The Discipline of Vipassana

Day 1 of my Vipassana retreat, and I am so mad that I have been asked to sit for 12 hours of meditation, starting at 4:30am, that I take four retaliatory naps throughout the day (and two during unsanctioned times).

I had done silent meditation retreats before, the last five-day just a few months prior, so I thought I was prepared. But the 4:00am wake up times with no walking nor yoga was another level of intensity. For me, the silence and turning inward was no problem. But I was not prepared for this. If the IMS retreat was like a military boot camp, then Vipasanna was like training for Navy Seals. The pressure valve of being with oneself is released a little when one can get up, can walk, can shift positions in one's seat; take that away, and you sit in a pressure cooker of yourself.

I had looked at the schedule before I came, so I should have known. But actually experiencing twelve hours of seated meditation in a single day, and knowing that the next eight days of my life would also contain that very experience, was a whole other world away from reading the schedule. Jon Kabat-Zinn famously talks about how you can't get nutrition from eating the menu, you have eat the food, as a way of describing the importance of actually practicing meditation. By that same law, I couldn't possibly begin to understand the pressure I would experience when asked to sit for that length of time, day in and day out. I just had to do it.

Vipassana is a rigid and specific sequence of meditation techniques designed to sharpen your mind and attune it to the entire internal landscape. You start the first day by only concentrating on the breath in the triangular shape starting above your upper lip and following your nose line up to between the eyes. The next day you narrow it down to focusing on the movement of the breath against the skin, and then the next just to the area between the upper lip and below the nose. Finally, you focus on sensations on that tiny space—tingling, heat, coolness, pain, pressure— for hours, and hours, and hours. At last, on day four, you are directed to start slow body scans, noting areas that are blind to sensation or painful "gross solidified sensation," and noting all with equanimity. No judgement. No reactivity. No nothing. Just noticing. The catch is that for three of the twelve hours a day, you are no longer permitted to move or shift in response to discomfort. You cannot open your eyes. You cannot uncross your hands. You cannot wiggle your toes. You just note.

After learning this strategy on Day 4, and sitting motionless for most of the 1 1/2 hour teaching (my knee screaming and searing pain in my back ultimately did cause me to squirm), I walked quickly back to my room and burst into hot, angry tears. How could I be asked to sit in the pain? What is the point of this? I had been practicing a meditation that allowed mindful deliberate movement when pain became too intense, and this permitted none. I was convinced I was injuring my knees and each hour tried a different position. I eventually found a way to sit that relieved that pain, but the back pain would not dissipate.

At first, it was just a generalized terrible pain. The same pain I made peace with my last gentler retreat, so I wanted so badly to be soothing and loving towards it with my narration. But there was no space for mental constructs in this particular meditation. Only looking and perceiving. There was to be no action, movement or thoughts, at all to change the experience. Just observation.

As I looked at it longer, I saw the pain was sharp and radiated down from my right shoulder blade. I saw that it occasionally faded from one spot only to heighten in the spot next to it. It was a gripping tense pain that eased for a moment or two with subtle back and side bends to the left and right, tilting of the pelvis forward and back, only to resume moments later with the equal or greater ferocity. Every formal sit, we were reminded to just observe, without needing to change or control, just observe experience. I practiced again and again bringing my attention to that spot, allowing myself to be completely absorbed in the sensation, and then backing away to explore sensation through the rest of the body.

I was promised that the sensation would resolve on its own if I did not fight or engage with it. I had a hard time keeping faith, and as I watched, it seem to multiply and shift.

On the fifth and sixth days, I started to see cracks in the intensity. I noticed that I could sit with the sensation for longer before I started getting frantic about it. I even had more transcendent experiences once the pain dissipated where I could feel subtle sensations all across the body. I got excited to see these shifts. I must be making progress! I must be becoming more enlightened!

"I have been having these cool experiences," I informed my teacher, "but I'm not sure what it all means."

"Nothing," she responded placidly, "Just keep watching."

Sigh.

My mind wanted so badly for it all to mean something. Surely I was cracking the space-time continuum with my laser-like focus. Surely I would be drifting into to cosmos soon for my efforts. Instead, it turned out I was just making up a story about a particularly pleasant constellation of sensations.

This stuff is hard. Nonreactive means nonreactive to everything. You don't react to pain by trying to make it go away; you don't react to pleasure by making up a story about it meaning something. But in order to NOT do those things, you watch yourself DO them again. And again. And again. It's so very human to want discomfort to stop and pleasure to stay, but the whole game is about letting it all go. The moments where I could, what freedom there was. What a delightful (yet fleeting) experience of noticing without clinging or aversion.

There was also something very freeing about having every moment of my day accounted for, even if I just spent that time sitting and watching. I didn't have to decide if I was going to get up at 4:00am and meditate. They rang a bell, so I did. I was told to come back at 9am, and to eat at 11:30am, and to listen at 7:00pm, so I did. These are not choices I would make for myself on a daily basis, which is part of why I go to retreat. If someone didn't tell me to stay motionless for the full hour, I would most certainly wiggly my way out. But then I wouldn't have had the experience of seeing what happens next. What happens the eleventh hour of meditation in a day. What happens the eighth day of meditation in a row.

On our last day, our teacher informed us it was important to keep up our practice, an hour in the morning and an hour at night, to maintain our sharpened awareness. I knew immediately I wouldn't be committing to that. Two hours of my precious waking time dedicated to silent observation? Enlightenment isn't yet worth it to me.

I walked away with a sense that I could stay longer in my discomfort, and react slightly less, than when I arrived. It is said that you're always practicing something, and to make up for all of those years of practicing avoidance, resistance, and grasping, I can't expect one week to bring me to a new plane of existence. But even the slightest shift has got to be worth something. And for that, I am grateful.

Finding My Way Back Into Balance

In having left the classroom after five years, I have finally found myself in a place where I can do so much that I've always wanted to do: "...sit by the window when it rains and read books...paint because I want to...listen to my body..." And more... repetitively strum the ukulele with no thought for song recall, cook a meal and eat it one bite at a time, write letters to friends around the country, wake up with the sun shining around the curtains.  It is so luxurious to have this wealth of time.

Back in Washington, D.C., it was normal to wake before sunrise and return home well into the evening. It was expected that people sat in coffee shops on weekends with spillover work, ate most meals out of the house, and scheduled friend dates one right after the next so never was there an afternoon to fritter away. Unscheduled time, the rare occasion when it came up, was met with confusion and unease.

I don't want to work in overdrive my whole life only to begin finding space in my old age. I wonder why it is that this is the advanced civilization that we've created. Is this really how we want our lives to go? The constant pushing to do, to perform, to better, to acquire is exhausting.

And yet.

Too little structure and I find my life becomes shapeless and vapid. I find myself whiling away my days with endless streaming Netflix and Facebook and handfuls of popcorn. Also, not inconsequentially, I find my savings rapidly depleting. I do not thrive when I am let loose in the universe with little to hold me in place. For myself, I like a box. Not a tight box, mind you, but one which prevents me from dissipating into nothingness. I like having something to work in and push against, as long as it isn't too small.

The quote above is not quite right for me, I guess. I don't, "just want to be, boundless and infinite." I want to balance that being with doing. There are many things that can be done to contribute to this world, and it feels important to me to do one of those things.  I want to earn my keep by providing service to others. I want to have days full of purpose and meaning.

One of Pantanjali's most quoted yoga sutra states, "Sthira Sukkham Asanam."  This means the posture should be steady AND easeful. We need both.

My life quest is to find that balance between Popcorn-munching Neftflix-watching Couch-potatoeing and Endless Email-responding Overscheduled Work-worship. I would guess that the sweet spot looks different for different people, but we all crave the balance.

Because that equilibrium point is always shifting, it is like approaching infinity, and we are likely never able to get it just right. I swung hard out of my years of teaching and efforting into the opposite extreme of underemployment and relaxation. Now I work to bring myself back towards the midline, so that I might both give something of value to the world and continue to cultivate inner wellbeing as I do it.

The Muppets of Thought

I've been loving the abundant use of Muppet characters to personify the voices in our heads.

Earlier this month, Mindful Magazine used the Statler and Waldorf heckling duo from The Muppets to personify our Inner Critic.

My favorite animated movie Inside Out  presented its own adorable muppet-esque characters to represent five of Paul Ekman's six universal emotions: Sadness, Fear, Anger, Joy, and Disgust (leaving out Surprise).

I love this phenomenon because imagining these voices as muppets completely disarms them. In my head, there are more than a few voices who are often fully locked and loaded, ready to fire at anything that moves, like: 

The guy at the coffee shop who is laughing too loudly.
The woman at my panel discussion who wouldn't smile when I looked at her.
Anytime I get in front of more than five people to share something I know.

Any of these events can trigger the peanut gallery and the commentary rolls in:

There are other people working here, sir.
What happened to you this morning? Wait, what am I doing wrong? Why don't you like me? 
I don't know anything, and I need to get out of here before they figure it out.

These trains of thought can be incredibly powerful and completely derailing. They can impact how we respond to others (I've on more than one occasion glared at THAT guy). If we aren't careful, they run around without us even realizing it, driving us to do things that we wouldn't choose to do. We need to do some work to put them in their place.

Step 1: Notice you're having those thoughts. Creating quiet unstimulated space each day often brings thoughts to the forefront. They eagerly present themselves to your consciousness, filling any empty space you give them. This doesn't have to be anything formal. Keep your phone in your pocket for a few minutes of your bus ride, while on the loo, or while walking down the street. Get curious about what's going on up there.

So let's say we start gaining that awareness and noticing we are having those thoughts. Then what? 

My first instinct is always to fight 'em (I've got a bit of a fiery personality): 

Relax! It's not such a big deal.
Stop being so judgy and such a coward! You don't know what's going on with her.
Shut up.

There's a back, a forth, and before you know it, World War III is taking place in my head. 

Unless. Unless I...

Step 2: Imagine them as Muppets. This helps me in a couple of ways. 

One. It helps me remember my thoughts aren't me. That is, they are some separate beings that don't have to be taken too seriously, and I don't have to blame myself when they say something terrible or embarrassing. I've heard it said that the brain secretes thoughts like the mouth secretes saliva. Our thoughts are just going to keep spinning whether we like it or not, and they are going to be all sorts of crazy, so we best not get too attached to them. 

Two. Muppets are cute, and cute things are hard to take seriously. Even the grumpy ones are fuzzy and soft. So when I consider them as Muppets, I feel less annoyed at their existence. It is much easier for me to look upon them with compassion, which both defuses them and my sometimes overly aggressive reply.

This is easy enough to remember in my calmer moments, but how do I remember it during the more chaotic moments when they Muppets are on a tirade, and I can barely hear myself?  We need to train when things are relatively easeful if we most want to have access to that rational chill part of self that can laugh at our Muppets. 

Step 3: Train in the emotional off season.

Because of my more hot-headed nature, my teacher, Vinny Ferarro, prescribed me compassion meditation at a retreat last year. When I spoke of the silly annoyances I found arising through our silent practice— like the person who would walk through my mindful walking space, for instance— he suggested combating those "Muppets" gets you no where. Instead, I was told to try actively cultivating a compassionate voice. 

So I put aside my skepticism and have added repetition of the lines below into my daily practice. (Into the blank space you can insert "I", the name of a friend or family member, or even an enemy if you've filled your heart up first with some warm fuzzies.)

May _______ be happy.
May _______ be healthy.
May _______ be patient.
May _______ be peaceful.

You can adapt these lines to fill whatever quality you are trying to cultivate. When I speak them to myself in meditation, I try to notice what it feels like in my body. It turns out that even sending the wishes to others still has the bonus benefit of creating the sensation of warmth and expansiveness in myself.

That warmth and expansiveness help me keep perspective. The sensation helps me remember my thoughts are nothing but Muppets, and are best dealt with in good humor and compassion. Every now and then I can even laugh at myself and the ridiculous things they find to be worried, angry, and frustrated about. 

So to the Muppets: I hear you, loves. I hear you.

Am I legit?

When have you done enough— enough studying, training, practicing, experiencing, researching, retreating — that you are legit?

Which of us get to be the teachers of this world, and who needs to sit back and do some more learning before they even approach the front of the room?

I have been thinking a lot about these questions recently, as I step onto a new path where I am 100% a newbie teacher.

Am I legit?

The first thing I am tempted to do in the face of this question is list the experiences that "legitimize" my teacher status. My grandmother was a yoga teacher, so it's in my blood. I have been practicing yoga seriously for over ten years. I am a certified yoga teacher and did my yoga teacher training in 2010, then taught at various points for the next five years. I have been intensively studying mindfulness in schools these last few years. I have committed myself to a particular lifestyle, and practice regularly, so I have a wealth of personal experiences to draw from.

My initial reaction to this list is that it's a middle of the road to bottom of the barrel resume, by any spiritual practice standards.  I can hear voices immediately naming that "real" teachers have studied in India for decades, sat silently in ashrams for months at a time, and studied with a teacher intensively in order to enhance their knowing. Or, in the secular movement, legit teachers have created their own evidence-based programs associated with high-powered institutions and conducted years of research on their work.

There have been a number of criticisms lobbed against both yoga and mindfulness for churning out unprepared teachers who offer superficial experiences and understandings of deep and ancient traditions.  My own yoga teacher trainer, Devarshi Steven Hartman, recently disowned the term "yogi" on his Facebook page for the highly commercialized corporatized empire he self-admittedly had a hand in building. And I, too, have had that response to the Lululemon exercise yoga craze that sits on top of a deeper, more complex, whole practice. I understand much of the mindfulness I practice is distilled from a deep Buddhist tradition.  I am left to wonder where the line is between superficial bum strengthening affirmation exercises and meaningful practice?

Furthermore, I am very aware that I am still early on this path. I still struggle in the morning to stay off my cell phone from the moment I awaken. I still fight sitting on my cushion. I still say mean things and wish I didn't. So am I "allowed" to be a teacher?

A few things have helped shape my answer to this question.

As I was talking through this with a friend, she pointed out something a teacher of hers shared: Buddhists don't have a trademark on mindfulness. The same could be said for Hinduism. While Buddhism certainly created many of the amazing practices we apply to secular spaces, they are not the only one with a tradition of mind-clearing and focusing exercises. Every spiritual tradition has some element of that. I attended a Quaker college, and a major component of that school's tradition is sitting in silence until you feel moved to speak. It is quieting the body and mind to hear something deeper. That's something anyone can do, of any or no religious background, and there are a million different ways of talking about how to get there.

And yet, I still wondered if I embody my practice enough to facilitate experiences for others. Ankati Heather Day and I hosted a yoga retreat last weekend, and we had women come who had deep practices and decades of experience steeped in their own spiritual traditions, from yoga to Judaism. What happened at that weekend reminded me that sometimes the role of the teacher is simply to create space and get out of the way.

I did not teach these women anything they did not already know. I held space for them to explore that. They brought their own deep knowledge to the table and together we co-created understanding.  I was transparent about my intimidation around the wealth of knowledge around me, and then again about the deep gratitude I had for them bringing their whole selves forward. Part of learning to trust myself as a teacher is trusting others to get what they need from an experience.

On the opposite end of that spectrum, I sat on a wellness panel this past week representing mindfulness alongside women from Harvard, Mass General Hospital, and a prestigious independent school. We were there to share our knowledge with parents who wanted to learn more about wellness in schools. I found I had things to say. And my perspective was valuable. Even if I wasn't conducting research as my fellow panelists were, I had experiences of kids practicing mindfulness to draw upon, and could speak to its beautiful messiness and complexity. I had my data from years of reading and studying. I had personal anecdotes. I found my voice had value there, too, even if it wasn't from the top of a well-established institution. I didn't have to be able to say all of the things, just the things I knew.

We need yoga teachers who move us safely through asana and don't talk about flattening our bums or abs the whole time. We need mindfulness teachers who have sat with themselves and fully understand what it feels like to be in a space of equanimity. We need them both to be able to give us lots of metaphors, cues, anatomy lessons, and data, that explain these practices so we can find something that resonates for ourselves. We need well-trained practitioners who have committed to living their respective practices.

And we need them to be honest and humble, recognizing both their own strengths and limitations. We need them to be able to say when they don't know, and come out of postures when their backs hurt, and apologize when they make mistakes.  And we need them to trust us to take what we need from them and leave the parts that do not resonate. We need them to know they don't know everything about everything, and yet their experience and perspective still has value.

I strive to be that kind of teacher.  I am legit in that I can offer what I know and have learned, and admit there is much I still haven't experienced. I know there are teachers who have trained in their respective fields for much longer than I, and they offer a perspective from a different place on their path. But that doesn't mean that I what I offer is not valuable. So I continue on this path as student and teacher. But it is only through my honesty with what I do and don't know that I legitimize myself.

I aspire to the confidence of the sage MC Hammer's line,"Too legit, too legit to quit."

Gif credit to: Time Magazine

My deepest fear: Manual transmission.

I am currently engaging in one of the most terrifying stunts I have ever undertaken in my adult life:

I am learning to drive a stick shift.

The first time I got behind the wheel in the abandoned parking lot, I was literally shaking with fear. The shaking has not stopped in the month that I have been puttering around town stalling out, rolling backwards, and, on rare occasion, seamlessly shifting.  I take deep breaths and hum to myself.  Sometimes I have to have my boyfriend drive us back because I am too riled up and need to decompress.

People have fallen into two camps when I seek public support for this feat during various conversations and on social media platforms.  On the one hand, they are supportive and congratulatory. They say things like,

Or they tell me a story about how hard/impossible it was for them to learn it, and good on me (thanks guys!)

On the other hand, they say things like,

"It's really not that hard."

and

"I had to learn driving from one side of the country to the other. You'll be fine. (subtext: stop being a weenie)"

The problem with this side of the argument is that it ignores what is actually making driving this car so hard. They're probably right that the mechanics of driving a stick shift are totally manageable. Anyone who can simultaneously pat their head and rub their belly should be able to get this down eventually. But that is not really my biggest stumbling block.  It is my FEAR of driving the car that is so hard to overcome, justified or not (though I would argue that in a hilly city like Portland, the very real chance of rolling back into someone makes it justified.)

For those of you who can't possibly understand my terror, I ask that you suspend disbelief for one minute and imagine yourself doing something that is, in fact, very scary for you. Maybe putting your head in a lion's mouth. Maybe it's working with twenty-four bonkers middle schoolers by yourself. Whatever that scenario may be for you is what I face every time I get behind the wheel.  The heart pounding, muscle-shaking, hard-breathing is my physiology reminding me that I am ready to fight or flee. The fear is real.

To tell you the truth, I was kind of hoping that I would be able to escape this kind of fear when I decided to dedicate my life to mindfulness and yoga. Don't you, get, like, a free pass from being human when you're studying this stuff? Shouldn't you just be able to breathe yourself into a blissful calm and approach all scenarios with that grace and centeredness? Perhaps my set point is particularly low, and I just need A LOT of work to get there, but in the meantime I'm constantly bumping up against my humanity in all of its glory.

There was one article in Outside magazine that I recently read that gave me hope. It was about the great stuntman Felix Baumgartner who was getting ready to jump from 24 miles above the earth for the highest BASE jump ever. However, he was stymied from completing the feat, despite his impressive stuntman record, because of his overwhelming fear of one aspect: his spacesuit. He would put it on and panic.  It got so bad that he had to be slowly coached into wearing it, one body part at a time, by Michael Gervais, sports psychologist to the elite athletes (Baumgartner did eventually complete the jump successfully in October of 2012). This guy is no stranger to death-defying stunts, and surely had managed to get his fear in line on many occasions before. But this suit was really an obstacle for him, and he had to do a lot of work to overcome it.

My point is that we all have fears, even crazy stuntmen, and when we are confronted with them, we have to figure out how to manage that fear.

Today I texted my boyfriend, proudly reporting that I had driven around the block. By myself. I literally took a right, and another right, and a third before gliding back into our parking spot. But what a relief it was to do it!  It wasn't the driving I was proud of. I was proud because I sat with that nervousness, breathing and observing my body challenging me to take off running from this stressful scenario. I sat until my blood stopped pumping so hard through my veins, so I could turn on the ignition and make the loop.

I still (not-so)-secretly hope that we will be gifted a new car with automatic transmission (anyone trying to get rid of theirs?) I am in no way enjoying this process, as I don't really like driving in the first place, and there are lots of extra steps to think about now. But I am trying. And I am proving to myself I can do scary things. I guess that might be worth it.

The Trees Don't Care

Chewonki

The Trees

The trees do not care about
   your voice quaking when you speak in public
   that flap of skin that dangles from your upper arm
   the unanswered emails piling up in your inbox.

They sigh only in response to
   the wind.

Nor do they care about
   the countless hours you've sat in meditation
   the rugged mountains you've summited
   the "A" you received on your Spanish midterm sophomore year.

They applaud only in response to
    the wind.


One of my biggest fears is to become a Spiritual Egoist. You know the type. They may have an abundance of culturally appropriated items— bindis, mala beads, henna ink — adorning their body. They may speak to you in Sanskrit, have a spiritual name, and end every exchange with "Namaste."  Every yoga class is an opportunity to show off their press handstand, and every conversation becomes a time to share stories of how much gratitude they experienced after spending time in India, with those who have so little. They are conspicuous because they lack authenticity. They are "so far long along their spiritual journey" that they see no way to learn from the voices and experiences of people around them.

Most of us in this community have some of these elements in our lives. After all, cliches only become trite after overuse, but are first rich nuggets of truth. The elements alone are not what make us inauthentic. For some, they are deeply meaningful displays of who we are. A close friend of mine was given a new name after a powerful ceremony, and to her that embodies who she is. I see nothing wrong with that. Another friend lives in India half the time because it is there that she feels most fulfilled. I, myself, have a set of mala beads that I wore around my wrist from my yoga teacher training, imbued with the love of all the yogis in my class. It is when we use these things to pump ourselves up, to shore up our identities as spiritual people, that we've gone astray.

I had to catch myself in these moments of egoism this past week when I spent four days with thirty amazing educators at a Teachings In Mindful Education (TIME) retreat at Chewonki, an environmental education organization an hour outside of Portland. There, we were invited to explore self care and mindfulness in a community of teachers from up and down the East Coast. Having spent the last year and half studying mindfulness in education, and implementing programming in my school, I had to hold back from jumping in on lectures and answering questions. I knew the answers! I wanted to tell everyone what I knew!  In truth, I also wanted everyone else to know I knew.

When I noticed myself seeking this, I recoiled in disgust. I was being that person. I was unavailable to hear from other participants because I was so eager to share with everyone what I thought.  I wanted affirmation. And I wanted it, I came to realize, because of insecurity. I am about to embark on a new adventure, providing mindfulness education to young people and teachers around New England. In those moments, I needed assurance from others that I was qualified. That I was someone they would trust to bring mindfulness to their school. 

But spending my energy showing off left me unavailable to take in what was being offered right then. In order to really soak in that experience, I had to be present for it. And in fact, in order to really offer anything to others, I needed to move my ego back and heart forward. Indeed, the moment when I felt most useful to anyone involved saying very little. It was a deep listening exercise when I was tasked with hearing someone's dilemma, without fixing, critiquing, or judging, but just listening deeply.  It was being present in that moment for this brave soul that I felt most skillful. In not trying to prove myself, I had proved myself. The more I let go of trying to be something specific, and was receptive to what was there, the more I was to able to offer and soak in. 

It is not possible to get rid of ego (Unless you are enlightened, I hear. And then, well, congrats). The more I berate myself for this part of me, the part that puffs up in front because of the insecurity it hides, the smaller I feel. But if I can look gently at that part of myself. If I can acknowledge and hold space for, rather than judge, the insecurity and the bravado that springs forth, then I can offer that to others.

The most valuable advice I got this past week from one of my teachers (who got it from one of his), was, "Get on the cushion and love the sh** out of yourself." He meant this for all parts of ourselves, and particularly those that we have not made peace with, the scared parts and conceited parts. I like to imagine those parts as muppets (a la Inside Out) who have their own agenda and don't need to be taken too seriously nor held too harshly. They just need a little space and some love.

I started with a fairly critical view of those trying to inflate themselves in the spiritual community. In fact, we have seen the heavy consequences of this with guru-types who have built themselves up for a big fall when their fallibility becomes obvious (John Friend took out my favorite style of yoga, Anusara, on his way down. Now it's hard to find people who teach it because no one is willing to affiliate with it anymore). However, it does me no good to begrudge them for their overinflated sense of importance, nor their fears that they are likely hiding underneath that. The more work I do to reconcile those parts of me in myself, the more I can hold others with that kindness. Likely the disgust I feel for them has much to do with the disgust I feel for that part of myself, and toning it all down may help open me up.

So can I be like the trees? Can I hold all the parts of myself, and all the parts of others, without acclamation or condemnation? With compassion? Even this Spiritual Egoist? I sure hope to learn.

Keeping life in three dimensions

As a teacher, I relied heavily on my computer. I used my computer as a tool to collaborate with other teachers that were in the same room with me, or supplemental to late night phone calls. I had it connected to the smartboard, and used it to organize class periods and share information with my students. I communicated with families and other staff throughout the school in great volume through this amazing tool. 

But I also spent the majority of my time interfacing with my colleagues and students face-to-face.  I hugged their bodies, ranging from pint-sized to ginormous, as they entered my door each morning. I absorbed their joys, sorrows, and frustrations as they grappled with the challenging task of learning. I smelled the sweet middle-school funk each day as they crowded into my room after gym. Everything was loud and vibrant and tangible. 

Since starting my new career, I have found myself staring at my screen for hours at a time. I understand this is not radical for many people. I understand this is "normal." But my recent conversion to this role of Computer Worker has given me insight into what it means to be facing a computer for hours at a time. 

I am staring at a glowing screen and communicating through my fingers pressing plastic keys. Conversations are silent. Emails never quite capture sentiment, emoticons and all. I can't feel the people to whom I'm "talking," nor smell them (for better or worse). Everything it, literally, flat.  It is amazing how much time one can spend in two dimensions. 

And on top of the work elements, there is so much socialization that happens through my computer and phone. Text messages, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (I just signed onto that and it's completely overwhelming). What a beautiful curse to be able to share everything in our lives with others. What a strange compulsion to want to. I read once that we get a dopamine hit from our pleasure center every time we get a like, an email response, or a comment on our wall. I definitely notice a little rush from these electronic affirmations. 

The crux of this is that, however good it may feel, it is nothing compared to the hit we get in the three dimensional world. And when we limit ourselves to our screens, we limit our ability to absorb the energies of others, to smell the salty breeze that flows in through our windows, to taste the sweet and tart juices of the apple as we take a bite (I am embarrassed to admit the number of times I've eaten while futzing around on the computer). I don't again want to miss one minute of the awe-inspiring sunset as we cruise across the gentle waters out to Peaks Island because I had to send one final email. 

There's nothing evil about the electronic world, and many of us have to learn to work with it. In this strange new world, I know that I need to be intentional about time away, about leaving my phone in my purse or (gasp) at home. I need to stand up from my computer and chat with the person next to me at the coffee shop every so often. I need to be intentional about when I engage, and when I put it away. 

Because this world is too rich to spend all my time in two dimensions.