https://na-newyorkcity.com/14513/digital-detox-workshop-teaches-power-off

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Read full article on abcnews.com:

http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/excessive-cellphone-anxiety-experts-warn/story?id=48842476

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Read the full article in The Irish Examiner http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/healthandlife/digital-distraction-are-smartphones-dumbing-down-students-457223.html

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Teenagers are frequently out and about in the world on their own and with their peers, particularly in the summer.  They’re taking a crack at independence, living new situations and challenges without their parents’ supervision and guidance.  Adolescence is a time to start figuring things out for themselves, to problem solve, and to be creative with whatever challenges life is presenting.  It’s a time to build self-reliance and maturity, as they attempt to navigate the world on their own.  It’s a crucial and transformative period in the development of our children, one in which they lay the groundwork for confidence and capability that will support them for the rest of their lives.

Source: Unsplash

It used to be that when teenagers went away in the summer, they went away.  These days, with smartphones in their hands, there’s no break in the communication.  Many teens stay in constant contact, in a continual conversation with their parents throughout the day.  If something upsets or delights them, or a practical problem arises, they’re quick to text out for help, validation, and feedback.  And they usually receive that understanding, empathy, guidance, solution, or whatever else is needed, immediately.  Technology is removing the need for our kids to figure things out for themselves. It’s robbing our children of the opportunity to experience their lives on their own, to live through challenges and joys inside their own company, and to learn how to effectively meet life’s ups and downs in their own unique ways. With a smartphone in hand, nothing needs to be figured out or experienced alone.  Living happens by consensus, inside a shared and safe zone of continual communication and handholding. Previous generations, in contrast, had to let go of the big people’s hands at some point, to jump into the waters of independence, because there simply was no alternative, and we grew into actual adults as a result.

The result of all this communicating is that we are unintentionally growing a generation of helpless, infantilized, and unable people—children who don’t feel and are in fact not equipped to handle life’s challenges. Technology is depriving our youth of the true self-confidence, grit and resilience that can only come from and through practicing independence. Just because our kids can now do without cutting the cord, and can effectively rely on us to babysit them around the clock, doesn’t mean that they, or we, should.

What then is the solution to this new digital dilemma, the disempowerment and disabling of our children as a result of their dependence on constant communication through technology, and our parental collusion in this dependence under the guise of attentive parenting?  The solution begins with awareness. That is, becoming conscious of the long-term effects of perpetually interacting with and attending to every text your child sends. While it may feel good to be helpful, needed, and wanted, to be the person that your child wants to share everything with, in fact, providing moment to moment validation, support, and guidance, eventually will create a not self-reliant and not self-confident human being. When we literally accompany our children through every step of life, they stop (or never start) knowing how to walk for themselves.

Although counterintuitive perhaps, stepping away from your child’s texts can be the wiser and more loving choice.  Explain to them why you are not immediately responding to their every communication, what the larger intention is behind your silence, that it’s in service to their true independence (so that they can’t accuse you of neglecting or forgetting them!).  When you allow your son or daughter the opportunity to start experiencing life on their own, to figure it out, generate solutions, self-soothe, cope… you are, in the long run, being a good parent.  You are offering a gift to your child that is far more valuable than solving the problem of the moment.

This is of course not to suggest that we should never be available to our children’s communications, but rather that we should become mindful of what we are actually doing in a larger sense when we are forever and immediately available to our kids every experience. If we truly desire what’s best for our children, namely, for them to become capable and to know that they can trust themselves, then we as parents need to stop holding up the other end of the constant conversation.  It’s up to us; we who are older and wiser need to take the higher road and create some space and silence, turn off the conversation, be a little bit unavailable, and let them discover that they can indeed fly on their own.

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Chris Grosso – The Indie Spiritualist – Ep. 51 – Nancy Colier

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I immediately flipped open my laptop and started researching. Researching what?  Everything, anything, something that would interest me, something to do, something to fill the space.

After distractedly surfing through movie schedules and museum exhibits, I had a thought: “sound baths.” Within seconds, Google had delivered a page of options on the new auditory class that meditation and yoga studios now offer. I inattentively skimmed through several descriptions and testimonials on the bath experience, as well as schedules for five or six studios that offered it. Rapidly scanning the pages, I wasn’t able to find a class for the day at hand. In the process, however, I bumped into a link for the 10 hardest workouts in New York City. Wouldn’t that be a great idea, I thought, and so I flitted through a whole host of kettle ball, circuit training, and boot camp options, none of which sounded remotely like something I wanted to actually do.

I am not sure what happened next, but I found myself inside a list of vacation destinations with direct flights from New York. Seems I had followed a link for “easy family holidays that won’t break the bank.” Inside one of the hotel write-ups was a description of a garden that sat on the sea, which reminded me of a neighborhood park that I had read about, but not yet visited. I found the park online and superficially perused its history and hours for visiting. But then I remembered that I needed a new pair of sneakers. And so I sped over to the Nike site and discovered that there were so many new styles, all of which were so fabulous that I couldn’t decide. The only pair I investigated further wasn’t available in my size. At this point, I went back to movies, because I had a thought about a documentary on a runner. But it turned out the film was only playing way downtown and that didn’t appeal. What then followed was a speed train through hot yoga studios, great city walks, dog parks for shy dogs, independent bookstores, places to buy cooking supplies, and kirtan performances — which is when I woke up.

I shut my computer and took a deep breath, pulling the air down into my body. “Stop,” I said to myself. “Just stop.” I looked at my watch: I had been down the rabbit hole for two hours. Two of my five free hours were gone. I felt agitated, anxious, and paralyzed, entirely overwhelmed with possibilities, but unable to move on any of them. I was “twired” — tired and wired at the same time. I put my hand on my heart and felt the simplicity of stillness.

“Come home,” I said to myself. “Be here.” I then unhooked from all the ideas of what I should or could do with my time and just felt into my body, felt my own physical presence. I took a few conscious breaths and invited myself to relax and land where I was, now.

What happened next was that I felt an immediate sense of relief and peace, to be allowed to be where I was and to not have to do anything at all, nothing other than pay attention to what I was actually experiencing.

I became aware of a longing to call a particular friend. I also felt the desire to take a walk, to be with myself and to be outside. That’s what came to me, organically, when I dropped into my body and now.

One of the problems that technology is creating for us is a feeling that we should be constantly taking advantage of every opportunity available to us —and that if we’re not, we are somehow missing out on life. We believe that there is something somewhere inside Google that will make this moment complete, someplace else that is better than where we are, something more that we ought to be doing. We no longer ask ourselves, or let ourselves discover what we want to do. Rather, we ask Google what’s possible, or what we can do. The thing is, what we can do is often very different from what we want to do. We find frequently that what we want to do is much simpler than what we can do. And also that when we listen in to what we actually want, from the body, the answer is clear and without ambivalence or confusion; it has a sense of “Oh yes, that’s right” — unlike the “can and should do’s,” which leave us feeling murky without the clear “Yes” that comes with truth.

Technology creates an infinite number of choices. We can do anything at any time.  And yet while we may delight in the idea of choice, research shows that when we have too many choices, we actually end up unhappy, deadened, overwhelmed, fatigued, and immobilized. With unlimited choices, we frequently end up making no choice at all. And if we are able to make a decision amid the mountain of choices, we generally feel less satisfied with our choice and more concerned that another option would have served us better. Unlimited choices also cause us to shut down our creative thinking. When presented with too many options, we often revert to the simplest one, or consider only one manageable variable in making our selection. The more technology beckons with possibilities, the more we humans pull the covers over our heads and find ourselves frozen in a perpetual state of both too much and not enough.

The issue, too, is that we are looking outside of ourselves for our own truth. When we have a free afternoon, we look to the internet, hoping to find something that will generate interest in us. When we cook dinner, we go surfing on Instagram to find a picture of something that will tell us what we want to eat. When something happens in our life, we post the experience to find out what it should and will mean to us.

We have forgotten that we can know things through our own experience. We have forgotten that the process of knowing can happen from the inside out and not the outside in.

Source: logoboom/Shutterstock

The next time you find yourself with a chunk of unscheduled time, even just a little (e.g., standing in line, riding public transportation), try living it in a new way  — or, at least, differently than I did — and create a new habit. Instead of immediately searching outside yourself, on your phone or computer, to find something that might interest you, something to fill the time, drop into yourself, into now. Feel your body, the sensations arising, how you are in that exact moment. Pay attention inside; notice if there is a natural longing or interest already present. If nothing comes, that’s fine; just stay still and keep attending. Practice not doing, not filling the time, not habitually forcing something into every open space as soon as it appears. In so “doing,” you are, in fact, turning yourself, now, into a destination and a place to be.

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Nancy Colier comes to Muhlenberg Library to discuss and sign copies of her most recent book, The Power of Off: the Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World.

Have you ever caught yourself checking your smartphone while you’re behind the wheel?

https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2017/01/17/author-talk-nancy-colier

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