In the beginning, there was meditation…

Oh, the irony. My road to digital minimalism began with an app. On my phone no less.

In December 2021, I was introduced to the popular meditation app, 10% Happier now Happier. I listened to the podcast of the same name created by Dan Harris. He’s an American television journalist, creator of the app, and now, my meditation guru.

Harris identifies himself as a skeptic and his breezy, no-nonsense style appealed to me. So did his non-wu wu approach to meditation. I immediately read his excellent book. 

I also watched the You Tube clip where he totally melted down during a panic attack while anchoring the news on Good Morning America. He unabashedly shares the humiliation of that attack with readers. He ‘fessed up he’d been abusing coke for a long time after stints reporting from war zones for ABC News. 

Dan turned to Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzburg among others for help. Prolific authors and gurus on loving kindness metta meditation and mindfulness, both had humble beginnings in Indian ashrams. They are part of a group often referred to as the JuBus: the Jewish Buddhists. 

Beginning in the 1970s, quite a large cohort of Jewish kids ‘ran away’ (their family’s interpretation most likely) to India and Southeast Asia. Thich Nhat Hanh, the late renowned Vietnamese monk and peace activist, was their guru. 

All these years later, Goldstein and Salzburg, along with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, are the pre-eminent meditation teachers in the US. Maybe they had the right idea running away, after all.

My own earlier experiment with meditation—one I failed at spectacularly by the way—also involved so-called Jewish runaways at an Indian ashram. A cousin of mine from Nova Scotia had been an early acolyte of a Buddhist swami in northern India. He too left home in the 1970s to live and chant on a mountain top.

In the mid-1990s, I travelled to visit him in Kullu and met his Canadian pals, including an old bunkmate at the Young Judean camp I attended as a young girl. They were all devout followers of Swami Shyam. I wrote about my desperate attempts at seeking enlightenment from the swami in my 2023 memoir.  

My cousin’s swami (wouldn’t that make a great name for a movie?) was the first person to try to teach me to meditate. He failed. Only a club over my head was going to get the job done. With the 10% Happier app, guided by Dan Harris and his instructors, I was definitely starting over. 

I had other good reasons to begin again. 

The world was eighteen months into the pandemic. Earlier on, I’d retired from our family business, Maple Bear Global Schools, and no longer travelled incessantly. I had time on my hands and devoted it to writing and walking my neighbourhood. Both activities helped to pass the long pandemic days. 

The barrage of bad news that year meant my phone and news apps were never far away. Reading about the world going off its rails made my cortisol levels soar. 

There had been some pleasant surprises. Our daughter, Lilly, found true love in the rainforests of Costa Rica during the pandemic and gave birth to Lucy, our first grandchild. On the day I first listened to Dan Harris in December 2021, I was sitting on the balcony of our cabina in San Vito, a newly-minted bubbie, living a dream existence in Costa Rica. 

Anxiety, though, ebbs and flows. Mine never went away. A meditation app offering me ways to quell it was worth giving a try. 

There was also a giant elephant in the room. At the start of the pandemic, I was diagnosed with hypertension. High blood pressure runs in my family. It was probably inevitable I would end up with it, even without an anxiety-inducing global health scare, the stress of staring down the age of seventy, and a depressing, abrupt ending to my working life. 

The app helped me enormously. I still take medications but meditation helps keep my readings at a healthier level. True, enjoying grandchildren in a tropical paradise during the winter months has probably helped too. 

I continue to use the guided meditations every morning. Before I get out of bed, I don my headphones. It beats doom scrolling in my head upon first awakening. 

My daily mindfulness meditation practice has taught me to set daily intentions. Those have proven to be extremely useful in, you guessed it, my pursuit of digital minimalism. 

***

When I first introduced the idea for this blog to friends and family, I was told I will never change anyone else’s digital consumption. Moreover, I shouldn’t try. Can I please say this loud and clear?

I am not trying to change anyone other than myself.

I do not claim to be The Digital Minimalist Expert and this is not a how-to blog in any way shape or form. Been there, done that, written five self-help books as an expert on expatriate life. I am not judging anyone else’s behavior, only my own. This is my account of taking back my brain and my reasons for doing so.

Now that I have got that out of the way, I need to stress another fact. Despite gurus, apps, and daily mindfulness meditations, I do not have it all figured out. Absolutely nothing is foolproof. It’s an on-going process.

And, there will be slippage.

While drafting this post, I went to my local coffee shop and scarfed down a huge piece of forbidden chocolate chip banana bread. (I’m allergic to chocolate if I eat too much of it.) 

Second bad decision: I decided to write on my phone. Yes, I still have the WORD app on it. Of course, the app went wonky on me. 

Third distraction: a text popped up from a girlfriend. Quite an intense one, actually. I responded without thinking, probably offering misguided words of wisdom, the kind I love to hand out.

Fourth misstep: I failed to turn on my digital minder. That allowed my son to respond to a WhatsApp about seeing a movie together. The rabbit hole only got deeper. I asked if he could buy the tickets after Googling for show times. I muted the WiFi. Too late.

Fifth interruption: my video partner messaged to confirm we could review footage of a documentary we’re shooting in less than an hour’s time. I created a Zoom link.

Getting into my car afterwards, I was utterly disgusted with myself. I had only myself to blame for my state of self-induced digital distraction. Only by sheer luck did I avoid an accident when I pulled out too quickly without looking.

Castigating myself, I remembered that the app is loaded with meditations on self-compassion. I made a note to myself to cue one up for the following morning. Then I finished this post, at my desk. 

In the meantime, like my guru Dan Harris, ‘fessing up has made me feel a lot better.