Jeremy Mohler

Writer, meditation teacher, and therapist-in-training

Is it wrong to feel compassion towards cops?

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I recently bonded with a friend over the work of meditation teacher and psychologist Tara Brach, who just published a new book called “Radical Compassion.” We kept coming back to the same question: Is it wrong to feel compassion towards the police?

I’m angry at the cop who killed George Floyd. I’m outraged about cops harming protestors. But I’m also a little empathetic towards the police. It’s embarrassing to admit, but it’s true.

Let me be clear. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something about police brutality. I’m with Black Lives Matter: #DefundThePolice. Fire cops and hire more social workers. Build public housing instead of sending cops to terrorize the homeless. Give people well-paid work so they don’t have reasons to commit crime.

If anything, humanizing cops highlights the systemic nature of the problem. Cops are just doing their jobs — and that job is a violent tool used by the rich and powerful to control poor and working class people.

We might think that cops “protect and serve” the public. But modern policing began with slave patrols in the South. After slavery, cops helped break up labor strikes, regularly shooting and killing workers.

Today, cops are asked to do way too much. For decades, we’ve cut public budgets for things like education, housing, and social services while spending more and more on policing. Kids don’t need cops in their schools — they need higher-paid teachers, safer buildings, and more counselors.

That is to say, there are no “good” cops. There are good people who are cops. But policing in America is inherently violent and racist.

So, here’s my issue. I’m mad about the cops, white supremacy, capitalism — yet I know in my bones that compassion is the strongest catalyst for change.

I can’t just turn off my empathy. I used to hate the hustling part of myself that’s always striving to do more and more work. But then I started listening, trying to understand why that part wanted me to work so hard. Turns out it was trying to protect me. It thought that if I wasn’t always working hard, I’d be worthless, a loser, a nobody. Once I empathized with that part, I gained the ability, for the first time in my life, to actually, truly, authentically rest. (See Chapter 2 in my ebook “How to Get Out of Your Head” for more on this.)

And you know what? The more compassionate I‘ve become towards my workaholic part, the more empathetic I’ve become towards others who can’t stop working. As Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes, “By being kind to ourselves, we become kind to others. By being kind to others — if it’s done properly, with proper understanding — we benefit as well.”

She goes on: “So it is with aggression. 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.”

I’m not going to lie. It feels really good right now to hate the cops. I felt a complicated sense of joy watching the Minneapolis Police Department 3rd Precinct building burn. But I’m also feeling compassion. Not towards police buildings, or for that matter any property. Towards the human beings who think they’re protecting but are in fact hurting us.

Again, that’s not to disarm your anger towards cops or whoever has hurt you. I’m just laying all my feelings out on the table, hoping that allows you to give yourself permission to do the same.

For now, all I’ve got are questions. Does compassion make me a less effective fighter against injustice? Is it just making me feel better in a fucked up, broken society?

Or better yet, here’s writer bell hooks: “For me forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

Get my free ebook on 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

On Meditation for the 99%, I take mindfulness out of faraway monasteries, expensive retreat centers, and Corporate America, and bring it to work, relationships, and, especially, politics. Listen everywhere podcasts are available.

Here’s what to do with all that anger you’re feeling towards Trump

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This whole coronavirus thing is filling me with what English professor Phil Christman argues is masculinity’s biggest flaw: an “abstract rage to protect.”

Christman writes:

By ‘protect’ I don’t mean the actual useful things a man (or anyone else) may do for other people… All functioning adults are ‘protective’ of others in this sense, to the best of their ability. Rather, I mean precisely the activities that stem from a fear that simple usefulness is not enough: that one must train and prepare for eventualities one has no reason to anticipate, must keep one’s dwelling and grooming spartan in case of emergencies, must undertake defensive projects that have no connection to the actual day-to-day flourishing of the people one loves.

When I read that I think of doomsday preppers storing water and cans of beans. I think of my dad — who grew up hunting in Virginia — tucking away guns around the house just in case. But I also see it in myself yelling at the TV and shitposting on social media the past few months.

There’s just so much to be angry about. Trump is a selfish, bumbling media savant who manages to stay in the spotlight while doing almost nothing. The Democratic Party is yet again failing to offer a real alternative to Trump’s racist, right-wing populism. Corporate-funded media ignores the pain and suffering of poor and working people. Rich people are getting bailed out while tens of millions lose their jobs.

I know there’s very little I can do about any of that. Sure, I can donate to organizations helping people less fortunate than me. I can refuse to use Amazon, especially when its workers go on strike. I can join a car protest to support the #CancelRent movement.

But one person can’t make the world fairer and less vicious. That would take a massive, multiracial movement demanding what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “radical redistribution of political and economic power.” Will that happen anytime soon? I hope so, but probably not.

Yet, reading that Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, has made $35 million every day the past three months, still pisses me off. “Are you kidding me?” the angry part of me yells in my mind. I fill with abstract rage — which has nowhere to go but my shoulders and neck.

My shoulders and neck… That’s the first step towards taking the edge off. If I can recognize that I’m clenching up, that I’ve been triggered, that I’m angry, there’s a chance I’ll find some levelheadedness and maybe even a little peace.

Recognize is the first step in a mindfulness practice called RAIN, which has been popularized by Tara Brach, one of my favorite meditation teachers.

“RAIN,” Brach writes, “directly de-conditions the habitual ways in which you resist your moment-to-moment experience. It doesn’t matter whether you resist ‘what is’ by lashing out in anger, by having a cigarette, or by getting immersed in obsessive thinking. Your attempt to control the life within and around you actually cuts you off from your own heart and from this living world. RAIN begins to undo these unconscious patterns as soon as we take the first step.”

President Trump is “what is.” A Democratic Party bought by corporations is “what is.” Capitalism is “what is.” Me being angry is “what is.”

But if I can take the first step — recognize the anger — then I’ve got a fighting chance to move on the next step, allow.

Allow means to accept “what is” as the way it is in this moment. As hard as it is to accept that a reality TV star is in power, it’s the truth. As hard as it is to accept that we don’t have the power to demand more coronavirus testing, let alone #MedicareForAll, it’s the truth. As shitty as feeling angry is, it’s how I feel right now, it’s the truth.

Allowing isn’t rolling over and giving up. It’s pressing pause on thoughts about how things should be. Yes, I shouldn’t be angry because, of course, capitalism sucks, but I am.

Pausing for a few seconds gives me more space internally to investigate, which is the “I” in RAIN.

Investigate means to find out what’s needed in this moment to calm the overwhelming emotion. Start with the body — what sensations accompany the emotion? My anger shows up as tightness in my shoulders and neck. It feels like I’m a battering ram or an NFL running back barreling towards the defensive line.

Then you ask yourself something like: what is this overwhelmed part of me believing right now? My angry part believes that if I yell loud enough, people will listen. If I convince just enough people on Facebook that capitalism sucks, then we’ll have that mass movement.

Brach notes, “While mental exploration may enhance our understanding, opening to our embodied experience is the gateway to healing and freedom. Instead of thinking about what’s going on, keep bringing your attention to your body, directly contacting the felt sense and sensations of your most vulnerable place.”

That is, keep an eye your body. The investigate step often begins to soften the tension. Avoid psychoanalyzing yourself — save that for your therapist or at least a close friend.

The last step in RAIN is nurture. I ask: what does my angry part of me need right now? I imagine it as an angry little kid. Everyone knows that rationalizing with children doesn’t work. My angry part just wants someone to listen, so I imagine sitting beside the little kid and listening. I sometimes imagine being joined by MLK, someone who turned their anger into political action.

As Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön writes, “Whether it’s anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression — whatever it might be — the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it.”

The idea with practices like RAIN and mindfulness meditation is to care for yourself when other resources aren’t available. They aren’t meant to replace therapy, close friends, or mentors. They just help take the edge off when no one who really gets you is around.

And taking the edge off of my anger keeps me focused on helping those around me and doing my part to build that mass movement we need, rather than posting on Facebook every time the world lets me down.

Get my 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

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.

Emotions can feel like sh*t, but ignoring them feels worse

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The coronavirus crisis has me feeling all kinds of feelings. Fear, about getting sick. Worry, about my asthmatic dad. Anger, towards the Trump administration. Even a little schadenfreude, about people who adored our capitalist, individualist, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps, “free market” society now having to eat crow.

But a friend posted this quote on Facebook the other day, and it reminded me that emotions — as shitty as they can feel — are a good thing. It’s attributed to White Eagle of the Hopi Nation of indigenous people in northern Arizona, and it goes like this:

“This moment humanity is going through can be seen as a portal and as a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or go through the portal is up to you. If you consume the news 24 hours a day, with little energy, nervous all of the time, with pessimism, you will fall into the hole. But if you take this opportunity to look at yourself, rethink life and death, and take care of yourself and others, you will cross into the portal.”

(What a quote, right? If you want to donate to the Hopi Reservation, which is an extreme food desert, you can do it here.)

The English portal derives from the Latin porta, meaning “gate.” The Old English geat means a “door, opening, passage.” A portal is transformative — it takes you from once place to another.

As hard as it is right now to imagine a different future, this pandemic can be a portal — if you turn towards your emotions. Again, as shitty as they can feel.

“Normal” has changed, maybe forever. Who knows what’s going to happen with your job? Who knows what’s going to happen with your family? Who know what’s going to happen in your marriage? Who knows what’s going to happen with the economy? Who knows what’s going to happen in the November election?

The Buddhist meditation teacher Pema Chödrön writes something similar in her book “The Wisdom of No Escape”:

“The purpose of your whole life is not to make a lot of money, it’s not to find the perfect marriage … It’s not to do any of these things. You have a certain life, and whatever life you’re in is a vehicle for waking up. If you’re alone and you feel lonely and you wish you had a mate, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you have a huge family around you and wish you had a little more free time, that’s the vehicle for waking up. Whatever you have, that’s it. There’s no better situation than the one you have. It’s made for you.”

You’re probably thinking, okay, sure, but how do I step into the portal, how do I wake up?

First, pause. Take a break from all the breaking news, the social media, the Netflix, the routines. What are you feeling? What’s the loudest voice in your head? Anger, fear, worry? Restlessness?

Next, stay with the emotional discomfort — as long as it isn’t too overwhelming. Don’t distract yourself as you normally would. If you notice yourself trying to think your way out of the emotion, let go of the thoughts and come back to the emotion. When we’re feeling intense emotions, rational thinking is often beside the point.

If you notice any judgement — about the emotion, about yourself for feeling the emotion — release it. Whatever you’re feeling right now is acceptable. I promise you that you’re not the only one.

Then, feel your body. Where’s the tension? Is there a clench in your stomach? Are your shoulders tight? Is your head pushed forward? What does the middle of your chest feel like? Tingling, a burning sensation, tenderness?

When you find a clench, soften around it. Let it grow and expand. Ask yourself, how big can this get?

Finally — and this is probably the most important step — hold your experience with compassion. Rather than making the emotion wrong, rather than beating yourself up inside, rather than wishing you felt differently or that this whole crisis would go away, just be with yourself like you would a close friend or a little kid.

Hold space for yourself and listen — be curious. Ask yourself, what does the part of me that’s afraid, angry, whatever need right now? 

Experiment to see what soothes the emotion. Read a novel that moves you or a book by a spiritual teacher. Go for a slow walk in nature. Put your hand on your chest and take five slow, deep breaths. 

You’ll know when you land on what works. The clench will soften and sometimes even melt away. The space around you will feel more spacious.

“Whether it’s anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression — whatever it might be — the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it,” Chödrön writes.

“The more you open your heart, the more you make friends with your body, speech, mind, and the world that’s inside of your circle — your domestic situation, the people you live with, the house you find yourself eating breakfast in every day — the more you appreciate the fact that when you turn on the tap, water comes out. If you have ever lived without water, you really appreciate that. There are all kinds of miracles.”

Want to start meditating or meditate more often?

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

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.