Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

I used to cringe when a meditation teacher mentioned compassion

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Living the good life is simple but extremely difficult.

Simple, as in all it takes — beyond food, water, and shelter— is one thing: self-compassion.

Difficult, because so much is stacked against us being nice to ourselves.

What I mean by “the good life” is what the poet Mary Oliver must’ve meant when she asked, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

The adjectives wild and precious about sum it up. The good life is realizing the seriousness of this present moment. How it never, ever will happen again. Yet being okay with that. Not making anything too precious. Celebrating the wildness.

It’s like that old Oscar Wilde line: “Life is too serious to be taken seriously.” (Though, apparently, that’s not exactly what Wilde wrote.)

Or like what the ancient Indian mystic known as the Buddha meant by “the middle way” when he said, “There is a middle way between the extremes of indulgence and self-denial, free from sorrow and suffering.”

Let me bring all this abstract stuff down to Earth.

When I first got into meditation, I would cringe whenever a meditation teacher mentioned compassion. What is this hippie, bougie shit? I’d think. When they recommended self-compassion, my mind would go blank.

It made no sense. I was meditating to be like a Buddhist monk, you know, cool, calm, and collected.

But in hindsight, I was just trying to feel better. And it wasn’t until I practiced self-compassion that I actually started to on a regular basis.

A few years ago, I dated someone I was incredibly attracted to. She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. Yet, when we slept together, I had trouble — let’s say — performing.

She was understanding and gentle with me about it. But I was a wreck. I thought I was broken physically or — worse — emotionally.

It wasn’t until I talked to a therapist that I felt better.

My friends had been kind. They’d recommended this or that supplement, this or that move in bed, this or that perfect thing to say.

But the therapist made me feel normal. Like nothing was wrong with me. Sure, what happened wasn’t ideal. But it happened. It was the truth.

The therapist’s non-shaming attitude allowed me to see that, despite being upset, I was also curious. What happened was evidence that my needs weren’t being met. Not evidence that I’m broken or weak or not a “real man,” whatever that means.

So, I decided to experiment. What is it that I really want? What really turns me on? What if I slowed down? What if I went at a pace that felt comfortable to me, instead of barreling forward because that’s just what a man does?

See, what gets in the way of self-compassion are thoughts. Spiraling, ruminating, critical thoughts. Stories about how we should or shouldn’t be.

angel Kyodo williams, the Zen Buddhist priest, says these stories fill our mind as if it were “that drawer that collects everything in your house.” She goes on:

They’re moving at an incredible rate of speed. And, for the most part, we almost never get the opportunity to observe them and sort through them. 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.

I was putting pressure on myself because… that’s just what men do. Men take control, do the exact right thing at the exact right time, and perform perfectly, no matter what. Those are the messages I inherited from our patriarchal culture.

But when I slowed down and got curious — when I observed and sorted through my thoughts— I also got confident, creative, and the rest of “the 8 C’s,” as they’re known as in the form of therapy called Internal Family Systems (IFS). I got courageous, compassionate, calm, and clearer about what I actually wanted.

I saw that I wasn’t emotionally connected with the woman I was dating. I was so caught up in her physical beauty that I’d lost connection with myself.

In other words, self-compassion is acceptance. Celebrating the wildness. Embracing our humanness. Dancing in the messiness. Learning from it all.

“Life is an incredible curriculum,” said the late spiritual teacher and psychologist Ram Dass. “In which we live it [sic] richly and passionately as a way of awakening to the deepest truths of our being.”

I’m happy to report that I haven’t experienced “performance issues” since. In fact, some 20 percent of erectile dysfunction cases are caused by anxiety, stress, or some other psychological issue.

But who knows if I will again? Life is unpredictable. Why would I want it not to be?

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.

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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

Is hating Trump supporters eating you up inside?

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I hate Trump supporters. Especially the working class ones.

The white dudes I grew up with who work in construction alongside Latinx people but who want to “build the wall.” The family friends on Medicare who celebrated Trump’s tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy.

I want to punch them in the face. I want to hold them down and force feed them the awareness that the rich and powerful are swindling them.

But that feels shitty. Not because it’s wrong of me to want to do those things.

Because hate burns. It tenses up my shoulders and my gut. It makes me forget to breathe, to feel my feet on the ground. Hating ends up hurting me.

The 5th century Buddhist scholar Buddhaghoṣa wrote:

By [getting angry] you are like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember or excrement in his hand and so first burns himself or makes himself stink.

Here’s how the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön puts it in her book “Start Where You Are”:

When you get to tell someone off, you might feel pretty good for a while, but somehow the sense of righteous indignation and hatred grows, and it hurts you.

It’s hard to let go of hate—even if it’s burning shit. Part of me thinks letting go is rolling over and giving up. I’m afraid of what would happen if there was no one to fight back against Trump supporters.

But another, deeper part of me knows they’re human beings. And like all human beings, they are suffering.

They just have a different story for why they suffer and who’s to blame. A story that happens to benefit the rich and powerful. A story, of course, that endangers people who don’t look like me.

But because you don’t hate someone doesn’t mean you can’t hold them accountable, set boundaries, and defend yourself and others. 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.

I once heard a story in a meditation class taught by Kaira Jewel Lingo that helps me navigate all this complexity. It comes from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who lived through the Vietnam War and its aftermath.

Hanh tells of a 12-year-old girl who was raped by a pirate while trying to return to Vietnam after the war. The girl jumped in the ocean and drowned herself.

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

But, he says, when he paused and looked more deeply, he saw it differently.

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 educators, social workers, politicians, and others 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.

Can you imagine? Seeing your homeland occupied and destroyed. Watching your friends and family get slaughtered. Hearing about horrific things happening to your people. And still not hating.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s story reminds me to look for myself in Trump supporters. I know that hate they feel. I’ve felt that same fear. I’ve hurt someone I didn’t mean to because I was afraid. I’m pissed and terrified about all the problems in the world. I’m human too.

If Thich Nhat Hanh can do it. If angel Kyodo williams, a Black queer Buddhist teacher, can see the fear in Trump supporters. Then I — a white, cisgendered, heterosexual man who grew up fishing and shooting guns — can too.

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, reach out. Get my writing straight to your email inbox here.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.