Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

How Buddhism is helping me through the coronavirus outbreak

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I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, but I recite what are called the “three refuges” after meditating each morning. I even have them tattooed on my arm along with a fourth.

Buddha, dharma, sangha, justice.

Whispering these words reminds me of what really matters, regardless of what’s happening in my life, even a global pandemic that’s bringing the economy to its knees.

In fact, they’re helping me stay grounded more than ever—because it’s so easy right now to get caught up in every breaking news story, tweet, and ominous text from a friend about flu-like symptoms.

Here’s what they mean:

Buddha is a Sanskrit word that refers to every human’s ability to see reality absolutely clearly, just as it is.

Tragically, we rarely see things just as they are. We get caught up in stories about how they should or shouldn’t be. We get lost in worrying, planning, daydreaming, and remembering. We get triggered into overwhelming emotions that color our thinking.

Every time I do a silent meditation retreat, I’m reminded of my tendency to forget my “Buddha nature,” as it’s called. I see how I judge people without even talking to them. I judge their choice in shoes or how they enter into a room.

One time, for an entire week I hated a young, bearded man who was wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt. I thought, Who the hell does this libertarian bro think he is? But when we talked after the retreat ended, his voice sounded completely different than I’d imagined. He seemed like a pleasant person, despite his unfortunate political views.

Buddha also refers to our innate ability to be compassionate. Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön reminds us that even the most vicious animals love their offspring. Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once said, “Everybody loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.”

Right now, despite the craziness, we all have access to a more sane and caring way of being. People are picking up groceries for the elderly, fostering shelter animals, texting friends who might be lonely. It’s OK if you can’t be compassionate right now. But just know that one of these days you might.

Dharma refers to the way things actually are. So, Buddha is our ability to see reality clearly—Dharma is reality itself.

Reality is out of whack right now. It seems upside down and unnecessarily cruel. But it’s what we have to work with — it’s reality.

When I say Dharma each morning, I remember that reality is always changing, bringing good things and challenging things. Reality “adds wood to the fire,” so to speak. It’s what helps me grow as a human, to learn new things and develop new skills.

Dharma is the truth. And who doesn’t really want the truth, even if it’s hard to stomach? Who doesn’t really want to cut the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter?

“A pebble, a bamboo tree, the cry of a baby, anything can be the voice of the Dharma calling,” writes Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. “We should be able to practice like that.”

Sangha is community, particularly those who you’d consider “my people.” These are your friends who share a similar aspiration to wake up, to feel alive, to connect.

And God knows we need community right now. We’re seeing a natural inclination towards Sangha in all the online hangouts, meetings, and watch parties. Despite what cutthroat capitalists say about human nature, we need each other.

Thich Nhat Hanh goes as far as saying, “The next Buddha will be a Sangha.” Meaning, we can’t see reality clearly without close friends, allies, therapists, and others to help us.

Lean on your community right now. Don’t hold back.

Justice, to me, refers to the need for balance. I throw it on the end because I think the other three alone are insufficient.

There’s a need for justice in every situation, all of the time, because there’s so much injustice in our society. We’re watching it play out in Congress right now. The Republicans want to bail out the airlines, hotels, and other big corporations. The Democrats—in a pleasant surprise—want to help everyday people too, those who need it the most.

If we repeat 2008–9, when millions of people lost their homes and the Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy walked away scot-free, justice will not have been served.

We need justice to make sure everyone has their basic needs taken care of. If people’s material needs aren’t met, all the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha in the world won’t make a difference.

Want to start meditating or meditate more often?

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

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.

Tips for managing anxiety during the coronavirus outbreak

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My mind is usually a churning soup of anxiety, overplanning, and confusion, but the COVID-19 outbreak has put it in hyperdrive.

Does this runny nose mean I have the virus? What’s going to happen to my job? Are we headed towards another Great Depression? Will grocery stores have food on the shelves in a week? How am I going to manage spending two weeks or more by myself?

Under normal circumstances—and these are far from normal—I’d lean on resources such as therapy, close friends, and community. But those things will be more difficult to access in the coming weeks and months.

So—and it pains me to say this because capitalism is all about the individual, and capitalist ideology has almost certainly made this crisis worse in the U.S.—we must do what we can to care for ourselves right now.

On top of caring for our loved ones and demanding that the government bail out human beings and not just Wall Street, we must learn how to self-soothe, i.e., hold our emotional experience with care and compassion.

There are certain to be moments ahead that will overwhelm us emotionally, so I’ll share how I self-soothe in hopes that it helps you come up with your own process. My process is influenced by meditation teacher Tara Brach’s “RAIN” practice and the Internal Family Systems (IFS) work of the psychotherapist Richard Schwartz, if you want to dive in further.

Most of all, I’m keeping the routines that I can, particularly daily meditation, stretching, working out, and a healthy diet. As the world shifts beneath our feat, we need all the stability we can get to feel safe and secure.

The first step is to bring attention to what’s going on in the mind when emotions begin to swirl. When we’re lost in worrying thoughts, our mind is off in the future or the past, which only exacerbates our anxiety. We often imagine the worst possible outcome, i.e., catastrophize, adding unnecessary fuel to already fiery situation.

As Brach writes in her new book Radical Compassion, “When we are lost in the forest, we can create a clearing simply by pausing and turning from our clamoring thoughts to become aware of our moment-to-moment experience.”

You might be thinking that paying attention to the reality right now sounds like hell—and you’re sort of right. You might be thinking distraction is the way to go.

But the next step is to accept that you’re worried and afraid. Normally we try to hide from our emotions by denying them, distracting ourselves, trying to find solid answers with our mind. By denying them, we unconsciously judge ourselves for feeling the way that we do.

The spiritual teacher David Deida tells a story about a teacher of his feeling jealous at a party. Deida sees the teacher’s wife across the room enjoying a conversation with an attractive man and asks his teacher, “Aren’t you jealous?”

“Yes, but the fact that I’m jealous isn’t bothering me,” his teacher responds.

In other words, the teacher was aware of how he was relating to his jealousy. Instead of making his jealousy a problem, he was allowing it to just be. He could decide to intervene or discuss the situation with his wife after the party. Or he could decide not to. He was putting himself in a better position to respond rather than react to what was happening.

You might be thinking that allowing yourself to feel the pain of this moment sounds like hell—and you’re sort of right.

But the next step is to investigate what’s going on in the body. Emotions and anxious thoughts are often accompanied by tension in the stomach, shoulders, or elsewhere. For example, when I’m worried, my ab muscles clench like I’m trying to fit into jeans a size too small.

Just like with emotions, the practice is to allow the clench to be there rather than making it a problem. Slowly let go of the tension from the inside out. You might even ask, “How big can this feeling get?” as you allow it to expand throughout your body and dissolve.

Letting go of tension sometimes can reverse-engineer your mind into calming down. Research has shown that smiling during brief periods of stress may help reduce the body’s stress response, regardless of whether you actually feel happy or not.

But what we’re facing isn’t a brief period of stress. So, the final step in my self-soothing process is to bring care and compassion to myself. That sounds hippie dippie, but in my experience it’s the most powerful step towards becoming more courageous and emotionally resilient.

Here’s an example: when I’m feeling lonely, I imagine the part of me that’s lonely as a young boy who is looking for a friend. I invite this part to come sit beside me. More often than not, the loneliness dissipates along with the tension in my stomach that accompanied it.

Another way to care for yourself: imagine the part of you that’s afraid and anxious as a good friend. How would you be with this friend? Would you ignore them or give them your full attention and love? Likely, you’d do the latter.

The bottom line: these are unprecedented times. Don’t add fuel to the fire by catastrophizing or—worse—pretending that everything is great.

Instead, notice your emotions. Allow them to be there. Let go of any tension in your body. And most important, hold your emotional experience with compassion rather than judgement and criticism.

Want to start meditating or meditate more often?

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

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.

I’m 34 years old and still afraid of the dark

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As I’ve written, I’m housesitting for my parents in rural Maryland while they’re in Florida for the winter. When I’m not driving back into Washington, D.C., to see friends, days pass without human interaction.

But the solitude isn’t what’s getting to me. It’s the silence, particularly at night.

The house is on a farm at the end of a mile-long dirt road. It’s a 20-minute drive outside of town, “town” being La Plata, which has a population of barely over 9,000.

Living in D.C. for the past 12 years, I’ve been rocked to sleep by the sound of roommates, ambulances, and drunk people in the alley.

Out here, there’s just empty, mind-bending silence and the occasional gunshot. The other night someone fired off a few semi-automatic rounds across the field from the house. I picked up a 12-gauge shotgun and peered into the darkness for a good 15 minutes.

I’m trying to enjoy being surrounded by the forest as it prepares for spring, and during the day I do. My mother’s side of the family has owned this land since 1849. It’s not as obviously gorgeous as the mountains out West, but there’s beauty if you look for it.

Most nights, though, as soon as the sky fades to black, I imagine someone breaking into the house. Images from TV murder mysteries fill my mind. I listen into the silence, imagining the sound of glass breaking or a door being kicked in. I go up to my room, lock the door, and watch Netflix with that shotgun next to my bed.

I know the odds of someone burglarizing a house this far out in the woods are low. But when we’re triggered into intense emotions, rational thinking is beside the point.

So far, what I’ve been able to do is bring attention to the fear. I’ve noticed that my shoulders and neck tense up as if something frightening is right behind me. The last thing I want to do is get out of bed to check downstairs.

Based on my journey working with other emotions, like loneliness and grief, the next step is to accept that I’m afraid. But, so far, all I feel is ashamed. Once the stories about murders and break-ins fade away, I think things like, I’m 34 years old, I shouldn’t be afraid. Or, I should be a man like my dad who seems to never be afraid.

“Shoulds” are a dead giveaway that we’re fighting reality. When we think we should or shouldn’t be a certain way, we’re trying to deny who we really are in this moment.

The German psychoanalysis Karen Horney called this the “tyranny of the shoulds.” It really does seem like a tyrannical leader in the mind takes the steering wheel and won’t let go. There’s a rigidity to the “shoulds.” We are either this or that, good or bad, strong or weak.

But the part of me that’s afraid needs to be seen and held with compassion—just like a frightened child. If I keep denying that I’m afraid by wishing I wasn’t, that part will keep being afraid because it doesn’t trust the other parts of me. It will keep taking over and causing me to freeze up.

Thank God for my meditation practice, which has developed the muscle memory in my mind to watch out for “shoulds.”

“Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better,” writes the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. “It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.”

I’m curious about my fear, but befriending it sounds so lame. Who wants to be friends with someone who’s afraid of the dark like a little kid?

I’m not there yet. But at least I know where my edge is, and I’ve come to trust that when I step towards my edge rather than away from it, good things tend to happen.

Want to start meditating or meditate more often?

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

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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