe not from the sources
You have poured yours
Twist your head around
It’s all around you
All is full of love
All around you
You just ain’t receiving
Your phone is off the hook

But as a kid you developed ways of trying to manipulate life to give you that connected feeling. And that’s what hurts. All your trying to reestablish connection just causes more disconnection.

Here’s the good news. Even just one second of mindfulness presses pause on the kid stories. One second of noticing what’s actually happening in the present moment shines a light on the love.

Take a second right now. Feel your feet on the floor. Notice your breath coming in and out. Listen for the furthest sound. See if you can sense your gratitude for the fact that life just happens, regardless of whether you feel connected or not.

That’s why meditation can be so powerful. It retrains our nervous system — our mind and body connection. Every time we let go of thinking and come back to the breath or our feet on the floor or sound, we’re strengthening a muscle that keeps us more present.

We’re learning to trust that we can feel connected in any moment, regardless of what’s happening. Regardless of whether we’re getting what we want. Regardless of whether someone treats us a certain way or not.

As Chödrön writes:

Sitting practice teaches us how to open and relax to whatever arises, without picking and choosing. It teaches us to experience the uneasiness and the urge fully, and to interrupt the momentum that usually follows. We do this by not following after the thoughts and learning to come back to the present moment. We learn to stay with the uneasiness, the tightening … We train in sitting still with our desire to scratch. This is how we learn to stop the chain reaction of habitual patterns that otherwise will rule our lives. This is how we weaken the patterns that keep us hooked into discomfort that we mistake as comfort.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. I’m here to help you be more mindful about work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe to my weekly email here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation can transform your life.

Photo by Russ Morris.

Waking up to the thoughts that make your life worse

March 30, 2021 by Jeremy Mohler

My dad comes from a working class area of West Virginia, with German Protestant ancestors who were sent to the American colonies as indentured servants. My mom, from a long line of self-sufficient family farmers in rural Maryland.

No wonder I struggle with anxiety. Particularly, anxiety about never getting enough work done. A voice in my head that whispers, “You better get moving.” A wretched restlessness that won’t quit until I burn out and collapse.

I inherited generations of capitalist ways of being. Centuries of rushing to get seeds in the ground, to cut enough wood for winter, to clock in on time at work, to keep the boss happy.

And not just capitalist ways, but also settler-colonialist ways. The early colonies around the Chesapeake Bay where my ancestors settled had a “distinctive settlement pattern … where numerous, more or less isolated, ‘plantations’ lay stretched out along rivers and ridgelines, with little in the way of village-style contact among them.”

This, among other influences, gave American culture its trademark individualism. Its “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” arrogance. Its isolation. Its loneliness.

As the Zen Buddhist teacher and author Natalie Goldberg writes, “Alienation is the American disease. It is our inheritance, our roots.”

I inherited white supremacy too. My family owned a small number of slaves in the years before the Civil War and who knows how many before that. I’ve benefited in narrow, material ways from being white. As much as I’ve suffered from losing my European roots to whiteness.

This isn’t to say that I inherited nothing good. My grandma marched for civil rights in the late 1960s. The work ethic my parents gave me is how I got up early this morning to write this.

It’s to say that waking up is a big deal. Waking up to the ways I move through the day on autopilot. Noticing the countless moments I’m just acting and reacting out of habit. Challenging my delusions.

angel Kyodo williams, the Zen priest, says thoughts fill the mind as if it were:

that drawer that collects everything in your house. They’re moving at an incredible rate of speed. And, for the most part, we almost never get the opportunity to observe them and sort through them. You say, ‘Oh, but wait a minute, someone lived in this house before me. And some of that stuff is not mine. Actually, this is not mine. That’s my mom’s. This is not mine; that’s the inheritance of white supremacy.’ And we have no real way of being able to discern what is mine, what is yours, what we’re holding collectively, what I have inherited, what I have taken on as a measure of protection, of a way to cope at some point in my life.

That’s why meditation, therapy, and other ways of observing and sorting through the mind are so powerful. They press pause on thought patterns and emotional reactions set in motion hundreds if not thousands of years ago.

Even just one second of being awake is extraordinary. You’re turning against the stream when you see things not as they should be but as they actually are.

You’re able to respond rather than react based on old habits that no longer serve you, your family, and your community.

You’re experiencing true freedom. Not the bubble gum, cartoon, “I don’t want to wear a mask” version that political and economic elites want us to keep fighting over.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly email newsletter helps you be more mindful about work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation can transform your life.

Photo by dierk schaefer.

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