Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

The Capitol riot was traumatic, even if you weren’t there

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Since the white supremacist attack on the Capitol, I’ve been looking for ways to process what happened.

Turns out, what I needed most was poetry. More on that in a second.

The first helpful thing was realizing that what happened was traumatic.

Even though I’m white and experienced it by doomscrolling social media, it triggered my nervous system. Stress hormones flooded my body. My breath shortened. My muscles clenched for protection.

But there was no one to fight or run from. There was nowhere for the stress to go except gnaw at my insides.

“I know many people who feel exhausted, reactive, depressed, hypervigilant, sleepless, cloudy/dazed, and super raw,” tweeted therapist and meditation Ralph De La Rosa. “These are common traumatic reactions.”

This is why compassion has been so important.

When we’re scared, we need unconditional love. We need to be held and told not that everything will be okay but that we are okay, exactly how we are, whatever we’re feeling.

That is what good friends are for. And therapy. They provide what psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard.”

“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.”

I love this Carl Rogers quote: “People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right-hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”

It’s also been helpful to meditate and move my body.

Unconditional love often isn’t enough. Trauma can stay trapped in the body. “The body,” the title of van der Kolk’s bestselling book says, “keeps the score.”

After the violence, my attention was stuck in my mind. And my mind was stuck in the future, worrying, planning, catastrophizing.

That’s why I couldn’t stop looking at social media. As De La Rosa said, “People were offloading their emotions … by refreshing and doomscrolling as if that was going to do something, as if that was going move something. And it was just the neurochemicals trying to affect the situation, [yet they were] rendered useless.”

Meditation has helped me stay with what’s happening in the present moment. What’s going on in my body. What it feels like to breathe. What it actually sounds like right here, right now, in my Baltimore apartment.

Meditation counters stress by triggering the body to stop releasing stress hormones, slow the heart rate, and deepen breathing.

I’ve noticed that even going for a short walk or stretching can take the edge off. The energy has somewhere to go instead of being redirected inside. Yoga is even better, as it‘s been shown to reset critical brain areas that get disturbed by trauma.

But, if I’m being honest, I have a therapist and plenty of close friends. And I’ve got a halfway decent meditation practice.

I’ve been needing something more. Something bigger. Something to hold not just me but all of us and the violence and trauma and this country’s history in a larger way.

Something that holds Trump and white supremacy accountable. But that also sees the humanity in all the insanity. In a word, something spiritual.

Thank goodness for adrienne maree brown’s poem, which she wrote the morning after the riot. Here’s my favorite part:

things are not getting worse
they are getting uncovered
we must hold each other tight
and continue to pull back the veil
see: we, the body, we are the wounded place

we live on a resilient earth
where change is the only constant
in bodies whose only true whiteness
is the blood cell that fights infection
and the bone that holds the marrow

remove the shrapnel, clean the wound
relinquish inflammation, let the chaos calm
the body knows how to scab like lava stone
eventually leaving the smooth marring scars
of lessons learned

Seriously, go read the whole thing right now.

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.

Photo by Blink O’fanaye

Feeling unfulfilled? Try relaxing your stomach more. Really.

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I’ve been singing for over 20 years. Since I was a pop punk-loving, skateboard-riding high schooler. But only recently have I started liking my voice.

That’s because of meditation teacher Stephen Levine. His “soft belly” practice is refining my singing voice. It’s also helping me during hard, uncomfortable conversations. It’s even helping me relax on dates.

“When the belly is hard there is holding,” Levine wrote in his book “Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings.” “Some degree of fighting or posturing is resisting and hardening to the moment, attempting to control.”

Maybe where you tense up the most isn’t your stomach. Maybe it’s your shoulders, chest, or forehead.

But Levine’s point is that letting go — over and over again — is the key to living life to the fullest.

In fact, some 80 percent of information that travels between the mind and body goes from the body to the mind. Relaxing the body relaxes the mind far more than the other way around.

(There’s a reason so many of us tense up our midsections, though. This society pressures us to have flat stomachs. Fat shaming is American as apple pie and racism.)

At 15, I wanted to be a rock star on MTV. I wanted to sound like Mark Hoppus from Blink 182. I wanted to impress the girls at my band’s shows.

In college, I wanted to sound like Jim Morrison and appear a tortured, madman poet like Bob Dylan.

At this point, I want to be plain old, boring me. Inspired by Levine, I’ve been relaxing my ab muscles as I sing. Before, I was squeezing my throat, narrowing myself down to sound a certain way.

Now, I breathe deep and let my body do the singing, whatever comes out. And I’ve been digging my voice. It’s… me.

If singing isn’t your thing, when do you feel vulnerable? Public speaking. Talking to your boss. Having sex. When do you put on an act?

Whatever it is. Except for, maybe, Pilates. Softening your stomach will help.

Levine’s “soft belly” is a practice. “You may have to come back to soft belly dozens of times an hour,” he wrote. “The belly needs to be reminded that it has unconsciously tightened to that which we wish to remain unconscious of.”

I’ve realized that my stomach is a thermometer for my closed-offness. When it’s tense, I know I’m armoring myself by trying to come off a certain way. Trying to manufacture a certain outcome. Trying to get people to like me. Trying to avoid discomfort.

The irony is, trying to avoid discomfort is uncomfortable. It’s exhausting trying to be someone I’m not. It keeps the boat from rocking, sure. But it’s so damn unfulfilling.

“Don’t you want to be all used up when you die?” Natalie Goldberg, the writer and Zen meditation teacher, once asked at a retreat I attended.

“Yes!” I thought.

Living with a soft belly — whether singing or talking or loving — is using myself up. Which is why it’s scary. It’s taking the armor off. Living fully this limited vessel that is my one and only life.

It’s so fucking hard to let go of the outcome. To just be. To just be myself. As flawed and broken as I am. Knowing, somehow, that I’m also beautiful.

Levine, who often counseled people who were dying, once wrote:

Most fight death as they fought life, struggling for a foothold, for some control over the incessant flow of change that exemplifies this plane of existence. Few die in wholeness.

Don’t you want to be all used up when you die? I know I do.

“Soft belly” is my cheat code for doing it.

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

Download my free ebook on how meditation transformed my life.

How to cope with the emotional dumpster fire that is 2020

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I’ve been a broken record recently playing all the Pema Chödrön hits. But, get this:

[When] you wake up in the middle of the night with an anxiety attack and when you can fully experience the taste and smell of it, you are sharing the anxiety and fear of all humanity. People’s stories are different, their situations are different, but the experience is the same.

This pandemic just won’t end, will it? Wildfires. Hurricanes. Record unemployment. Winter around the corner. Two old men fumbling through an election, one of them a flat out racist, the other unwilling to stand for anything that would actually change people’s lives.

Everyone I know is suffering on multiple fronts. We repeat, mantra-like, “There’s just so much going on in the world.” Even pets are acting needier than usual.

But what Pema is getting at is: At least we’re not alone. We might be physically isolated. We might be tired of interacting through little boxes on screens. But we’re all feeling more or less the same emotions: anxiety, impatience, fear, anger, loneliness.

The trick is to just admit that they’re there. Don’t hide from them. Don’t beat yourself up for feeling them. Don’t take them as evidence that something’s wrong with you. Because your best friend, your neighbor, your postal worker feels them too.

My default move is hiding from uncomfortable feelings, stuffing them down and pretending everything’s fine.

But not the other day. During a group therapy session, someone teased me in a way that embarrassed me. Just like that I was 14 again, worried about what the girls in class think. My stomach squeezed up in that familiar way. I felt a million miles from the little boxes on the screen.

But because the group therapist had created such a safe space, another part of me felt secure, solid, stable. Instead of hiding, I was able to notice how curious I was. Wow, look how scared part of me is, I thought. I wonder what it was that triggered me. What if I just allow this discomfort to be here?

That’s what we have to try to bring to our inner world, that curiosity. That unconditional positive regard, as the psychologist Carl Rogers called it.

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be,” Rogers once wrote. “When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right-hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”

Once I got curious and “fully experienced the taste and smell” of the embarrassment, it didn’t feel so overwhelming. I even was able to tell the group that I felt a little scared. They, of course, accepted me. I was less alone—less like a 14-year-old in gym class. Less like I’m the only person who’s afraid in the whole wide world.

Rogers, again: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

Start small. You don’t have to work with your feelings about the pandemic, about Trump, about climate change, all at once.

Just try to stay by the fire a little longer when you feel that familiar tightness. When you’re feeling lonely on a Friday night. When your partner falls asleep without saying they love you. When your boss wants you to work late again.

Pema with the mic drop:

We can close our hearts to life to try to protect ourselves against difficult circumstances. Or we can let difficulties soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.

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.