Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Mindfulness meditation helps me work smarter and relax harder

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My parents had yet to figure out I needed glasses, so I sat cross-legged a few feet from the television.

My mom was talking on the cordless phone. A lawnmower blared outside the wall. I felt free, content, and safe. Our quiet, rural Maryland home oozed 1990s middle-class prosperity. Five types of cereal sat in the pantry, and 50 cable channels awaited my eyes.

My mom came over to talk to me. “They wanted to hold you back from first grade. But I told them no,” she said. “You can handle it.”

An alarm rang inside my body. My throat tensed and mind churned. Why did they want to hold me back? What did I do wrong? Is Mom upset?

As far as I can tell, this is the first time I felt the shame that I’ve been running from since.

I hadn’t known that my teacher had been evaluating me—which was her job, of course. From then on, I was going to at least appear as though I was on task and working hard. I didn’t want to feel that shame ever again.

I often feel like I need to hustle, like I’m behind and must catch up. Behind who or what? I don’t know.

I have trouble truly resting and struggle to be present with others. I’m almost always leaning toward the future to get to the next thing on my to-do list. During my last semester of college, I even had three jobs.

I didn’t begin to notice this tendency to hustle until my mid-20s. Before that, I didn’t see it. Striving all the time was just the water I swam in.

Reading Karl Marx and learning from organizers in the Occupy movement taught me about capitalism. I learned that our society is divided between people who own things and those who work for them. Those of us not lucky enough to be born wealthy spend more time working for a living than enjoying that living.

Odds are, you feel the pressure to hustle too—most of us have no choice.

But knowing about capitalism’s flaws hasn’t helped me all that much.

Yes, it’s given me a perspective on why I feel dissatisfied despite living in the richest country in the history of the world. Yes, it’s given me a sense of comradery. Yes, it’s taught me that the solutions to many of our problems, like climate change, are systemic, not individual.

But it wasn’t until I started practicing mindfulness meditation that I found a practice for whenever I feel overwhelmed by my tendency to hustle.

Meditation is a roadmap for working with almost any overwhelming emotion. When you notice that your mind is focused on the future in an unhealthy way—be it worrying or overplanning—let go of the thoughts. Then bring your attention to the feelings of your breath or the sensations in a neutral-feeling part of your body, like your feet.

Most importantly, mindfulness taught me acceptance. I’ve learned to accept that part of me wants to hustle all of time. It’s just how I am. It’s just how we are.

When that part—or any part of me—is barking orders in my mind, I can allow it to be there even if I don’t listen. What a relief. I don’t have to listen or drown it out. I can just let it be. I can just let myself be.

“If you allow that you’re not relaxing, then you’re relaxing,” says Tibetan Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

Acceptance creates inner freedom, a little space to decide whether to hustle or not. Sometimes I need to kick ass and get shit done. But do I really need to strive when I’m making dinner or visiting a friend?

That might not sound like much, but it’s been huge for me. I finally can relax … like, actually relax. Not veg out with Netflix or a beer. Relax, as in, who I am is enough—I’m okay.

Free ebook on mindfulness meditation

My ebook, How to Get Out of Your Head, will help you start or 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.

Like everything these days, mindfulness is being co-opted by neoliberalism

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If you’ve paid any attention to politics recently, particularly on Twitter, you’ve heard the word “neoliberalism.” It’s used to describe so many different politicians, ideologies, and policies that it’s hard to define what it means.

But it’s important to define, because neoliberalism shapes almost everything about our lives, even how we practice meditation—and that’s a problem.

My favorite definition comes from political scientist Wendy Brown, who says it’s “the expansion of markets—understood as competition—to every feature of life, including democracy, human social life, education, social services, and so forth.”

Think about how social media has turned our lives into a contest for attention—for more and more likes, shares, comments, “engagement.” And how high-stakes testing has transformed K-12 education into a competition with winners and losers. And how journalism has become a battle for clicks.

Neoliberalism is dog-eat-dog capitalism on hyperdrive, and the real sinister thing it’s done—what makes it different than prior forms of capitalism—is make us incapable of solving big problems together.

Climate change, gaping inequality, mass incarceration, the opioid crisis. History shows that the only way to fix these sorts of enormous problems is when massive political movements are able to force the government to increase and reprioritize its public investments.

But it’s hard to imagine another Civil Rights movement or a return to the New Deal era, when nearly a third of American workers were in a labor union.

Neoliberal logic makes us think that the solutions to our problems are individual. If you’re lonely, just post on Facebook. If you’re struggling to pay the bills, just work harder. If you’re unfulfilled at work, just quit and “do what you love.” If you’re worried about the environment, just become a vegan.

God forbid we’d band together and fight for a higher minimum wage, universal healthcare, or ending the fossil fuel industry.

What does all this have to do with meditation? Two things.

What meditation produces, mindfulness, can help you notice when you slip into this way of thinking.

When you notice your mind is off in the future, telling yourself to hustle, to work harder, to pull on your bootstraps, let go of the thought. Note silently in your mind, “thinking”—or even “neoliberalism.” Bring your attention back to the sensations of your breath, feelings in your body, and the sights and sounds around you.

Mindfulness won’t stop you from neoliberal thinking, but it can help you notice when you’re in the trance and snap out of it.

And two—I meet so many people who are trying to get into meditation by themselves. They want to know what apps to use, how often they should practice, what books they should read.

Go figure: meditation is being filtered through neoliberal logic. Corporations are rolling out mindfulness programs for employees left and right. Meditation is on every list published about what to do to have a more productive day.

“[Meditation] can provide benefits, but the way they’re being deployed is a neoliberal cooptation, where they are then refashioned as performance enhancement methods in alignment with institutional goals, whether it’s a corporation or the military,” writes Ron Purser, professor of management and practicing Buddhist.

When I got started with meditation, I learned from other people, like, in the flesh, in real life—but it took me awhile to get there. I’d spent years as what Zen priest Roshi Joan Halifax calls a “book Buddhist,” reading about meditation but rarely actually practicing it.

Then a girlfriend took me to a class. Seeing other people meditate—people that looked like me, normal people—encouraged me to do it more often. Going on a weekend retreat with 20 people, albeit strangers, motivated me to meditate every day. Talking about mindfulness with other people inspired me to learn how to teach meditation.

It’s absurd that this has to be said, but to really embrace meditation—and to live in a society that has a shot at solving climate change and our many other crises—we need other people.

Free ebook on mindfulness meditation

My ebook, How to Get Out of Your Head, will help you start or 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.

This is your brain on capitalism

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One reason it’s difficult to be mindful—i.e., to pay attention to the present moment—is ideology, but not the kind you might be thinking.

Yes, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, or Independent shapes how you think about politics. But ideology goes much deeper than that.

It’s a set of beliefs about how and why the world works the way it does. It’s often unconscious and less a choice than a preconceived notion, an idea that just seems like “common sense.”

Like, why do dogs pee on trees? To mark their territory, right?

No, dogs pee on things for all kinds of reasons. Some do it to give other dogs information about themselves. Some do it because they feel anxious. And, yes, some do it to stake their claim.

Thinking that dogs must be marking their territory is an example of capitalist ideology.

Before a few hundred years ago, the idea of “private property” didn’t exist. For tens of thousands of years, humans roamed Earth as hunter gatherers with no fixed territory.

Only with agriculture did land become something to measure, control, and claim as “mine.” Even then, individuals didn’t “own” land. Farmland and pasture supported villages, tribes, and peasant communities, and served feudal lords and religious leaders.

Capitalism privatized land, food, housing, health care, and other human needs. So, when we see a dog peeing on a tree, we automatically think it must be marking its territory because that’s what humans do living in capitalism. We “greedily grasp lands,” as the Muscogee Native Americans described European Americans.

Capitalist ideology shapes our thinking in so many ways:

It makes us think that the only path to happiness is to hustle — to never stop working.

It makes us think that people are driven only by competition, and not connection too.

It makes us feel guilty for calling in sick to work.

It makes us think that resources are not finite and potentially abundant but scarce.

It makes us blame people who have it worse than us for our problems — often because of their skin color, nationality, or gender.

It makes us think that downing Nyquil is how to cure a cold because we’ve got work tomorrow.

It makes us think that emotions are only valuable in our private lives and not at work or in public.

It makes us praise kids conditionally, only if they behave how we want them to.

It makes us think that one day we’ll be rich too.

It makes us think that if we just have the right morning routine—or diet or workout regimen or—we’ll finally be successful.

It makes us scared to quit a job we hate until we’ve got another lined up.

It makes us judge those who suffer—addicts, the homeless, the incarcerated—for making “bad” choices.

It makes us judge ourselves for not working hard enough, for not paying attention, for not having the right body, for not having enough money, for…

Mindfulness can’t change society—it’s an individual practice. But it can help us avoid falling hook, line, and sinker for the dominant ideologies of our time, like capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Then, we can get to work together to change the society.

As Zen priest and meditation teacher angel Kyodo williams says, the mind is like “that drawer that collects everything in your house.”

“You say, ‘Oh, but wait a minute, someone lived in this house before me. And some of that stuff is not mine. Actually, this is not mine. That’s my mom’s. This is not mine; that’s the inheritance of white supremacy.’ And we have no real way of being able to discern what is mine, what is yours, what we’re holding collectively, what I have inherited, what I have taken on as a measure of protection, of a way to cope at some point in my life. [Meditation] lets us begin to do that.”

Want to be more mindful?

I’ve come up with a cheat sheet to help you start and stick with a regular meditation practice. Get it for free here.

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.

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