Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

New Year’s resolutions. War with Iran. The rent just went up. Focus on your breath.

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I got a massage the other day and was reminded of the first thing you learn in Mindfulness 101: if you’re feeling lost, find your breath.

I’m not a person who gets massages. I’ve always thought they’re for rich people who have the time and money to pay someone to touch them.

But just before New Year’s I fell down my rain-soaked back porch stairs. My glutes (read: ass) seized up. My lower back developed a bruise that looked like the sky in Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” It was time to pay for professional help.

The massage therapist noticed that I held my breath when she gently pushed into the bruise.

“Focus on your breath,” she said. “Breathe through the pain.”

Oh yeah, I thought, I can do this. I do it all the time during meditation.

How’d I forget? Well, it’s easy to when we’re not practicing, when we’re at work, with family—in everyday life. My mind wanders when my mom calls, my boss emails, someone cuts in line at the grocery store, and, apparently, when I get a massage.

This time of year is especially mindless and forward thinking. New Year’s resolutions. Diets, workouts, goals. Trump is trying to start a war. Australia is on fire. Murder rates are climbing. If you feel scattered and overwhelmed, you’re not alone.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, writes that “breathing is a stable solid ground that is always there for us to take refuge in. Whenever we are carried away by regret about something that has happened or swept away in our fears or anxiety [about] the future, we can return to our breathing and re-establish ourselves in the present moment.”

That’s mindfulness meditation in a nutshell. Notice when your mind has been carried away. Let go of the thoughts. Come back to the air entering your nostrils or your lungs expanding. Over and over again.

As my new massage therapist says, breathe through the pain. Focus on the next breath. And the next breath. And the next breath.

“We don’t need to control the breath in any way,” Thich Nhat Hanh writes. “We simply encounter it, just as it is. It may be long or short, deep or shallow. With the gentle energy of mindfulness it will naturally become slower and deeper.”

If focusing on the breath doesn’t feel comfortable, put your attention on one part of your body. Feel your hands, feet, or legs. Relax and feel the sensations.

No matter what’s happening right now, your breath and body are bread crumbs back to the peace and freedom of the present moment.

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.

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Like everything these days, mindfulness is being co-opted by neoliberalism

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If you’ve paid any attention to politics recently, particularly on Twitter, you’ve heard the word “neoliberalism.” It’s used to describe so many different politicians, ideologies, and policies that it’s hard to define what it means.

But it’s important to define, because neoliberalism shapes almost everything about our lives, even how we practice meditation—and that’s a problem.

My favorite definition comes from political scientist Wendy Brown, who says it’s “the expansion of markets—understood as competition—to every feature of life, including democracy, human social life, education, social services, and so forth.”

Think about how social media has turned our lives into a contest for attention—for more and more likes, shares, comments, “engagement.” And how high-stakes testing has transformed K-12 education into a competition with winners and losers. And how journalism has become a battle for clicks.

Neoliberalism is dog-eat-dog capitalism on hyperdrive, and the real sinister thing it’s done—what makes it different than prior forms of capitalism—is make us incapable of solving big problems together.

Climate change, gaping inequality, mass incarceration, the opioid crisis. History shows that the only way to fix these sorts of enormous problems is when massive political movements are able to force the government to increase and reprioritize its public investments.

But it’s hard to imagine another Civil Rights movement or a return to the New Deal era, when nearly a third of American workers were in a labor union.

Neoliberal logic makes us think that the solutions to our problems are individual. If you’re lonely, just post on Facebook. If you’re struggling to pay the bills, just work harder. If you’re unfulfilled at work, just quit and “do what you love.” If you’re worried about the environment, just become a vegan.

God forbid we’d band together and fight for a higher minimum wage, universal healthcare, or ending the fossil fuel industry.

What does all this have to do with meditation? Two things.

What meditation produces, mindfulness, can help you notice when you slip into this way of thinking.

When you notice your mind is off in the future, telling yourself to hustle, to work harder, to pull on your bootstraps, let go of the thought. Note silently in your mind, “thinking”—or even “neoliberalism.” Bring your attention back to the sensations of your breath, feelings in your body, and the sights and sounds around you.

Mindfulness won’t stop you from neoliberal thinking, but it can help you notice when you’re in the trance and snap out of it.

And two—I meet so many people who are trying to get into meditation by themselves. They want to know what apps to use, how often they should practice, what books they should read.

Go figure: meditation is being filtered through neoliberal logic. Corporations are rolling out mindfulness programs for employees left and right. Meditation is on every list published about what to do to have a more productive day.

“[Meditation] can provide benefits, but the way they’re being deployed is a neoliberal cooptation, where they are then refashioned as performance enhancement methods in alignment with institutional goals, whether it’s a corporation or the military,” writes Ron Purser, professor of management and practicing Buddhist.

When I got started with meditation, I learned from other people, like, in the flesh, in real life—but it took me awhile to get there. I’d spent years as what Zen priest Roshi Joan Halifax calls a “book Buddhist,” reading about meditation but rarely actually practicing it.

Then a girlfriend took me to a class. Seeing other people meditate—people that looked like me, normal people—encouraged me to do it more often. Going on a weekend retreat with 20 people, albeit strangers, motivated me to meditate every day. Talking about mindfulness with other people inspired me to learn how to teach meditation.

It’s absurd that this has to be said, but to really embrace meditation—and to live in a society that has a shot at solving climate change and our many other crises—we need other people.

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.

The mindfulness movement has a class problem

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There’s an inside joke among practitioners of Buddhist-inspired meditation about the lack of working class representation in the growing mindfulness industry. “The Upper-Middle Way” is a play on the Buddha’s first sermon, which prescribed a middle way between the extremes of self-indulgence and asceticism. But a new study suggests that mindfulness can lower levels of anxiety and depression for those suffering most from American society’s extreme economic and political inequality.

Walk into a meditation studio or attend a weekend retreat and odds are almost everyone will be both white and white-collar. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while the percentage of Americans who practice meditation more than tripled from 2012 to 2017, black and Latino people continue to practice at lower rates. Those with a high school education or less, no matter their skin color, are significantly less likely to meditate.

As a meditation teacher, I hear people stress about finding their true calling, feeling disconnected from nature, or President Donald Trump’s latest Twitter outburst. Everyday problems, sure, but different than experiencing racism firsthand or not having enough money to pay rent.

It’s only when I teach at labor union offices—which I do to get out of the mindfulness bubble—that the conversation shifts. Workers say they’re grateful for having a rare moment to think about themselves. Less talk of spirituality; more worry about toxic managers, long commutes, and caring for children.

That’s what makes the findings published in October in the Journal of the Georgia Public Health Association so encouraging. Researchers at Georgia State University wanted to study the effectiveness of mindfulness practices with parents of young children living in poor communities, who, because of persistent poverty, unstable employment, and family disruption, often experience increased feelings of anger, depression, and anxiety. They led 15 parents from one of Atlanta’s poorest neighborhoods, all black and most women, through eight weekly lessons, including breathing exercises, practicing gratitude, and mindful eating. At program end, there was an increase in the parents’ self-reported mindfulness, particularly less reactivity and an improved ability to label thoughts. Also, self-reported levels of anxiety and depression decreased. A number of the participants said they enjoyed the lessons and expressed interest in deepening their mindfulness practices.

This fits with a bevy of recent findings that mindfulness can improve the relationship between parents and their children. Mindful parenting may lower the risk of child abuse, decrease anxiety and depression in children, and more. But that meditation can help those dealing with the highest levels of social and financial instability is especially promising given the mindfulness industry’s blind spots.

“Mindfulness, like positive psychology and the broader happiness industry, has depoliticized and privatized stress,” writes San Francisco State University management professor Ronald Purser in his recent book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. To a growing chorus of critics of so-called “corporate mindfulness,” meditation is being wielded by the likes of Google and Goldman Sachs to pacify employees who otherwise might openly voice their stress and dissatisfaction. Rather than organize a union, employees are encouraged to do “self-care.” Instead of allowing more time off and paying higher wages, corporate executives learn “mindful leadership.”

That’s the rub when it comes to mindful parenting, policing, or any other change in individual behavior. Just like the fact that wearing body cameras has little to no impact on police officers’ use of force, becoming more mindful won’t end poverty, lower the cost of health care, or stop climate change. Only collective action with demands for systemic change will, what Martin Luther King Jr. called, “a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

Nearly half of residents in the Atlanta neighborhood where the study took place live under the federal poverty level. Almost a quarter are unemployed. The neighborhood is considered a food desert and ranks third citywide for the number of individuals incarcerated or returning from incarceration.

Practicing gratitude, taking time to savor the taste of each bite of food, or noticing sensations in the body won’t help change these conditions for the study’s participants. Still, that they now have a way to ease some of their suffering that can be practiced for free almost anywhere at any time, can only help.

Free meditation cheat sheet

I’ve come up with a cheat sheet to help you start and 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.