Mindfulness in an Age of Distraction
I wrote this piece some years ago and am rewriting and publishing it today. We have been teaching mindfulness at our Zen Life & Meditation Center of Chicago now for over ten years. Today mindfulness is popular for good reason. We are in need of tools to help us retrieve a quality of attention that can be present to our embodied and relational awareness.
Social media has impacted our ability to pay attention without distraction in radical ways and the article the follows will explain some of the ways this is taking place. It is estimated that the average person sees about 5,000 ads a day. The all-consuming impact of technology infiltrates our lives with a voracious appetite that demands our constant attention. Attention is now a scarce commodity and this is why we need tools like mindfulness to retrieve it again. We are living in a new digital age. Not just an age of distraction, but a new kind of colonial age. The colonial lords no longer need proxy armies to exploit the resources of others. They have Madison Avenue and multi-media empires instead. Make no mistake. They are mining your attention. They use algorithms and information about your habits and life style to get you to buy their product, the next version, the next cell phone or video game.
One symptom of this is our increasing disembodiment and isolation. Americans are some of the loneliest people on the planet. We have lost communities and the trust in our own embodied wisdom. Our body, mind and heart are out-of-sync. And this makes us increasingly vulnerable to anxiety and fear. This seems to come suddenly from out of left field. It is unsettling and bewildering. For some, it may be the source of trauma or panic attacks. Our fragmented and distracted attention is the source of much of our dread and angst. If you don’t take back your attention, others will do it for you.
Mindfulness is an embodied awareness that can help you be intimate with yourself and others. It takes intention. It takes practice. It’s not a technique. It’s an act of courage in which you decide once and for all, to reclaim your life. I have been teaching meditation for over 30 years. And I see that for many, it is not an easy practice. Many find it hard to sustain on a regular basis. The distractions are seductive. So, it’s an act of courage to keep company with yourself in this quiet way without reaching for the closest shiny object. When you establish meditation as a regular aspect of your life, you are taking a gigantic step towards personal and social freedom. Fortunately, there are genuine traditions and teachers and communities still teaching these skills. As we approach another new year, please seek them out and commit to living the full measure of your own humanity. Sanity and wisdom are your birth right. They have never left you. You’ve just lost track of how important this quality of attention and awareness is. It’s time to take back the most important aspect of your humanity. Don’t squander it. And don’t give it away. Mindful awareness is a source of healing, health, wellness and integration on many levels, both physically, psychologically, mentally, and spiritually. At our Zen Center we speak of this spiritual path as living a Zen-inspired life of openness, empathy and clarity. May all beings be at peace with the deepest truth of themselves. @ 2022 Roshi Robert Althouse