Jeremy Mohler

As I’ve written and talked about, meditation is most powerful when practiced daily. For most of us, its benefits fade away during sleep, so we must reset each day with another session, preferably in the morning.

But doing anything other than fulfilling our basic needs—eating, sleeping, drinking water—each and every single day is hard work. And the last thing we need in this society is more work that we don’t get paid for.

So, if your 2019 resolutions and goals include meditating more—or finally meditating for the first time—I’ve got some tips.

Start with an intention, not a goal. My practice began with the intention to sit every day, no matter how little. Some days, I sat 20 minutes in the morning; others, I could only manage five minutes just before getting into bed at night. A few weeks in, I missed a day. But because I had set an intention, I was a little easier on myself, which allowed me to begin again the next day without the weight of feeling like a failure.

If you’re like me—i.e., a human being—the idea of perfection is a fantasy that allows you give up at the first sign of failure. As the saying goes, perfect is the enemy of good.

Meditation is simply sitting and observing, not losing 50 pounds or making a million dollars. It cuts against the direction that our society flows in—it’s about accepting and letting go, not judging and holding on. So, give yourself slack and take your time.

Eventually, settle into a routine. Within a few weeks or months, you’ll find a sweet spot in terms of length, whether it’s 10, 20, or 30 minutes a day. You’ll also get a feel for what time of day gives you the most bang for your buck.

Routine is crucial to developing any habit. It greases the wheels, so to speak, by saving mental energy that would otherwise go towards making decisions—when should I sit today, where, how long?

At the moment, I sit 30 minutes every morning after making my bed and stretching—even when I’m sick or traveling—and most days another 20 minutes in the afternoon. I’ve followed this routine long enough that my day is noticeably more stressful and unfocused if I skip my morning sit. Intention has morphed into discipline, a must-do.

Don’t go it alone. Meditation groups in the U.S. have a long way to go to be more accessible, particularly to people of color, LGBTQ folks, and working people. But when you become bored of your routine—which you will—seeing others sit and go headfirst into the unknown of the present moment can inspire your individual practice.

There are groups in monasteries, centers, and living rooms in most cities and regions, most of which sustain themselves on volunteer effort and donations. Find a public event to drop in on.

Often, you can check out a guided meditation and hear a talk from a teacher without having to say a word to anyone. Or if you want to talk to others, most people love to talk about their practice with other meditators.

If you live in a city, try various lineages and orientations to the practice to see what resonates. Lineages common in the U.S. include: Vipassana (Insight meditation), Zen, and various Tibetan Buddhism orientations, like Shambhala. Many are quite secular and require little commitment, if any.

If you can’t find a group in your area, use a meditation app like Dharma Seed or Headspace to listen to guided meditations. It’s totally fine to lean on guided meditations, especially when you first start daily practice. Find a quiet place and let the guidance play from your phone—though listening with headphones is fine in a pinch. I sat with my phone in my shirt pocket playing Tara Brach’s guided meditations for at least the first six months. The app Insight Timer is great for keeping time once you’re sitting on your own.

Good luck! As always, shoot me an email at jeremy@jeremymohler.blog if you’re struggling.

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Growing up, my favorite quote was this, which I misattributed to Abraham Lincoln: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”

What a miserable way to look at the world.

I’ve spent most of life trying to appear intelligent, clever, on top of things, “with it.” I’ve rarely asked questions, and if I did, it was usually to stump or impress someone.

But I’ve learned through meditation and therapy that this is an attempt to avoid feeling vulnerable, which, I’m also learning, is what matters most in life.

I probably picked up this way of avoiding vulnerability as a kid when, at some point, the curiosity natural to all young people was stomped out of me. I probably asked too many questions to my parents who were working full-time jobs to pay the bills while trying to have lives of their own. There’s also a little toxic masculinity in the mix, as young boys are encouraged to problem solve while showing little indecisiveness and emotion.

We all have this tendency to avoid vulnerability— let’s call it “ego” — it just comes in different forms for different people.

Ego is like an imaginary version of yourself that you carry around with you. This version doesn’t evolve, adapt, or change at all like a real human. It’s who you think others see, who you “really are.” But it doesn’t actually exist. It’s made up of thoughts, which are snapshots of moments that have already passed or worries about a future that might not come. We mistake the snapshots for evidence that we really are a bad person after all, or the best, or an addict, or whoever we think should or shouldn’t be.

“Ego is like a really fat person trying to get through a very narrow door,” writes Buddhist meditation teacher Pema Chödrön. “If there’s lots of ego, then we’re always getting squeezed and poked and irritated by everything that comes along. When something comes along that doesn’t squeeze and poke and irritate us, we grasp it for dear life and want it to last forever. Then we suffer more as a result of holding ourselves.”

Trying to appear intelligent — or nice, or “manly,” or however you try to come off to others — is “holding ourselves.” Sometimes it’s healthy to protect ourselves by setting boundaries with others, especially if you’ve experienced serious trauma. But many of us literally hold ourselves whether there’s a threat or not, tensing our shoulders or stomach or jaw, closing off to the openness of the moment and mystery of this life.

Asking questions is becoming my ticket out of ego, which, for me, sometimes feels like a straitjacket of shyness and cartoon masculinity. The “dumber” the better — if someone references something I don’t know about, I ask them to explain it to me. If I don’t know where someone lives, where they grew up, what they do for work, whether they’re happy, I ask.

You’d be surprised by how many people are walking around dying to be asked about the most important parts of their lives. How many people will light up just because you put the effort into getting out of your own head to ask them to explain something they just said.

It surprised me after a seven-day silent meditation retreat earlier this year when I visited friends on the way home. What I wanted most was to tell them everything that happened, all the feelings I felt, the lessons I learned, the gorgeous views I had while walking around the farm surrounding the retreat center. But they didn’t want to hear about it.

I don’t blame them — they were like all of us, thinking about their own lives , enjoying the moment— but in the moment I felt hurt. I felt small, unseen, alone. Yet — maybe it was all the meditation I had done — I decided to give them what I was yearning for: attention. So, I listened. I tried hard to understand what they were saying, which required me to ask questions. Eventually, they started asking me about the retreat, and I could tell that all of us felt seen, heard, and not alone.

So, here’s my new quote: better to speak and be thought a fool than to remain silent and never be thought about at all.

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Despite the Republican Party’s insistence that anyone who struggles to pay the bills must be lazy, Americans are a striving bunch. Not because of anything essential about us, but because of the way our society is organized. Capitalism forces those not lucky enough to be born wealthy to spend more time working for a living than enjoying that living. We have no choice but to hustle.

So, it makes sense that, in American Buddhist circles, teachings about the historical Buddha often solely focus on one chapter of his life. As the story goes, after leaving his noble family’s palace for the first time, the soon-to-be spiritual master encountered four people — one sick, one old, one dead, and one a monk — who so awakened him that he renounced civilized life to pursue a path of becoming enlightened, awakened for good.

This heroic search for meaning resonates with our conditioning, motivating us to deepen our own search. Suffering is all there is, we learn, so we better grit our teeth and get to work. One day, with enough money, time, love, mindfulness, or whatever we’re searching for, maybe we’ll finally feel fulfilled.

But what happened next is just as enlightening, even more so for those of us who strive. For six years, the Buddha wandered forests and jungles practicing intense forms of meditation and austere living. Alongside other yogis, 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.

Eventually, at the edge of death, he realized that starving himself was only causing more suffering. With the help of a peasant woman who gave him milk rice, he recovered and developed the practices and teachings that would soon become known as Buddhism, sometimes called the “Middle Way.”

This second chapter of the Buddha’s life offers two powerful lessons.

First, striving, even in spiritual practice, is yet another form of the grasping that causes our suffering. When we lean into the future, we leave the present moment, which numbs us to our bodies and emotions — which is exactly why we do it.

Feeling things directly is difficult, especially if we’ve experienced severe trauma. So, we develop habits and patterns at an early age to protect ourselves from having to feel intense emotions caused by people we have no control over. But, as adults, the more we try to escape our feelings, the more pressure builds up inside of them, making it more difficult to express them in skillful and creative ways. Our patterns of suffering, samsara, feed into themselves, and around we go, again and again.

Striving is just one of those patterns. It’s a way of convincing ourselves that we’re working hard to end our suffering — to lose 50 pounds, write a novel, reach our goals. But it’s actually how we’ve been conditioned to dodge the hardest but most rewarding work of all, staying engaged right here, right now.

Luckily, the Buddha taught a practice to go along with his theory of human suffering. Meditation calms our mind and produces mindfulness, which helps us notice when we’re trying to escape. Then, with practice, it helps us feel compassion rather than resentment toward our habits. It helps change the way we relate to striving, anger, addiction — to whatever our pattern is.

The other lesson is: we can’t do it all alone. The Buddha didn’t reach enlightenment by himself. He would’ve died trying had it not been for someone else — a peasant woman living in an extremely patriarchal society, at that.

Pretending we can do it all on our own is yet another way we’ve been conditioned as Americans — this time in order to justify and preserve a particular social order. We worship the start-up entrepreneur, the one kid that made it out of a poor neighborhood, or the underdog politician. When people come together to make collective demands, say through a union, they’re denounced as “activists” with an “agenda,” or worse, crushed by the powerful, often using the government.

Ironically, this do-it-yourself mentality is what underpins racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. Women who want equality should just “lean in,” i.e., strive harder to get to the top. Black people who end up in jail deserve their punishment because they chose to commit a crime — not because of skyrocketing economic inequality and hundreds of years of racism.

Not only did the Buddha need help to save him from an early death, but he would go on to include sangha, or community, as one of the ideals at the heart of Buddhism, known as the Three Refuges.

We can’t do it alone — thinking otherwise is just a fantasy.

Both striving and the do-it-yourself mentality are as American as apple pie. When we talk about the Buddha’s life, we shouldn’t skip the second chapter, which has so much to offer to our lives in these times.

 

Ready to get serious about meditation?

Sign up for my weekly email on meditation and bringing mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics.

Listen to the podcast version

My podcast, Meditation for the Masses, takes meditation out of faraway monasteries, expensive retreat centers, and corporate America, and brings it to the things that matter most to people who work for a living—work, relationships, and politics. It’s mindfulness for the hustle and the class struggle.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | RSS | More