Jeremy Mohler

Writer, meditation teacher, and therapist-in-training

How to be with your anger towards anti-vaxxers

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An old friend who I haven’t seen for a while just texted that he isn’t vaccinated, and I lost my shit.

Not to him. I responded that I appreciated him telling me when I asked. And I do appreciate it. But my insides were boiling.

“Just get the vaccine, you f*cking idiot!” I yelled in my apartment.

I have so much anger inside me towards anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. Especially towards politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who are vaccinated but keep challenging the advice of public health experts.

It feels like molten lava flowing up from the pit of my stomach. I just want to hold little Ronnie DeSantis down until he quits squirming and make him do the right thing.

But I don’t know if my friend is an anti-vaxxer or just a little scared or just a little too busy to get around to it. I do know that he’s my friend. I love the guy. I don’t want him to get sick just like I don’t want anyone to get sick.

(And just so you know, I’m not a fan of Big Pharma — or, for that matter, corporate control of health care. We wouldn’t have the vaccines if it weren’t for public research and public funding. Their patents should be waved so that poorer countries can make their own vaccines.)

So, I’m trying to sit here and “just be with” the anger.

What’s coming up is a memory of when a meditation teacher of mine responded to an angry meditation student during class.

The teacher had just read aloud Thich Nhat Hanh’s story about a young girl who was raped by a pirate. Nhat Hanh is a Buddhist monk who lived through the Vietnam war and who Martin Luther King Jr. once nominated for the Noble Peace Prize.

According to Nhat Hanh, the girl was returning to Vietnam by boat after the U.S. left the country. But after being sexually assaulted, she jumped in the ocean and drowned herself.

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

But, he says, when he paused and looked more deeply at his reaction, something shifted.

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 … 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.

After my meditation teacher read that story, a student became visibly upset. She said there was no way she could feel sympathy for the pirate. She hated him and wished he was dead. She said that the story was letting rapists off the hook.

“There’s room for all of it,” my meditation teacher responded. “For your anger, for the trauma you’ve been through, and for your sympathy, if you can find it.”

There’s room for all of it. That’s what stuck with me.

It’s okay that I’m pissed at my friend. It’s also okay that I feel love and sympathy for him. It’s okay that I want to punch Ron DeSantis in the face. All of my reactions are okay.

That doesn’t mean that if I hung out with my friend I would ignore that he’s unvaccinated. It doesn’t mean that I can’t maintain my boundaries to stay safe. It doesn’t mean that I’m a weak pushover.

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.

It means that there’s space for my anger. I have more choices than either being a “nice guy” and suppressing it or acting out in reckless, harmful ways. And don’t we all want a little more choice in our lives?

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, therapist-in-training, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. Subscribe to my weekly email on how to be more mindful at your job, in your relationships, and when it comes to politics here.

If you’re in D.C. or Maryland, reach out for reduced-price online therapy: jeremy@jeremymohler.blog

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness can decrease your anxiety and transform your life.

Photo by CT Senate Republicans.

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.