Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

How to wake up to the unconscious driver behind most of your decisions

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“Pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral?” Those are the choices.

Is that tightness in your lower back pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral?

Is that emptiness in your chest pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral?

Is the thought of going to work tomorrow pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral?

In mindfulness meditation, this is called “noting” practice. Last week, I sat with meditation teacher Valerie Roth at the Albuquerque Insight Meditation Center, and her teaching reminded me how transformative it can be.

Here’s how to do it: when your mind wanders from the present moment, label silently whether what you’re experiencing is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

Don’t open up an investigation. Just note how you feel about what’s drawing your attention away. Try to sense if there’s a feeling attached. Then, as mindfulness meditation practice prescribes, return to your breath, bodily sensations, or sound.

Ah, that thought felt pleasant. Let go of the thought and come back.

As I practiced with Roth, my feelings were all over the place. I was in town to explore the possibility of moving there. I’d be hit with a fantasy of my new life as a cowboy in the Southwest. Pleasant. But then I’d worry about making a huge mistake. Unpleasant.

Life isn’t always so dynamic. The woman beside me told the room she’d only experienced neutral, boring feelings during the meditation.

The point of noting practice is to put us in touch with how we’re relating to our experience.

The mind not only wanders constantly, but it also judges. Fantasy good. Fear bad.

Just like our wandering thoughts, these judgements are out of our control. They’re unconscious reactions to thoughts that often summon emotions, sometimes strong enough to create bodily sensations, like a clenched stomach.

What I realized that morning in Albuquerque is that most if not all of what we do is based on these judgements. We’re like the kid who has to touch the hot stove to learn not to do it again. Except that the stove becomes subtler and subtler as we grow up. We’re bouncing through our days moving towards things that feel pleasant and away from things that feel unpleasant.

Noting practice is stepping back with the mind to witness our thoughts and judgements. It’s becoming conscious of the unconscious. It’s smoothing out the up and down of emotions, which can sometimes feel like an unnecessary roller coaster ride.

What if we could feel an emotion like fear and not make it a problem? What if we could see our fantasies for what they are? What if we could experience life as it is, without judging one way or the other? What if we could respond rather than react?

That’s the inner freedom that mindfulness meditation cultivates.

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.

What it actually feels like to meditate

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I’ve meditated every day for five years now, and every time is still a roller coaster ride.

But the payoff is worth the ride. In fact, it’s the ride itself that pays.

For at least the first ten minutes, sometimes even 15, my mind jumps from thought to thought. I worry about what I’ve got planned for the day. I often replay things that happened the day before, usually conversations that made me feel vulnerable.

Did I sound stupid? Did I say too much? Does she like me? I’m just destined to be lonely.

This is my mind’s default state — unsettled, questioning myself, meandering in the past or the future.

It wouldn’t be so bad if all I did was daydream. What I really like to do is find patterns, to create meaning, to tell stories.

These stories are like looking up symptoms on WebMD. A cough can mean bronchitis or lung cancer or adenoidal hypertrophy. They spiral out of control into assumptions stacked on assumptions, until I’m wracked by anxiety about something that either didn’t happen or hasn’t happened yet or may never happen at all.

Before I started meditating, the stories were in the background all day long. They’d die down if I was really engaged in something, but that something had to be really engaging — say, a good TV show or a close friend who really listens.

But during meditation, after ten or 15 minutes of this frantic thinking something shifts. My body seems to unclench deep inside. My shoulders relax back and down, my stomach muscles release, my face eases, my breath falls into a comfortable rhythm.

It’s like I’d been swimming against the current and finally let the waves just take me.

My mind lets go of whatever I was thinking about and starts to notice more, as if I took a step backwards to witness the present moment. I hear the rain falling outside. I feel the warmth of the room. I smell my roommate’s coffee brewing downstairs. I notice that I’ve slumped over and sit up straight.

Time flows by as an unbroken chain of sensations rather than something to be measured or planned or worried about.

But, sure enough, as soon as I settle into this newfound awareness — known as “mindfulness” — another story rips me away. Planning that email I need to send narrows my focus and stops the flow. A few more minutes pass as I’m lost in thought.

Then some part of me notices that my mind is wandering, and I bring my attention back to the sensations in my body. I hear the sounds in the room. I’m back! I open to the flow until, inevitably, my mind takes me away again.

The bell rings, and I bring this mindfulness off of the cushion, to breakfast, work, and whatever the day has in store.

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Listen to the podcast version

My podcast, Meditation for the Masses, is mindfulness for the 99 percent. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available. Stream this episode below.

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