Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

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What the Buddha’s near-death experience teaches us about hustling too hard

November 30, 2018 by Jeremy Mohler

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.

 

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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.

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Why meditate if it’s difficult?

November 29, 2018 by Jeremy Mohler

Life is hard, especially in a capitalist society. The vast majority of us are only valued for our time and energy — our labor — and not for our creativity and passion. And even that doesn’t buy us the stability, community, and free time we all yearn for. Markets crash, the rent keeps going up, and we feel further and further behind.

So, why meditate? Why waste the little free time you have on something that at times can feel like work?

Ajahn Chah, the late Thai Buddhist monk, wrote, “There are two kinds of suffering: the suffering that leads to more suffering and the suffering that leads to the end of suffering. If you are not willing to face the second kind of suffering, you will surely continue to experience the first.”

Yes, meditation is suffering — but in a comfortable, safe environment. It turns suffering into a means towards learning how to suffer less.

What do I mean by suffering? I don’t mean pain. It hurts when you get the flu, or someone breaks your heart. There’s no way around the pain. But we suffer when we try to get around the pain, to avoid it, to even deny that we feel it. We feel a lingering sense that something is wrong or a little off. Our minds go haywire, churning stories that only add fuel to the fire. It’s all her fault. But maybe I don’t deserve love. I should’ve gotten a flu shot. Etc. Etc.

That’s the sort of suffering that, as Ajahn Chah said, leads to more suffering.

Right in the middle of a seven-day meditation retreat a few months back, I started feeling pain in my lower back. I  spent a good three or four hours suffering, not because of the pain, but because of all the stories that I invented that made it a problem. I’m not a good meditator. I’m a meditation teacher, I shouldn’t have pain when I sit. Maybe I’m not cut out for this after all.

Once I noticed the stories, I stopped resisting the pain in my back. The pain became interesting rather than evidence of me being weak or a fraud. Instead of a problem, it appeared as it actually was: a little bit of heat that throbbed up and down as I breathed. I could handle it.

Meditation can feel like suffering sometimes, but that’s the point: by practicing, we’re forcing ourselves to sit down and stay with whatever sensations and emotions come up.

Any time you’re resisting what is actually happening — that your heart hurts, that you have the flu — you’re suffering. Mindfulness is noticing all the little ways you try to avoid staying put.

If I asked you, would you rather spend 20 or 30 minutes mildly suffering right now or spend the rest of the day suffering at the whims of everything that’s out of your control — which is pretty much everything — which would you take?

Ready to get serious about meditation?

Sign up for my weekly email on meditation and bringing mindfulness to the stuff that matters — work, relationships, and politics.

And check out my podcast, Meditation for the Masses, on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and wherever else podcasts are available.

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.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/meditationforthemasses/podcast_6_-_difficult_-_dec_2018_-_FINAL.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | RSS | More

How to mindfully handle being around your family this Thanksgiving

November 21, 2018 by Jeremy Mohler

A few weeks back, my mom and I were driving to Baltimore-Washington International Airport when we got locked in one of our typical bickering matches.

She kept repeating the name of the parking lot we were to park in. “Long-term Lot B.” “Long-term Lot B.” Five minutes later, “Long-term Lot B.” Yet again, “Long-term Lot B.”

“I hear you,” I said with a hint of bitterness. Internally, I felt like a 16-year-old again, only talking to my mom in short bursts of “I hear you” and “I know” on my way out the door.

But in the silence that followed, I noticed that my stomach and shoulders had tensed up, and that I wasn’t even looking for the “Long-term Lot B” sign. I was lost in my head.

This noticing loosened me up. I remembered that my mom had introduced the idea of the cross-country trip to see my sister. I realized that she had put a ton of thought and care into planning and budgeting the flight, and so, in her mind, parking in “Long-term Lot B” was an important step.

So, I mustered the vulnerability to say, “Hey, I appreciate that you set all this up.”

She didn’t respond, seemingly lost in her paranoia about missing the turn to the parking lot.

We continued into the early morning darkness, eventually bickering again over our plans for once we landed in San Francisco.

I tell this short, inconsequential story to highlight what is, counterintuitively, the most important ingredient in making the best of spending time with family, particularly your parents: having compassion for yourself.

Self-compassion won’t convince your uncle that his support for Trump is support for white supremacy or stop your grandmother from judging you for not going to church. But it will give you a little bit more freedom to choose how to engage with those who trigger you back into parts of yourself much smaller, narrower, and younger than who you’ve become and who you really are.

“Self-compassion” sounds hippie and new agey, but so what? I’m 100 percent confident that taking it easy on myself has improved my life more than any other skill. It might seem obvious to you, but it’s taken years of meditation and therapy and the help of countless friends and teachers for me to realize that I spend more time with myself than I do with anybody else. Not because I’m an introvert or that I like to read books, but because I am literally always with myself. Even while eating lunch with a friend, I’m still paying some attention to myself, whether I notice it or not — how I feel, how I relate to my friend, what I should say next, how much time I have, and so on.

We all do this automatically, but many of us aren’t so nice to ourselves. We obsessively plan what we’ll say next, as if whoever we are with won’t accept us unless we fix their problems, provide them some value, or come off in a certain way. We ignore our emotions, repressing them so we don’t say how we really feel because doing so might get us in trouble. We spend hours rehashing conversations, worrying that we hurt others or didn’t say enough to impress them.

Your relationship with yourself is complicated, developed through your experiences as a kid, the trauma you’ve been through, and how the powerful in society treat you based on your skin color, gender, sexuality, and (lack of) wealth. Befriending yourself is difficult, but even if you can only do it a little bit and for short periods of time you’ll notice the difference.

After snapping at my mom, I could have gone down the rabbit hole of blaming myself, of turning my reaction into more evidence that I haven’t really grown up, that I’m a bad son, that I’m not where I should be when it comes to handling my emotions — and in the past I would have. But one thing I’ve learned about myself is that when I feel anger, I try to escape it, usually not by getting aggressive with whoever I’m angry at, but by getting aggressive with myself. This aggression looks like self-blame, shame, and guilt, a noxious mix meditation teacher Tara Brach calls the “trance of unworthiness.”

This trance is a natural part of being human. We identify with our actions and feelings, quickly assuming that we’re broken and unfixable, or broken and therefore in need of fixing. If we say something mean, we must be a mean person. If we fall of the wagon and smoke a cigarette, we’re not only a “smoker,” but we’re also a failure, whatever that means.

And that’s why the holidays in particular can be so tough. For most of us, family members have the unique power to trigger us into old behavior. We spent so much time with them early in life, so they easily push us back into patterns that served us back then.

This year try to notice when you’ve been pulled back into a role that feels younger and less wise. If you can muster the strength to do it, try to let go of the tendency to identify with that feeling. Taking breaks can help. Breathe deeply and feel the sensations of your feet on the floor. Go for a walk by yourself and notice the sounds and sights around you. Do whatever you need to do to break the pattern and start fresh again.

I promise you that in the long run, the moments you speak and act from a fresh sense of vulnerability will mean much more to you and your family than the hours you spend acting out old patterns and beating yourself up inside about it.

This is mindfulness at its best — helping create a little bit more space and freedom to relate to yourself and others in ways that make you feel fully alive, which is what all of us really want in the end.

 

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.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/meditationforthemasses/Podcast4_Thanksgiving_Nov2018_FINAL.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | RSS | More

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