Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

The life-changing power of allowing yourself to be sad, angry, and afraid

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I recently bought marijuana for the first time in years, and on the way to the shop I was reminded of the power of mindfulness.

Playing in bands in my 20s, I used to get weed from a friend or bum off friends of friends. Drugs and alcohol were always just hanging around.

After it was decriminalized in D.C. in 2014, I began to wonder how to buy it. A friend told me, while shops can’t sell directly, they skirt the law by giving it away as a “free gift” with the purchase of merchandise, like a t-shirt. Supposedly, shops are routinely raided by the police.

Walking through the Columbia Heights bustle, anxious thoughts raced through my mind: what if the shop gets busted when I’m there? What if a cop sees me leaving?

Then came ego: I’ve got this. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

Then came self-judgement: why am I afraid of buying pot at 33 years old? Why am I smoking again? When am I going to grow up?

Then came logic: I’m a college-educated, white, heterosexual, cisgender man. Cops don’t care about me.

None of the self-talk helped. My shoulders and stomach were still tense. I still felt a little claustrophobic and off-kilter. I wasn’t going to talk my way out feeling anxious.

But then I remembered a story the spiritual teacher David Deida tells about his own teacher feeling jealous at a party. Deida sees the teacher’s wife across the room enjoying a conversation with an attractive man and asks his teacher, “Aren’t you jealous?”

His teacher responds, “Yes, but the fact that I’m jealous isn’t bothering me.”

In other words, the teacher was aware of how he was relating to his jealousy. Instead of making it a problem, he was allowing it to just be.

Mindfulness is often associated with focus and paying attention. But it also involves accepting rather than resisting what’s happening inside of us.

We often deny, ignore, or repress emotions we don’t want to experience. The mind tries to calm us down by telling stories (There’s nothing to be afraid of).

But think about what makes you feel better when you’re sad or afraid. It’s when your partner or friend or relative gives you their undivided attention without giving advice or trying to change how you feel. When someone let’s you be yourself, with all your messy emotions. When someone just listens.

Once I acknowledged that I felt nervous and a little silly about buying pot at 33 years old, the tension in my body dissolved, and I saw it as yet another of life’s adventures.

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.

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It’s okay to meditate, do yoga, etc., while fighting for social justice. In fact, it’s necessary.

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Four years ago, I left a cushy tech industry job to work alongside teachers, bus drivers, and other workers in the labor movement. Burying my head in the sand and looking out for myself hadn’t been enough.

Our society is so violent, backwards, and corrupt. I had to starting helping change it.

But sometimes I struggle to square my politics with my meditation practice. How can I sit in silence as corporations exploit workers, white supremacists march in the streets, misogynists fill the White House, and the rainforests burn?

That’s why I love this metaphor from the spiritual teacher David Deida.

It reminds me that there’s room for many approaches to dealing with life’s problems, that I don’t have to choose one approach over another, and that integrating so-called “self-care” with social justice is actually the healthiest approach of all.

Imagine yourself as a stained-glass window.

“You look at yourself and notice there are pieces broken out of you,” Deida says. “There are hunks of glass missing. You’re battered, abused, chipped, wounded, rejected.”

The first approach, therapy, is like fixing or replacing altogether the broken pieces of glass. It helps you function better by healing dysfunction.

Say, you aren’t getting along with your father. Your therapist could help you forgive him for how he treated when you were young, and over time the relationship might improve.

Meditation, yoga, and other similar practices are like wiping the dust from the stained glass so the light shines through. They increase the flow of life in the present moment.

Our minds are constantly stopping the flow by following thoughts into the past or the future. Meditation is practicing letting go of thinking and observing the flow (of thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, sounds, all of experience), over and over again.

Doing meditation (or yoga) isn’t the same as therapy. Sure, it can feel therapeutic, but it’s not meant for investigating the causes of emotional problems. It’s about being here, right now.

“You can be broken as fuck, and still do good yoga,” Deida says. “You can be entirely dysfunctional therapeutically, psychologically, emotionally, you can be a wreck, and still be a master yogi. Yoga doesn’t fix the parts of you that are broken. It just takes the dust off.”

The third approach, spirituality, isn’t about fixing the broken pieces or wiping away the dust. It’s about realizing that you’re the light itself, whether you’ve meditated, or you’re broken, or whatever’s happening. It’s realizing you are “one with everything”—there’s no separation between you and everything else.

Prayer, looking at the night sky, being in nature, and taking psychedelics are examples of spiritual experiences.

Let’s make this concrete. Say, you don’t like your job. A therapist might help you manage the stress it’s causing you. Meditation, yoga, etc., might help you feel a little better for short periods of time. Spirituality might make you realize a job is nothing relative to the 93-billion-light-years-wide universe.

You’re probably wondering, what about quitting or getting a new job?

There’s a fourth approach missing from Deida’s metaphor, which I call “political economy.” This would be like trimming the trees outside the window, i.e., changing the environment around the window so more light shines through.

As the label suggests, this is the realm of politics and economics, i.e., addressing the dysfunction outside of oneself, in society. Examples: leaving your job, starting a union with your coworkers, protesting, running for elected office, voting, starting a business, hiring a career coach, etc.

In other words, therapy helps you function better within dysfunctional conditions. Meditation helps you flow with the conditions, whatever they are. Spirituality is unconditional, i.e., finding peace and freedom no matter what. Political economy helps you change the conditions.

Meditation, therapy, and spirituality, by themselves or even all together, aren’t enough. They aren’t going to end capitalism or white supremacy or patriarchy or [insert oppressive system here.]

We also need societal change, specifically, what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

Yet, raising taxes on corporations, restructuring the economy, or ending racism—which are easier said than done—won’t be enough either.

We also need to work on ourselves. It’s not one or the other.

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.

Stop beating yourself up for not being closer to meeting your goals

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The last few months have skyrocketed my anxiety above normal levels. I’ve been applying to therapy graduate programs, and the combination of not knowing the outcome and likely having three years of school ahead of me (albeit, part-time) is testing my patience.

Thank God for meditation. The mindfulness it produces loosens me up enough to notice what’s going on inside of me. To stop distracting myself and running from thoughts and emotions, which only intensifies the anxiety. To pause instead of move. To feel instead of think, think, think, do, do, do.

Within the stress and tension, gratitude has been rearing its beautiful head. At times, limitless appreciation has washed over me—for meditation and everyone who’s inspired me to practice. For those who come to my classes. For you for reading this.

But this having patience thing might be my biggest test yet. Part of me wants to fall asleep and wake up three years from now a licensed therapist—to just get it over with. Another part of me knows the journey is the point, and the whole point of life.

I once heard about a boot camp training for Navy SEALs called “the box drill.” The former SEAL Eric Davis describes it like this:

They put you in the corner of the room and say you have as much time as you need to get to a doorway across the room. There are six people guarding the door. You try to fight your way through, but you get your ass kicked over and over again. Every few minutes, one of the people leaves the room. You keep trying to fight because you want to prove you’re tough. Finally, the last person leaves, and you walk through the door and they say you passed. You’re like, ‘What? I didn’t beat anybody.’ They’re like, ‘That wasn’t what this drill was about.’ What they’re doing is producing an experience where you realize you have all the time in the world.

Meditation is like the box drill. Out of habit, the mind keeps narrowing its attention to follow thoughts into the past or future. It spins stories that stir up emotions in the body, which it tries to escape by telling even more stories.

It’s when you let go and rest as awareness—as a neutral observe witnessing what’s going on inside of you—that a little bit of spaciousness appears.

Like being a Navy SEAL, this requires courage. Into that spaciousness you create—that mindfulness—anything can appear. Anything. That childhood memory you thought was locked away forever. That gut feeling that you’ve outgrown your job. That age-old fear of love.

Whatever appears—for me recently it’s been impatience—is just the next step in the journey. It’s your edge. And the hardest thing in life is sitting still at your edge and feeling its raw sensations—the tightness, the burning, the pain, the pleasure, the whatever.

It’s much, much easier to fantasize about the future or worry about the past. To beat yourself for not being further along in your journey. To try to fight to prove your tough or however you want to be perceived by other people.

As the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa said, “Meet your edge and soften.”

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | RSS | More