A confession
It’s 2015 and I’m half-way through the meditation retreat that I attend each year in southern France. The sun is beating down outside, and the large group of practitioners are gathered in the relative cool inside the shrine room.
Only I’m not with them.
Instead, I’m locked in a toilet cubicle and glued to my phone. I’m in a slightly manic state, jumping from email, to app, to web page with an unchained mental hunger to endlessly chase the next hit of stimulation for my mind. As I sit there, I’m suddenly aware of what I’m doing. It’s as if I have caught myself red-handed.
How crazy is it, I thought, that even when I’ve chosen to be in an environment perfectly designed to help observe and still our minds, I’m still unable to control my relationship with my technology, even just for a few days?
The chances are, you may have a similar story to me. Many of my sangha friends that I’ve spoken with have admitted as much. As meditators, the constant distractions, mental attachments and emotional storm clouds that our smartphones can create feel like a significant threat to our practice that we’ve so carefully nurtured in the shelter of retreat.
But given that tech is everywhere (and billions of dollars are spent in designing it to draw in our attention) is there even anything we can realistically do about it?
I am a very undisciplined practitioner, and need all the help I can get on the cushion. So after that retreat in 2015 I set out to try and answer that very question. After many years of experimenting a publisher approached me to write a book sharing all that I have learnt in that time, and now finally (after much procrastination and getting lost down numerous internet rabbit holes) Your Best Digital Life—will be published next month.
The folk at Mandali asked if I’d share some of what I learnt about how to integrate my practice in the digital world with you here—I hope you find it helpful.
Know that technology is an extension of your mind
Humans stand out in the animal kingdom as being skilled at (and obsessed with) building tools.
The thing to understand about our tools is that they are all expressions of our intent. We wanted to travel faster, and more efficiently, so mankind created the wheel. The tool extended our physical capacities.
The same thing is true of any technology—from the microscope, to the newspaper and even the internet-connected cappuccino machine. Each of them extends your capacities to do things (see things in more detail, be more informed, make your morning brew before you even get out of bed).
Why am I talking about this? Because your smartphone, laptop, Ipad (and any other digital tools that you care to think of) generally all extend one thing in particular—your conceptual mind. Steve Jobs described the computer as “a bicycle for the mind” for the exact reason that it enables us to have access to, generate and share ideas much faster (and also more efficiently) than before.
Take a moment to look around you and observe anyone who is currently using a piece of digital tech (yourself included). Where are they right now? They may be sitting in a specific physical location, but its likely that the majority of their current experience is all up in their head. That’s what’s so unnerving about commuting in a train full of people staring at their phones—the carriage is packed, but mentally it’s as if no-one is there.
Understood in this way, your smartphone is an extension of your mind. To pick yours up almost guarantees that you will begin engaging with a long train of thoughts (and as it happens, studies show that the average engages their phone once every 8 minutes of the day throughout their waking hours).
As meditators it’s easy to see our smartphones (and other digital devices) as the enemy, something that disrupts our awareness. And yet we have to live in the world, which pretty much guarantees that we must engage with them all the time.
But I believe that seeing your technology simply as the enemy is a limiting perspective. Seen from another angle—by becoming deeply curious about how tech shapes who we are—our digital devices become a constant invitation to get to know our own minds better, identify what we value most, and ultimately deepen our understanding of what it means to be human.
Instead of trying to turn away from tech in order to understand our minds, I believe we should be turning toward it and using our digital habits as a mirror to understand our mental habits. The inescapable and mundane moments of Zooming, doomscrolling and instant messaging could then be used to deepen our grasp on how the mind works, notice distraction and integrate the practice that we have nurtured in the supportive environment of retreat.
The M.O.R.E. Method
Over many years of trying to do this, I found that it can be a really powerful way to integrate your meditation practice in the realities of the digital world. However, like most practices, doing this consistently can be really hard.
So through trial and error I began to develop a simple framework that would help make it as easy as possible to make this intentional use of technology second nature. I call it the M.O.R.E. Method.
Here is a very brief summary of the four steps:
Mobilise
You start by Mobilizing—taking a moment to consciously check in with your intention and also bring your mind into a space that is open to growth and change. The MORE Method is designed to be used by anyone, but a meditator can use this Mobilize step to bring their mind back home for just 30 seconds or so, and connect with the heart of their practice. By repeating this process—again and again—you increase your capacity to bring awareness to your digital habits in the busyness of the day.
Observe
Next, you spend some time simply being mindful of your activity and observing how your digital tech actually plays a role in shaping your thoughts and behaviour. If you find yourself doomscrolling through twitter, carry on—but use a part of your awareness to watch yourself and take note of the various thoughts, emotions and feelings that show up. As with your practice, try to do so without judgement or trying to change anything. Simply become deeply curious about what is actually happening. This process can be deeply insightful, but it can also be comical (watching yourself pick up your phone to tell the time, only to get lost in YouTube for 20 mins and putting it down again before realising that you never actually checked the time…) and also painful. So be kind to yourself as you do so.
Reflect
The next step involves setting aside some formal time in your week to reflect on everything that you have observed and consider how you feel about it. What did you notice? What were the consequences of your digital habits? Are they aligned with your deeper goals, or distracting yours from them? If you are familiar with a formal contemplation method then this can be a great tool to bring in at this point. Once you have finished reflecting, you will likely have identified something about your digital habits that you would like to change, which leads directly to the final step.
Experiment
The Experiment step helps you make this change by disrupting your existing unconscious digital habits and making a small but highly intentional change to your behaviour. The key here is that the changes are small. You are not looking to redesign your entire relationship with tech overnight but to make a very specific intervention based on your insights into your own digital habits. The very first experiment I ran was putting a sticky note on the screen of my phone, with the intention of making it easier to become aware that I was picking it up. Seeing the sticky note was an invitation to put the phone down without unlocking the phone (unless I really needed to do something specific). Making focused and intentional incremental changes like this will isolate any potential benefits you experience, giving you confidence in that approach as a tool you can rely on in the future.
Join me live to learn how to put this all into practice
On April 24th I’ll be hosting a virtual workshop alongside my co-author Menka Sanghvi to celebrate the launch of our book. For anyone with a meditation practice, this will be a fantastic opportunity to get together with like-minded folk and learn a simple but effective tool that will really help you integrate your practice in the realities of the modern digital world.
This workshop is exclusively available to anyone who pre-orders the book before April 15th—if you would like to join then you can register at yourbestdigitallife.com
I hope to see you there!