Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

The Capitol riot was traumatic, even if you weren’t there

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Since the white supremacist attack on the Capitol, I’ve been looking for ways to process what happened.

Turns out, what I needed most was poetry. More on that in a second.

The first helpful thing was realizing that what happened was traumatic.

Even though I’m white and experienced it by doomscrolling social media, it triggered my nervous system. Stress hormones flooded my body. My breath shortened. My muscles clenched for protection.

But there was no one to fight or run from. There was nowhere for the stress to go except gnaw at my insides.

“I know many people who feel exhausted, reactive, depressed, hypervigilant, sleepless, cloudy/dazed, and super raw,” tweeted therapist and meditation Ralph De La Rosa. “These are common traumatic reactions.”

This is why compassion has been so important.

When we’re scared, we need unconditional love. We need to be held and told not that everything will be okay but that we are okay, exactly how we are, whatever we’re feeling.

That is what good friends are for. And therapy. They provide what psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard.”

“For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety,” writes psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. “Being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart.”

I love this Carl Rogers quote: “People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right-hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”

It’s also been helpful to meditate and move my body.

Unconditional love often isn’t enough. Trauma can stay trapped in the body. “The body,” the title of van der Kolk’s bestselling book says, “keeps the score.”

After the violence, my attention was stuck in my mind. And my mind was stuck in the future, worrying, planning, catastrophizing.

That’s why I couldn’t stop looking at social media. As De La Rosa said, “People were offloading their emotions … by refreshing and doomscrolling as if that was going to do something, as if that was going move something. And it was just the neurochemicals trying to affect the situation, [yet they were] rendered useless.”

Meditation has helped me stay with what’s happening in the present moment. What’s going on in my body. What it feels like to breathe. What it actually sounds like right here, right now, in my Baltimore apartment.

Meditation counters stress by triggering the body to stop releasing stress hormones, slow the heart rate, and deepen breathing.

I’ve noticed that even going for a short walk or stretching can take the edge off. The energy has somewhere to go instead of being redirected inside. Yoga is even better, as it‘s been shown to reset critical brain areas that get disturbed by trauma.

But, if I’m being honest, I have a therapist and plenty of close friends. And I’ve got a halfway decent meditation practice.

I’ve been needing something more. Something bigger. Something to hold not just me but all of us and the violence and trauma and this country’s history in a larger way.

Something that holds Trump and white supremacy accountable. But that also sees the humanity in all the insanity. In a word, something spiritual.

Thank goodness for adrienne maree brown’s poem, which she wrote the morning after the riot. Here’s my favorite part:

things are not getting worse
they are getting uncovered
we must hold each other tight
and continue to pull back the veil
see: we, the body, we are the wounded place

we live on a resilient earth
where change is the only constant
in bodies whose only true whiteness
is the blood cell that fights infection
and the bone that holds the marrow

remove the shrapnel, clean the wound
relinquish inflammation, let the chaos calm
the body knows how to scab like lava stone
eventually leaving the smooth marring scars
of lessons learned

Seriously, go read the whole thing right now.

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.

Photo by Blink O’fanaye

How to handle overwhelming emotions that come up during meditation

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If you haven’t seen the documentary “The Work,” go see it, now. (It’s streaming on Kanopy, which is free with a public library card.)

It made me cry five times, at least—and I can’t remember the last time I cried.

The film’s subject is a therapy group in a maximum-security prison in California. Prisoners join volunteers from outside the prison to talk through grief, anger, and other painful emotions their experiencing.

I cried a mere 15 minutes into the film when a former gang member named Kiki breaks down because he’s never mourned his sister’s death. “I don’t want to bottle up that little kid, that little kid who used to cry when his daddy would whoop his ass,” he says, weeping and screaming as the other prisoners hold him.

I cried because I was reminded that every one of us hides our emotional wounds. We hide our pain behind anger, or our grief behind being a “real man,” or our resentment behind a pretend smile, or our loneliness behind another beer.

Even if your father didn’t beat you, or you aren’t a gang member, you’ve gone through trauma. You have wounds. You’ve been through some shit.

How your parents or caregivers treated you when you were young—even if they loved you deeply—shaped how you relate to yourself and others as an adult. As physician and addiction expert Gabor Maté writes, “Emotional nurturance is an absolute requirement for healthy neurobiological brain development.”

If your mother was stressed about work, or your father was an alcoholic, or there was conflict in the family, you were affected in ways that influence how you handle emotions today.

Get this: studies show that concentrations of the stress hormone cortisol are elevated in the children of depressed mothers. At age three, the highest cortisol levels were found in those children whose mothers had been depressed during the child’s first year of life.

No one can avoid the trauma of being an infant and relying on others to fulfill our needs. There’s really no escape.

That’s why mindfulness meditation, which gives us the opportunity to turn towards rather than away from our emotions, is playing with fire. This practice isn’t all peace, love, and productivity gains.

When we stop believing our own bullshit—the stories our mind comes up with to avoid feeling painful emotions—we can experience moments of relaxation, acceptance, and wholeness. That’s why so many people are drawn to meditation. But we can also experience what we’ve been hiding from.

“It’s very easy to overload your circuits,” says Willoughby Britton, a neuroscientist who studies meditation. “We have this idea that diving in is going to make us feel better. But often it can destabilize the system. It’s just too much, and it can be dissociating.”

So, what should you do if you’re meditating and out of nowhere comes a bout of sadness or anger or extreme anxiety?

Well, stop meditating and go see a therapist or talk with a trusted friend. You don’t have to turn this practice into a heroic performance like everything else in our individualistic, capitalist society.

But if you feel safe enough to step towards the flame, try to find a neutral feeling in the body. Notice the connection points between your feet and the floor. Feel the density of the bones in your hands. Follow the air as it travels down through your sinuses and back up again.

Once you feel safe, move your attention to wherever you feel that sadness or anger or anxiety, likely in the middle of your chest or your stomach. Feel the raw sensations—the warmth, the coolness, the tingling, the flow of energy.

If your mind goes to stories about the emotion—he’s such an asshole—let go of the thought and return your attention to the raw sensations.

If the sensations are overwhelming, return to that neutral place in the body. Go back and forth, over and over again. Eventually, the difficult emotion might dissolve—or it won’t.

Healing your wounds—doing the work—is a lifelong journey, so take your time.

Free meditation cheat sheet

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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.