Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Every dead body on Mt. Everest was once a highly motivated person

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Who knew a turning point in my life would happen at a Chinese dim sum restaurant in suburban Maryland?

It was a Sunday, and I’d just gone hiking with my best friends. We were passing around potstickers and stuffed eggplant.

“You’re on Bernie Sanders’s Facebook,” a friend said to me, looking at her phone. “Jeremy’s in a video on Bernie’s Facebook!”

“Holy shit,” someone said from across the table. “Are you serious?” “Whoa!” “That’s awesome!”

I explained that I‘d had a connection in Bernie’s Senate office, and that they’d interviewed me about the immorality of private, for-profit prisons — a topic I’d studied for the nonprofit I worked with.

After peppering me with a few questions, everyone went back to their dim sum. The conversation moved on to where we should hike next and then to the pros and cons of living in the suburbs.

I felt hollow. Even though the video had over 200,000 views within a few hours. Even though the other Bernie video I’d been in had over two million views.

Part of me had hoped my friends would shower me with attention. That they’d moved on so quickly hurt. I felt alone even though I was surrounded by people I loved. I ordered another beer and stuffed an egg tart in my mouth.

The lesson was that I’m never going to get what I really want if I’m being led by the rock star part of myself.

My inner rock star wants to be worshipped. It thinks that if I’m in the spotlight, I’ll feel wanted and loved and never feel lonely.

Sure, it’s fueled many of my accomplishments. Starting a band at 15. Touring the country with said band at 19. Launching a weekly meditation class that lasted over two years. Being published in the Washington Post.

But it also keeps me from what I really, deeply, ultimately want — which is connection.

Singing in front of hundreds of people left me wanting to sing in front of thousands. Being published in the Washington Post left me wanting to be published in the New York Times. (Imagining my name in the Times really gets my inner rock star going.)

I remember feeling that same hollowness back in 2005 on the first night of tour with my band. It was a Monday at a dive bar in Johnson City, Tennessee. There was one old drunk watching us play over sips of his PBR. The whole town seemed asleep by 8:00 p.m. “This is it?” I thought, kicking a beer can around the parking lot. “Where are all the fans and groupies and journalists?”

Even if there had been fans and groupies and journalists, it probably wouldn’t have been enough for my inner rock star.

That’s the lesson I learned with the Bernie video. This rock star part of me believes a story about what it takes for me to feel connected. It thinks that I need to be famous. And it’s wrong.

The truth is that connection, love, belonging, they come and go. We can’t force other people to give them to us. We can’t force life to give them to us.

Somewhere along the way — likely when we were really young — we lost trust in life’s ebbs and flows. We forgot that connection would eventually come back. We forgot that connection — love — is right here, right now in the present moment. Every present moment.

Maybe you were hurt really bad by someone you loved, and you lost trust. Maybe you were scared and lonely, and those you loved were just too busy.

However you were hurt, you developed parts of yourself — like my rock star — that believe you have to be a certain way to get the love and sense of belonging you so badly want.

That’s why we do things like overwork, pick fights, people-please, numb out. A part of us thinks it will help, even though deep down inside we know it won’t.

A friend shared an Instagram post yesterday that captures this lesson. It said: “Every dead body on Mt. Everest was once a highly motivated person, so… maybe calm down.”

I teared up thinking about how lonely I’d felt surrounded by my friends and vowed to never choose attention from strangers on social media over them ever again.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. Subscribe to my weekly email on how to be more mindful at your job, in your relationships, and when it comes to politics here.

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness can decrease your anxiety and transform your life.

Photo by b1st wang.

The one emotion keeping you from the life you want

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The other day I was watching the Netflix show Easy when shame screamed in my ear.

I couldn’t stop looking at Orlando Bloom’s ripped abs. How does he look like that? He’s fucking 44. I shouldn’t have eaten that donut.

I’ve gained a few pounds this summer, and like many men, they went straight to my gut. I know I’m relatively strong and healthy. But that doesn’t stop me from criticizing myself when I see six-pack abs or bulging biceps.

I suddenly wasn’t enjoying the show anymore. As social worker Brené Brown writes, shame is a “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

Luckily, I was with a friend who’s in recovery from an addiction and has a longtime, white-knuckled relationship with shame.

“I just know that shame is going to come up,” he said. “When it comes, I say, ‘Oh, there you are.’”

Poof. The shame disappeared. It was like I was standing behind myself, watching my shame from a distance rather than being caught up in its story about my flabby stomach. This wider vantage point allowed me to see the shame for what it was: just a story, just one voice among many in my head.

Then a familiar voice chattered in my mind. I’m not going to eat bread or sugar for the next week. I’m going to lift weights and run sprints every day. I’m going to get my shit together.

This one was like a drill sergeant, determined to get me back in shape with a disciplined diet and workout regimen. Or a parent who was fed up and took away my toys.

I’d experienced this one-two punch of shame and punishment before, after drinking one too many beers or eating one too many slices of pizza or smoking a one-off cigarette at a party.

But this time was different — and encouraging. I was watching shame and punishment’s little game play out inside my head.

How to get to know the different parts of yourself

My buddy didn’t know it, but he was essentially describing a form of psychotherapy I’m a huge fan of called Internal Family Systems (IFS).

IFS is a way of describing our personality as having different “parts.” Parts are like little people inside our head with different goals and motivations.

It sounds weird, but you’ve probably said something like this before: “Part of me feels like this, but another part of me feels like that.” Rarely do we ever feel one singular emotion and not a tangle of feelings that are hard to separate out.

With the help of my therapist, I’ve found IFS to be a powerful tool for untangling my feelings. It helps me understand and relate to the different parts of my personality, which has lowered my anxiety and — most of all — helped me talk about my emotions more clearly.

For example, often the loudest voice in my head is the one that thinks I should be working 24/7. “Get to work!” it says every morning, “You’re lazy!”

Sure, it’d be fine and healthy if I woke up calm and relaxed, focused on my routines and to-do list. But instead, I’m tense and anxious, worried whether I can get everything done.

My days often feel like a constant sprint to catch up. By the end, I don’t feel all that accomplished because this hardworking part is still whispering in my ear that there’s more to do, that I have unfinished business.

Again, it’s okay to work hard and strive to do more. But when this part of me takes over, I get so hyper focused on work that I forget to take breaks.

I wear out more than I should. I get short with people and turn down their help. I struggle to show up fully with friends and family even after my workday ends. There’s a nagging sense that I should be doing something somewhere else — though I don’t know where that somewhere else is.

Before working with IFS, I sort of knew my tendency to overwork had to do with anxiety. But I didn’t have a strategy to work with the anxiety rather than try to suppress it. IFS has helped me peel back the layers on where this part of me came from.

My parents both come from hardworking, self-sufficient farming families. So I got the message early in life that relaxing means that you’re lazy.

Capitalism elevates work above everything else. Patriarchy socializes men to think that our worth is to provide for others. Whiteness has cut me off from my European roots, thousands of years of rituals and traditions that connected my ancestors to nature and its rhythms of change and rejuvenation.

Knowing all of this has helped me have compassion for the hardworking part of myself. I now see that it’s trying to help me. It just has an extreme, rigid view: that if I stop working, even for a moment, I will get left behind — and I might even die.

No wonder my hardworking part can’t shut up. It’s like a little kid inside of me trying to protect me.

As Richard Schwartz, the therapist who developed IFS, says, our parts “are like internalized children who are in over their heads and don’t know how else to run the whole family other than by yelling and criticizing.”

Now that I see this hardworking part as a little, scared kid, I don’t have to listen to it all the time. I can grind out a blog post, respond to 20 emails, and then hit the gym with the best of them. I can work as hard as I ever have. But I can also rest.

I can tell the hardworking part of me that it’s okay to take a break. Through getting to know this part, I’ve built up enough trust in myself.

Why shame is counterproductive

Back to my shame. That Netflix moment was a turning point. For the first time, I was able to see shame as a just a part of me rather than believing its story about me. I also saw how quickly I pivot to punishing myself.

“The experience of shame — feeling fundamentally deficient — is so excruciating that we will do whatever we can to avoid it,” writes the psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach.

The next step will be to investigate where this shaming part of me came from.

How did it get the story that enjoying a donut is bad? What is it so afraid is going to happen if I gain five pounds? What does it think is so special about having six-pack abs?

Once I get to know my shame more — once I can see that it’s just trying to protect me, albeit in an extreme, rigid, counterproductive way — I’ll be able to relate to it differently. When it comes up, I’ll be able to say, “Oh, there you are,” rather than believing it’s painful story that I’m unworthy of love and belonging.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. Subscribe to my weekly email on how to be more mindful at your job, in your relationships, and when it comes to politics here.

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness can decrease your anxiety and transform your life.

Photo by Anthony Easton.

Why you should be resting rather than just vegging out

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If you’re like me, you feel a constant need to be doing, doing, doing. Working, improving, building, working out, consuming, investing, hustling, grinding.

The antidote to this anxiety is, go figure, not doing. Meditating, going for a walk, resting, doing yoga, journaling, making art. Doing anything that allows the mind to slow down and the body to relax.

Not vegging out watching Netflix. Not numbing out with a glass of wine. (Though, there’s nothing inherently wrong with doing either.)

Actually resting means relaxing the nervous system

Not doing is slowing the mind and relaxing the body enough to simply be with what’s actually happening in the moment. It’s getting out of your head and into sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings. It’s living fully.

When the mind is slow and body relaxed, the nervous system — the connection between the brain and spine that manages stress — can calm down.

When the nervous system is calm, our heart rate eases and muscles relax even more. We’re less on edge and more in the moment. We experience the moment just as it is, not what our mind says it should be.

That’s why it’s important to have a daily practice of some kind. It might be 20 minutes of meditation in the morning or an aimless walk after lunch. (Research shows that spending 20 minutes outside three times a week has the greatest effect on reducing levels of the stress hormone cortisol.)

Even pausing and taking three deep breathes a few times a day can be enough to take the edge off.

The key is to stop doing. Put down the phone, notice the sounds around you, feel your feet on the ground, and soften your muscles — especially around your eyes, the back of your neck, and your abs.

Be with what is actually happening in the moment — not lost in thought about your to-do list or what so-and-so thinks of you.

Of course, your mind won’t stop thinking. You’re still going to worry about responding to that passive aggressive text or what to eat for dinner or how you’re going to make rent this month.

But instead of worrying yourself into more tension or distracting yourself in the ways you normally do, let go of doing.

Bring your attention back to how your breath feels and your feet on the ground. Let go, and then let go again. If you’re outside, notice the wind in the trees and the smell of flowers.

You have a hard time resting because of capitalism

I know it’s hard to not do. “We live in a culture that celebrates activity,” writes the Buddhist teacher Roshi Joan Halifax.

The public performance of busyness is how we demonstrate to one another that we are important. The more people see us tired, over-stretched, the more they think we must be somehow indispensable. That we matter.

In a capitalist society, a full-time job is required to survive — sometimes even two! Constant growth in the stock market and corporate profits is the number one priority.

We think we have to hustle to keep up. And we think that if we don’t keep up, we’ll be left behind to feel lonely, unhappy, and unfulfilled.

Because of all of this go-go-go energy, we feel anxiety about slowing down and not doing. But here’s the thing: Taking time to rest allows you to move through the rest of your day more effectively and with more intention.

Meditation not only reduces stress, but it also manages anxiety, boosts self-awareness, lengthens the attention span, reduces memory loss, and more. When we’re in nature, our brains enter a mode called “soft fascination,” which restores and builds the resources we need to think, create, process information, and execute tasks.

So, stop pretending that vegging out while watching Netflix and scrolling Instagram is relaxing.

In today’s distracted world, you actually have to put effort into getting enough rest. You have to actively not do.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. Subscribe to my weekly email on how to be more mindful at your job, in your relationships, and when it comes to politics here.

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness can decrease your anxiety and transform your life.

Photo by ☼☼Jo Zimny!☼☼.