Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

How to wake up before your one precious life comes to an end

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My maternal grandfather died last week.

Donald lived in Southern Maryland—where I grew up—his whole life. He was a pipefitter and computer manager who played golf and watched Nationals baseball on TV.

He was also, in my experience, a very quiet man. We rarely spoke, so I never felt close to him.

So, when my mom told me that he’d passed, I first felt relief. She’d been managing his care for the past few years as he slipped into more and more health issues, silence, and pain.

But since, I’ve felt a mixture of sadness and gratitude. Sadness about how fast time can seem to pass and how short life can seem. Gratitude for having heard about mindfulness meditation and not being too close-minded to give it a try.

More than ever before, I see meditation as a practice for waking up.

I couldn’t care less about the focus, health benefits, and “increased productivity” people like to rave about. I sit because it helps me see all the things I do on autopilot, without intention. And there are many of those things. Like, when I blindly pick up my phone and look at Facebook, or when I hurt somebody even if I don’t mean to.  

Isn’t it tragic that we spend so much of our precious time asleep at the wheel?

Sure, we’re jarred awake whether we like it or not, but only occasionally. We get really lucky or hit rock bottom. Or someone—a lover or mentor—shows us a glimpse of our potential.

But most often we’re driven by parts of ourselves—parts we developed early in life because we weren’t ready to feel the intense emotions of being human. These parts take the wheel because they think they can protect us from pain and deliver us pleasure.

Part of me thinks that if I keep hustling, one day, with enough money and success, I’ll finally be satisfied.

Part of me thinks that cracking open a beer will make me feel less alone.

Part of me thinks that people will like me if I’m excessively nice to them.

Another part of me thinks that people will love me if I’m a great writer, guitar player, singer, thinker, etc.

The mindfulness that meditation produces allows me to choose whether to listen to these parts. It helps me identify less with their stories about how I should be. It helps me accept that they’re all part of me and so I’ve got to accept and work with them. It helps me stop trying to be someone else as this one fleeting life flashes by.

Because, if I sit back as the consciousness that is aware of my thoughts—who I am behind all my stories of how I should be—I know what I really want. I want to be all of myself and still feel accepted and loved no matter what.

Free ebook on mindfulness meditation

My ebook, How to Get Out of Your Head, will help you start or stick with a regular meditation practice. Get it for free here.

Listen to my podcast Meditation for the 99%

On Meditation for the 99%, I take meditation out of faraway monasteries, expensive retreat centers, and Corporate America, and bring it to work, relationships, and, especially, politics. Listen everywhere podcasts are available.

New Year’s resolutions. War with Iran. The rent just went up. Focus on your breath.

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I got a massage the other day and was reminded of the first thing you learn in Mindfulness 101: if you’re feeling lost, find your breath.

I’m not a person who gets massages. I’ve always thought they’re for rich people who have the time and money to pay someone to touch them.

But just before New Year’s I fell down my rain-soaked back porch stairs. My glutes (read: ass) seized up. My lower back developed a bruise that looked like the sky in Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” It was time to pay for professional help.

The massage therapist noticed that I held my breath when she gently pushed into the bruise.

“Focus on your breath,” she said. “Breathe through the pain.”

Oh yeah, I thought, I can do this. I do it all the time during meditation.

How’d I forget? Well, it’s easy to when we’re not practicing, when we’re at work, with family—in everyday life. My mind wanders when my mom calls, my boss emails, someone cuts in line at the grocery store, and, apparently, when I get a massage.

This time of year is especially mindless and forward thinking. New Year’s resolutions. Diets, workouts, goals. Trump is trying to start a war. Australia is on fire. Murder rates are climbing. If you feel scattered and overwhelmed, you’re not alone.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, writes that “breathing is a stable solid ground that is always there for us to take refuge in. Whenever we are carried away by regret about something that has happened or swept away in our fears or anxiety [about] the future, we can return to our breathing and re-establish ourselves in the present moment.”

That’s mindfulness meditation in a nutshell. Notice when your mind has been carried away. Let go of the thoughts. Come back to the air entering your nostrils or your lungs expanding. Over and over again.

As my new massage therapist says, breathe through the pain. Focus on the next breath. And the next breath. And the next breath.

“We don’t need to control the breath in any way,” Thich Nhat Hanh writes. “We simply encounter it, just as it is. It may be long or short, deep or shallow. With the gentle energy of mindfulness it will naturally become slower and deeper.”

If focusing on the breath doesn’t feel comfortable, put your attention on one part of your body. Feel your hands, feet, or legs. Relax and feel the sensations.

No matter what’s happening right now, your breath and body are bread crumbs back to the peace and freedom of the present moment.

Free ebook on mindfulness meditation

My ebook, How to Get Out of Your Head, will help you start or stick with a regular meditation practice. Get it for free here.

Listen to my podcast Meditation for the 99%

On Meditation for the 99%, I take meditation out of faraway monasteries, expensive retreat centers, and Corporate America, and bring it to work, relationships, and, especially, politics. Listen everywhere podcasts are available.

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Like everything these days, mindfulness is being co-opted by neoliberalism

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If you’ve paid any attention to politics recently, particularly on Twitter, you’ve heard the word “neoliberalism.” It’s used to describe so many different politicians, ideologies, and policies that it’s hard to define what it means.

But it’s important to define, because neoliberalism shapes almost everything about our lives, even how we practice meditation—and that’s a problem.

My favorite definition comes from political scientist Wendy Brown, who says it’s “the expansion of markets—understood as competition—to every feature of life, including democracy, human social life, education, social services, and so forth.”

Think about how social media has turned our lives into a contest for attention—for more and more likes, shares, comments, “engagement.” And how high-stakes testing has transformed K-12 education into a competition with winners and losers. And how journalism has become a battle for clicks.

Neoliberalism is dog-eat-dog capitalism on hyperdrive, and the real sinister thing it’s done—what makes it different than prior forms of capitalism—is make us incapable of solving big problems together.

Climate change, gaping inequality, mass incarceration, the opioid crisis. History shows that the only way to fix these sorts of enormous problems is when massive political movements are able to force the government to increase and reprioritize its public investments.

But it’s hard to imagine another Civil Rights movement or a return to the New Deal era, when nearly a third of American workers were in a labor union.

Neoliberal logic makes us think that the solutions to our problems are individual. If you’re lonely, just post on Facebook. If you’re struggling to pay the bills, just work harder. If you’re unfulfilled at work, just quit and “do what you love.” If you’re worried about the environment, just become a vegan.

God forbid we’d band together and fight for a higher minimum wage, universal healthcare, or ending the fossil fuel industry.

What does all this have to do with meditation? Two things.

What meditation produces, mindfulness, can help you notice when you slip into this way of thinking.

When you notice your mind is off in the future, telling yourself to hustle, to work harder, to pull on your bootstraps, let go of the thought. Note silently in your mind, “thinking”—or even “neoliberalism.” Bring your attention back to the sensations of your breath, feelings in your body, and the sights and sounds around you.

Mindfulness won’t stop you from neoliberal thinking, but it can help you notice when you’re in the trance and snap out of it.

And two—I meet so many people who are trying to get into meditation by themselves. They want to know what apps to use, how often they should practice, what books they should read.

Go figure: meditation is being filtered through neoliberal logic. Corporations are rolling out mindfulness programs for employees left and right. Meditation is on every list published about what to do to have a more productive day.

“[Meditation] can provide benefits, but the way they’re being deployed is a neoliberal cooptation, where they are then refashioned as performance enhancement methods in alignment with institutional goals, whether it’s a corporation or the military,” writes Ron Purser, professor of management and practicing Buddhist.

When I got started with meditation, I learned from other people, like, in the flesh, in real life—but it took me awhile to get there. I’d spent years as what Zen priest Roshi Joan Halifax calls a “book Buddhist,” reading about meditation but rarely actually practicing it.

Then a girlfriend took me to a class. Seeing other people meditate—people that looked like me, normal people—encouraged me to do it more often. Going on a weekend retreat with 20 people, albeit strangers, motivated me to meditate every day. Talking about mindfulness with other people inspired me to learn how to teach meditation.

It’s absurd that this has to be said, but to really embrace meditation—and to live in a society that has a shot at solving climate change and our many other crises—we need other people.

Free ebook on mindfulness meditation

My ebook, How to Get Out of Your Head, will help you start or stick with a regular meditation practice. Get it for free here.

Listen to my podcast Meditation for the 99%

On Meditation for the 99%, I take meditation out of faraway monasteries, expensive retreat centers, and Corporate America, and bring it to work, relationships, and, especially, politics. Listen everywhere podcasts are available.