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.

“Just be yourself” is misleading advice. Here’s how to actually do it.

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I wept when I first heard meditation teacher Tara Brach tell this story written by author Bruce Holland Rogers:

“When he was very young, he waved his arms, snapped his massive jaws, and tromped around the house so that the dishes trembled in the china cabinet,” Rogers writes in a short story called “Dinosaur.”

“‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ his mother said. ‘You are not a dinosaur! You are a human being!’

Since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time that he might be a pirate. ‘Seriously,’ his father said to him after school one day, ‘what do you want to be?’ A fireman, maybe. Or a policeman. Or a soldier. Some kind of hero.

But in high school they gave him tests and told him he was good with numbers. Perhaps he’d like to be a math teacher? That was respectable. Or a tax accountant? He could make a lot of money doing that. It seemed a good idea to make money, what with falling in love and thinking about raising a family.

So, he became a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted it, because it made him feel, well, small. And he felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant, but a retired tax accountant. Still worse: a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curb, to take his pill, to turn his hearing aid on. Every day it seemed he forgot more things, important things, like where his children lived and which of them were married or divorced.

Then one day, when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling its familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching dragonflies flitting among the horsetails at the water’s edge.”

I cried because I’d spent so much of my life trying to make other people happy. 

I’d half-assed college just enough to keep my parents and the professors off my back. I’d worked in the tech industry for seven years because it made me appear successful.

Not everyone can get paid to do the work they love, of course. That’s a fact of capitalism. Only a few get the freedom of owning their own business, while the many have to work for them. So, we shouldn’t shame people for not “doing what they love,” because they can’t.

But what Rogers’s story is really getting at is that the life we want is about being emotionally vulnerable, and I’d rarely been that either. 

I’d stumbled through romantic relationships on autopilot, never really saying what I felt. I’d loved, missed, and been angry at friends so many times without saying a word about it.

“Vulnerability is uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure,” says professor and social worker Brené Brown.

That doesn’t sound so good. Who wants to feel the discomfort of being exposed?

But now I know it’s worth it. On the other side of that discomfort is what we’re all searching for: feeling alive.

“I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad,” Brown says. “My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.”

Being vulnerable is hard because, even if we weren’t abused as a child, we learned early on that we couldn’t really be ourselves. When we showed our true self, we were shamed, ignored, or simply not understood by our parents and other adults.

This caused us to hide parts of ourselves and lead with other parts that we thought might get us attention. We started acting certain ways to avoid getting hurt again.

The problem is, when we hide our parts — our wildness, our curiosity, our passion — we aren’t vulnerable. We aren’t truly open to the possibilities of this one life we’re lucky to have. Sure, we don’t feel pain as often, but we don’t feel pleasure either. And worse, we suffer.

So, how does one actually be more vulnerable? How does one lean into the discomfort?

That’s a question with a lifelong answer. But it starts with noticing when we’re trying to appear a certain way to other people. Noticing when we’re trying to make things “certain and definite, black and white, good and bad.” Noticing when we’re trying to avoid the pain.

Then it’s about accepting that life is messy, that pain is inevitable, that we can’t control life, especially other people.

Then it’s about letting go of our thoughts and sense of control.

Then it’s about opening to this present moment and feeling, tasting, smelling, hearing, and seeing. Opening is allowing the uncertainty of the present moment to be there, even resting in it. In other words, living fully.

(Noticing, accepting, letting go, and opening happen to be the four steps in mindfulness meditation, which I wrote about in my ebook, How to Get Out of Your Head.)

Sure, sometimes the pain is too much, or it’s unsafe to be ourselves around certain people. Leaning into the discomfort might not be the right thing to do at every moment.

But, where it feels possible, we can start to allow ourselves to be okay with a little uncertainty. What we’ve been waiting for, life, is in the mystery, not our thoughts, worries, and plans.

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.

Mindfulness meditation helps me work smarter and relax harder

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My parents had yet to figure out I needed glasses, so I sat cross-legged a few feet from the television.

My mom was talking on the cordless phone. A lawnmower blared outside the wall. I felt free, content, and safe. Our quiet, rural Maryland home oozed 1990s middle-class prosperity. Five types of cereal sat in the pantry, and 50 cable channels awaited my eyes.

My mom came over to talk to me. “They wanted to hold you back from first grade. But I told them no,” she said. “You can handle it.”

An alarm rang inside my body. My throat tensed and mind churned. Why did they want to hold me back? What did I do wrong? Is Mom upset?

As far as I can tell, this is the first time I felt the shame that I’ve been running from since.

I hadn’t known that my teacher had been evaluating me—which was her job, of course. From then on, I was going to at least appear as though I was on task and working hard. I didn’t want to feel that shame ever again.

I often feel like I need to hustle, like I’m behind and must catch up. Behind who or what? I don’t know.

I have trouble truly resting and struggle to be present with others. I’m almost always leaning toward the future to get to the next thing on my to-do list. During my last semester of college, I even had three jobs.

I didn’t begin to notice this tendency to hustle until my mid-20s. Before that, I didn’t see it. Striving all the time was just the water I swam in.

Reading Karl Marx and learning from organizers in the Occupy movement taught me about capitalism. I learned that our society is divided between people who own things and those who work for them. Those of us not lucky enough to be born wealthy spend more time working for a living than enjoying that living.

Odds are, you feel the pressure to hustle too—most of us have no choice.

But knowing about capitalism’s flaws hasn’t helped me all that much.

Yes, it’s given me a perspective on why I feel dissatisfied despite living in the richest country in the history of the world. Yes, it’s given me a sense of comradery. Yes, it’s taught me that the solutions to many of our problems, like climate change, are systemic, not individual.

But it wasn’t until I started practicing mindfulness meditation that I found a practice for whenever I feel overwhelmed by my tendency to hustle.

Meditation is a roadmap for working with almost any overwhelming emotion. When you notice that your mind is focused on the future in an unhealthy way—be it worrying or overplanning—let go of the thoughts. Then bring your attention to the feelings of your breath or the sensations in a neutral-feeling part of your body, like your feet.

Most importantly, mindfulness taught me acceptance. I’ve learned to accept that part of me wants to hustle all of time. It’s just how I am. It’s just how we are.

When that part—or any part of me—is barking orders in my mind, I can allow it to be there even if I don’t listen. What a relief. I don’t have to listen or drown it out. I can just let it be. I can just let myself be.

“If you allow that you’re not relaxing, then you’re relaxing,” says Tibetan Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

Acceptance creates inner freedom, a little space to decide whether to hustle or not. Sometimes I need to kick ass and get shit done. But do I really need to strive when I’m making dinner or visiting a friend?

That might not sound like much, but it’s been huge for me. I finally can relax … like, actually relax. Not veg out with Netflix or a beer. Relax, as in, who I am is enough—I’m okay.

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.