My smartphone. The nifty little tool that has become my constant companion with its sweet promise of keeping me connected to everything and everyone I ever met. Yet, more often than not, it insulates or isolates me from the very part of myself that needs me most desperately. My contracted, wounded self that can only ever truly heal through my own loving presence and awareness. Yes, that unwelcome part of me that feels anxious, unloved, and devoid of meaning -- that’s the portal to freedom, and my phone and every other distraction is like a watchdog that makes sure I don’t see this doorway to liberation that, as it turns out, is right there within me.
The first time I realized I was addicted to my iPhone was at a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Along with everyone else, I had turned in my phone, keys, and wallet when I arrived. We weren’t allowed books or journals, and for the duration of the retreat, we weren’t allowed to talk to each other or even look at one another. Boom. There. Just me. In my own company. For ten days.
Initially, it seemed like a relief. A soothing silence. No obligations. No demands. Just meditate, eat, and sleep. Repeat. Then the anxieties started to appear. The emotional discomfort. The loneliness. Oh, the terrible loneliness. The sadness. The grief. On the third day, during lunch, I found myself lying on my bottom bunk in fetal pose, staring at the wall, so sad and no one to turn to. No one to hold me or soothe me. All alone and so, so, so wanting to pick up my phone and call a friend. Or at least text a friend who would surely tell me something to the effect of: you are not alone, the world is full of Love, and God loves you, remember? You always say that? Right now, the angels and guides are around you to heal you and guide your way. Then I would not feel so terribly alone and meaningless anymore.
Or, short of talking to a friend, there would be Facebook. Oh, sweet Facebook. Where I would scroll and scroll my awareness into someone else’s life and woes, and then I would mercifully forget my own miserable rendition. Within seconds I would be free of being with me, and instead, I would be with a friend or an acquaintance, learning the details of what they were having for dinner -- which would surely be more interesting than the meager cup of tea and fruit that was our retreat dinner. Then I would forget all about the piercing pain in my heart, the anxious fear in my gut, and the aching doubt that my life really means anything. Or I could get lost and outraged by the terrible news of the world, or look at old pictures and let myself journey to happier times when I wasn’t balled up on a dumb bunk bed, alone, feeling sadness and despair rise like a dark tide with no promise of ever subsiding again.
Curled up into this utter smallness, I realized how much I had come to rely on my phone to help my ego short-circuit something that wanted to happen within; an invitation to be suspended fully in the void, the scary portal where the ego dissolves (a less scary word than dies) and you realize, I am not kidding, you realize for real, that you are all of it. I mean, all of it. You are all the worst villains that ever lived, as well as all the victims and everyone else too. That’s such a crazy concept to the ego that it/we just don’t want to know because it would change everything. Everything. When I hate you, I hate myself. When I love you, I love myself.
This we want so badly not to know that we would rather escape endlessly by being present to something else, someone else, just not to my own self and my own pain, and then I cried. I bawled. No, not out of longing for my iPhone, but out of longing for God to love me and reveal to me my own Divinity within me. But nothing was revealed; it was just me, in pain, alone, in the barest of rooms, missing one of the few daily retreat meals, and I bawled, sobbed until snot and tears were soaking my sheet, and no one brought me a Kleenex.
I did make it back to the meditation hall for the next hour-long session. Pounding cry-headache, puffy eyes, stuffy nose. I hate it when I can’t breathe through my nose, but as I began noticing my breath slowing down and I started yet another body scan, a quiet peace crept in, and I wasn’t alone. There were other struggling souls seated in rows all around me. Some were quietly sniffling as well. Slowly, my own awareness, which is my Divinity, started illuminating my body's energy field. Part by part. Patiently my awareness loved me back into wholeness. The loneliness and the fear didn’t evaporate, but it was held. By me. My strong, steady Presence was there with those tender parts in me that don’t believe she’s loved and that her life has meaning, and like a sobbing child, these parts began to calm down. The petrified and fearful energies within me started to relax and give into the blanket of steady Love that I was providing by simply being there and not running off into cyberland or down memory lane.
Over the course of this ten-day retreat, I experienced myself as pure, radiant, orgasmic love energy imbuing and embracing every corner of my Being. I know without a doubt that radiant Divine energy is my true nature and that only my distracted, tormented mind with all its fluctuations stands in the way of me, any of us, experiencing this all the time. The distractions are many and oh-so clever. Some are disguised as very noble pursuits: I have to be there for my kids, my friends, and students, develop my business, clean my house, sort through stuff, get rid of stuff, buy stuff -- or even run off to a yoga class, the noblest distraction of all of course.
But then there is that less noble distraction that’s closer than close. All the time. In your pocket, your purse, or right next to your bed when you sleep. The smartphone. Always there beckoning for attention with the promise of something exciting for you: a text from that special someone, yay, I matter! A growing number of likes on my recent post. Yay, I matter! An actual phone call, yay, I really, really matter. And then, of course, also the text you didn’t want. Oh, no, I don’t matter! Or the text that never came, Oh, now I know, I really, really don’t matter! And we pick it up, again and again, to check for something, anything to signal a change for the better, and so we are steadily whipped around and interrupted and sidetracked again and again from what we intended to do.
I recently read that if you pick up your phone within the first hour of awakening, you are likely to be 30% less productive for the rest of the day and that Americans pick up their phones every 10 minutes on average. So I decided to put this to the test. Notice when I pick up my phone, which is constantly! Terrible. So I started turning my phone off—all the way. Not look at it in the morning before my meditation, writing, and tea. I had to get an old-fashioned analog alarm clock for my bed stand. On Ebay, I got the same alarm clock I had as a teenager in Denmark. I know, a bit nostalgic and shoppy of me. Now, when I do have my phone on, the sound is off. I will look at it when I want to and check what I need to take care of. It’s hard. Still. People expect us to be right there—all the time. Well, I am just not. Not anymore. I am right here with me and what I need to get done.
I want to be conscious of where my time goes, and I want to be conscious of my numbing agents. Because I don’t drink, it’s easy to think that I don’t numb out when my heart aches, but I do, and my iPhone is absolutely a numbing agent, and when I pick it up, instead of feeling what is moving inside of me, I miss an opportunity to be with a part of me that needs me. It’s like being a pretty bad, neglectful parent to myself.
I have come to see it that way. My Divine, Present Awareness is my True Self (I know I love to capitalize these wonderful words) and that True Self can heal through the power of Love because it IS Love. Whatever within me doesn’t yet trust that I am safe and loved and ok as I am, a stumbling work in progress, flawed and human; that sad, scared part of me needs my Presence. But it’s not very pleasant to feel sad, lonely, and scared. It’s pretty awful -- especially if we don’t believe that anyone is coming for us. Then the mission becomes one of finding a bad babysitter who will hush the baby so we don’t have to deal with it. Enter the smartphone. A really bad babysitter. A good instrument for taking care of business and communicating and even indulging in Facebook but not a substitute for really good, loving parenting of yourself.
When we don’t source the Deep Present Love from within, our Love essence that genuinely has our back, we will look for it outside of ourselves. And be disappointed. Ouch. Over and over. It’s the nature of it. No one can be a lasting substitute for our own Divine connection. Anitya, anitya; means impermanence, impermanence. When we stop reaching outside ourselves for something impermanent to rescue us, we are left with one option: total surrender to the Divine within.