It’s the very end of January. Snow sits heavy on the bare trees outside my window, my home feels quiet and still. My cat is looking longingly at me, chirping for a treat.
This morning I’m thinking about how to begin a Thing. How to begin a Substack. How to begin a Newsletter. How to allow myself to unfurl into something new that feels true to myself. My intention is simply begin with whats the most present and alive in my mind and body, and to keep following that thread. So, here it is.
I’ve been off social media for almost one month now and its going so well. My brain feels lighter and more clear. I feel more *in* my body, and less like I’m viewing myself from the outside. I feel softer and kinder towards myself. I find myself reading more - books, poetry, long-form writing. Amazingly, surprisingly, blessedly - my work has not decreased or suffered. In fact, January has been a pretty successful month in my private practice by all accounts. This has led to be think, with a slightly gleeful and subversive laugh, maybe I’ll leave social media for a whole year. Maybe…FOREVER!
Is substack social media? I’m not sure. I’ve been enjoying reading peoples substacks, enjoying delving into long form writing and personal narrative. I love to write. I guess the true test will be if I am able to withstand my sense of ground within myself, say I start posting and people start reading.
Recently I began listening to an NPR podcast called “The Body Electric” and promptly sent it to about a dozen people and started talking to all my clients about it. Its about technology and its effect on the body and the brain. Manoush Zomorodi (I love her as a podcast host), shares about the amazing and life altering affects of getting up to move every 30 minutes of sitting / computer work, to move lightly for 5 minutes. I implemented this into my day yesterday, and it felt great. Right now, I have a timer going, when it dings, I’ll get up and roam around my apartment and do some sun salutations.
In one of the episodes, she talks about new mixed-virtual reality technology coming out from Apple, that fuses together this reality with virtual reality. These high tech goggles project your computer screen or phone screen g onto your surroundings, which you can control with the swipe of your fingers (in the air). This gives me such a headache to think about. Monoush tried the goggles out and said something to the effect of “I feel like I’m trapped inside my computer.”
I’ve always been a bit of a luddite. When I was 16 in 2004, I didn’t want to get a cellphone. My parents made me get a flip-phone when I got my first vehicle (a 1989 Plymouth Sundance whom I named Cheryl & loved deeply). I had a flip phone until 2017. Maybe you don’t remember, but pretty much everyone had already had smart phones by this time, to the point where most everyone commented on my flip phone, and it was a shitty barely alive flip phone that only worked on speaker phone. I surrendered to the need for a smart phone because also in 2017 I began my own business and needed an upgrade. Even then, I started with a hand-me-down from my mom that I kept till its last dying breath.
And now I am so heavily dependent upon this Thing, like so many of us are. I think of my friend Caitlin, who I worked with on an organic farm in Maine when we were both 20, circa 2008. At that time, she had never owned even a flip phone, or a car! Many years later we reconnected, probably around 2019, and amazingly she still did not a cell phone or a car. Being around her is like being in a jar of honey. Or floating on a pond on a clear day. Or taking a nap in the sunshine. Her nervous system is so clear and dropped in. She’s been living on earth-time, not tech-time. And because she never entered that world, she hasn’t built her life around it in a way that makes it feel impossible to shift or change.
So when I see this video of Virtual or Mixed Reality, in which you’re wearing a headset thats basically merging your computer with your world that you’re then walking around in, I feel very uncomfortable. I think back to a friend of mine in college who once said to me, in a derogatory way, “You’re probably going to be one of those people who gets freaked out by robots!” And I looked at him like, yes, yes of course. How stupid to NOT get freaked out by robots!
I guess what I feel weary of is this: I resisted smart phones until I started a business, and got one because it made having a business so much easier. And now I’m intertwined and caught in the web in a way that feels impossible to get out of. So, say I resist Virtual Reality Goggles for a long time, until one day I cave because of the convenience, and then my world shrinks even smaller and my brain gets even weirder, until I feel like I cant live without it.
Maybe I’m writing this as a reminder to my future self. Tech that seems like its going to make my life easier is probably also a trap. Be wise, future Leela!
Another thing on this podcast was this guy who is an “expert” on how the body and brain work together. This guy, who presides in a science lab in academia, was stressed out (duh) and his kids recommended him doing yoga and pilates, which he scoffed at, because he said there was no actual scientific research date of that having any impact on the brain. But then he decided to test it with his fancy equipment and lo and behold found that yoga and pilates does decrease stress and have a direct impact on the brain. So then he went to pilates. At one point, some scientist was like “who would have thought that movement would impact the organs and the brain so much.” I’m sitting there listening like, ARE YOU KIDDING ME? These people are called “EXPERTS” and just recently they are accepting the notion that movement has some very real and beneficial impacts on the body and the organs and everything? And only after doing their own white-guy science around it. Sure, lets ignore Yoga, lets ignore Chinese medicine, lets ignore Indigenous wisdom. Its only true until some dude in a lab says it is.
No wonder we are where we are today.
Honestly, it makes me feel very smart. It makes me feel like my luddite, right-brain, kinesthetic, neurodiverse, pagan self is fucking Brilliant in this world. It makes me trust the wisdom that I hold dear to me.
I walk through the woods in silence and let my eyes drift over the white pines heavy with snow. I stop to touch the forsythia blanketed with thin ice. I stop by the pond and scan to where the cracks thread out like roots tangled below the forest floor. I hear the call of the Robin, and I take note of his return. Early this year. I stop and suck the snowy ice off a low hanging hemlock bough, and chew the ice mixed with a few zesty hemlock needles. The snow crunches below my feet and my nose is cold.
In a world of technology that is trying to steal my attention and profit off my insecurities, I am grateful to live surrounded by forest, who welcomes me into her quiet and wild embrace. I am grateful to feel connected to this body and the wisdom that flows through it, and to trust in the wisdom of this body and this wisdom of this land more than any white-guy science lab. I was having dinner with a friend the other night and we were talking about how there are all sorts of ways of showing up in activism. Some people are made for organizing big crowds of people and spear-heading movements. Thank god for those folks! And there are some folks who are quietly learning to listen to their bodies, other peoples bodies, and to the Earth. Which is vital, given that these oppressive paradigms we live within - capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy - depend upon people’s disconnection from their own bodies and the land.
Who knows, maybe I’ll get my rid of my smart phone and trade it in for a flip phone.
I’m aware of Pluto moving into the sign of Aquarius, and how there is so much talk about this transit’s association with AI, technology and transhumanism. It is no wonder to me that as our technology is deepening and broadening, through AI and mixed realities, I am having so many conversations with folks around moving away from tech and social media. Pluto in Aquarius might bring revolutionary ideas around technology and this thought feels particularly revolutionary in itself “maybe I don’t actually need any of this.” Maybe, I can survive and thrive without it.
So thus is born my inaugural substack post, on this Mercury ruled day when the moon Libra, and snow blankets the lands of so called Southern Vermont. Thank you for reading!
Have you ever done, or ever considered doing, a social media cleanse?
How’s your relationship to tech feeling these days?
What revolutionary ideas are you entertaining (big or small)?
May you be held by the bountiful beauty of this reality
May your mind and heart feel washed in Awe
May your body be a channel for your Truth
May the technology we choose to engage with be Life-Affirming
5 Things
1.) “The Body Electric” by Manoush Zomorodi & NPR (podcast series)
2.) “Finding Focus” on Hidden Brain (podcast episode)
3.) Love on the Spectrum (USA) Seasons 1 & 2 (i’m obsessed) (netflix)
4.) “Newsletter Class” Cody Cook-Parrott (formerly Marlee Grace) (workshop)
5.) “The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future” Riane Eisler (non-fiction
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Integrative Somatic Therapy Sessions & Transformational Containers (remote & in-person sessions available)