 All right, I think we're live. Welcome everyone to another session during our Mindfulness at IBM virtual summit for a week full of mindfulness from internal and external guest speakers. Topics ranging from agile to conscious parenting to being a mindful cyborg or becoming a mindful cyborg. Big gratitude and a big thank you for everyone involved in making this happen. All the volunteers, the practice leaders, the executives, the participants and all the communities that we've partnered in on this. Big thank you to all of you. I don't wanna take up more time because personally, this is a fascinating topic for me and it's with a gentleman that is close to my heart that I met some time ago and then we've been connecting and Chris, thank you for everything that you do. Thank you for being and making me a better human and a better cyborg. That being said, the show is all yours. Thank you, Patrick. I'm excited to be here. I'm gonna kind of give two caveats up front. I'm struggling with a little bit of a cold. So I'm sorry if I have to clear my throat a few times during this chat. And the second thing is I am in the middle of Helsinki with an unstable connection. So if I fall apart, I'll try to come right back but I'll do my best. So today I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about becoming a mindful cyborg and then do some questions at the end of this. The first thing I wanted to share with you was this comic that I found. It's from 1906 and the illustrator was articulating what possibly could be the worst case scenario if everyone got a wireless telegraph and they envisioned a world where people would start possibly ignoring each other, ignoring the world around them and they would spend all their time gazing hopelessly into these devices. Again, in the late fifties, there was a lot of talk about the rise of mass media and how people were starting to become overly consumed by a newspaper. We found that the worst case scenario didn't happen. And if you look at a lot of the news today around technology, a lot of people are kind of contemplating that possibly we're in some sort of dark age when it comes to our technology. But my question for this session is really is what if we're wrong about technology? What if technology actually is a route to being more enlightened and more mindful? What could we learn? And that's really the genesis for this entire talk. I'm not gonna go into a whole lot about me. There's enough YouTube videos and interviews and things about me. But very succinctly, for over 10 years, I collected, managed and navigated thousands of digital connections into my life, organized them and created a way to get very tight feedback loops to help me change everything from the types of food I was eating to spiritual practices, to finances, to even how to be a more mindful human. With that being said, one of the biggest learnings that I took away at about year seven was this huge difference between what is known as the quantified self and this alternate view of yourself which is not really referred to as often as you hear quantified self, but the qualitative self. And where those two meet, I think it creates something called the quantified selflessness. And how do you really focus on merging both the benefits of measurement and the innate wisdom of kind of meaning? To really dig into this, I think it's important to talk a little bit about what really is happening to us when we think about us as a species. One of my dearest friends is named Amber Case and in 2010, she did a talk called We Are All Cyborgs Now. And she highly recommend you check it out. And she pontificated and talked about how the rise of regular technology, computers and stuff, but specifically mobile phones were really transforming us. But the term cyborg really doesn't have anything to do with mobile phones. It doesn't have anything to do with robots or biomechanics or androids. Cyborg is any organism that has restored or enhanced functionalities due to some type of integration or artificial component. And our devices today actually do enhance our, I'd say our organism quite a bit. But it's not just us. You can find videos of primates using tools to fish. There's a very viral video of a monkey who's handed a smartphone and instantly without any understanding of Instagram starts to hunt down and find other primates and watch them. So the idea of being enhanced or extending our functionality doesn't make us any less organic or any less human. And I think that's really important for people to take away. The origins of kind of cyborgism really go back to JCR link letter who back in 1958 was looking for a way to deal with the fallout from a possible worldwide nuclear war. And one of the things they talked about at this point was a man computer symbiosis. You jump forward to 1968 with what's referred to as the mother of all demos and Douglas Inkelbart. And he demonstrated what for all intents and purposes was the early internet, early mouse. A lot of things we take for granted today. Right up to 1981, when we look at someone like Steven Mann at MIT, these are videos from his life at MIT when he was basically covered in computing. And what did he do with it and what did he learn? More modern day cyborgs would be someone like Neil Haberson. This is what people normally think of when they think of cyborgism. Neil actually has a sensor that allows him to hear colors. And then Rob Spence actually has a camera embedded where his eye would be because he lost his eye in a hunting accident. You've got me, of course, if you look me up online, you know, I wore hundreds of devices all over my body in the early part of the decade to learn more about who I am. And as recently as just a few years ago, if you went any place in Sweden, you'd find a large number of people who had chips in their hands and who could ride trains without any type of external technology. So the idea is we're all cybernetic in how we use our devices, even if it's just carrying them around on us. And I think so much so that we often don't think about the symbiotic nature between our devices and us. The challenge though is we're entering a time where people feel that to be mindful, you need to abandon all technology. I know on my silent retreats, I'm always told no books, no pens, no clocks. So I mean, that's seriously abandonment of all technology. But if we look at the way technology is moving currently, we're seeing that it's getting smaller, there are less screens and it's less about us looking at something and more about us being immersed in something. And this is radically important, I think for you to think about when it comes to your mindfulness practice because how you ordinate yourself to the world, how you orientate yourself to others and the world around you really is not gonna be dependent on seeing or holding some physical piece of technology in a very short amount of time. What we're going to see is people who are innately influenced by technology invisibly without their knowing it. See, it's my belief and why I'm talking about this today, we can't escape technology because we've become it. And technology at its core can be education, it can be a process, it can be a book, it doesn't have to be silicon. But living wholly organic in a world that's slowly being built for cybernetics can be difficult. There are really I think six main areas that are starting to, I'd say blossom. I noticed a lot of people are starting to suffer with sensory challenges, a lot of the movies and things that are out now are about actually the absence of senses. There are temporal issues where people are feeling time is speeding or slowing down. A lot of our media is actually temporally dysmorphic where they kind of move things around in a timeline. And our group awareness, I think it's sincerely enhanced of late because of the cybernetics. We can sense people around us. In all three of these types of evolutions as you would allow us to I think further deepen our practice. Now, the genesis of this talk is really about the ways I've which seeing people attempt to be digitally well. You know, on one hand you've got tools like the Pavlok which will send you a mild electrical shock when you do something to remind you of what you need to focus on. Apple and Google have these tools now that allow you to monitor and control how much you're using your devices. I call this shameification. There are tools you can spend money on, tool like freedom that will put blocks on you. You spend money with this company every month for them to limit how much time you can actually use the internet. There are movements like time well spent which kind of give you hacks to focus on maybe making your technology not so attractive. Can you imagine if you tried to do that to your spouse? So, you know, some of these things I just don't personally agree with. Or then you've got the Dalai Lama. I'm a big fan, you know, but the Dalai Lama doesn't seem to have a whole lot of problems being on Twitter or dealing with his attention, but he also doesn't follow anyone. So, I think that's really important. And of course, I wrote a book about this called Don't Unplug How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours Too. So, what we're gonna do today is go over some methods and strategies to place you, what I call yourself, in airplane mode. So, we're not gonna worry about silencing our devices. We're learning how to put you in airplane mode. These really fall over five different areas I wanna cover with you. The first is about giving your device a silent treatment. And if you handle that, we're gonna go over surfing your internet. If you handle that, we're gonna go over the art of happiness. And when we get through that, we're gonna look at turning all technology into a time machine and then finally grief as a service. Now, as we go through these kind of steps on digital enlightenment, you'll notice in the upper left hand corner, there are little, I guess, challenge badges to show you how difficult these things are. Now, these challenge badges were how difficult they were for me. These things might be completely easy to you. So, don't really worry about that, but you might wanna take note of it. So, the other thing I wanna challenge you to think about as we go through this is so often when we talk about our journeys in life, we talk about them as if they're from a starting point to an end. And what I've noticed with any idea or practice, whether you're new or slightly advanced, it always goes in this very simple flow. You go from being inspired to wanna start a new idea, project to practice, you get really into it. You get so much into it, you kind of exhaust yourself and you start forgetting about all the other things that are important in your life. You get completely burned out. You slowly bring back on other parts of your life to become what we would call balanced. You then forget that you actually had to balance that and it becomes an integrated practice. And then finally, you have those same challenges again in that area and a level of resiliency comes up. So with these practices I'm gonna be going over you, realize that there will be times where some of them might work for one part of your journey and not another and always be really cognizant of that because what I found is resilience is the act of perpetual perspective. I'm gonna say that one more time. Resilience is the act of perpetual perspective. So understanding the journey, the temporal ephemerality of your relationship to all of these systems, all of your life is really what defines resilience. So the first kind of topic, subject matter here in these five step processes is giving your devices the silent treatment. So often our devices are what I would call alert dualistic they're either completely off or they're completely on. And people find this to be really easy. I could silence the whole thing or sometimes they'll even put it in airplane mode if they really wanna go out. The idea of this first session or this first section of the suggestions is for you to start to avoid this kind of alert dualism because I think being truly mindful is being able to handle a certain level of distractions. And when I think about my phone I think about it in these specific areas. So you can do things like simply turning down the sound stopping any music or silencing your device and turning off the ringer but that's kind of like level one. The next thing you can do is just lower the brightness put your phone in night shift to true tone or even orientation lock. These are also ways of silencing your phone. Additionally, just turning off your cell signal so that you can't get phone calls or text messages just turning off wifi so you can't surf very fast or even limiting your Bluetooth signal or all ways of also silencing your phone. Turning on do not disturb or do not disturb while driving we'll talk about that a little bit later other ways you can silence your phone. And then finally putting your phone on low power mode which limits the background and data transmissions. If you have to go all the way to airplane mode and then also you've got the sleep which turns off a certain level of reminders. So right now, hopefully you can see there were a lot of things you can do to start to balance or flex your attention muscles other than completely silent or completely driving you insane because I want your phone to become a friend and ally to your mindfulness journey. The next thing is it just doesn't really stop with your phone even our wearable devices have layers of silent treatment. One of my favorite things you can do on watch is just putting it in theater mode which basically allows the watch to not illuminate when you raise it to your eye level. And this could be great because it forces you to touch your hand and that can be a moment of practice. And then finally, I think one of the most non-obvious ways to kind of get a break from your devices without silence thing completely is just privacy protection. So privacy protection really was made for information security. But what you find out very quickly if you have a privacy screen on your devices just the absence of illumination when you're not directly in front of your device is a real motivator not to be distracted by it popping up. And again, I want to remind you folks distraction is not bad. Distraction literally keeps you alive. So we don't want to demonize technical distractions. We want to learn to tame it and work with it. See, I believe we can't be distracted by what we can't see. So really coming down to working with all the different ways our phones can alert us and then mindfully turning them on or off as we learn to practice. Step two in this session we have here is learning to what I call your surf your internet. See, the internet is the network of systems we employ to embrace and extend our values. So what do I mean by a network of systems that we learn to embrace or extend? Well, every day you use hundreds of pieces of software, multiple different devices, you interface with lots of different technology whether it's at a payment terminal or ordering food in a restaurant kiosk but we don't look at those as your internet or all the things you're connected to and the influence you have over them. So some things you can do, I think that are really, really provocative to help you with your internet is rename any devices that you have control over. These can be computers, these can be wearables, these can be mobile phones, these can be headsets. Any devices you have, you can go into the settings and actively change their name. When you connect to these devices or you share a file or someone sees you, they suddenly will see not iPhone or headset, they'll see words like tenderness, you are loved, balance, groundlessness. My watch is called groundlessness. And these are really important reminders not only for you but for the world around you. Simple things like creating playlists that have an emotional or inspired title can be really grounding ways to see this. Also, I love using emoji. Whenever possible, embed your entire existence with emojis in certain magical practices, these could even be considered sigils which is a whole nother topic. Also, when you're thinking about your devices, consider creating file systems based on your values. You could have files and tags for files that have to do with work to be done or current projects, but why not also have file tags for hope or value or happy? And something I absolutely loved when I finally did to myself was I rearranged all the icons on my smartphone and put them in folders based by the type of sin or challenge that those things were doing to me. So anything to do with measuring my body I put in suffering. Anything to do with shopping I put in a folder called Averus. First thing is it's really interesting because you kind of have to stop for a second and look at these names before you jump in them. But I think the second thing is people who see your phone will just want to talk to you about that. And one of the most powerful things we can do today is talk to each other about technology. And then there are apps like Lifecycle. This app is a wonderful companion to learn to surf your internet because in the background, it keeps track of where you are and how much time you're there. And then you can actually create categories. So for me, I have categories like mindfulness, obviously, if I'm meditating, but more importantly, body, mind, self-care, home and family upkeep, love. And that way when I take the time to go out with my partner or I take the time to talk to a stranger or I take the time to do something that gives back to the world around me, that gets logged. The reason why this is important is if those things become of value to you, this app will suddenly push messaging to you when those normative states start to fall off. And there's nothing more powerful than getting a message from yourself saying that your mind, body and self-care routine is down by 5%. It kind of helps, that's the kind of push message you don't want to get, but it certainly helps refocus you on what you might define to be really important. Also, I love the idea of using technology in non-conventional ways if you haven't already figured this out. So one of the things the latest iPhone will do for you is it allows you to actually turn on do not disturb while driving. Now, this feature you can manually turn on, but the most interesting thing about do not disturb while driving is you can customize your message. So by default, the message says when you're driving, so-and-so can't, so-and-so being you, can't answer the phone right now, they're driving and we'll return your call right as soon as possible. But what I did was I customized my message and said, hey, I'm meeting with a friend right now or having lunch or possibly even spending time with my family. I've purposely turned this on to tell you that maybe you should give it a try too. So automatically it's a way of, it's like a out of office message for your conscience so that it gets sent to your friends when they text you or your coworkers and things. And it's a really, really provocative and super fun. Other ways you can use technology in non-traditional ways to really embrace kind of your core values and that sense of love and belonging are photos, both Google and Apple have this thing called live photos now. A lot of people look at photos just as stills, but you'll see in this case, this was a photo from my husband, he actually embedded a kiss inside a live photo. So sending messages to people you love or care about what looks like a photo by perfectly timing the message at the end is a great way to do that. Also with our home systems, whether it's Amazon Alexa or Google or Siri, we can set up reminders. So if we're gonna be away for a week, maybe on a work trip or we're gonna be away overnight, we can actually set up scheduled reminders that gets delivered to our families while we're away. Another really amazing way, instead of saying, remind me to take the chicken out of the oven, you can say, remind Fernando that I love him tomorrow morning at eight o'clock. This is a super powerful way to extend your love and caring for the people in your life and the world around you. But you can go even further because our devices allow us to surf our internet out to complete strangers. So we could actually use our device to say set up a reminder. So when I'm at the grocery store, I say hi to the cashier. What this does is it creates a geofence around the places you go often. And as you enter those places, you get reminders to be more mindful and pay attention to the things you want. It's really easy to forget the milk, but it's really important you don't forget the people selling you the milk. And then finally, I love this so much. With so much mobile ordering going on in the world, there's always an opportunity to put special instructions in the mobile order. And a lot of times we'll say extra ketchup or something like that. But I love taking time to put in the mobile order messages to the people making my food. Simple message to tell them that I appreciate them or I can't wait to taste the food or this is my favorite restaurant. Getting a special instruction that reminds someone that they're just not delivering you a service, but they're delivering something to you that you really value makes their day and create a sense of gratitude in you. See, I feel each connection, whether it's with a device or another person is a reminder of what we value. Three, the art of happiness. So a lot of people, when they think about mindfulness and technology, they think about apps. But as you can see, there's already a ton of things we did in the first two steps, but we can't ignore apps. So let's talk about them per second. I think some of the first things you can do are there are apps that actually create wallpapers that are very, very serene, very, very calming. Also, there are apps that can replace your wallpaper that will put a different cover screen on you, maybe one that says, hey, don't take a picture or hey, text your mom or dad. But when we think about apps, before we buy anything, there's stuff we can do with our default apps. One of the things I do, and I've done for years now, is I have lots of alarms that go off on lots of different days that tell me things that are really important to me, like to focus on others, or that I'm not my thoughts, or that if I'm resisting something, I'm probably suffering, or really important for me to hear multiple times a day move slow. But also, that's just alarms. Reminders are super powerful because they go beyond time. They can be reminders for places. So for instance, when I pull into my driveway, I get a message that says, remember, you were loved here. When I exit the house, I get a message saying use this drive to be more mindful and pay attention to your body. So location-based, time-based, and even behavioral-based things are all possible in the default operating systems without us having to buy any apps. But maybe you're still not ready to start to meditate. There are games that can be super mindful. And I just noticed just last week, there was an entire section of these on both app stores. Monument Valley is a super mindful game that allows you to really get deep. But my absolute favorite, check out Mountain, M-O-U-T-A-N. Mountain doesn't do anything. Mountain just sits there. And the longer you stare at Mountain, the more powerful Mountain becomes. I can tell you right now, Mountain will change your life. You can even use it on your Apple television. Speaking of apps, of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention all the ones we all know about. Headspace for basically anybody who's kind of plugged into the Silicon Valley game. Budify, one of my favorites, that has a lot of different context aware. So they've got a meditation for when you're on a train or a medication for when you can't sleep. And then the one I started with and still use to this day, Insight Timer. Very, very simple and shows you other people you're meditating with. But when I talk about meditation apps, I think it's really important to remember, don't just stop at the app. Most of these apps have companion plugins and extensions for your browser. Most of these apps have companion apps for your smart televisions and your smart speakers. So it's not enough just to have the app on your phone, you might ignore it. So put it in places you have to see when you're digital world. One of the most powerful things you can do to slow yourself down and become more mindful is slow yourself down and become more mindful. But with our devices, they become habitual. So the one thing I suggest to people living in North America is switch your phone to 24 hour time. We're not used to seeing 14 o'clock and it takes our mind a few minutes to figure that out. If you're in Europe, switch it the other way to three o'clock, like what is three? It's the middle of the day, why is it three? Also, if you really wanna get super, super challenged, if you know Celsius, switch it to Fahrenheit. If you know Fahrenheit, switch it to Celsius. Not only will it slow you down, but you'll learn something really, really important about the world and yourself. And then battery percentage. Half the people I talk to, no matter where I go, have that battery percentage on their phone turned on full time. They always know to the exact point when their battery is gonna die. And I can tell you one thing for sure, it is super stressful. So even though you think you will die without your battery percentage turned on, I'm telling you right now, it's stressing you out. If you have your battery percentage turned off, turn it on because you'll learn very quickly how important this is. Plus, you can maybe get used to a little bit of the discomfort being able to see yourself fading away happens. Now we all love social media. I mean, it's nothing new. Some people say they hate it, but the challenge with social media isn't always the social media itself, it's the immediacy of it. So there's an application I really like a lot called space. You can download it from both app stores, Android and Apple. And what it does is it places a wrapper underneath Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, even your browser. And this wrapper forces you to stop and take a breath before you actually can get into the app. Super, super neat. If you haven't heard of space, check it out. It's mind blowing. The only thing they don't have space for right now is LinkedIn, and I wish they did because I still hit that thing to see what's going on in my network. Speaking of Facebook, gosh, it seems like they're always on the news lately. You know, to me, Facebook isn't the problem. It's how Facebook displays your life to you. When you look at Facebook through a very mindful eye, through an eye that is trained to look for buys, you learn very quickly that the thing that makes Facebook sticky are the numbers, when something happened, how many things are happening, how many times something was acted upon. This app by Ben Grocer removes all of those. So there are no dates, there are no numbers of comments, there are no likes, hates, there are no updates. Your Facebook literally just becomes something your trained eye that looks for metrics will not know how to deal with. And one of the things I love about the Ben Grocer Facebook plugin is after just three seconds of using Facebook this way, you'll realize you weren't friends with people, you were friends with dates and popularity. And this is a very, very, it can be a very, very hard moment because people will wanna turn it off right away. And I always tell people it takes a good day or two to get used to navigating relationships without metrics. But once you do, you remember what you loved about Facebook. See, I need us to focus on technology that makes life good. Not just easy. Because I believe technology can make life good or it can make life easy, but rarely does it do both. And if something makes life too easy, I can guarantee that's where a lot of the mindfulness challenges happen. And then step four, this can be a real mind blower. So see all technology as a time machine. So what the heck do I mean by that? See, if we think about time today, a lot of people, whether it be me and how I've catalogued my life or college students who are tracking every single hour of the day, or families that don't leave five minutes free time in a vacation, we're all abundantly thinking about time and our relationship to it. The Greeks had a version of time that they talked about, they had two of them actually, one we don't use anymore. It was called Kairos. And we're seeing non-ordered time, the subjective kind of feeling that something was good or about to happen. Of course, they also had Chronos, which is chronological time. We still use it to this day. But because of the rise of technology, we're starting to enter a new period of time that I call Algorithmos. So Algorithmos actually explains a lot of what you feel being connected, being hyper connected to machines. Things seem emergent, they don't seem ordered. Things seem chaotic, they don't seem determined or indeterminate. Things seem technological, not scientific, nor theological, right? This is a really big difference. And we've moved from an agrarian base to an industrial to almost an accelerated base system. And I think if you start to view time this way with technology, it'll make a lot more sense. So let me give you some examples. For me, there are five different ways you can view applications in your life. Anxious, impatient, indifferent, calm, or spacious. So applications that make you anxious are ones that focus on what I call the temporary. Anyone who's ever used two factor authentication who watched that countdown and knows how hard, how anxiety provoking it is to race to put in your code will know what I mean by this. Also applications that show you things that are changing in real time, like traffic, you know, real-time navigation apps are exciting, but they're really anxiety provoking. Now, most of the apps we use every day are what I would call for the impatient. These are apps about ordering food, about getting entertainment, about listening to things. These are all what we would call the on-demand apps. Between the anxious and the impatient, most people's times are completely spent and those in that category of application. And what you'll find is if you just start tracking that, you'll see what I mean. Because as you move more to the right and you get into the soon, which is different than the now, you get into the area of indifference. Applications that remind you of things coming up aren't as stressful as things that need to happen now. And applications that show you things that just happened are a lot less stressful than the things that are coming up. Applications that show you the past or things you've completely forgotten about are literally the least stressful applications we have. So we're gonna go into some kind of deep dive on this, but again, I want you to start looking at all your time and all your applications to this level of temporality. So the first thing is simple temporality. What time of day is it? So since about 2014, our devices have had the ability to shift automatically from light to dark in their color scheme. This is super important, not just for your mindset, but for your circadian rhythm. As of just last month, I think with Apple and probably last year with Google, our devices also now have the ability to shift automatically into dark mode. This is really interesting because once you do this, you'll be using your app maybe at sunrise or at sunset and your phone will automatically shift to dark mode or shift to light road. I call it Cyborg Sunrise and Cyborg Sunset. This is a really good trigger if you're inside, kind of take a break and reorient yourself to the world around you. Up until recently, we paid attention to the clock, but we didn't pay too much attention to the world around us and these automatic night shifting screens are really important. Also in Windows and now in Mac, we have the ability to actually have dynamic wallpapers that just like night shift sink to the time of the day. So you'll get a morning, midday and evening and even gradients in between. So even when you're stuck in an office, even when time seems like there's a no window to anything, it's still important for you to understand nature and world around you. Our wearables I think are even more provocative because they have a way to show you not only the sunrise and sunset, but where you are on earth, where the moon is in its phase and more importantly, where the earth is around the sun. I sometimes like to use these faces thinking about the spans of time. So a solar dial would give me about 12 hours of intellectual cognitive span, but a globe dial would give me a full 24 hours because literally that earth will move all day long on my watch. A moon is even more expansive and it gives you 72 hours of constant change. Every 72 hours you get a new phase and the solar system phase literally takes 365 days to go around, mind blowing ways to kind of expand yourself. Now, this next one is a little bit more provocative. I'm not gonna lie to you, but we've all had that experience of social media reserving us our past and showing us something we did a year ago. What I challenge people to do in my workshops nowadays is actually do this on purpose. And what I mean by this is log into any of the social media accounts that show you something a year from now and send a message to yourself, a message in a bottle and tell yourself who you are one year from that date. I can guarantee you that whoever you say you are a year from now, and I have students all the time right back to me and say, I did it, I just got my message and I am living the life I said I was gonna live. See the challenge is when we use technology we're creating our future selves, but we're not participating in it. And what I want you to learn to do, even though we're kind of taught to always be in the present moment is to be in the present moment through the values you wished to invoke in the future. It's something I call gift, gratitude and tent future truth. And it's a way of using technology to reinforce and help shape who we're going to become. There's even an email application called dabble me that I absolute love because you get these reminders every day. It might be from a year ago, it might be from five years ago, but you end up writing to yourself knowing you're gonna get it back from yourself at some random time in the future. Absolutely wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And we all know when you get alarms based on time, but did you know you can get alarms based on location, alarms based on behavior like you're supposed to be in a meeting right now, alarms based on activity, you've been sitting too long, alarms based on biology, you're a little stressed out right now or alarms based on environment. I encourage you to remove any alarms you have that aren't based solely in time because alarms based in state are super positive ways to start to feel more mindful and in control of yourself. We all know what it's like to get alarms at five, six, whatever times we want, but alarms in places, alarms in states of behavior, alarms in activity, alarms in biology and alarms in environmental factors are a completely way of freeing yourself from this algorithmic time that we're living in. Also, what about food? A lot of applications now allow you to log food and see what you'll weigh in five weeks if you were to eat that food every single day. Again, the idea is using technology in a provocative way to kind of reinforce what you value. And then my absolute favorite is this application called time well spent. So it's a plugin for your browser and any website that you shop on instead of showing you prices of the items that you could buy, it converts it to how many hours you have to work. So you put your yearly salary in this plugin and then anytime it sees a dollar sign, it converts it to how many hours you have to work for the item. This is a completely exciting way for you, your family, your friends to start to shop and then more importantly, think about your time because all technology is a time machine. See, anxiety can be an improper relationship with time. Most of the time, as someone who's had been to panic attacks for 51 years, been hospitalized for them, I can tell you time is anxiety provoking. So we need to start to learn to use our state, not our time to navigate the world around us. And then finally, build a death stack. So embracing grief as a service. So this one's completely edgy. I'm sorry, but we're gonna go there. One of the most important things you can do is go through all of your applications you use and find out if there's a legacy contact. Talk to someone in your life who you want to be your legacy contact and have the conversations now. It's one thing to skip your will. It's another thing not to say for your retirement, but it's completely irresponsible not to have a legacy contact for your social media because that's the one place people find out that you've passed. We don't find out people passed in the newspaper. We rarely find out from other people that someone's passed. No, we get push messages from services that someone's dead. Yet we're not taking the appropriate moments to write letters and do the things to help us convey our wishes to the world post passing. And this is the most mindful, beautiful thing you can do because just like bad feelings and scary thoughts, you too are temporary. And coming to terms with that is super powerful. There are apps like WeCroak. WeCroak sends you random messages throughout the day and week with quotes about death to really help reorient you to your inevitable demise. Progress Bar is an application that removes the clock and battery percentage from all of your devices and calculates the time you have left on this earth by showing you a battery for your life and the actual percentage. Deadline, watch as well how you're sleeping, how you're moving, what little activity or how much activity you get and sends you actually calculated messaging. Maybe you added one hour and 40 minutes to your life by taking a walk. It's an amazing way to stay in touch with being in the moment or what I call embracing grief as a service. See, we all have to die. Everything else is a choice. There were three main lessons I had learned through my technical mindfulness journey. The first one is we don't get better by counting steps, we get better by taking them. Super important that you start doing small things right now and don't get too caught up in the perfection of it all. Second thing is we don't download apps. We download habits. Every single piece of technology used is a habit. It's not an app doing a service. It's a habit you've created. Facebook is a friendship habit. And then, I'm sorry, and the last one is we need to stop valuing our schedules and start scheduling our values. And this is really to combat that time anxiety we all feel because so many people right now are really valuing their time so much more than they're actually scheduling their values. And I think this is a really easy way to flip it and think of it. And then finally, I think the one thing that I've really taken from this journey that I know I try to practice and think about every day. And that's, we don't know how to measure what we care about. So we care about what we measure. And I think if we were to slowly back away from all of this technology and re-approach it through this lens of mindfulness and non-duality and non-judgmental-ness, we'd find that we actually have a beautiful future ahead of us and we can start to really realign ourselves not only with our minds and with our bodies and with others, but with the planet as a whole. So with that, Patrick, thank you so much for having me. I'm sure there's a ton of questions, and I doubt it. But I'd love to get your feedback, Patrick, on what you thought, because I'd never done just a straight mindfulness, tech mindfulness presentation before. I think when I last saw you, I did kind of a more health and wellness, so. Just really quickly though, there already some people are saying thank you. Excellent, emojis are the best. Great ideas, thank you so much. Those are easy and are options which we're using every day. Right. I liked it. It's a lot of information to digest, that's for sure. And I wonder how many notifications you got during the presentation to slow down? Probably a few, but everything's away from me because I really wanted to make sure I didn't have any strange bings or bongs in the background while we were presenting. I've noticed for myself that even just straight notifications from other people's phones will send the entire room into a panic. And I've also noticed lately that we have TV shows and even podcasts are starting to embed phone notification sounds in them to kind of get people to like, what was that? It's kind of insidious. But that's a whole separate conversation about desensitizing yourself to notification sounds, which I mean, I was trying to give people more of a route until they could get to that point. Because my desire would be, everyone just leaves everything on full blast and we kind of feel uncomfortable and we'd be uncomfortable and that's okay. But we're not quite there yet. Right, right. So yeah, if anything's coming to anybody's mind, feel free to comment, to ask some questions. Great tips, we should learn how to use technology in the correct and healthy way. Excellent info. I think you touched briefly about the stigma, right? You see somebody on their phone and you're like, oh, they need to practice mindfulness, right? Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. We're in a time of what we would call digital dualism. And we all have practices from different parts of the world. And, but the one thing that's true of all the practices is this avoidance of dualism. It's neither good nor bad, the middle way. And the most disturbing trend I see in the world is this pathology making of technology. Because I know that no one's died from tech addiction but people are dying of shame every day. And I see a lot of young people who go to the bathroom to check their messages or they'll hide their phone under a table to see if someone's texting them. And the first thing we do as a culture is we kind of shame them for being less human. The challenge is people are creating this idea of what a real human looks like instead of saying actually a real human would be scared right now and would wanna check their phone. That's actually what a real human would do. A real monster would make someone feel bad for that. And I think if we were more honest with ourselves and we were more kind to each other, we would understand where people were. Again, this would be a different conversation Patrick if it was 2014. And we could talk about how to use these things differently or 2008 we could talk about, do we really wanna put a full touchscreen on something that's connected to the internet all the time that can change at the drop of a hat? But it's not, it's 2020 almost. And most people need their devices for their family, they need it for their careers, they need it for their health, they need it for even activism, right? So no one's telling activists in Beijing or South America to stop using their phones. No one is telling them to stop using their phones. It's only when we get in the mode where we feel superior that someone isn't giving us the attention that we deserve that we get upset. And that's a very, very dangerous road with anybody with a decent level of practice will tell you to go down. Chris, if I could ask you to stop sharing so the screen could go more on you, us, and then there is a chat in the Zoom, there is a question. And I think it might be easier to read it because it's quite lengthy. Sure. I'll also read it for the audience. I had a black period of time a few years ago and my phone and devices have never been on full active mode since. They only vibrate and many apps will not show up notifications unless they are open. So that helps me focus on the present and reduce the need of having stress or no phobia, which is no mobile phone phobia. Any, and question, how do you cope with that impulse of going through all of your notifications for everything? Emails, apps, newsfeed, et cetera? Well, when I think about this question, I think first off, it's very brave. And I would say that any of us who haven't been through a black period are just young. So it's kind of like the default mode. But I don't get what I would consider a dark period. I almost get a level of trauma that's been induced here when I read this. And I know I'm reading it, I'm sorry, I can only do what I can do with text. And I think trauma is a different beast. We're not talking about the tips I've given someone during this presentation or someone suffered some form of trauma that was partly invoked by their phone. I mean, we'd be disingenuous to say that stalking, bullying, and harassment isn't pervasive across multiple platforms. It's an everyday occurrence. Now, the challenge is as these tool providers create more ways for us to manage our digital relationships, we start to see things through the lens that completely honor off. Because it's really easy to block someone we disagree with. But I know for myself, if I ever see my block list on all the different services, they've reintroduced me to the trauma. Because like there I am going over all the fights I ever have with all these people. So I think there's a certain level of getting to know yourself to your devices again, that might be useful for this person. But based on what I'm reading, I would definitely suggest they work with a sangha or a group, a religious person, a spiritual advisor, or maybe even a therapist to talk about some of these very, very important and very real traumatic events. Because there's no app and there's no level of mindfulness that will help you get over certain, very traumatic periods in your life. You literally just have to go through them and you'll get to a point. The good news is you will get to a point. When I was 23, I'm 51, I woke up next to me and my lover had died in bed next to me. I mean, he was half purple. I thought I would never recover. When I was 31, I was flying to see my mother and as I got on the plane, I got a text message she had just dropped dead. I ended up flying to the funeral. Just five years ago, I left my partner of 20 years and my dogs and I thought I will never ever be happy again. And I was married two years ago now. I've been homeless twice in multiple drug rehabs and arrested. You can do this. You are stronger than you think. And I believe in you. So let, you know, if you want to reach out to me, reach out to me. I mean, my phone number's on the internet. It's on the slides. I'll help you with your phone. Just believe in yourself as much as your phone believes in you. You're welcome. I just got to thank you in the chat. Very nice. It's like you said, no questions. You covered everything, right? Well, I didn't cover everything. I mean, the one thing I've noticed, I mean, I'm very fortunate I get to travel the world talking about this stuff. I mean, can you imagine your full-time job is talking about how great the phone is in a time where everyone hates it? I think the challenge nowadays is people are so worried. I mean, it doesn't matter what age, it doesn't matter what income level, it doesn't matter what part of the world. Almost every audience I speak to, there's a feel of existential angst. There's a feel of nihilism. There's a feeling of fear. There's a death that hangs over a lot of people and people come to me and tell me they notice people aging faster than they ever have before. They can feel people are getting sicker, quicker. Just reading the news about the planet and some of the climate changes is enough to overwhelm you. What I'm asking for is a radical act of hope. What I'm asking for is a blind sense of faith in yourself and our own ability to come through this because at the end of the day, the earth will be fine. We might not be, but the earth will be fine and civil unrest will rest. And I really encourage people to, if you have a good practice, don't keep it to yourself. And if avoiding all of your devices and technologies is helping you with your practice, that's great, but at some point you have to use them again. So one of my favorite books is by Pema Children and the idea behind it is just abandoning hope, just this idea of hopelessness being the new hope. And I went through a period of time where that was super important to me, but the book is called When Things Fall Apart and I would encourage anybody who's dealing with any type of dread or anxiety or depression and the practice is doing a great job for you, but you need a little boost. Check out Pema Children's When Things Fall Apart the entire book is about dealing with drama that seems unfathomable when it comes to getting through it. I know you go around the world and teach this stuff, but how do you make, and you touched about this in the presentation also, in the little moments that you have with people, right? How do you try to make an impact on that? This is gonna be really, this is gonna sound very woo-woo. You know the word woo-woo, Patrick? Ah, it's like fluffy, magical. Magical, I have magical is a good way to put it. So I have learned just from my own practice and when I say my own practice, I don't mean like anything outrageously different, but over the years I've learned that that feeling of being grounded, like I can do it if I just sit here, like I can bring it online about any effort. It's something that's super transferable. And what we call paying attention is really the act of groundedness, transferance, right? When you're paying attention, you're not paying attention, it's paying attention, you and it. So in those little moments, it would sound very woo-woo-ish, but I have a pretty good track record of just being with someone without doing a whole lot and having to go, what was that? Who are you? And what they're just feeling is attention. The challenge is for people who have any level of practice in today's world, doing that grounded transferance, can make someone feel almost assaulted because people are so unused of being paid attention to. People are so unused to having someone feel their fear. So I always tell people move with it slowly and when you have to fluff up the feeling. So a lot of times when I approach someone and I can tell they're in a bad space but I still wanna connect, I literally will happy up. I don't know how to describe it, like in my chest, I make it happier and then I push it. And I don't know, I mean, I've studied a lot, I can't find what I'm talking about, but people with practice know what I'm talking about. So, you know, if you've only got a few moments or someone make them count and you don't have to say a whole lot, you have to feel a whole lot. Right, right. We touched earlier about, we did this, I don't know if you were listening then, we did a demo, we had Alan on the call, interpersonal mindfulness and we did a demo and we were doing eye contact via Zoom and then talking. And I felt a very strong connection. And it seems like now more and more, especially in the corporate world, we're engaging through devices, right? We're having more video calls. And what's interesting is we used to have audio calls so we could connect better. Then we switched to video to connect better so we could see each other but now most people have their videos off on video calls. So even in, I mean, I wanna hear it from you but I have a feeling that that groundedness, that presence, you could even send through technology. Absolutely, I mean, who amongst us, even though you won't admit it now, has sent an email or read intent in an email you received? I mean, I can tell you right now, I close a lot of business with what looks like witchcraft because I will literally word an email with so much love and not anything fluffy. Literally you know when you're writing what you're writing. So I don't think we needed video to do this. I think we could have done it on the phone. I think we could do it in pen and paper. Intent goes a long way. And intent is just gratitude practiced early. So I think, yes, we can do this. People, again, people with their phones on the videos on blank, there are times if you're at home or you're not feeling well, I think that's important. Plus there are days where we just feel ugly. It doesn't matter how attractive you are, days where you feel ugly or not desirable. And those are great opportunities to practice. And there's no good way to say it, but I think intent goes a long way and we need to stop worrying about technology pulling us apart because I know when I end this call I'll send a lot of love toward Patrick. And even though he won't see me, I won't be connected to the Zoom, they'll feel it. It just works. It works if you work it, we used to say in the program. I think this resonates very well with what you're saying. Comment from one of our participants. I understand the use of technology, we all use it. But how and when we use it is the challenge. That we need to work at. When, how, do I need it? Does it help? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it making me more stressful or letting me be in more contact with family and friends? Can I virtually slap the guy in the movies for not turning off his cell phone or do I practice my breathing? Lots to think about. Thanks. You know, again, I think there's a time and place. The challenge with judging someone using their phone and we've all been to that movie that he's talking or she's talking about is we don't know. You might get a text message that your mother just died. It happened to me, right? I'll tell you one thing. The last thing you think about is dimming your phone. We have to be very, very, very, very careful. It's not like it was a few years ago, you know, where these non-critical communications had other routes to get to us. You know, Apple on their devices just released an update that you can say silence all unknown numbers. You know, I was so excited by the first thought. I thought, you know what? I'm gonna avoid all these telemarketers. I literally turned it on. You know, the first phone call I missed was an important phone call from a relative I hadn't heard from in 20 years. The first phone call. And that was such a powerful reminder of me two weeks ago when I flipped that thing on and then I saw a missed call and I looked and I'm like, oh, this doesn't look like a telemarker. And I literally called it back because we all do that. And I heard Christopher and I'm like, yeah? Because the telemarketers don't call me Christopher. This is your cousin Heather in Boston. I heard you're coming to Boston. And my mind was blown. I hadn't talked to Heather since 20, almost 30 years. And she was in a rehab home and had been hooked on opioids and all those other kinds of stuff. And I got to see Heather. So, you know, we have to be super, super careful because it's just a dangerous time to love online. So I understand I want to slap the guy in the movie or the lady in the movie too, maybe not lady, but we just have to, you know, it's hard to love. But it's needed and we need to practice it. I'll just end with one more comment and then we'll end the live stream in about a minute or two to get ready for our next session. A few months ago I removed my Facebook and Instagram account and it has been the best decision I have made. I noticed I would be more focused on my social media instead of spending time with my family. And now it's just an amazing feeling going home and using my time with my family instead of being in social media. And again, I know a lot of people who've done that. I think the challenge with removing social media is twofold. One, a lot of people still use it. So basically you're cutting off people who might wanna contact with you. And it's a school of thought that says there's nothing wrong with that. The bigger challenge with signing off of social media is some people use it like a badge of honor. Look at me, I'm not on Facebook. Look at me, I don't use my phone. Look at me, I'm not on Instagram. And I think at that point you might as well get back on it because anytime you elevate yourself at the cost of someone else, it is the least mindful thing you can possibly do. So I'm all for getting off social media but just don't brag about it. You're no hero because you couldn't control your attention. Chris, as always, thank you, thank you. And Max, thank you for the participants as well. Okay, thank you so much, I'll talk to you soon. Bye everyone, and thanks for watching.