Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

How the Buddha stumbled on mindfulness

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Let’s zoom in on mindfulness to get a sense of what we’re after when we sit down to meditate.

Mindful.org says it’s “the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.”

There are a few interesting things here.

Mindfulness is a “basic” human ability. Meaning, it’s not some complex skill that we have to spend 10,000 hours learning how to do. It’s available to us in any moment.

You can think of the ability to stay in the present moment as like the sun. It’s always there. There are clouds in the way sometimes, sure. But the sun is still there in the background.

We can’t push the clouds away. We must accept that they’re there and wait for them to pass. Same thing with a big storm — some big trauma or emotional state. No matter how shitty it feels, it will pass.

The Buddha — the ancient spiritual master who developed mindfulness meditation — stumbled on mindfulness when he was a young boy.

His family was watching the ritual first plowing of the fields. As the sun scorched, he sat in the shade of a rose-apple tree.

Plows turned up the soil exposing worms that wriggled around trying to find cover. Other worms writhed in pain after being cut in half. Birds hovered near the ground to eat the defenseless worms and other bugs that laid bare for their easy picking. A hawk swooped down and caught one of the small birds.

The Buddha felt the striving of the man plowing. He felt the exhaustion of the water buffalo chained to the plow. He felt the pain of the worms cut by the plow and the small bird taken by the hawk. He felt the unpredictability of life itself.

That’s what we’re doing when we meditate. We’re getting out of our head and into our bodies. We’re feeling rather than thinking. We’re connecting rather than staying disconnected, caught up in the little drama in our head.

It’s like that old Zen Buddhist story about two monks watching a flag flapping in the wind. One said to the other, “The flag is moving.” The other replied, “The wind is moving.”

Another monk overheard this and said, “Not the flag, not the wind. Mind is moving.”

When we’re caught up in the drama, we’re not seeing the big picture. We’re missing the fact that everything is changing and moving and living and dying all of the time.

The other interesting part of the definition is about reactivity.

When we’re practicing mindfulness, we’re cultivating equanimity. Meaning, while we might feel things — even painful, difficult things — we’re not overwhelmed by them.

We can be with our feelings without necessarily acting on them. Which also means we can be with others’ feelings without necessarily having to do anything.

We have a little more choice. We can respond rather than react.

Say a woman cuts the line in front of you at the grocery store. You might get angry because you’re in a rush. You might yell or say something passive aggressive or stew about it for the rest of the night.

But, as the late author David Foster Wallace said in his commencement speech “This is Water”:

Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable.

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

In other words, mindfulness is about remembering that everything is connected, despite our mind’s attempts to say otherwise.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. I’m here to help you be more mindful about work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe to my weekly email here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation can transform your life.

Photo by Hartwig HKD.

How letting go of control can improve your life

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There’s a tragic irony to this life: The only thing we can control is whether we’re willing to stop trying to control things. Whether we’re willing to let go.

The bad news is, letting go is probably the hardest thing to do.

Addiction recovery programs offer 12 steps over months, years, even decades to help people let go of alcohol, heroin, or something else they love. Meetings are available 24/7, in every corner of the world. There’s almost certainly someone spilling their guts out in a meeting somewhere right now about how hard it’s been to let go.

Maybe you’re not an alcoholic or drug user. But you’re addicted to something. It might be appearing a certain way to other people. Or pleasing your significant other. Or making lots of money. Or pretending that your better or smarter or more woke than other people.

The good news? Letting go is, well, letting go. There isn’t much to it. It’s like realizing that the door you’ve been struggling to open actually opens the other direction. It’s the opposite of effort. It’s relaxing, not doing anything, releasing the controls.

The meditation teacher and psychologist Tara Brach tells the story of pilots attempting to fly at high altitudes back in the 1950s. They would anxiously try to stabilize their planes when they were thrown off by the low gravity. But the more they manipulated the controls, the wilder their planes became. Many plunged to their death.

This continued until one of the pilots was knocked out. “Unconsciously, he plummeted toward Earth,” writes Brach.

“Seven miles later, the plane re-entered the planet’s denser atmosphere, where standard navigation strategies could be implemented. He steadied the craft and landed. In doing so, he had discovered the only life-saving response that was possible in this desperate situation: don’t do anything. Take your hands off the controls.”

Again, it sounds simple. But it’s difficult. Why? Because it means we have to feel the feelings we’re unwilling to feel.

The pilots who died weren’t willing to feel their fear. They got anxious and caused more harm than good. The pilot who survived was just lucky enough to be forced to let go.

I recently saw a photo of a friend who died of an overdose almost a decade ago. It made me incredibly sad. I hadn’t thought about her in years. To be honest, I’d never slowed down enough to think about her much at all.

Luckily, during the pandemic I’ve been writing songs on guitar to cope with the isolation. I picked up my guitar and started to write. Thirty minutes later I had a song filled with sad but angry lyrics.

Writing the song put me in touch with my anger. Toward her for dying. Toward myself for never telling her how I really felt about her and her drug use. Toward the world for allowing such a brilliant, beautiful person to die.

But now I feel lighter. Like I’ve let go of something. I’m not angry anymore. If anything, I appreciate the short time we had together.

I now know for sure that I couldn’t have saved her. I don’t have that kind of power. No one does.

The point is, we can’t let go of feelings we don’t even know are there.

Those unfelt feelings are what cause us to suffer. They keep us stuck in anxious patterns of manipulation, avoidance, or other ways of trying to control things. They hold us back from being able to control what we can control.

Pema Chödrön, the American Buddhist nun, writes in her book Start Where You Are about the 11th-century Tibetan Buddhist master Milarepa.

As a young man, Milarepa murdered someone. He turned to Buddhism for salvation, living alone in caves, meditating for days on end. One evening, the story goes, he returned to his cave to find it filled with demons. They were eating his food, reading his books, sleeping in his bed.

Milarepa tried teaching the demons about Buddhism. But they didn’t listen. He tried talking to them about compassion, but that didn’t work either. He got angry and ran at them. They just laughed.

Finally, he gave up. “I’m not going away, and it looks like you’re not either, so let’s just live here together,” he told them.

All the demons left, except one. Milarepa surrendered even more, walking over and putting his head in the demon’s mouth. Poof. The last demon disappeared.

Chödrön concludes, “The moral of the story is, when the resistance is gone, so are the demons.”

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly email newsletter helps you be more mindful about work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation can transform your life.

Photo by -5m.

The Buddha almost died from working too hard. So did I.

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I don’t consider myself a Buddhist. But I often find myself digging stories about Siddhartha Gautama, the ancient spiritual master known as the Buddha.

One lesser-known story is when Siddhartha almost died from starvation. He’d been wandering the jungle practicing intense forms of meditation and austere living. He tortured his body to try to overcome its desires and needs, eventually limiting 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.

Collapsed near a river at the edge of death, he realized that starving himself was only causing more suffering.

With the help of a peasant woman who nursed him back to full strength, he soon started a spiritual community and developed the practices and teachings that would become known as Buddhism.

I like this story for three reasons.

One, it reminds me that there’s a limit to the hustle.

Capitalism tells us otherwise. Relaxation is shamed in our society. Unless you’re rich, which means you deserve that vacation on your yacht. Otherwise, work harder, start a side hustle, be more productive, wake up earlier, do these ten things in your daily routine, blame poor people if you’re still unsatisfied with your life.

I’ve internalized these messages like a sponge. If I’m not careful, I’ll forget to take breaks, work on the weekends, start new projects before I’ve finished others. Eventually, I’ll burn out and collapse in my bed.

Once, in my mid 20s, I ended up in the hospital after half my body went numb. I probably wasn’t at the edge of death. But I got the message that if I continued working hard and partying harder, I might get there.

Two, it reminds me that I can’t do it alone. It being, live the life I so desperately want to live. A life lived fully.

Part of the reason Siddhartha almost died is because he was alone. He was fortunate a peasant just so happened to be walking by when he collapsed.

Eventually, his cousin Ananda would say to him, “Lord, I’ve been thinking. Spiritual friendship is at least half of the spiritual life.”

Siddhartha replied, “Ananda, that’s wrong. Such a view is not correct. Spiritual friendship is the whole of the spiritual life!”

As the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, “Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”

Capitalism, on the other hand, says lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. Do it yourself. Maybe start a family and buy a house in the suburbs. But when it comes down to it, you’re on your own. Have some personal responsibility!

Whiteness, which infects all of us, says so too. Being “white” has robbed me of my ancestors’ traditions, rituals, and ways of relating. It’s tricked me into thinking that I came from nowhere. That I didn’t come from English settler-colonialists who stole this land and German indentured servants who were all but forced to come here. That I’m not part of a community. That I’m self-made.

The third thing I like about the story is that it highlights the danger of toxic masculinity.

During his hustling phase, Siddhartha had no time for nourishing food, women, or anything considered soft. “All of these were temptations and a potential cause for [his] downfall,” writes the Buddhist nun Thanissara.

But “through the humble presence of a loving and caring woman,” Thanissara writes, “he saw the beauty of the river, of the sun shimmering on the tress and grasses, and of the graciousness of life in its abundance. The problem was not the world; the problem was his aversion to it.”

The peasant woman represents feeling emotions rather than stuffing them down. Embracing rather than rejecting and even hating anything that appears feminine. Collaborating with, rather than dominating over.

She also represents the belittlement of so-called “woman’s work.”

As socialist feminist Nancy Fraser says, with the rise of capitalism, “[The creation and maintenance of social bonds] was left behind, relegated to a new private domestic sphere, where it was sentimentalized and naturalized, performed for the sake of ‘love’ and ‘virtue,’ as opposed to money.”

We should always remember that the peasant woman is a crucial figure in Siddhartha’s awakening and the formation of Buddhism, a world religion now with over 535 million followers.

All of this is to say: Rest is a worthy thing to do, community matters, and patriarchy must go.

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.