Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

The most compassionate and loving people are the best at setting boundaries

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Young men were yelling and laughing like it was 2:30 in the afternoon—but it was 2:30 A.M.

I was wide awake and pissed off. It’d taken an hour to fall asleep in the September cold.

The campground was outside of swanky Potomac, Maryland. They must be entitled rich kids, I thought, fiddling with my sleeping bag. They have BMWs, expensive camping gear, and those topknot haircuts.

I unzipped the tent and shined a military-grade flashlight their direction. They got the message. Within seconds, all was quiet except for the river.

In the frigid morning, I passed them on the way to meditate in my car. No topknots. Only modest camping gear. Not even tents! They were wrapped up in sleeping bags like mummies.

In the warmth of my car, I imagined the men freezing a few hundred feet away. I breathed in their regret for forgetting sleeping pads and tents. Following the Tibetan meditation practice of tonglen, I imagined their suffering as dirty, polluted air. I breathed out warm, healing air towards them, hoping the sun would soon rise.

I’ve been those guys before, I realized. I’ve showed up unprepared for a chilly night. I’ve stayed up late drinking and laughing just to forget my freezing hands.

Most of all, the resentment I’d felt seemed years in the past. I wasn’t pissed anymore—I was curious. Did they forget tents or plan to rough it out? Are they from the area or on a road trip? I decided to offer them firewood if they were staying another night.

In her book Start Where You Are, the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön tells the story of Milarepa, an ancient figure in Tibetan Buddhism:

One evening Milarepa returned to his cave after gathering firewood, only to find it filled with demons. They were cooking his food, reading his books, sleeping in his bed. They had taken over the joint. So first … he sat on this seat that was higher than they were and said things to them about how we are all one. Nothing happened. Then he lost his patience and got angry and ran at them. They just laughed at him. Finally, he gave up and just sat on the floor, saying, ‘I’m not going away and it looks you’re not either, so let’s just live here together.’ At that point, all of them left except one. [Milarepa] didn’t know what to do, so he surrounded himself even further. He walked over and put himself right into the mouth of the demon and said, ‘Just eat me up if you want too.’ Then that demon left too. The moral of the story is, when the resistance is gone, so are the demons.

That’s not to say that we should roll over and give up when someone or something challenges us. I forgave the men after the fact. In the moment, they were keeping an entire campground awake. Their obliviousness gave me an opportunity to practice speaking up and setting boundaries—which doesn’t come natural to me.

As social worker and author Brené Brown says,

“The most compassionate people I’ve interviewed over the past 13 years were absolutely the most boundaried … loving and generous and really straightforward with what’s okay and what’s not okay.”

It’s counterintuitive, but being compassionate doesn’t always mean being nice.

To be sure, I’m not some great person or enlightened or anything. If the men hadn’t quieted down, I would’ve spent the night pissed off in my tent. It just happened that we all figured out a way to be on public land together, and I got to practice being compassionate.

The moral of the story is: set boundaries, have expectations for others and the world. But be ready to work with whatever happens. The world is going to do whatever it does. Our desire to control it—our resistance to reality—usually just makes things worse.

The next night, the men were gone but a large group of women had loudly taken their place. I felt resentment again. But there was a little more spaciousness to work with. I saw that they were enjoying the outdoors six months into a plague that’s kept us all cooped up inside. I covered my ears with a beanie and closed my eyes.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out. Get my writing straight to your email inbox here.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.

Your girlfriend is right. You should see a therapist.

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I was catching up with a therapist friend recently when a light bulb went off in my mind: Meditation is harm reduction.

It doesn’t solve the deeper emotional issues that cause many of our problems. But it helps us feel a little better in the here and now.

“Harm reduction” refers to an approach towards substance users that minimizes pain and suffering. For example, my new hometown of Baltimore has been giving out free needles to injection drug users for decades. People are going to use drugs. Why not make it as safe as possible?

Over the last ten years, giving out needles has prevented more than 1,900 new cases of HIV in Baltimore and saved the city over $32 million in public health costs every year.

People using drugs in a problematic, unhealthy way need more than just free needles. They need evidence-based drug treatment that addresses their health and social needs. They might need housing, healthcare, or a good paying job.

Meditation is like giving out clean needles. It reduces the harm caused by what therapist and author Mark Epstein calls “the trauma of everyday life.”

When we’re mindful we can step back from our thoughts rather than believe them without question. We feel a little less anxiety because we see that our anxious thoughts are just thoughts. We feel a little more joy because we’re in touch with what joy feels like in our bodies.

But we need something more revolutionary if we’re going making lasting change. We need to get to know our inner experience. We need to get familiar with different parts of ourselves, what triggers them, and how relate to them. We need to accept and even love whatever comes up inside.

That’s why therapy is so powerful. Working with someone skilled in holding back their judgement is like standing in front of a mirror. Except it’s a mirror that sees inside of you.

“I don’t take it personally,” says therapist and writer Lori Gottlieb, talking about clients who say mean things to her. “[Their aggression] is a way of coping with something that’s very unmanageable. And when we find out what the trauma and tragedy is … we [can come to like clients] quite a bit.”

A friend, your mom, your partner can’t provide that. They feel resentment, love, and all kinds of feelings towards you, even if they’re good at hiding it.

When you’re sitting across from someone who sees you fresh, who sees who you really are, you get to see yourself clearly. There’s no faking it, no bullshit. All that’s left is to dig into what’s really going on.

I don’t want to go as far as saying you must see a therapist. There’s a stigma against therapy, that it’s only for rich or “crazy” people. And it’s way too expensive—another reason we need #MedicareForAll. (Though, some therapists have sliding scale or even free rates.)

But please don’t be that guy, the one who thinks that meditation (or lifting weights or some job) has solved all your emotional problems. Don’t be me a few years back!

I was that guy until—you guessed it—a girlfriend all but commanded me to see a therapist.

“You can be broken as fuck, and still do good yoga,” spiritual teacher David Deida says. “You can be entirely dysfunctional therapeutically, psychologically, emotionally, you can be a wreck, and still be a master yogi. Yoga doesn’t fix the parts of you that are broken.”

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out. Get my writing straight to your email inbox here.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.

Heartbroken? The love you’re looking for is already inside of you.

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Over the weekend, I was painting a room in my house when Guy Clark’s “Stuff that Works” came on Spotify:

I got a woman I love
She’s crazy and paints like God
She’s got a playground sense of justice
She won’t take odds
I got a tattoo with her name
Right through my soul
I think everything she touches
Turns to gold

Those words hit me like an NFL linebacker. Every single one is the love I used to feel for an ex-girlfriend—“the one that got away,” as they say.

We long ago agreed to be just friends, which has been great. But sometimes I still feel romantic love for her—when I see a beautiful painting, when the sunlight looks a certain way, when I bite into a perfectly cooked steak.

As I mindlessly painted, I decided to watch what emotions were coming up.

First came desire—I missed and wanted her. Then sadness. What if I never find someone like her again? I thought. Then regret and self-blame—Why couldn’t I have gotten my shit together sooner? Then compassion—we were young and still figuring things out, of course we fucked up.

But that’s when I struck gold. Next came love. Overwhelmingly love. For my ex, yes—but also in a much wider, ubiquitous way. My chest went tender with a little sadness but a ton of warmth. In the words of the poet Mary Oliver, I couldn’t help but be in awe of “this one precious life.”

Here’s what I realized: That love is mine. It was inside of me from the start. I just needed someone else to help me feel it. But what if I can access it myself? What if love is available at any time, yet I just overlook it?

Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes about this in one of my favorite books ever, “Start Where You Are,” but about the flip side of the coin, about negative emotions, like anger.

“If you have rage and righteously act it out and blame it all on others, it’s really you who suffers. The other people and the environment suffer also, but you suffer more because you’re being eaten up inside with rage, causing you to hate yourself more and more.”

That makes me think of politics, of hating Trump and white supremacy and capitalist greed. I recently saw an Instagram video of white counter-protesters yelling hateful things at Black Lives Matter activists. As I watched, it was me who felt the hate. The counter-protestors were probably already home relaxing and watching TV. I felt like shit, like I was burning up inside.

What I’m saying is, we have to live with our emotions, good and bad. Might as well get to know them a little bit. And in getting to know them, we might stumble upon the fact that love is already inside of us. That it’s not out there. That it’s not something to acquire. That it’s not as hidden as we assume.

“We already have everything we need,” writes Chödrön. “We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.”

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out. Get my writing straight to your email inbox here.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.