Positive Health Online

A High Tech Flood

Many of us are finding the digital revolution to be overwhelming. Some of us are in agreement with the novelist Jonathon Franzen when he calls Twitter “unspeakably irritating...” and describes Facebook as “all one big endless loop...” Still we flood the world with our texts and tweets - in Scandinavia more than 85% of the population communicate by text; worldwide around 294 billion email messages are sent every day. Research tells us that our kids are no longer out playing in the fresh air but are addicted to computer games and almost all of us are on our laptops daily. We are constantly fed by the machines, devoured by a cloud of Electro Magnetic Smog.

And as we get older we find it harder to re-learn how to use a newly upgraded mobile phone / laptop /TV / DVD. The old one seemed so easy to use - how will we ever find our way round this new machine? And in addition to the pressure from keeping up with technological ‘improvements’, replying to our emails, extracting our phone messages, being informed by Google and dealing with call centres on the other side of the planet, we have another constant pressure from those flickering screens;  according to some researchers we each watch more than 30,000 television commercials a year. Altogether it often feels as if we are being flooded and overwhelmed by our modern technology in one form or another.

There's an old Daoist story about dealing with inundations. A young man sees an old monk fall into a fast flowing, wild river. He assumes that the old man will die, but later sees the ageing man make his way out further down the river. When he asks him how he managed in his frail state to fight the flow of the waters, the monk laughs and replies; "I didn't, I relaxed, and let the flow of the river carry me along safely until I found my way to the bank." This is the essence of Daoist teaching and can help us all to handle the fast moving world of high tech, media and mass communications.

We can choose to fight and resist the changes that we find around us in the technologically fast-paced world we now live in and carry on griping about texts and emails being ungrammatical and misspelt and worry about EM smog and its effects on our health. Alternatively we can burn out from over use of all things to do with the media revolution and then flee to live in a far away cave having nothing more to do with qwerty keyboards and the like. Or we can respond to this strange new world in the ancient Daoist way.

The Daoist solution is to neither fight nor flee our technological world but instead learn, as the monk did in the wild river, to relax and find ways to mindfully handle our high tech environment and so appreciate its benefits. Instead of feeling buffeted by the demands of email and phone, overwhelmed by the stream of media information, exhausted from too much EM pollution , we can respond to this frantic media landscape with ways that allow us to become masters, not slaves to our machines. Learning to respond with stillness we transform our energy from frantic to flowing and feel better, calmer and more centred.

From Frantic to Flowing

Here are some suggestions to go from frantic to flowing and so handle better our high tech world

• Before responding to an e mail or picking up a ringing phone take a moment to relax your shoulders, breathe from your abdomen and smile;
• Switch everything off - phones, laptop, computer, TV etc for a set period of time every day. I suggest at least 2 hours per day to be free of all technological energy. No tweeting , face booking, no Sykpe, phone calls etc during this time!
• Go on a news fast for one day per week. No news from any source!
• Once a month turn off all the power in your house - connect with inner energy!
• Every day spend at least twenty minutes sitting watching the sky through a window or outdoors. This can be at any time of day and will help reconnect with a sense of spaciousness within. Switch everything off so that there are no interruptions!
• At least once a week spend a couple of hours in nature - outside the city or in a park;
• Take two ten minute naps every day to allow your mind to rest from constant input.

Follow these tips so that you transform your relationship with technology. You will find yourself back in the driving seat – in charge of the machines rather than letting them run your life. Goethe said “We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden”. This is a very Daoist approach - to constantly immerse ourselves in a flood of technology we will lose our sensitivity and become stale, hardened to the flow of life. By turning off the machines regularly and tuning into our own energy flow we feel refreshed and re energized to go on enjoying our lives - machines and all!