Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Almost every man I know is falling apart because of social distancing

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There’s no getting around it. This winter is already horrible, and it’s going to get worse.

Not sure how much more I can take. The constant death, the social isolation, the widespread unemployment, the closing of my favorite small businesses.

What’s hardest, though, is watching people I love struggle. Seeing them cope in unhealthy ways. Worrying about their increased drinking and drugging, their fake “I’m fine’s”, their unraveling relationships, their closing off and going inward.

Sometimes it’s like I’m all that’s keeping them from jumping into a black hole.

Sometimes I just want to shake them, yelling “Wake the fuck up!”

Sometimes I’m annoyed that it seems like no one’s helping me help them.

Sometimes I’m pissed at the government for leaving so many of my friends and neighbors hanging.

Sometimes I beg the Universe for mercy. I’ve got a regular meditation practice, a therapist, a good job, a stable family, and plenty of close friends. And I’m barely staying halfway sane.

Sometimes I want someone to hold me and pet my hair and tell me everything’s going to be alright.

What I’ve come to notice is that my friends who are struggling the most are men.

Which is not to say that others aren’t struggling too. It’s just that men tend to experience depression in ways tailor made to leave us hanging in a pandemic.

We often hide our vulnerability in fear of being less “manly.” We tend to have more “shoulder-to-shoulder” interactions — like playing or watching sports — than deep, connected, face-to-face friendships. We tend to avoid doing anything that would make us seem “needy.”

This causes all the toxic shit that gives so many men a bad rap: isolation, emotional numbness, angry outbursts, binge drinking.

No wonder some 80 percent of people who die of suicide in the U.S. are men.

This isn’t to say that men deserve attention more than anyone else. Women have been taking care of men’s emotional needs — without acknowledgement, without reciprocity, without pay — for way too long.

I’m just saying most of the men in my life are depressed right now. And I don’t know what to do.

Mostly, I’m exhausted. We’re in the middle of this thing, and who knows when it ends?

I also wanted you to know that if it feels like you’re holding everyone else up right now, you’re not alone. I see you.

Maybe the Serenity Prayer will resonate with you like it does with me?

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

If the word “God” turns you off, just take it out.

The point is, I can’t save my friends. What I can do is make sure they know that I’m here for them, that I’m curious how they’re doing, and that they aren’t “weak” for struggling during the biggest crisis of our lifetimes.

Everything else, I just have to let go of. There’s no way around it. Maybe letting go just isn’t supposed to feel good.

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 Jerónimo Roure

Feeling unfulfilled? Try relaxing your stomach more. Really.

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I’ve been singing for over 20 years. Since I was a pop punk-loving, skateboard-riding high schooler. But only recently have I started liking my voice.

That’s because of meditation teacher Stephen Levine. His “soft belly” practice is refining my singing voice. It’s also helping me during hard, uncomfortable conversations. It’s even helping me relax on dates.

“When the belly is hard there is holding,” Levine wrote in his book “Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings.” “Some degree of fighting or posturing is resisting and hardening to the moment, attempting to control.”

Maybe where you tense up the most isn’t your stomach. Maybe it’s your shoulders, chest, or forehead.

But Levine’s point is that letting go — over and over again — is the key to living life to the fullest.

In fact, some 80 percent of information that travels between the mind and body goes from the body to the mind. Relaxing the body relaxes the mind far more than the other way around.

(There’s a reason so many of us tense up our midsections, though. This society pressures us to have flat stomachs. Fat shaming is American as apple pie and racism.)

At 15, I wanted to be a rock star on MTV. I wanted to sound like Mark Hoppus from Blink 182. I wanted to impress the girls at my band’s shows.

In college, I wanted to sound like Jim Morrison and appear a tortured, madman poet like Bob Dylan.

At this point, I want to be plain old, boring me. Inspired by Levine, I’ve been relaxing my ab muscles as I sing. Before, I was squeezing my throat, narrowing myself down to sound a certain way.

Now, I breathe deep and let my body do the singing, whatever comes out. And I’ve been digging my voice. It’s… me.

If singing isn’t your thing, when do you feel vulnerable? Public speaking. Talking to your boss. Having sex. When do you put on an act?

Whatever it is. Except for, maybe, Pilates. Softening your stomach will help.

Levine’s “soft belly” is a practice. “You may have to come back to soft belly dozens of times an hour,” he wrote. “The belly needs to be reminded that it has unconsciously tightened to that which we wish to remain unconscious of.”

I’ve realized that my stomach is a thermometer for my closed-offness. When it’s tense, I know I’m armoring myself by trying to come off a certain way. Trying to manufacture a certain outcome. Trying to get people to like me. Trying to avoid discomfort.

The irony is, trying to avoid discomfort is uncomfortable. It’s exhausting trying to be someone I’m not. It keeps the boat from rocking, sure. But it’s so damn unfulfilling.

“Don’t you want to be all used up when you die?” Natalie Goldberg, the writer and Zen meditation teacher, once asked at a retreat I attended.

“Yes!” I thought.

Living with a soft belly — whether singing or talking or loving — is using myself up. Which is why it’s scary. It’s taking the armor off. Living fully this limited vessel that is my one and only life.

It’s so fucking hard to let go of the outcome. To just be. To just be myself. As flawed and broken as I am. Knowing, somehow, that I’m also beautiful.

Levine, who often counseled people who were dying, once wrote:

Most fight death as they fought life, struggling for a foothold, for some control over the incessant flow of change that exemplifies this plane of existence. Few die in wholeness.

Don’t you want to be all used up when you die? I know I do.

“Soft belly” is my cheat code for doing it.

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.

No, half the country didn’t vote for Trump. But it sure feels like it.

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Ten thousand votes in Arizona. Barely 0.03% of the vote in Georgia. Joe Biden’s margin of victory is — as my West Virginia-born dad says — skinny as a mosquito’s peter.

It really does feel like half the country likes having a racist, misogynist reality TV show star as president. Or they’re willing to tolerate him to “own the libs.”

But are Trump supporters really all that different from me? More on that in a second.

What the facts say

First, here’s what I’m trying to remember when I feel hopeless.

Half the country did not vote for Donald Trump. Around 30 percent did.

More than a third of eligible voters didn’t vote. That’s 78 million people. Some were disenfranchised by restrictive voting policies. But most weren’t convinced the election result would affect their lives.

The Democratic Party wasn’t offering much beyond, “At least we’re not Trump.” Biden only paid lip service to social justice. His campaign followed the lead of its corporate donors and all but ignored the needs of everyday people.

Still, Biden is up in the popular vote by over 5 million and counting. The electoral college is the only reason Trump had an outside shot.

The electoral college was invented to preserve slavery. The Founding Fathers needed a way to make sure the slave-owning Southern states had an equal say. Our political system isn’t broken. It’s working just as it was designed.

Racism is and always has been this country’s defining feature. People who look like me — European settlers — stole this land from indigenous Native Americans. Then they stole workers from Africa to clear and work it. Racism is the “American Blindspot,” wrote historian and author of Black Reconstruction (one of my favorite books) W.E.B Du Bois.

Still, most Trump voters aren’t Confederate flag-waving, QAnon-believing, Ford F-450-driving white supremacists. Many are typical, well-off Republicans who put up with Trumpism for lower taxes and less regulation.

What really calms my nerves, though

But most of all, I’m trying to remember that Trump supporters aren’t all that different from me. They’re not dumber or meaner or less civilized. They just have a different story than I do for why they’re suffering and who’s to blame.

They’ve been conned by the powers that be into blaming poor people and people of color. That’s Trump’s whole game. Turn people’s pain and anger into hatred aimed down rather than up at him and his rich buddies or capitalism itself.

But I know that pain and anger in the Trump supporter’s eyes.

I felt it when my dad got home from working 12-hour shifts delivering packages during the holidays.

When my mom complained about her male colleagues not taking her ideas seriously.

When I worked 12-hour shifts at an air conditioning-less factory one long, hot summer.

When I worked at a restaurant and customers acted like they knew me because they saw my name tag.

When the tech corporation I worked for laid off half the company, many of them my friends.

When a developer bought the artist warehouse I was living in to build condos.

When I read about the Arctic melting at record rates. Or another Black man killed by police.

I know how much powerlessness hurts. How angry it makes me.

I’m just lucky to have learned to blame the system itself. For keeping so many of us powerless, especially those born in the “wrong” neighborhood or with the “wrong” color skin. For allowing Trump-like corporate suits to run the world into the ground.

When I think about this way, the pill is easier to swallow. The distance between me and nastiest Trump supporter doesn’t seem so wide.

That doesn’t mean I’m letting them off the hook

No way I’m going to start giving Trump supporters a pass. I won’t stop calling out their racism. And I’ll keep standing beside those who don’t look like me and are in the cross hairs.

But I’m exhausted from pretending I’m better than them — or anyone else for that matter. It’s not working.

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 mindfulness meditation transformed my life here.

Photo by Blink O’fanaye