Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

How to handle overwhelming emotions that come up during meditation

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If you haven’t seen the documentary “The Work,” go see it, now. (It’s streaming on Kanopy, which is free with a public library card.)

It made me cry five times, at least—and I can’t remember the last time I cried.

The film’s subject is a therapy group in a maximum-security prison in California. Prisoners join volunteers from outside the prison to talk through grief, anger, and other painful emotions their experiencing.

I cried a mere 15 minutes into the film when a former gang member named Kiki breaks down because he’s never mourned his sister’s death. “I don’t want to bottle up that little kid, that little kid who used to cry when his daddy would whoop his ass,” he says, weeping and screaming as the other prisoners hold him.

I cried because I was reminded that every one of us hides our emotional wounds. We hide our pain behind anger, or our grief behind being a “real man,” or our resentment behind a pretend smile, or our loneliness behind another beer.

Even if your father didn’t beat you, or you aren’t a gang member, you’ve gone through trauma. You have wounds. You’ve been through some shit.

How your parents or caregivers treated you when you were young—even if they loved you deeply—shaped how you relate to yourself and others as an adult. As physician and addiction expert Gabor Maté writes, “Emotional nurturance is an absolute requirement for healthy neurobiological brain development.”

If your mother was stressed about work, or your father was an alcoholic, or there was conflict in the family, you were affected in ways that influence how you handle emotions today.

Get this: studies show that concentrations of the stress hormone cortisol are elevated in the children of depressed mothers. At age three, the highest cortisol levels were found in those children whose mothers had been depressed during the child’s first year of life.

No one can avoid the trauma of being an infant and relying on others to fulfill our needs. There’s really no escape.

That’s why mindfulness meditation, which gives us the opportunity to turn towards rather than away from our emotions, is playing with fire. This practice isn’t all peace, love, and productivity gains.

When we stop believing our own bullshit—the stories our mind comes up with to avoid feeling painful emotions—we can experience moments of relaxation, acceptance, and wholeness. That’s why so many people are drawn to meditation. But we can also experience what we’ve been hiding from.

“It’s very easy to overload your circuits,” says Willoughby Britton, a neuroscientist who studies meditation. “We have this idea that diving in is going to make us feel better. But often it can destabilize the system. It’s just too much, and it can be dissociating.”

So, what should you do if you’re meditating and out of nowhere comes a bout of sadness or anger or extreme anxiety?

Well, stop meditating and go see a therapist or talk with a trusted friend. You don’t have to turn this practice into a heroic performance like everything else in our individualistic, capitalist society.

But if you feel safe enough to step towards the flame, try to find a neutral feeling in the body. Notice the connection points between your feet and the floor. Feel the density of the bones in your hands. Follow the air as it travels down through your sinuses and back up again.

Once you feel safe, move your attention to wherever you feel that sadness or anger or anxiety, likely in the middle of your chest or your stomach. Feel the raw sensations—the warmth, the coolness, the tingling, the flow of energy.

If your mind goes to stories about the emotion—he’s such an asshole—let go of the thought and return your attention to the raw sensations.

If the sensations are overwhelming, return to that neutral place in the body. Go back and forth, over and over again. Eventually, the difficult emotion might dissolve—or it won’t.

Healing your wounds—doing the work—is a lifelong journey, so take your time.

Free meditation cheat sheet

I’ve come up with a cheat sheet to help you start and 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.

How to work with fear, anxiety, and other difficult emotions

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In his book In Love with the World, the Nepalese Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche writes about “adding wood to the fire”:

“Generally, people go through life taking note of those experiences that recurrently enflame our anger or anxiety or fear—and then we try to avoid them, telling ourselves things like, I can’t watch scary movies. I cannot be in big crowds. I have a terrible fear of heights, or of flying, or of dogs, or the dark.

But the causes that provoke these responses do not go away; and when we find ourselves in these situations, our reactions can overwhelm us. Using our inner resources to work with these issues is our only true protection, because external circumstances change all the time and are therefore not reliable.

Adding wood to the fire deliberately brings difficult situations to the forefront so we can work with them directly.”

In other words, we can’t escape painful feelings, so we might as well try to work with them when they appear. We might as well move in their direction rather than resist them. We might even want to try to put ourselves in situations where they’re bound to come up.

Back in 2012, as the Occupy movement was fizzling out, I went to the first meeting of the Washington, D.C., reading group for the socialist magazine Jacobin. I walked in with a big ego, thinking I knew a bit about the problems with capitalism.  

But it’s D.C. Everyone was not only brilliant but also well-versed in socialist history and all the various tendencies of Marxist thought. There were a handful of experienced organizers and even PhDs in the room.

I didn’t say a single word and left feeling horrible—so small, uninformed, and insignificant. Part of me wanted to give up the whole politics thing and stay with what I’d spent the last decade doing, singing in a rock band.

Yet, another part of me sensed that, yes, this is exactly what I need. This is the only way to grow.

Eventually, I got in politics doing what I love, writing. Countless moments of letting my ego get gut punched no doubt helped me get there.

The Zen priest angel Kyodo williams calls this becoming undone: “We’re not trying to become something; we’re trying to un-become. We’re trying to undo ourselves.”

Usually we do the opposite by ignoring fear, anxiety, grief, and other painful feelings. We try to appear a certain way to others. We numb ourselves with Netflix or Facebook or drinking.

Psychologist Sheryl Paul writes, “You can resist the call and numb the pain, or you can walk through the center of the fear-storm and surrender to the most transformational ride of your life.”

Now, sometimes the pain is too strong, and it overwhelms us. We might need help from other people, like a close friend or therapist, especially when working with trauma. 

But we can learn to be with many of our feelings by practicing mindfulness meditation.

We’re sitting and we notice a tenderness in the middle of our chest or a lump in our throat. We feel its raw sensations. We notice that our mind is telling stories about it, trying to figure out why we feel the way we do.

Following the practice’s directions, we then let go of the thoughts and bring our mind’s attention to the tenderness, to its raw sensations. We let it just be there, even if it grows and fills our whole body. Eventually, like all feelings, it goes away.

What we’re learning is the priceless skill of adding wood to the fire, of allowing rather than resisting the substance of our life.

Free meditation cheat sheet

I’ve come up with a cheat sheet to help you start and 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.

It’s not why you’re anxious that matters. It’s whether you know how to reconnect.

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A friend recently gave me a book by Tibetan Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche called In Love with the World, almost every page of which is knocking me on my ass.

Mingyur tells the story of sneaking away from his monastery at the age of 36 to spend four years wandering India on foot, begging for food. On the second night, looking for a place to sleep in a crowded railroad station, he comes to an insight about the concept of home.

“I had wished to enter the Varanasi station with the ease that many people reserve for coming home after a hard day’s work,” he writes.

“Say you come home from a grueling day, or a long commute. You walk through the door, so grateful to find shelter from an uncontrollable world … But this station definitely did not feel like my clean, safe rooms in my monastery.”

For months, as he’d planned his first few days of wandering, he’d imagined the station would provide him a temporary feeling of comfort.

“We often get caught in the illusion that arriving at a pre-determined destination will end the mental agitation of feeling in-between. This happens when we do not know the continuity of awareness—or when we know but still lose connection.”

I can so relate. It seems like I’m almost constantly leaning into the future, thinking that once I get somewhere else—or make more money, or land the right job, or make more friends, or…—I’ll finally feel okay.

Once, when camping in one of the most beautiful places in the U.S., Arizona’s Oak Creek Canyon, I became so overwhelmed with anxiety that I packed up my stuff and drove an hour north to the closest town.

I’d been looking forward to a peaceful night under the stars for months as I planned the road trip. But I felt lonely, and also ashamed for feeling lonely at the ripe old age of 31.

Nothing would console me, not even the laughter of children playing with a puppy a few campsites over. I needed the familiarity of a bookstore to calm down—a Barnes & Noble, for God’s sake.

The reasons I leave the present moment are plenty.

Capitalism requires constant hustle. The American Dream is all about the “pursuit” of happiness, not happiness right here, right now. I grew up with middle class parents who valued working hard and saving money for retirement. There was a lot of holding back when I was young, waiting for “one day.”

But, in a sense, the reasons don’t matter. Exploring why we habitually lose connection is essential work, but it can become yet another way we leave the present moment.

That’s why I love mindfulness meditation, this practice for finding our way back to connection. For discovering a sense of home in any moment, anywhere. For staying in the “continuity of awareness.”

It’s not some intellectual pursuit or religious exercise. It gives us three tangible anchors in the present moment we can tie our rope to: breath, sound, and the body.

No matter what’s happening, we can come inward and observe the sensations of our body breathing. Or we can pause and listen. Or we can relax a particular part of our body and notice the sensations.

There really is a sense of home in every moment. Right here, right now, everything belongs, and nothing is missing. There’s nowhere else to be, nothing else to do.

The trick is finding our way back, over and over again, which is a lifelong practice.

Free meditation cheat sheet

I’ve come up with a cheat sheet to help you start and 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.