Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

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© 2021 Jeremy Mohler
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It’s not you, it’s capitalism

February 9, 2021 by Jeremy Mohler

I keep forgetting that there’s a pandemic. Not that I need to wear a mask and socially distance. That’s in my bones now. But that I’m starving for human contact. That this isn’t normal.

This forgetting often comes in a familiar form: self-criticism.

I beat myself up inside for feeling lonely during the pandemic. I think things like, I should be handling this better. Or, I should be writing the next great American novel. Or, I shouldn’t be on social media so much.

But tens of millions of years of social connection are wired into my nervous system. So much so that the author Yuval Noah Harari argues it’s been essential for the survival of the human species.

“It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bisons,” he writes. “It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest and who is a cheat.”

The psychologist Matthew Lieberman says, “Mammals are more socially connected than reptiles, primates more than other mammals, and humans more than other primates.”

Our brains are supercomputers for knowing and remembering others. A 2005 study found that a single neuron in the brain was activated when people saw pictures of the actress Halle Berry, but that it failed to do so for other famous faces.

It all starts in the womb. When a pregnant mom is stressed or anxious or depressed, her baby’s developing brain is flooded with the same neurochemicals. Like mother, like child.

The children of women suffering from PTSD while pregnant during the 9/11 attacks, for example, were found to have abnormal stress hormone levels at one year of age.

Even if your mom didn’t suffer from PTSD, your kid brain was shaped by how your parents and other adults related to you.

“You can have childhoods were no overt trauma occurs,” says physician and addiction expert Gabor Maté. “But when the parents are just too distracted, too stressed to provide the necessary responsiveness, that can also traumatize the child.”

In other words, as a species, we’ve needed healthy connection to survive. And as individuals, we need it to thrive.

It’s so easy to forget all of this in a capitalist society. We’re told that if we work hard enough, one day we’ll have the life we’ve always wanted. That it’s on us — and us alone — to overcome our problems.

“There is no such thing as society,” once said Britain’s first female prime minister Margaret Thatcher, one of the most cold-blooded capitalist politicians who ever lived. “There are individual men and women and there are families.”

Just look at the commercials during the recent Superbowl. There was Dolly Parton remixing her hit “9–5” into “5–9,” with lyrics about having a side hustle: “Working 5 to 9, making something of your own now.” There was a swimmer who overcame her disability to become a 13-time Paralympic gold medalist. There was Bruce Springsteen driving around the desert, through small towns, in a city, with no other humans in sight.

But there are other ways of being. Other ways of organizing a society. Ways of honoring our need for connection.

A Canadian First Nations tradition, as just one example, says that when a woman is pregnant, no one who is angry or stressed is allowed in her presence until they’ve calmed down

I just need to keep reminding myself: This isn’t normal. And capitalism isn’t either.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly email newsletter helps you bring mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation transformed my life.

I’ve finally figured out why I’m unfairly needy with the people I love

February 2, 2021 by Jeremy Mohler

I’ve been trying to outrun loneliness for as long as I can remember.

One summer afternoon when I was seven or eight, I called my parents crying. My grandparents had been busy with their middle-age lives. I’d fed their horse apples and fished in a nearby pond until I couldn’t take it anymore. The loneliness vanished as my dad and little sister pulled into the driveway.

In middle school, I’d play video games with my best friend Matt. We’d stay up as late as we could. Because sleep meant disconnection — and loneliness.

Then I found songs. Lonely, nighttime songs. The Early November’s “Sunday Drive.” Ryan Adams’s “September.” Dylan’s “You’re a Big Girl Now.” I’d drive Southern Maryland backroads writing my own in my head.

If my band had a show coming up, I was okay. There was something to look forward too. To strive for. Something that all the work and practice and boredom in between was serving.

Along the way I hurt people. I expected them to make me feel less lonely. When they inevitably didn’t, I was pushy and needy and sometimes angry.

Now, it’s Friday nights. No plans and I’m a wreck. I text friends for some sort of connection. I scroll social media, assuming the relative quiet means everyone else is up to something special. I mostly just feel like shit. I pour some tequila or smoke a joint.

Plain-old plans aren’t even enough. My perfect Friday night is a dinner party with close friends, fix or six tops. Good food. Meaningful conversation. Deep connection. I need to be seen and heard. And I need to see and hear. (The pandemic has made this almost impossible, of course.)

Saturday morning comes and I’m back to my routines. Operating under the assumption that some future moment will finally be “it.” Saturday morning isn’t “it.” Monday mornings or Thursday evenings aren’t either. They’re preparation for whenever “it” happens; whatever “it” is.

By Friday night, I’m exhausted. Suddenly, this is it. This, right here, right now, is my life. So it has to be deep and meaningful. If it’s not, then I’ll be lonely forever. My mind sneers: you’re going to be 75 years old and still alone, watching football in a house somewhere in a gray, nameless suburb.

But I’m starting to glimpse another way. Another way of relating to that scared, lonely kid still inside of me. Because he is part of me. And never going away.

As the poet Nayyirah Waheed writes:

there is you and you.
this is a relationship.
this is the most important relationship.

What helps is imagining that kid beside me. Wrapping my arm around him and listening to what he has to say.

“For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety,” writes psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. “Being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart.”

That’s why deep, meaningful connection is so soothing to me on a Friday night. It’s a pacifier for that scared, lonely kid.

I’m learning how to give that to myself. To self-soothe. Imagining my arm around that kid calms me down. Picking up the guitar softens my shoulders. Taking a hot shower makes me feel held by something larger than myself.

And thank God for my meditation practice. It’s helped me get to know my inner world. All my different parts. The loneliness. The striving to be perfect. The self-righteous anger. The people pleasing.

Mindfulness takes a little bit of the charge out of the thoughts. Creates some distance between them and me. Makes them less believable.

Like getting up from the front row of a movie theater and walking to the back. You realize the thoughts are just images on a screen. As Nepalese Tibetan Buddhist teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche says, they’re “real but not true.”

My worries about being lonely forever are real — they’re appearing in my mind. But they aren’t necessarily true.

Which allows me to choose how to relate to my loneliness. Rather than following those same old patterns that haven’t served me since I was a little, lonely, scared kid.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly email newsletter helps you bring mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation transformed my life.

I used to cringe when a meditation teacher mentioned compassion

January 26, 2021 by Jeremy Mohler

Living the good life is simple but extremely difficult.

Simple, as in all it takes — beyond food, water, and shelter— is one thing: self-compassion.

Difficult, because so much is stacked against us being nice to ourselves.

What I mean by “the good life” is what the poet Mary Oliver must’ve meant when she asked, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

The adjectives wild and precious about sum it up. The good life is realizing the seriousness of this present moment. How it never, ever will happen again. Yet being okay with that. Not making anything too precious. Celebrating the wildness.

It’s like that old Oscar Wilde line: “Life is too serious to be taken seriously.” (Though, apparently, that’s not exactly what Wilde wrote.)

Or like what the ancient Indian mystic known as the Buddha meant by “the middle way” when he said, “There is a middle way between the extremes of indulgence and self-denial, free from sorrow and suffering.”

Let me bring all this abstract stuff down to Earth.

When I first got into meditation, I would cringe whenever a meditation teacher mentioned compassion. What is this hippie, bougie shit? I’d think. When they recommended self-compassion, my mind would go blank.

It made no sense. I was meditating to be like a Buddhist monk, you know, cool, calm, and collected.

But in hindsight, I was just trying to feel better. And it wasn’t until I practiced self-compassion that I actually started to on a regular basis.

A few years ago, I dated someone I was incredibly attracted to. She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. Yet, when we slept together, I had trouble — let’s say — performing.

She was understanding and gentle with me about it. But I was a wreck. I thought I was broken physically or — worse — emotionally.

It wasn’t until I talked to a therapist that I felt better.

My friends had been kind. They’d recommended this or that supplement, this or that move in bed, this or that perfect thing to say.

But the therapist made me feel normal. Like nothing was wrong with me. Sure, what happened wasn’t ideal. But it happened. It was the truth.

The therapist’s non-shaming attitude allowed me to see that, despite being upset, I was also curious. What happened was evidence that my needs weren’t being met. Not evidence that I’m broken or weak or not a “real man,” whatever that means.

So, I decided to experiment. What is it that I really want? What really turns me on? What if I slowed down? What if I went at a pace that felt comfortable to me, instead of barreling forward because that’s just what a man does?

See, what gets in the way of self-compassion are thoughts. Spiraling, ruminating, critical thoughts. Stories about how we should or shouldn’t be.

angel Kyodo williams, the Zen Buddhist priest, says these stories fill our mind as if it were “that drawer that collects everything in your house.” She goes on:

They’re moving at an incredible rate of speed. And, for the most part, we almost never get the opportunity to observe them and sort through them. You say, ‘Oh, but wait a minute, someone lived in this house before me. And some of that stuff is not mine. Actually, this is not mine. That’s my mom’s. This is not mine; that’s the inheritance of white supremacy.’ And we have no real way of being able to discern what is mine, what is yours, what we’re holding collectively, what I have inherited, what I have taken on as a measure of protection, of a way to cope at some point in my life.

I was putting pressure on myself because… that’s just what men do. Men take control, do the exact right thing at the exact right time, and perform perfectly, no matter what. Those are the messages I inherited from our patriarchal culture.

But when I slowed down and got curious — when I observed and sorted through my thoughts— I also got confident, creative, and the rest of “the 8 C’s,” as they’re known as in the form of therapy called Internal Family Systems (IFS). I got courageous, compassionate, calm, and clearer about what I actually wanted.

I saw that I wasn’t emotionally connected with the woman I was dating. I was so caught up in her physical beauty that I’d lost connection with myself.

In other words, self-compassion is acceptance. Celebrating the wildness. Embracing our humanness. Dancing in the messiness. Learning from it all.

“Life is an incredible curriculum,” said the late spiritual teacher and psychologist Ram Dass. “In which we live it [sic] richly and passionately as a way of awakening to the deepest truths of our being.”

I’m happy to report that I haven’t experienced “performance issues” since. In fact, some 20 percent of erectile dysfunction cases are caused by anxiety, stress, or some other psychological issue.

But who knows if I will again? Life is unpredictable. Why would I want it not to be?

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly email newsletter helps you bring mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation transformed my life.

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