Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Mindfulness stops the habitual patterns that rule your life

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When was the last time you felt triggered by someone you love? What about the last time you treated someone in a way you now regret?

What did it feel like in your body? What was going through your mind? Can you remember?

Maybe your shoulders pulled up. Maybe the muscles around your eyes scrunched. Maybe your stomach balled up in a knot.

Maybe you can’t remember your body because you were so lost in thought.

What you were experiencing was a deep-rooted pattern that started when you were little. And you’re not crazy or weird or bad for experiencing it.

“It’s an everyday experience,” writes the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. “At the subtlest level, we feel a tightening, a tensing, a sense of closing down. Then we feel a sense of withdrawing, not wanting to be where we are.”

The tragic irony is that we tense up and withdraw when what we’re really after is connection.

This tension only adds to the disconnection. It cuts us off from what’s actually happening in the present moment. What’s happening in our body. What we’re truly feeling emotionally.

As the disconnection builds, we try to get connection back in the ways we know so well. Ways that seemed to work when we were young.

We people-please, get quiet, boast about ourselves, you name it. We try all kinds of ways to get someone else to make us feel good and loved and attended to. To make us feel connected.

When the connection won’t come, we turn to drastic measures. Some of us get passive aggressive. Others straight up pick a fight. Some of us numb out with things like drinking and overeating. Others just give up and walk away.

Again, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Your emotional patterns are built into your nervous system. You can’t help it.

As a kid, there were moments you lost connection with your parents and other caregivers. These moments were pivotal to the development of your young brain.

Because you were little, you were afraid you might lose the connection forever. You tried all kinds of ways to get attention. You watched how adults reacted to you. You learned over time what worked and what didn’t.

The problem is our emotional patterns are kid patterns. The stories that fuel them are extreme and rigid. “They better give me attention right now or I’ll be alone forever.” “If she isn’t happy then I’m not happy.” “If I don’t have a drink, I’m going to explode.”

Life isn’t really like that. It’s fluid and changing. There are ups and downs, moments of connection and disconnection. It can’t be controlled. Other people can’t be controlled.

But as a kid, you lost trust in life’s ebbs and flows. You forgot that connection would eventually come back. That connection — love — is right here, right now in the present moment. Every present moment.

As Björk sings in “All is Full of Love”:

You’ll be given love
You have to trust it
Maybe not from the sources
You have poured yours
Twist your head around
It’s all around you
All is full of love
All around you
You just ain’t receiving
Your phone is off the hook

But as a kid you developed ways of trying to manipulate life to give you that connected feeling. And that’s what hurts. All your trying to reestablish connection just causes more disconnection.

Here’s the good news. Even just one second of mindfulness presses pause on the kid stories. One second of noticing what’s actually happening in the present moment shines a light on the love.

Take a second right now. Feel your feet on the floor. Notice your breath coming in and out. Listen for the furthest sound. See if you can sense your gratitude for the fact that life just happens, regardless of whether you feel connected or not.

That’s why meditation can be so powerful. It retrains our nervous system — our mind and body connection. Every time we let go of thinking and come back to the breath or our feet on the floor or sound, we’re strengthening a muscle that keeps us more present.

We’re learning to trust that we can feel connected in any moment, regardless of what’s happening. Regardless of whether we’re getting what we want. Regardless of whether someone treats us a certain way or not.

As Chödrön writes:

Sitting practice teaches us how to open and relax to whatever arises, without picking and choosing. It teaches us to experience the uneasiness and the urge fully, and to interrupt the momentum that usually follows. We do this by not following after the thoughts and learning to come back to the present moment. We learn to stay with the uneasiness, the tightening … We train in sitting still with our desire to scratch. This is how we learn to stop the chain reaction of habitual patterns that otherwise will rule our lives. This is how we weaken the patterns that keep us hooked into discomfort that we mistake as comfort.

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 Russ Morris.

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.

Trauma made you who you are and is the key to changing

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One of my earliest memories is sitting cross-legged in front of the TV and getting some news that rocked my little kid world.

My mom was talking on the cordless phone behind me in the kitchen. A lawnmower blared outside.

I felt free, content, and safe. My family’s quiet, suburban Maryland home oozed 1990s middle-class prosperity. Five types of cereal sat in the pantry. Fifty 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 and shoulders tensed. What did I do wrong? Why did they want to hold me back? Is Mom mad at me?

This is an example of what psychologists call developmental trauma, or small “t” trauma.

It definitely wasn’t abuse. It wasn’t even mean. If anything, my mom was defending me. She believed in me, which should’ve felt empowering.

But my little developing brain didn’t take it in that way. I got the opposite message: that I wasn’t enough.

I’d been the class clown. Learning that my teacher had been evaluating me from afar — which was her job, of course — filled me with shame. 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 pain ever again.

“You can have childhoods were no overt trauma occurs,” says the physician and addiction expert Gabor Maté. “But when the parents are just too distracted, too stressed to provide the necessary responsiveness, that can also traumatize the child.”

I don’t say all of this to blame my mom. She was doing the best she could. She was in her early 30s — younger than I am now — with my baby sister on her hip. She was kicking ass in a male-dominated industry, information technology. And she wanted the best for me.

Developmental trauma just happens. No one can avoid it. Because no parent can be completely attuned to their kid’s emotional needs 24/7. Modern life with its smaller families and endless demands is, in a word, demanding.

I say all of this to say that trauma — both big “T” and little “t” — is what makes us who we are.

It wasn’t until I started seeing a therapist that I saw the connection between my kindergartner and adult selves.

I often feel like I’m behind and need to catch up. Behind who or what? I don’t know. This story — that I need to hustle or something bad might happen — appears first thing in the morning. It tells me to get to work on something, anything, right now.

No wonder I work on weekends when I don’t have to, start new projects before I’ve finished others, and forget to take breaks. No wonder I’m addicted to the hustle. A part of me is still trying to prove to my kindergarten teacher that I’m good enough.

My point is: Working with trauma is key to personal growth.

We can do all the things. The meditation, the trendy diets and workouts, the self-help books. But unless we get a sense of our trauma, we’re likely just acting out old patterns that don’t necessarily serve us. Patterns that keep us hurting people we love, doing work we don’t want to do, not living fully.

It’s also a useful way to look at changing society too. What are white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism if not collective traumas? They cause harm to all of us.

Even white, heterosexual men like me. I don’t have #MedicareForAll, a four-day workweek, and two months of vacation because racism keeps the working class from coming together to win those things. The planet is burning, flooding, and drying up because of climate change. I’ve had to scratch and claw to learn how to feel my emotions, because I was socialized as a man.

In other words, trauma causes disconnection. Which then causes harm.

And if we’re not careful, we can live a whole life disconnected from who we really are. Like the man in Bruce Holland Rogers’s story “Dinosaur”:

When he was very young, he waved his arms, snapped his massive jaws, and tromped around the house so that the dishes trembled in the china cabinet

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ his mother said. ‘You are not a dinosaur! You are a human being!’

Since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time that he might be a pirate. ‘Seriously,’ his father said to him after school one day, ‘what do you want to be?’ A fireman, maybe. Or a policeman. Or a soldier. Some kind of hero.

But in high school they gave him tests and told him he was good with numbers. Perhaps he’d like to be a math teacher? That was respectable. Or a tax accountant? He could make a lot of money doing that. It seemed a good idea to make money, what with falling in love and thinking about raising a family.

So, he became a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted it, because it made him feel, well, small. And he felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant, but a retired tax accountant. Still worse: a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curb, to take his pill, to turn his hearing aid on. Every day it seemed he forgot more things, important things, like where his children lived and which of them were married or divorced.

Then one day, when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling its familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching dragonflies flitting among the horsetails at the water’s edge.

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 can transform your life.

Photo by Olga.