Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

  • About
  • New to my writing? Start here.
  • When I teach
  • Mindfulness coaching
  • Listen to meditations
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
© 2021 Jeremy Mohler
Built by Amanda Frayer

Your girlfriend is right. You should see a therapist.

September 16, 2020 by Jeremy Mohler

I was catching up with a therapist friend recently when a light bulb went off in my mind: Meditation is harm reduction.

It doesn’t solve the deeper emotional issues that cause many of our problems. But it helps us feel a little better in the here and now.

“Harm reduction” refers to an approach towards substance users that minimizes pain and suffering. For example, my new hometown of Baltimore has been giving out free needles to injection drug users for decades. People are going to use drugs. Why not make it as safe as possible?

Over the last ten years, giving out needles has prevented more than 1,900 new cases of HIV in Baltimore and saved the city over $32 million in public health costs every year.

People using drugs in a problematic, unhealthy way need more than just free needles. They need evidence-based drug treatment that addresses their health and social needs. They might need housing, healthcare, or a good paying job.

Meditation is like giving out clean needles. It reduces the harm caused by what therapist and author Mark Epstein calls “the trauma of everyday life.”

When we’re mindful we can step back from our thoughts rather than believe them without question. We feel a little less anxiety because we see that our anxious thoughts are just thoughts. We feel a little more joy because we’re in touch with what joy feels like in our bodies.

But we need something more revolutionary if we’re going making lasting change. We need to get to know our inner experience. We need to get familiar with different parts of ourselves, what triggers them, and how relate to them. We need to accept and even love whatever comes up inside.

That’s why therapy is so powerful. Working with someone skilled in holding back their judgement is like standing in front of a mirror. Except it’s a mirror that sees inside of you.

“I don’t take it personally,” says therapist and writer Lori Gottlieb, talking about clients who say mean things to her. “[Their aggression] is a way of coping with something that’s very unmanageable. And when we find out what the trauma and tragedy is … we [can come to like clients] quite a bit.”

A friend, your mom, your partner can’t provide that. They feel resentment, love, and all kinds of feelings towards you, even if they’re good at hiding it.

When you’re sitting across from someone who sees you fresh, who sees who you really are, you get to see yourself clearly. There’s no faking it, no bullshit. All that’s left is to dig into what’s really going on.

I don’t want to go as far as saying you must see a therapist. There’s a stigma against therapy, that it’s only for rich or “crazy” people. And it’s way too expensive—another reason we need #MedicareForAll. (Though, some therapists have sliding scale or even free rates.)

But please don’t be that guy, the one who thinks that meditation (or lifting weights or some job) has solved all your emotional problems. Don’t be me a few years back!

I was that guy until—you guessed it—a girlfriend all but commanded me to see a therapist.

“You can be broken as fuck, and still do good yoga,” spiritual teacher David Deida says. “You can be entirely dysfunctional therapeutically, psychologically, emotionally, you can be a wreck, and still be a master yogi. Yoga doesn’t fix the parts of you that are broken.”

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

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

Heartbroken? The love you’re looking for is already inside of you.

September 9, 2020 by Jeremy Mohler

Over the weekend, I was painting a room in my house when Guy Clark’s “Stuff that Works” came on Spotify:

I got a woman I love
She’s crazy and paints like God
She’s got a playground sense of justice
She won’t take odds
I got a tattoo with her name
Right through my soul
I think everything she touches
Turns to gold

Those words hit me like an NFL linebacker. Every single one is the love I used to feel for an ex-girlfriend—“the one that got away,” as they say.

We long ago agreed to be just friends, which has been great. But sometimes I still feel romantic love for her—when I see a beautiful painting, when the sunlight looks a certain way, when I bite into a perfectly cooked steak.

As I mindlessly painted, I decided to watch what emotions were coming up.

First came desire—I missed and wanted her. Then sadness. What if I never find someone like her again? I thought. Then regret and self-blame—Why couldn’t I have gotten my shit together sooner? Then compassion—we were young and still figuring things out, of course we fucked up.

But that’s when I struck gold. Next came love. Overwhelmingly love. For my ex, yes—but also in a much wider, ubiquitous way. My chest went tender with a little sadness but a ton of warmth. In the words of the poet Mary Oliver, I couldn’t help but be in awe of “this one precious life.”

Here’s what I realized: That love is mine. It was inside of me from the start. I just needed someone else to help me feel it. But what if I can access it myself? What if love is available at any time, yet I just overlook it?

Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes about this in one of my favorite books ever, “Start Where You Are,” but about the flip side of the coin, about negative emotions, like anger.

“If you have rage and righteously act it out and blame it all on others, it’s really you who suffers. The other people and the environment suffer also, but you suffer more because you’re being eaten up inside with rage, causing you to hate yourself more and more.”

That makes me think of politics, of hating Trump and white supremacy and capitalist greed. I recently saw an Instagram video of white counter-protesters yelling hateful things at Black Lives Matter activists. As I watched, it was me who felt the hate. The counter-protestors were probably already home relaxing and watching TV. I felt like shit, like I was burning up inside.

What I’m saying is, we have to live with our emotions, good and bad. Might as well get to know them a little bit. And in getting to know them, we might stumble upon the fact that love is already inside of us. That it’s not out there. That it’s not something to acquire. That it’s not as hidden as we assume.

“We already have everything we need,” writes Chödrön. “We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.”

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

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

Had any luck dating during the pandemic? Asking for a friend.

June 24, 2020 by Jeremy Mohler

I met somebody interesting a few weeks before the shutdown—before I holed up at my parents’ house on their rural farm. Hours of FaceTime and hundreds of text messages later, she’s an irresistible mystery I’m dying to figure out in person.

But what’s my crush based on? How much about her has my mind invented? How much have I projected on to her? Probably a ton. Probably so much that I’ll hardly recognize her in “real life.”

Once, at the end of a meditation retreat, the writer and Zen Buddhist teacher Natalie Goldberg told us students, “Watch out. You might think you know each other, but you’re projecting so many things.”

I’d spent that week crushing on one of the retreat center staff members. Everything about Molly added up to perfection. Her sunbaked skin and snow-white teeth. Her glances in the kitchen, which broke the retreat rule of not looking at each other. Her California accent when I broke another rule by striking up a conversation one morning. (There’s actually a name for this instant obsession, the “Meditation Crush,” which Portlandia nailed in this sketch.)

In my head, Molly and I ran off together to buy a cabin in the nearby Sante Fe mountains. But, as I walked away from the retreat center on the last day, Goldberg’s advice came in handy. I’d probably never see Molly again, which hurt—but I knew, in my gut, that I’d fallen for a projection.

Here’s how projection works: “Your brain fill[s] in the gaps in an otherwise incomplete story and the way it does that is through use of your own past history—positive or negative,” writes the psychiatrist Paul Dobransky.

Key words: your own past history. We know ourselves more than anyone else. So, when we meet someone new our brain fills in the gaps based on this self-knowledge. Molly was more than just an attractive face—she was the wild, earthy free spirit that I’d wished I could be.

See, when we’re young, we get messages from parents, teachers, family, and friends that certain things about us are unacceptable, wrong, unworthy. We internalize these messages as shame, which causes us to hide and lose access to parts of ourselves. When we lose access to, say, our joy, we’re bound to idealize others who are unabashedly joyful. When we feel shame about, say, our tendency to get really anxious, we’re easily irritated by other people who get really anxious too.

The other day, I was flipping through one of my favorite books, Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are, and saw a note I’d made: “Molly, Sante Fe, May 2016.” Here’s the text beside it:

“Our sense of being defeated means that something got in. Something touched our soft spot. This vulnerability that we’ve kept armored for ages—something touched it. Maybe all that touched it was a butterfly, but we have never been touched there before. It was so tender.”

And that’s the thing. Even if the Molly I fell for was a projection, there’s a reason she got in. There’s a reason I made up the story that I did. And there’s a reason it hurt to let her go.

In other words, whether my pandemic romance turns into something real or not, I’m learning about myself. I’m peering into a mirror who also happens to be using me as a mirror, and we’re both growing together, as long as we stay openhearted—which is the whole point of falling in love in the first place.


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 in your life, reach out.

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

My podcast

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available.

Categories

  • Anxiety
  • Buddhism
  • Bypassing
  • Capitalism
  • Changing habits
  • Compassion
  • Gratitude
  • How to meditate
  • IFS
  • Lowering stress
  • Neuroscience
  • Politics
  • Racism
  • Relationships
  • Tonglen
  • Toxic masculinity
  • Trauma
  • Uncategorized