Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

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.

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 quiet your nagging, lecturing, shaming inner critic

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One of my favorite stories comes from spiritual teacher David Deida. At a party, he saw his mentor’s wife enjoying a conversation with an attractive man.

“Aren’t you jealous?” he asked his mentor.

“Yes,” his mentor responded. “But the fact that I’m jealous isn’t bothering me.”

In other words, the mentor was aware of how he was relating to his jealousy. Instead of making the emotion a problem, he was allowing it to just be there.

I love that story because I make everything a problem. When I’m sad, part of me says I should be happy. When I’m exhausted after work, part of me says I should still be working. (Thanks, capitalism.) When I’m lonely, part of me thinks I’ll be lonely forever.

That’s if I’m able to notice the emotion to begin with. Often, I’m completely blended, a concept from a form of therapy called Internal Family Systems. (More on that here.)

When I’m blended — overwhelmed, triggered, etc. — I’m caught up in my thoughts, believing they’re true. They’re like a movie. And I’ve forgotten the actual me is on the couch watching a TV screen.

Jealousy? I’m an expert in catastrophizing about how people don’t love me anymore.

One time, an ex-girlfriend and I went to a Washington Capitals hockey game. Who was sitting beside us? The team’s most popular former player, Peter Bondra.

My ex, a curious and remarkable person, struck up a conversation and had Bondra laughing in his Slovakian accent.

Does she think he’s in better shape than me? my mind sneered. Is it his perfectly tailored suit? I need to dress better. At least I’m a little taller than him.

Honestly, in past romantic relationships, I was more often than not lost in a virtual reality of thoughts, judgements, and assumptions.

That’s why mindfulness is so powerful. After meditation, it’s a little easier to unblend from my swirling thoughts. I can see them as they really are: not reality, but boring, two-dimensional ideas about the world.

“The movement from virtual reality — thoughts — to the awareness of sense-based reality is true homecoming,” says meditation teacher Tara Brach.

When I’m unblended, I’m in my senses — in my body. I’m seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling, and listening. Colors, sensations, tastes, smells, and sounds become more interesting than anything my mind can produce.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

As Brach says, this moment-by-moment awareness can be home-like. I can always return to the aliveness of the present moment, no matter what’s happening.

But emotions are seductive. They fly in and hijack your nervous system, triggering an area of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala then tells your body to release stress hormones.

Your breath shortens and heart pounds. Your muscles tense up in areas of the body like the stomach and shoulders. You’re ready to fight a hockey player. Or at least ruminate until you can complain about it later.

Emotions even layer on top of each other. The jealousy is one thing. Then there’s the criticism, the making jealousy a problem.

That’s the big takeaway from Deida’s story. Sometimes you have to start with the self-criticism. It’s standing in the way of the jealousy, the anger, the loneliness, the sadness.

“What’s known as the inner critic, what Freud called the superego, is but one of many parts of the personality responsible for keeping you safe,” writes therapist Richard Schwartz. “Most often it’s criticizing you to motivate you to achieve, look good, be tough, and so forth, so you won’t be hurt or rejected.”

And sure enough, making it a problem won’t work either. Your inner critic needs loving just like the parts of you that are scared or hurt or jealous. It needs to be seen, understood, and soothed, like the little inner child it is.

Deida’s mentor wasn’t some otherworldly guru. No one is. He’d simply done the work to get to know his inner critic. I bet his inner critic was blaring in his mind as his wife smiled and played with her hair. He just wasn’t listening to it. He was unblended.

To be sure, self-compassion won’t make you weak or soft or a pushover. If anything, it’s made me stronger.

Unblended, Deida’s mentor could decide to intervene or discuss the situation with his wife after the party. Or he could decide not to. He was in a better position to choose his response to what was actually happening, not what was on the movie screen in his head.

When you’re not under the sway of your emotions, you’ll be able to access the confidence, the calmness, the curiosity, the wisdom, all the things us human beings are capable of.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly emails will help you bring mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation transformed my life.

Photo by Nano Anderson