Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

The secret to a good life is letting go. Here’s how to actually do it.

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I recently turned 35 years old, which feels like a big deal.

That’s the same age Siddhartha Guatama — the ancient spiritual master who inspired Buddhism — became enlightened. He was well on his way to starting a worldwide religion that now has over 500 million followers.

I’ve been wearing sweatpants every day since March. Take that, Siddhartha. One day, I might even make it a whole week without forgetting to floss before bed.

Letting go is the secret to a good life

But here’s the counterintuitive thing about the Buddha’s life. The takeaway isn’t to strive and fight and claw your way to enlightenment, the good life. It’s about letting go. Letting go of our need for things to be different.

We might want things to be different. And we might even have the courage to ask if they can be. But needing life to be different — expecting, demanding, even assuming we’ll get what we can’t have — is a recipe for suffering.

Siddhartha left his palace for the first time when he was 29 years old. His tribal king father had protected him from the cold, hard reality of the outside world.

But the comfort and decadence had begun to irritate him. One morning after a long night of partying, he left without telling anyone, walking into the surrounding slums he’d always ignored.

Thousands, maybe millions of words have since been written about what followed.

Siddhartha stumbled on what are known in Buddhist lore as the “divine messengers.” One was an old man, his body skin and bones. Another, a sick woman vomiting in a ditch. Yet another, a decaying corpse being carried to a funeral. Shocked by these sights, he thought, “How vain to think this won’t happen to me.”

Wanting things to be different causes suffering

He then spotted a monk with a shaved head and simple robe begging for food. As the story goes, this inspired him to begin a spiritual quest to become the Buddha. American Buddhist monk Bhikkhu Bhodi says seeing the monk showed Siddhartha “a path whereby all suffering can be fully transcended.”

But I like to think of the monk as an illusion. Like the palace’s safety and decadent partying, yet another idea of the good life. Yet another fantasy to grasp on to and strive for.

It would take six more years — until he was 35 — for Siddhartha to learn the lesson of letting go.

After seeing the divine messengers, he wandered forests and jungles practicing intense forms of meditation and austere living. Along with other yogis, he tortured his body to try to overcome its desires and needs. He eventually limited his daily diet to a few grains of rice.

“When I touched my belly, I would feel my backbone, and when I went to urinate, I would fall over,” he would later say.

Near death, he realized that starving himself was only causing more suffering. With the help of a peasant woman who nursed him, he recovered and developed the practices and teachings that would soon become known as Buddhism.

Only after letting go did Siddhartha find enlightenment. Holding on, grasping, striving, trying to control — that’s what causes suffering.

“You are either closing or opening.”

I live in a comfortable home in a safe neighborhood. My refrigerator is full of healthy food. I get to do meaningful work for a living. And get this: I floss almost every day.

And yet I still suffer. There’s always someone else who has more than me or does even more meaningful work. Someday, I’ll get sick. And someday, I’ll die.

It’s even more ordinary than that. I suffer anytime things are different than I’d like. When my steak isn’t cooked perfectly. When I have no one to talk to on a Friday night. When the weather isn’t just right.

Actually, suffering is happening right now, as I write this.

“Right now, and in every now-moment, you are either closing or opening,” writes spiritual teacher David Deida.

You are either stressfully waiting for something — more money, security, affection — or you are living from your deep heart, opening as the entire moment, and giving what you most deeply desire to give, without waiting. If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer.

I’ve been waiting for 35 years. That’s a lot of suffering.

Suffering isn’t the same as pain

By “suffering,” I don’t mean pain. I mean the story I tell myself that only adds to the pain we all experience. The story that things — including myself — should be different than they are.

The, I should be a better writer. I should have a partner and kids by now. I shouldn’t have to wear a mask and stay home. She shouldn’t have said that hurtful thing to me.

And letting go doesn’t mean being a doormat. It’s healthy to set boundaries with people. To communicate your needs and desires. But it’s also healthy to let go of the outcome. To know that you can’t control anyone or anything, really.

That’s the trick. Or “the Middle Way,” as the Buddha called it.

Speak up. Say what you need. Do the best you can. But, remember, you can’t control life. All you can control is how you relate to 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.

Photo by Paul Bence.

Is hating Trump supporters eating you up inside?

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I hate Trump supporters. Especially the working class ones.

The white dudes I grew up with who work in construction alongside Latinx people but who want to “build the wall.” The family friends on Medicare who celebrated Trump’s tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy.

I want to punch them in the face. I want to hold them down and force feed them the awareness that the rich and powerful are swindling them.

But that feels shitty. Not because it’s wrong of me to want to do those things.

Because hate burns. It tenses up my shoulders and my gut. It makes me forget to breathe, to feel my feet on the ground. Hating ends up hurting me.

The 5th century Buddhist scholar Buddhaghoṣa wrote:

By [getting angry] you are like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember or excrement in his hand and so first burns himself or makes himself stink.

Here’s how the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön puts it in her book “Start Where You Are”:

When you get to tell someone off, you might feel pretty good for a while, but somehow the sense of righteous indignation and hatred grows, and it hurts you.

It’s hard to let go of hate—even if it’s burning shit. Part of me thinks letting go is rolling over and giving up. I’m afraid of what would happen if there was no one to fight back against Trump supporters.

But another, deeper part of me knows they’re human beings. And like all human beings, they are suffering.

They just have a different story for why they suffer and who’s to blame. A story that happens to benefit the rich and powerful. A story, of course, that endangers people who don’t look like me.

But because you don’t hate someone doesn’t mean you can’t hold them accountable, set boundaries, and defend yourself and others. 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.

I once heard a story in a meditation class taught by Kaira Jewel Lingo that helps me navigate all this complexity. It comes from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who lived through the Vietnam War and its aftermath.

Hanh tells of a 12-year-old girl who was raped by a pirate while trying to return to Vietnam after the war. The girl jumped in the ocean and drowned herself.

“When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate,” Nhat Hanh writes. “You naturally take the side of the girl.”

But, he says, when he paused and looked more deeply, he saw it differently.

I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate … I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

Can you imagine? Seeing your homeland occupied and destroyed. Watching your friends and family get slaughtered. Hearing about horrific things happening to your people. And still not hating.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s story reminds me to look for myself in Trump supporters. I know that hate they feel. I’ve felt that same fear. I’ve hurt someone I didn’t mean to because I was afraid. I’m pissed and terrified about all the problems in the world. I’m human too.

If Thich Nhat Hanh can do it. If angel Kyodo williams, a Black queer Buddhist teacher, can see the fear in Trump supporters. Then I — a white, cisgendered, heterosexual man who grew up fishing and shooting guns — can too.

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, reach out. Get my writing straight to your email inbox here.

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

I rolled my eyes at people who said they felt gratitude. Until now.

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Google “gratitude” and the articles are damn near infinite.

“Gratitude: How to Change Negative Beliefs, Be Happy, And Become Successful.”

“How to Hack Gratitude”

“8 Ways to Have More Gratitude Every Day”

Part of me wants to roll my eyes. What do these people mean by “gratitude?” Do they actually feel appreciation? Or are they just trying to appear like a good person?

Maybe they’re just guilty for having privilege. A, “I should feel grateful because there are starving kids in Africa,” sort of thing.

But that’s because I’ve never understood what gratitude is—until now.

One of my goals for the rest of the year is to do Tibetan tonglen for five minutes every morning. Tonglen is a “giving and taking” meditation practice. You imagine someone who is suffering and breathe in their pain as dark, polluted air. Then you breathe cool, healing air towards them.

The idea is to develop compassion for ourselves and others. The Zen Buddhist teacher Roshi Joan Halifax says that tonglen “asks us to invite suffering into our being and let it break open the armor of our heart. The tender spaciousness that arises awakens selfless warmth and compassion.”

Tonglen is becoming a doorway to an emotion I’ve been rolling my eyes about for years: gratitude.

This morning I imagined my grand aunt who recently fell and broke her wrist. I felt compassion, sure. I don’t want her to suffer any longer. But I also felt appreciation for the fact that my body is in good shape. That I have my health. That I’m not cooped up alone and hurting during coronavirus.

And it wasn’t an intellectual thing. It wasn’t a should, like, “I should be grateful because I’m healthy and others aren’t.” It was an organic sense of appreciation in my body. My shoulders softened. The center of my chest—dare I say it, my heart—became tender.

As the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön writes, tonglen “is designed to help ordinary people like ourselves connect with the openness and softness of our hearts.”

For a brief moment, maybe a few seconds, I was in awe of this life that I’ve been given. I was aware—in my bones—that it all could be gone tomorrow.

The thing about gratitude—the heart wrenching thing—is that once you start feeling it, you start feeling it for everything. “Gratitude needs practice,” writes the palliative care social worker Stephen Jenkinson, who has been with hundreds of the dying. “Gratitude for the things that don’t seem to help, that aren’t sought out or welcome—that’s a demanding kind, and it is needed in hard times.”

This morning, I also felt gratitude for my bum knee. I appreciated the parts of my heart that are broken from losing people I love. For a few seconds, I even was grateful for coronavirus giving me the opportunity to slow down and be with myself.

I’ve learned so much from the pain I’ve been through. From the perspective of gratitude, it’s all a gift.

That’s gratitude—even if it makes me want to roll 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.

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