Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Mindfulness is helping me finally give myself permission to relax

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I call it “striving.” I’ve heard others call it hustling, hard work, the grind, “just the way things are.”

It’s my mind’s default mode, the part of my personality that almost always jumps in the driver’s seat and takes the wheel.

On good days, it shows up as an exact and tidy to-do list, with just enough time to knock out each task one by one.

I wake up to my first alarm, roll out of bed, stretch, meditate, scramble eggs that look like they’re on a Michelin-starred chef’s Instagram, and get to writing. I finish work just before dinner and spend the evening relaxing with a book or enjoying time with my girlfriend.

Most days it gives me a gnawing sense of incompleteness, a lack of something, as if I’ve got unfinished business. It feels like I’m running from one thing to the next, like I’m leaning out of the present moment and into the future — like I need to strive to catch up.

Who or what am I trying to catch? I have no idea.

I’m Sisyphus, the ancient Greek king punished by being forced to roll a rock up a hill over and over again for eternity. I’m exhausted and don’t want to work anymore.

But ,  working more is the only way I’ll feel whole, accomplished, complete, says the striving part of me.

So, I start pushing the rock again, only to soon lose interest and get distracted. I pour another cup of coffee, pick up my phone and scroll through Instagram, turn on Netflix — anything to escape feeling the incompleteness.

(If striving isn’t resonating with you, think about what part of your personality takes the lead when you’re by yourself for a long period of time. Or ask yourself, what story do I most often tell myself when I feel anxiety?)

There are many reasons for my tendency to strive.

As a kid, I was young for my grade level, which often made me feel behind.

My parents are solidly middle class, having achieved a decent standard of living by working rather than hiring others to work for them.

I’ve been marinating in capitalist ideology my entire life, which manufactures a sense of scarcity and encourages individual rather than collective ways of achieving abundance. Capitalism is all I know — I’ve been cut off from the wisdom of tens of thousands of years of human experience with other sorts of relationships to each other and nature.

But let’s set the reasons why to the side for now.

What has helped me have more of those good days recently is that I’m changing the way I relate to my striving.

I’ve started noticing when I’m telling myself a story about being behind and needing to catch up. That’s what mindfulness is: “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally,” as scientist Jon Kabat Zinn describes it. (I’ll explain “non-judgmentally” in a moment. It’s the most important part of that definition.)

Mindfulness is the first step to changing any habit or pattern.

You must first notice the story you’re telling yourself in the moment. Then — as meditation teaches — you let go of the story and bring your attention to the sensations of your breath, how your body feels, and the sounds around you. You come back to what’s happening right here, right now.

It’s not about ignoring the stories by shooing them away. It’s about seeing if you can stay with the bodily sensations that the stories bring with them. Can you simply feel the burning in your chest or clench in your stomach without following the story?

If you stay put, usually, the storm will pass.

Sometimes it doesn’t pass. This is where non-judgment, sometimes called “self-compassion,” is crucial. You’re bound to be swept away by the story most of the time. You’ve spent years habitually following your mind’s every whim.

Sometimes it doesn’t pass. This is where non-judgment is crucial. You might’ve heard it described as “self-compassion.”

You’re bound to be swept away by the story most of the time. You’ve spent years habitually following your mind’s every whim. The stories are seductive — you created them, likely at an early age, in an effort to protect yourself. They also are reinforced by a violent, individualistic society. You’re not going to learn how to relate to them differently overnight.

So, be easy on yourself as you begin to explore the stories that hang around in the background of your life. Start by practicing the first step: simply noticing when they appear.

The good news: just a small tweak to how you relate to the part of yourself that believes a particular story can go a long way in changing your life.

As I’ve started to notice when I’m believing the striving story, I’ve started to let myself fully relax for the first time. In the past, it took the presence of someone else or alcohol or drugs or a great book or movie. The conditions had to be just right, which made it rare.

Now, if I’m particularly mindful, I can let go of the story like when I let go of thoughts during meditation. Sometimes, this little bit of space allows me to take my foot off the gas and not feel the need to be somewhere else doing my “unfinished business.”

Ready to get serious about meditation?

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Photo credit: Ichiban Yada

What it actually feels like to meditate

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I’ve meditated every day for five years now, and every time is still a roller coaster ride.

But the payoff is worth the ride. In fact, it’s the ride itself that pays.

For at least the first ten minutes, sometimes even 15, my mind jumps from thought to thought. I worry about what I’ve got planned for the day. I often replay things that happened the day before, usually conversations that made me feel vulnerable.

Did I sound stupid? Did I say too much? Does she like me? I’m just destined to be lonely.

This is my mind’s default state — unsettled, questioning myself, meandering in the past or the future.

It wouldn’t be so bad if all I did was daydream. What I really like to do is find patterns, to create meaning, to tell stories.

These stories are like looking up symptoms on WebMD. A cough can mean bronchitis or lung cancer or adenoidal hypertrophy. They spiral out of control into assumptions stacked on assumptions, until I’m wracked by anxiety about something that either didn’t happen or hasn’t happened yet or may never happen at all.

Before I started meditating, the stories were in the background all day long. They’d die down if I was really engaged in something, but that something had to be really engaging — say, a good TV show or a close friend who really listens.

But during meditation, after ten or 15 minutes of this frantic thinking something shifts. My body seems to unclench deep inside. My shoulders relax back and down, my stomach muscles release, my face eases, my breath falls into a comfortable rhythm.

It’s like I’d been swimming against the current and finally let the waves just take me.

My mind lets go of whatever I was thinking about and starts to notice more, as if I took a step backwards to witness the present moment. I hear the rain falling outside. I feel the warmth of the room. I smell my roommate’s coffee brewing downstairs. I notice that I’ve slumped over and sit up straight.

Time flows by as an unbroken chain of sensations rather than something to be measured or planned or worried about.

But, sure enough, as soon as I settle into this newfound awareness — known as “mindfulness” — another story rips me away. Planning that email I need to send narrows my focus and stops the flow. A few more minutes pass as I’m lost in thought.

Then some part of me notices that my mind is wandering, and I bring my attention back to the sensations in my body. I hear the sounds in the room. I’m back! I open to the flow until, inevitably, my mind takes me away again.

The bell rings, and I bring this mindfulness off of the cushion, to breakfast, work, and whatever the day has in store.

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Listen to the podcast version

My podcast, Meditation for the Masses, is mindfulness for the 99 percent. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available. Stream this episode below.

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Making big life decisions involves being confused. And meditation can help.

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There’s this counterintuitive thing about meditation that’s one of its biggest benefits.

While it helps you stay present — not lost in thinking about the past or future — it can also help you come to deep insights. And sometimes these insights are about your intentions, which are informed by the past and impact the future.

During a seven-day silent meditation retreat last year, I outlined two book ideas and finally settled on a design for my first tattoo — which I got tattooed on my arm an hour after leaving the retreat center.

All that silence and meditation had turned down the volume on my surface level thinking. It soothed my worrying, planning, ruminating, reminiscing, etc. until those thoughts were less interesting than how my body felt breathing and what the meditation room sounded like.

This allowed deeper thoughts to bubble to the surface, thoughts that felt so true I couldn’t deny them. Some of these thoughts were intentions.

What do I mean by intentions?

I used to work in the tech industry helping IT companies win business with the federal government. I hated it from the beginning, but I got pretty good at suppressing what I felt in exchange for the job’s benefits. I could afford living in Washington, D.C., during the 2008–10 recession, felt smart and productive, seemed “normal,” and was making my parents proud.

I always knew I would leave someday but couldn’t figure out what I really wanted to do and how to make the switch.

I slowly realized those questions didn’t matter so much. What was holding me back from leaving where the whys. Why was I still working there? Why did I want to leave? Why did I spend most of my free time writing, meditating, and being an activist?

As I began to explore these questions — truly sit with them, without pretending I had the answers — the job became even less attractive. The pointless emails seemed more pointless. A white colleague’s casual racism towards our Muslim CEO began to bother me. What really bothered me, though, was that I didn’t say anything to him about it.

I was finally admitting that who I was at the office and who I was after work were very different people. I was getting in touch with my intentions, which shone a 1,000-watt spotlight on the fact that my job wasn’t aligned with my values.

By then, I had started meditating regularly. I slowly saw that I was working a corporate job because it made other people happy for me. That was my intention for being there.

Around the same time, I was offered a job in the labor movement helping working people fight corporate power. When my new boss called me with the offer, I barely noticed that I was about to take a $20,000 a year pay cut. My anxious thoughts sounded like a kid upset about not getting ice cream and having to settle for cake. They were surface-level, easy to tune out.

Big life decisions — if we’re lucky enough to be in the position to make them — can be years in the making. But you have to be willing to sit with the questions without thinking you know the answers.

You have to be willing to be confused. You have to be willing to admit: I don’t know.

There’s an ancient Russian tale about an old woman named Baba Yaga that illustrates this point. She lives in a hut deep in a forest where she stirs a pot waiting to tell the truth to whoever visits her.

In the story, three people visit.

The first visitor, a young man encouraged to visit by his parents, knocks on Baba Yaga’s door.

“Are you on your own errand or are you sent by another?” she asks.

“I am sent by my father,” the young man says. Baba Yaga throws him into the pot and cooks him.

The second visitor is a young woman who entered the forest on her on. Again, Baba Yaga asks, “Are you on your own errand or are you sent by another?”

“I am on my own errand,” the young woman answers. Baba Yaga throws her into the pot.

The third visitor, a young woman confused about the world, approaches.

“Are you on your own errand or are you sent by another?” Baba Yaga asks.

The young woman says, “In large part I’m on my own errand, but in large part I also come because of others. And in large part I have come because you are here, and because of the forest, and something I have forgotten, and in large part I know not why I come.”

Baba Yaga says, “You’ll do,” and invites her into the hut.

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