Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Gratitude is making me into the friend I’ve always wanted to be

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I didn’t grow up religious, but I’ve recently fallen in love with saying a little prayer before meals.

Not a prayer, really. Some words of gratitude.

For the food itself. For who picked the blueberries in my oatmeal. For who transported them to the grocery store. For the cows that provided the milk for the yogurt. For the humans who made the first yogurt many years ago. For my friend Andrew who taught me to add honey to oatmeal. For the people I meditated with two years ago in Colorado who taught me to add a bunch of nuts and berries.

There I am alone in my house. Eyes closed. Breathing long and deep. Breathing in memories. Breathing out gratitude.

Writing about it now makes my eyes roll. But in the moment, it puts me in touch with my awe for life itself. For all the causes and conditions that must’ve come together for this particular meal. For the people who’ve inspired me, and the people who inspired them. For this moment. And this one… And this one…

Sometimes I text a friend, thanking them for something I never thanked them for. Mostly I’m just reminded of how much they mean to me.

But it’s not all unicorns and rainbows. If I’m grateful for the positive, I must be willing to be so for the negative.

“This plate of food, so fragrant and appetizing, also contains much suffering,” the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh recites before meals.

Countless people were exploited to make my breakfast possible. Farmworkers, undoubtedly immigrants from Latin America, worked long hours for little pay. Which is due to white supremacy. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act excluded domestic and agricultural workers, at a time when 90 percent of Black women and over half of Black men worked in either the domestic or agricultural sectors.

Animals were harmed. Land was stripped of its nutrients. Fossil fuels were burned.

I’d rather face these truths than sweep them under a rug woven with capitalist mythology. I’d rather feel them than numb out pretending I “earned” this food. It keeps me awake to the exploitation all around me.

As Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “Mindful eating can cultivate seeds of compassion and understanding that will strengthen us to do something to help hungry and lonely people be nourished.”

Most of all, this little gratitude practice reminds me that I am not self-made. That, despite all the messaging I get from this capitalist society, I am — in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. — “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”

The writer and meditation teacher Natalie Goldberg writes in one my favorite books, Long Quiet Highway:

Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, ‘Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.’

I want to know that — and never forget.

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 from freepik.

The Buddha almost died from working too hard. So did I.

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I don’t consider myself a Buddhist. But I often find myself digging stories about Siddhartha Gautama, the ancient spiritual master known as the Buddha.

One lesser-known story is when Siddhartha almost died from starvation. He’d been wandering the jungle practicing intense forms of meditation and austere living. He tortured his body to try to overcome its desires and needs, eventually limiting his daily diet to a few grains of rice.

“When I touched my belly, I would feel my backbone, and when I went to urinate, I would fall over,” he would later say.

Collapsed near a river at the edge of death, he realized that starving himself was only causing more suffering.

With the help of a peasant woman who nursed him back to full strength, he soon started a spiritual community and developed the practices and teachings that would become known as Buddhism.

I like this story for three reasons.

One, it reminds me that there’s a limit to the hustle.

Capitalism tells us otherwise. Relaxation is shamed in our society. Unless you’re rich, which means you deserve that vacation on your yacht. Otherwise, work harder, start a side hustle, be more productive, wake up earlier, do these ten things in your daily routine, blame poor people if you’re still unsatisfied with your life.

I’ve internalized these messages like a sponge. If I’m not careful, I’ll forget to take breaks, work on the weekends, start new projects before I’ve finished others. Eventually, I’ll burn out and collapse in my bed.

Once, in my mid 20s, I ended up in the hospital after half my body went numb. I probably wasn’t at the edge of death. But I got the message that if I continued working hard and partying harder, I might get there.

Two, it reminds me that I can’t do it alone. It being, live the life I so desperately want to live. A life lived fully.

Part of the reason Siddhartha almost died is because he was alone. He was fortunate a peasant just so happened to be walking by when he collapsed.

Eventually, his cousin Ananda would say to him, “Lord, I’ve been thinking. Spiritual friendship is at least half of the spiritual life.”

Siddhartha replied, “Ananda, that’s wrong. Such a view is not correct. Spiritual friendship is the whole of the spiritual life!”

As the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, “Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”

Capitalism, on the other hand, says lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. Do it yourself. Maybe start a family and buy a house in the suburbs. But when it comes down to it, you’re on your own. Have some personal responsibility!

Whiteness, which infects all of us, says so too. Being “white” has robbed me of my ancestors’ traditions, rituals, and ways of relating. It’s tricked me into thinking that I came from nowhere. That I didn’t come from English settler-colonialists who stole this land and German indentured servants who were all but forced to come here. That I’m not part of a community. That I’m self-made.

The third thing I like about the story is that it highlights the danger of toxic masculinity.

During his hustling phase, Siddhartha had no time for nourishing food, women, or anything considered soft. “All of these were temptations and a potential cause for [his] downfall,” writes the Buddhist nun Thanissara.

But “through the humble presence of a loving and caring woman,” Thanissara writes, “he saw the beauty of the river, of the sun shimmering on the tress and grasses, and of the graciousness of life in its abundance. The problem was not the world; the problem was his aversion to it.”

The peasant woman represents feeling emotions rather than stuffing them down. Embracing rather than rejecting and even hating anything that appears feminine. Collaborating with, rather than dominating over.

She also represents the belittlement of so-called “woman’s work.”

As socialist feminist Nancy Fraser says, with the rise of capitalism, “[The creation and maintenance of social bonds] was left behind, relegated to a new private domestic sphere, where it was sentimentalized and naturalized, performed for the sake of ‘love’ and ‘virtue,’ as opposed to money.”

We should always remember that the peasant woman is a crucial figure in Siddhartha’s awakening and the formation of Buddhism, a world religion now with over 535 million followers.

All of this is to say: Rest is a worthy thing to do, community matters, and patriarchy must go.

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.

Once I started considering myself worthy of love, I found it

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I didn’t need a pandemic to show me how bad I want to be part of something larger than myself. To be part of a real community. To be loved. To belong.

I’ve always felt like that. One of my earliest memories is crying over a broken radio my parents had thrown in the trash. Why can’t it stay with us? I wondered.

Sure, like anyone else I’m often drunk on white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist mythology. Imagining that if I work hard enough, one day I’ll feel like I belong. Pretending I don’t need help. Thinking I’m self-made — that I come from nowhere and the future is all that matters.

But about a decade ago I was lucky enough to find the meditation teacher and therapist Tara Brach. An ex-girlfriend took me to one of Brach’s talks and handed me her book Radical Acceptance.

“We yearn for an unquestioned experience of belonging, to feel at home with ourselves and others, at ease and fully accepted,” Brach writes. “But the trance of unworthiness keeps the sweetness of belonging out of reach.”

In other words, sometimes we hold ourselves back from belonging. Because we think we’re unworthy of love — we’re not enough.

It’s like what the subject of the documentary The Feminist on Cellblock Y, Richie, says, “The fear is, if I show you who I really am, that’s not going to be good enough. And it sounds silly. It sounds like a small fear. But it’s everything.”

Once I learned about this “trance of unworthiness,” I started seeing it everywhere. In how I communicated with the people I loved. In how they communicated with me. In my friend’s stories about their relationships, their jobs, their hopes and dreams.

Then I got lucky again. That same ex all but forced me to go to a therapist.

The therapist, Cynthia Wilcox, showed me that “unquestioned experience of belonging” Brach wrote about.

I told her how I couldn’t relax on the weekends because it felt like there was always more to do. How it was hard for me to ask for help. How my parents are the hardest working people I know.

She listened and nodded along. Then she said, “Sounds like your family values hard work.” There was no judgment in the way she said it. Not a whiff of shaming.

That might not sound like much. But it washed over me the like warmest ocean wave. She didn’t try to change my mind or fix me or make me feel better. She just listened.

That’s what therapy is for. Getting that “unquestioned experience of belonging.” Or as the pioneering psychologist Carl Rogers called it, unconditional positive regard.

It’s what my parents couldn’t give me. Or your parents either. When they see us, they see a reflection of themselves, how good of a parent they’ve been. We shouldn’t blame them for that. Blaming only deepens the trance.

Wilcox eventually gave me a list of common ways we can fall into the trance.

If you’re like me, you might believe that you must earn love by what you do, produce, accomplish. So you always feel burned-out.

Or maybe you believe you’ll lose yourself by getting too close to someone. So you avoid deep relationships.

Or you feel responsible for other people’s well-being. So you try to make everyone else happy and forget yourself.

Or you might think keeping others comfortable is the most important thing. So you hold back from saying what you really feel.

Or maybe you believe you can’t trust anyone completely. So you avoid asking for help.

Or maybe you think that if you’re all you can be, you’ll overwhelm people. So you keep yourself small and quiet.

There are tons of other stories that can cause the trance. The real work is waking up, getting curious about what stories guide your life, and learning how to show yourself that “unquestioned experience of belonging.”

How? By stopping the blaming. By finding friends who don’t shame you. By seeing a therapist. By meditating or doing yoga, i.e., practicing something that increases your presence. By caring for your body. By finding your people and building a community. By helping dismantle the systems that make it so hard to belong.

Those are the things that have worked for me.

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 Sarah C.