Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Martin Luther King Jr. showed you can be mindful while being politically engaged

by

My favorite King quote is something he wrote about a year before his death:

The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.

That’s powerful stuff coming from a figure whose politics have been defanged and whitewashed into a cartoon of “peace” and “equality.”

I also try to remember that when King was assassinated, he was in Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking Black sanitation workers.

But one of my favorite King ideas is a metaphor he borrowed from a socialist Methodist pastor.

“I’m sure that many of you have had the experience of dealing with thermometers and thermostats,” King said in a sermon he gave many times early in his life.

The thermometer merely records the temperature. If it is 70 or 80 degrees, it registers that and that is all. On the other hand, the thermostat changes the temperature. If it is too cool in the house, you simply push the thermostat up a little and it makes it warmer. And so the Christian is called upon not to be like a thermometer conforming to the temperature of his society, but he must be like a thermostat serving to transform the temperature of his society.

Let’s replace “the Christian” with “humans.”

[Humans] are called upon not to be like a thermometer conforming to the temperature of society, but [they] must be like a thermostat serving to transform the temperature of society.

King was arguing that we must change society rather than only be changed by it. Which is what Karl Marx meant when he wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it.”

Okay, fair enough. We shouldn’t care only about ourselves. It’s our responsibility, as Bernie Sanders put it in his 2020 presidential run, “to fight for someone you don’t know.”

But it gets really interesting when you apply the metaphor to the mind.

There’s a contradiction. On the one hand, being mindful is like being a thermostat. When you realize you’re lost in thought, you bring your attention back to the present moment. When you’re worrying, planning, ruminating, you feel your breath, notice bodily sensations, listen.

Mindfulness is staying steady in the riptide of thoughts. Resting in the center of your experience, at a comfortable temperature of 72 degrees.

But King’s whole point was that we must act. It is our responsibility to change the things that must be changed.

If mindfulness is about staying still with whatever comes up, wouldn’t that make trying to change the world unmindful?

No, because we’re a thermostat. Sometimes, a comfortable 72 degrees isn’t what’s called for. We need to turn up the heat. We need to protest, march, strike. Throw ourselves in the gears of the system.

What’s unmindful—or unwise—is trying to do it all by ourselves. We’re like a teenager complaining about the temperature but lacking the money to pay the heating bill.

That’s a recipe for suffering. As Buddhism’s second noble truth says, suffering comes from grasping on to things we like and pushing away things we don’t like. Wanting to change things that can’t be changed.

Like a furnace in a house, we need resources to turn up the temperature. We need help. We need each other.

That’s what King meant by “a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”

I’m pretty sure you don’t have the wealth of Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump. The 1 percent can change the temperature themselves (and they literally are heating up the planet with their outsized consumption).

But we’re the 99 percent, everyone else. If we’re organized—our power—we can turn up the heat when it’s called for. If we can get past our differences—that were created by the 1 percent, like the concept of race—we can change this society.

I’ll let King have the last word:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

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.

No, half the country didn’t vote for Trump. But it sure feels like it.

by

Ten thousand votes in Arizona. Barely 0.03% of the vote in Georgia. Joe Biden’s margin of victory is — as my West Virginia-born dad says — skinny as a mosquito’s peter.

It really does feel like half the country likes having a racist, misogynist reality TV show star as president. Or they’re willing to tolerate him to “own the libs.”

But are Trump supporters really all that different from me? More on that in a second.

What the facts say

First, here’s what I’m trying to remember when I feel hopeless.

Half the country did not vote for Donald Trump. Around 30 percent did.

More than a third of eligible voters didn’t vote. That’s 78 million people. Some were disenfranchised by restrictive voting policies. But most weren’t convinced the election result would affect their lives.

The Democratic Party wasn’t offering much beyond, “At least we’re not Trump.” Biden only paid lip service to social justice. His campaign followed the lead of its corporate donors and all but ignored the needs of everyday people.

Still, Biden is up in the popular vote by over 5 million and counting. The electoral college is the only reason Trump had an outside shot.

The electoral college was invented to preserve slavery. The Founding Fathers needed a way to make sure the slave-owning Southern states had an equal say. Our political system isn’t broken. It’s working just as it was designed.

Racism is and always has been this country’s defining feature. People who look like me — European settlers — stole this land from indigenous Native Americans. Then they stole workers from Africa to clear and work it. Racism is the “American Blindspot,” wrote historian and author of Black Reconstruction (one of my favorite books) W.E.B Du Bois.

Still, most Trump voters aren’t Confederate flag-waving, QAnon-believing, Ford F-450-driving white supremacists. Many are typical, well-off Republicans who put up with Trumpism for lower taxes and less regulation.

What really calms my nerves, though

But most of all, I’m trying to remember that Trump supporters aren’t all that different from me. They’re not dumber or meaner or less civilized. They just have a different story than I do for why they’re suffering and who’s to blame.

They’ve been conned by the powers that be into blaming poor people and people of color. That’s Trump’s whole game. Turn people’s pain and anger into hatred aimed down rather than up at him and his rich buddies or capitalism itself.

But I know that pain and anger in the Trump supporter’s eyes.

I felt it when my dad got home from working 12-hour shifts delivering packages during the holidays.

When my mom complained about her male colleagues not taking her ideas seriously.

When I worked 12-hour shifts at an air conditioning-less factory one long, hot summer.

When I worked at a restaurant and customers acted like they knew me because they saw my name tag.

When the tech corporation I worked for laid off half the company, many of them my friends.

When a developer bought the artist warehouse I was living in to build condos.

When I read about the Arctic melting at record rates. Or another Black man killed by police.

I know how much powerlessness hurts. How angry it makes me.

I’m just lucky to have learned to blame the system itself. For keeping so many of us powerless, especially those born in the “wrong” neighborhood or with the “wrong” color skin. For allowing Trump-like corporate suits to run the world into the ground.

When I think about this way, the pill is easier to swallow. The distance between me and nastiest Trump supporter doesn’t seem so wide.

That doesn’t mean I’m letting them off the hook

No way I’m going to start giving Trump supporters a pass. I won’t stop calling out their racism. And I’ll keep standing beside those who don’t look like me and are in the cross hairs.

But I’m exhausted from pretending I’m better than them — or anyone else for that matter. It’s not working.

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 mindfulness meditation transformed my life here.

Photo by Blink O’fanaye

How to dismantle the capitalism in your head

by

Where did my tendency to hustle and strive and work all the time come from?

Why am I almost always planning and worrying about the future? Why can’t I rest more often? Why am I afraid to fully let go and relax? Why am I constantly standing on the balls of my feet, leaning headfirst into the future?

Is it because (as I write about in How to Get Out of Your Head) I got the message early in life that my parents and teachers expected me to do well in school?

Or because our capitalist society worships hard work and shames rest as laziness (unless you’re rich)?

Or because my dad grew up in a working class family and worked over 30 years for the same company?

Or because my mom comes from a long line of self-sufficient farmers?

Or because some of my ancestors were self-sufficient Appalachians who survived in the hollers of West Virginia?

Or because others were run off their land in southwestern Germany and all but forced to come to the American colonies as indentured servants?

Or because those ancestors were Lutherans, followers of Martin Luther, who professed that work was a calling from God?

Peel back the layers deep enough and there’s no one singular answer. “All lives are lived in the swirls and eddies of what has gone along before them,” writes the spiritual teacher and writer Stephen Jenkinson.

One thing’s for sure: I’m definitely not choosing to work all the time. It’s in my bones just as much as it’s in our culture. Every morning, a speaker blares in my mind: “Get to work! Do something! Anything!” At night before bed, it whispers “Did you get enough done?”

In fact, it’s in my DNA. Biologists studying epigenetics—how genes are expressed—have found that a person’s individual experience appears to alter the cells and behavior of their children and grandchildren.

Centuries of rushing to get seeds in the ground, to cut enough wood for winter, to clock in at work. I’ve inherited generations of capitalist ways of being. White supremacist culture too, as a student reminded me in a recent class.

But what if I do have a choice? What if it’s up to me to aim my striving towards serving others, rather than just myself? What if it’s up to me to remember that we’re all connected, even the dead?

The thought of living that way gives me chills. It’d be turning against the stream of our capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal society. It’d be turning against the stream of centuries, if not millennia.

Here’s what I’m up against: My self-worth is so tied to individual success that part of me blames others for their suffering. That person living on the street must not have worked hard enough. That single mother struggling to pay the bills just shouldn’t have had children. That alcoholic just needs to have some personal responsibility.

But what if there was another way? What if I could remember that we’re all doing our best? What if I could remember that my rushing and striving, my leaning into the future and missing the present moment, is only adding to the crazed, speedy mindlessness of our age? What if I could remember to slow down?

As Jenkinson asks, “When was the last time you stood anywhere for a moment and saw that what you meant and felt and how you loved and lost and what you said and held off saying might already have become waves lapping somewhere else, washing upon a shore you’ve already passed by, where someone is standing?”

Answering that question by living in the moment, connected to all that has come before and will come after, would seem to me to be the good life.

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.