Jeremy Mohler

Writer, meditation teacher, and therapist-in-training

How to be with your anger towards anti-vaxxers

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An old friend who I haven’t seen for a while just texted that he isn’t vaccinated, and I lost my shit.

Not to him. I responded that I appreciated him telling me when I asked. And I do appreciate it. But my insides were boiling.

“Just get the vaccine, you f*cking idiot!” I yelled in my apartment.

I have so much anger inside me towards anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. Especially towards politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who are vaccinated but keep challenging the advice of public health experts.

It feels like molten lava flowing up from the pit of my stomach. I just want to hold little Ronnie DeSantis down until he quits squirming and make him do the right thing.

But I don’t know if my friend is an anti-vaxxer or just a little scared or just a little too busy to get around to it. I do know that he’s my friend. I love the guy. I don’t want him to get sick just like I don’t want anyone to get sick.

(And just so you know, I’m not a fan of Big Pharma — or, for that matter, corporate control of health care. We wouldn’t have the vaccines if it weren’t for public research and public funding. Their patents should be waved so that poorer countries can make their own vaccines.)

So, I’m trying to sit here and “just be with” the anger.

What’s coming up is a memory of when a meditation teacher of mine responded to an angry meditation student during class.

The teacher had just read aloud Thich Nhat Hanh’s story about a young girl who was raped by a pirate. Nhat Hanh is a Buddhist monk who lived through the Vietnam war and who Martin Luther King Jr. once nominated for the Noble Peace Prize.

According to Nhat Hanh, the girl was returning to Vietnam by boat after the U.S. left the country. But after being sexually assaulted, she jumped in the ocean and drowned herself.

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

But, he says, when he paused and looked more deeply at his reaction, something shifted.

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 … 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.

After my meditation teacher read that story, a student became visibly upset. She said there was no way she could feel sympathy for the pirate. She hated him and wished he was dead. She said that the story was letting rapists off the hook.

“There’s room for all of it,” my meditation teacher responded. “For your anger, for the trauma you’ve been through, and for your sympathy, if you can find it.”

There’s room for all of it. That’s what stuck with me.

It’s okay that I’m pissed at my friend. It’s also okay that I feel love and sympathy for him. It’s okay that I want to punch Ron DeSantis in the face. All of my reactions are okay.

That doesn’t mean that if I hung out with my friend I would ignore that he’s unvaccinated. It doesn’t mean that I can’t maintain my boundaries to stay safe. It doesn’t mean that I’m a weak pushover.

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.

It means that there’s space for my anger. I have more choices than either being a “nice guy” and suppressing it or acting out in reckless, harmful ways. And don’t we all want a little more choice in our lives?

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, therapist-in-training, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. Subscribe to my weekly email on how to be more mindful at your job, in your relationships, and when it comes to politics here.

If you’re in D.C. or Maryland, reach out for reduced-price online therapy: jeremy@jeremymohler.blog

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness can decrease your anxiety and transform your life.

Photo by CT Senate Republicans.

Another pandemic wall is coming

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Is anybody else hitting yet another pandemic wall? Another f*cking wall?!

Only half of Americans are fully vaccinated. Masks mandates are coming back. Summer is almost over, with cold weather and isolation just around the bend. Small businesses and restaurants are dreading the future. “I’m absolutely petrified about what’s coming down the pike,” a restaurant owner in my city said earlier this week.

Not to mention wildfires and historic floods and gaping economic inequality.

It feels like everything I’ve done — getting vaccinated (even if I was a little afraid to do so), doing my best to wear a mask indoors (even if it annoys me) — has done nothing. Absolutely nothing.

And that’s why I’m thinking about the psychological issue “burnout” again.

I’m remembering what I learned from reading sisters Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski’s book about it earlier in the pandemic.

It didn’t feel relevant to our Covid hell then. The term burnout has traditionally been used to described work-related psychological issues. I wasn’t feeling burned-out last summer. Work was (and still is) fine. Vaccines were coming. A return to something approaching “normal” was on the horizon.

But over the past few weeks — as cases rise and anti-vaxxers dig their heels in the ground — I’m feeling things that sound a lot like burnout.

Burnout, according to Herbert Freudenberger — the psychologist who coined the term in the 1970s — has three main symptoms: emotional exhaustion, alienation, and a decreased sense of accomplishment.

It’s that last one that’s been following me around like a rain cloud. Nagoski and Nagoski describe it as “the feeling that nothing you do makes a difference.”

Did getting vaccinated matter if we need to get booster shots for the rest of our lives? Did supporting essential workers matter if they’re still being forced to risk their lives for low pay? Did supporting local businesses matter if they’re still worried about closing down for good?

Another, less primary symptom is anger. And oh, do I feel that one.

I wish I could body slam anti-maskers. I wish I could sucker punch Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for his racist dog-whistles blaming the “border crisis.” I wish I had the time to comment “STFU” every time a yoga teacher posts anti-vax nonsense on Instagram.

That’s why knowing that I’m suffering from burnout is helpful. It gives me a roadmap to feeling a little better, even if it makes me a living version of the dog in the “This is Fine” meme.

Nagoski and Nagoski offer a few things to do to lessen burnout.

One is authentically connecting with others. That means I should probably try hard to make time with close friends (who are vaccinated). And I should keep going to therapy.

Another is to get enough rest. I’ve long struggled with that one. Our capitalist society tells us that rest is for the lazy (unless you’re rich like Jeff Bezos on his yacht). I’m going to try to find ways to rest that aren’t just vegging out watching TV, like slow walks in the park near my house.

They also talk about “completing the [stress] cycle.” They write:

While you’re managing the day’s stressors, your body is managing the day’s stress, and it is absolutely essential to your well-being that you give your body the resources it needs to complete the stress response cycles that have been activated.

What that brings to mind is maybe moving my workouts to later in the day or adding a short meditation to my evening routine. And as much as I want to stay up late and doomscroll Twitter, I need to get 8–9 hours of sleep a night.

I’ll start with some of these and see what happens. At least I know I’m not alone. In a recent Atlantic article, the physician Lucy McBride writes:

The symptoms of burnout have become medical. The work of living through a pandemic has been making us sick. As a primary-care doctor, I’m witnessing the physical-health toll of collective trauma.

Is anyone else feeling this way?

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. Subscribe to my weekly email on how to be more mindful at your job, in your relationships, and when it comes to politics here.

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness can decrease your anxiety and transform your life.

Martin Luther King Jr. showed you can be mindful while being politically engaged

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My favorite King quote is something he wrote about a year before his death:

The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.

That’s powerful stuff coming from a figure whose politics have been defanged and whitewashed into a cartoon of “peace” and “equality.”

I also try to remember that when King was assassinated, he was in Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking Black sanitation workers.

But one of my favorite King ideas is a metaphor he borrowed from a socialist Methodist pastor.

“I’m sure that many of you have had the experience of dealing with thermometers and thermostats,” King said in a sermon he gave many times early in his life.

The thermometer merely records the temperature. If it is 70 or 80 degrees, it registers that and that is all. On the other hand, the thermostat changes the temperature. If it is too cool in the house, you simply push the thermostat up a little and it makes it warmer. And so the Christian is called upon not to be like a thermometer conforming to the temperature of his society, but he must be like a thermostat serving to transform the temperature of his society.

Let’s replace “the Christian” with “humans.”

[Humans] are called upon not to be like a thermometer conforming to the temperature of society, but [they] must be like a thermostat serving to transform the temperature of society.

King was arguing that we must change society rather than only be changed by it. Which is what Karl Marx meant when he wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it.”

Okay, fair enough. We shouldn’t care only about ourselves. It’s our responsibility, as Bernie Sanders put it in his 2020 presidential run, “to fight for someone you don’t know.”

But it gets really interesting when you apply the metaphor to the mind.

There’s a contradiction. On the one hand, being mindful is like being a thermostat. When you realize you’re lost in thought, you bring your attention back to the present moment. When you’re worrying, planning, ruminating, you feel your breath, notice bodily sensations, listen.

Mindfulness is staying steady in the riptide of thoughts. Resting in the center of your experience, at a comfortable temperature of 72 degrees.

But King’s whole point was that we must act. It is our responsibility to change the things that must be changed.

If mindfulness is about staying still with whatever comes up, wouldn’t that make trying to change the world unmindful?

No, because we’re a thermostat. Sometimes, a comfortable 72 degrees isn’t what’s called for. We need to turn up the heat. We need to protest, march, strike. Throw ourselves in the gears of the system.

What’s unmindful—or unwise—is trying to do it all by ourselves. We’re like a teenager complaining about the temperature but lacking the money to pay the heating bill.

That’s a recipe for suffering. As Buddhism’s second noble truth says, suffering comes from grasping on to things we like and pushing away things we don’t like. Wanting to change things that can’t be changed.

Like a furnace in a house, we need resources to turn up the temperature. We need help. We need each other.

That’s what King meant by “a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”

I’m pretty sure you don’t have the wealth of Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump. The 1 percent can change the temperature themselves (and they literally are heating up the planet with their outsized consumption).

But we’re the 99 percent, everyone else. If we’re organized—our power—we can turn up the heat when it’s called for. If we can get past our differences—that were created by the 1 percent, like the concept of race—we can change this society.

I’ll let King have the last word:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

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.