Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

I’m tired of feeling self-righteous about politics

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Donald Trump will soon be gone. But the conditions that fueled his rise aren’t going anywhere.

Right-wing nationalism is intensifying. The wealth gap between the rich and poor is growing. The percentage of Americans in unions is plummeting to record lows. The Democratic Party is doubling down on moderate, uninspiring politics.

All that makes me feel helpless. Like a trillion-pound weight sits on my chest. Like the problem is beyond my lifetime. Like nothing I could ever do could make a difference.

It never feels like I’m doing enough. There’s always some perfect, more strategic protest I should’ve gone to. Some more accurate and inspiring book I should be reading. Some ideal political organization I should find and join.

I recently heard someone tell a story that made me feel less powerless — at least at first.Written by the anthropologist Loren Eiseley in 1969, it goes like this:

One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean.

Approaching the boy, he asked, “What are you doing?”

The boy replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.”

“Son,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!”

After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf.

Then, smiling at the man, he said, “I made a difference for that one.”

But when I heard that last line, a familiar self-righteousness filled my body. The same holier-than-thou arrogance I feel in political debates on Facebook. My shoulders pulled up and the back of my neck tensed. I was ready for a fight.

That’s like thinking buying organic milk will stop climate change, I wanted to say. Or reading books by Black authors will end systemic racism.

“Starfish throwing, like charity, isn’t a bad thing, but it is not a solution,” writes Rich Tafel in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. “When we confuse charity and justice, we perpetuate injustice. True world change requires more of its leaders. We must have the courage to work within our complex systems to change the rules.”

I agree with that. If we want to stop future Donald Trumps, we need to heal the disease, not just the symptoms.

But then I remembered that helpless feeling. It was right there under the self-righteousness. The self-righteousness was like armor I was wearing to protect myself from feeling vulnerable.

I realized that the starfish story isn’t taking a side in the debate over individual versus systemic change. It’s just reminding us to control what we can.

Social justice requires many people doing different things but moving in the same direction.

The civil rights movement wasn’t effective just because of Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcom X. Millions of people marched, went to jail, protested, and went on strike. Others supported those actions in seemingly smaller but no less important ways.

During the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, Black cab drivers lowered fares, churches donated station wagons, and others offered rides. Sure, the Black Panther Party fought police. But they also provided free breakfast and medical services to poor communities.

Activists have come to call this “mutual aid.” And the best mutual aid helps other people while also helping out the cause.

Our capabilities might seem small. But as long as we connect them to a larger, strategic fight for political power, we’re like the boy throwing starfish back in the water.

As long as we’re doing something more than buying organic milk. Maybe it’s protesting. Maybe it’s providing childcare at Black Lives Matter meetings. Maybe it’s caring for your grandmother while connecting with others to advocate for more public funding for elderly care.

This is all to say that the starfish story is a variation on the serenity prayer, common in 12-step recovery programs:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

If the word “God” turns you off, just take it out. The point is, there’s a razor’s edge between what we can and cannot control.

And it’s less courageous to get caught up in trying to change how other people feel than actually making a difference however we can.

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 how mindfulness meditation transformed my life here.

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.

How to emotionally prepare for Election Day, no matter the result

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Next week, the world will change. Or will it?

However the election goes won’t change that the three richest Americans — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg — own as a much as the poorest half.

That police violence is a leading cause of death for Black men. That veterans of the war in Afghanistan are now watching their kids deploy to the same war. That this week an already-scorched California faces its highest fire risk so far in 2020.

That a plague has taken over 225,000 American lives, left millions unemployed, and closed nearly 10,000 small businesses.

Getting Trump out is crucial. But Joe Biden will only mildly reform capitalism, the political and economic system holding us back from true, lasting change.

But those facts don’t change how I feel. A part of me hopes something, anything will shift on Tuesday. The same part that wakes up every morning hoping all of this — Trump, the plague, climate change — was a nightmare. The same part that wants to get back to “normal.”

If I’ve learned anything through meditation practice, it’s that the mind is almost constantly leaving the present moment.

The boredom, the sadness, the anger, the anxiety is too much to handle. So the mind churns. About how things should be. How I should be. How things could’ve been. How things will be if I just do this or that.

No wonder racism is such a powerful political tool. The number one reason British people voted to leave the European Union back in 2016 was a lack of economic mobility. They didn’t think life was going to get any better the way things were headed.

Like Trump, the leaders of the Brexit campaign successfully channeled this discontent into blaming immigrants of color.

What do we do with this part of ourselves that wants a better future? Isn’t it normal and healthy to hope for the best?

It is. It’s how our minds work. It’s human.

The problem comes when we’re banking on some massive shift to change how we feel. Some deus ex machina that’s going to swoop in and fix everything.

Trump crawling back to Trump Tower never to be seen again. A vaccine wiping out coronavirus with the snap of a finger.

These fantasies distance us from the cold, hard, messy truth. They keep us out of the hot, sticky, muddy river that is what the poet Mary Oliver called our “one wild and precious life.”

But like any thought patterns, they’re information. They point out our needs right here, right now — if we just slow down enough to look at them.

“External, measurable outcomes all point to the internal, subjective experiences or feelings that we most want to have in our lives,” writes the professional coach Tripp Lanier.

In other words, our mind fantasizes about the future, but our emotions point to what we need right here, right now.

What would it feel like if Trump loses? What would you do, right now, if a coronavirus disappeared?

Psychotherapists call this exercise “the Miracle Question.” They have clients imagine an ideal future. They ask what the clients would feel if that future happened. Then they connect those feelings to actions that can be taken in the present.

I don’t know about you, but if Trump loses in a landslide, I’d feel a lot. I’d feel free, motivated, fully alive, safer, connected.

So, what can I do today, regardless of the circumstances, to feel that way?

Who can I call or text, right now, to feel connected? What tough conversation am I avoiding? (Because there’s always at least one.) What hike have I been longing to do? How can I engage in local politics beyond Tuesday?

Bottom line: Getting our emotional houses in order before Tuesday will serve us way more than refreshing polling data and doomscrolling social media.

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.