Technology: Your Mind on Crack

If generating "to do" lists were an Olympic event, the human mind would surely take home the gold.  While undoubtedly useful for many tasks, the mind is also an unsettled and frantic creature whose basic state is agitation. The mind is in a state of constant craving; desperately seeking something to do, fix or figure out.  The mind is not wired to land here, but instead, always beckoning our attention into the past or future.  The mind does not want us to live this moment directly, but rather seeks to turn this moment into a project about which something can be done, or alternatively, a statement about our identity. What do we need to do about this moment, what does this moment mean about our past or future, what does this moment say about what kind of person we are?  These are the things the mind wants to know about now, but certainly not what now actually is.  The mind acts as a moderator between our life and us.  To the mind, being equals death--doing equals life.  

Enter technology.  Injecting technology into the human mind is like shooting a wild, agitated, drunken monkey with a thousand CC's of adrenaline.  The mind is thrilled, but what about we who have to house that wild monkey? 

If you ask a crack addict what will make him well, he will tell you more crack, and he will be sure of it.  The crack addict is the wrong one to ask what he needs. More crack will not make him feel well, but will only calm his shakes... for a short time.  And then his suffering will return--with more ferocity. Similarly, the mind is the wrong part of ourselves to ask what will make us well.  The mind tells us that more will satisfy us--more information, more entertainment, more choices, more everything.  More will make us whole--and ironically--give us a place where we can rest and finally enjoy less. In truth, the mind is painfully mistaken.  We do not need more frequent communication; we need deeper connections.  We do not need more sound bites of forgettable information; we need more meaningful dialogue.  We do not need more entertainment; we need to get interested in our own imagination and creativity.  We do not need more ways to get away from ourselves and now; we need to meet ourselves and discover the wonder of this moment. Well-being can only live in this now and if we are not in it, we will never experience it.

When I ask people what makes them feel truly well, I generally hear one of three things: connection with other people, creativity, and spirit-oriented activities.  In all my years asking this question, never have I heard the answer: technology. People that spend all day checking and re-checking their devices--checking for what they do not even know--do not feel well at day's end. They are addicts seeking relief--relief ultimately from the belief that there is somewhere better, more important, more fun, or simply more bearable than here.  At the end of all their frantic information and entertainment-gorging, they feel despairing and anxious--bloated yet ravenous and mal-nourished. Their addiction has grown stronger, along with their belief that something somewhere will complete them and offer them a place to—at last—be, if they could only find it.

Technology is breeding the addiction to distraction into the human species, just as you would breed long ears into a dog breed.  It is breeding out the capacity to be with ourselves or anyone else, and worst of all, to be here, the stuff that true well-being is made of.  

Our heart and spirit need something very different than what our mind craves.  As a society, we are living entirely out of sync with what really nourishes and makes us well.  The drunken, feverish monkey mind within us has taken over the controls and we are sailing into despair.  An entertaining, lightning-paced, bespangled despair for sure, but despair nonetheless.  It is up to us and well within our power to wrestle this life back from the misinformed (and suffering) monkey.  As human beings who, unlike other species, have the incredible gift of awareness, it is our responsibility to stop bingeing on what is ultimately starving us, to dismount from the frantic wheel of distraction.  If we tune into our deeper wisdom, we can see what the monkey is up to, the path the addicted mind is leading us down.  We can then choose to change our course and turn our attention instead to those experiences that truly nourish us, that lead us back to our natural well-being—reacquai

How to Stop Hating (and Fearing) Fear

My dear friend is in a new relationship.  It is her first in nearly a decade.  It has been only a short time, but she is positively head over heels in love with this new man.   We went out the other night to celebrate and it was a delight to listen as my friend sang her new boyfriend's praises and expressed her deep joy and gratitude for having met him.  But then something happened that saddened me.

My friend began to express fear, specifically, fear that her new relationship would not last, that this man would end up rejecting her or that it would turn out not to be the amazing union that she had hoped.  It wasn't the fear however that saddened me, but rather her response to that fear.  Within seconds she had shifted from feeling confident and reveling in her joy to attacking herself viciously--for being afraid.  She told me that fear was her worst enemy--always sabotaging her life.  If she could not get past and rid of her fear, she was certain that she would destroy this relationship and lose her chance at happiness.  Put simply, she--like most people--despised her own fear.

In this culture we are taught to believe that fear is the enemy; if we are afraid, it means that we are weak, that there is something wrong with us.  We believe that if we allow our fear to be heard or considered, it will prevent us from getting what we want, that fear is bigger than and separate from us.  Furthermore, if we let fear win--we are losers. 

After my friend had finished attacking herself, I asked her a simple question. Does she love this man and does she want this new relationship to last?  <em>Yes and yes</em> was her answer.  I then asked another question. Could she be certain that it would work out, that he would be the one?,  to which she replied, <em>Of course not, nothing was ever certain.</em> I then asked a final question.  Given the answers to the first two questions, how could she be angry with her fear, and at herself for having fear? 

With the invitation to consider the validity of her fear, to hear from the fear itself, she immediately broke into a smile.  Fear's experience was not something that she had ever imagined she could welcome into the dialogue.  She had never had a relationship with her fear that was made of anything other than anger, never been anything but furious at and afraid of her fear. I was suggesting the rightness of the enemy--not that fear was right that the relationship would fail--but rather the rightness of how scary it was to want it to work and not know if it would.  Indeed, I was encouraging a handshake between lifelong opponents.   

It is not my friend's fear that has hindered her, but rather her relationship with fear. Our fear is actually on the same side as we are. My friend's fear exists precisely because of how joyful this relationship actually is. Her fear is born out of wanting to hold onto all that joy. It is present because it knows that the future is unknown and not  entirely up to her or in her control.  In truth, fear is the ultimate joy protector.  When seen through its eyes, fear is in fact is quite sensible.

We must stop judging, blaming and shaming our fear.  It doesn't mean that we spend all day negotiating with it, listening to its worries--we do not let it run the show--but we must have compassion for its wish to protect us from loss, to hang onto our joy.  What could be saner that such a wish?   When we stop rejecting and running from fear, we disarm it, and remove its power. Fear stops being frightening and disruptive.  What we reject becomes fiercer and scarier; what we welcome eases and lightens.

How can we experience deep joy without also considering its potential loss. Are they not two sides of the same coin?  Taking a walk with my 9 year old, I feel the deepest gratitude a human being could feel, for getting to have this blessed time together with my child.  And yet interlaced in that poignant sweetness is the knowing that it won't always be this way, that we won't always get to have this.  Fear is the flag that reminds us of what we cherish and want. 

The path is in offering fear a seat at our inner table, understanding its place, its side.  To befriend fear is to wrap our arm it--let it know that we are on the same side, that we too do not want to lose what is precious to us.   Rather than yelling at our fear, we can reassure it that we we are doing everything we know how to do to keep what it fears from happening. 

Fear doesn't like the unknown and doesn't particularly care for the certainty of change either.  As I stroll through the park with my little girl, her blond head still thirteen inches south, her rainbow-painted fingers intertwined with mine, I can't say that I disagree.