3. The End Of The Line

I tried to out-meditate my phone

Early morning, before the house woke up. A messy spare room.

I was sitting with my eyes closed, around 10 minutes into a one hour meditation, when I was overcome by an overpowering joy. It forced my smile into a huge grin, almost painful in its intensity. Every now and then I let out a little laugh. I felt warm. Against my closed eyelids I fancied the light brightened a little.

I stayed in this state for some time, perhaps more than half an hour, until I heard a commotion. The household had woken up, and gone downstairs to find that our dog Jumble had been sick on the rug again.

I rushed downstairs and pitched in with the tidying up. There was a lot of it. And some of it bore the hallmarks of being eaten and sicked up again. Jumble seemed fine - happy in fact.

I was still reeling from my bizarre experience. As I sponged the rug, I found myself wondering if I now needed to free myself of these commitments and leave my family to become a monk. Maybe because of my new meditative experience I now needed to relinquish all attachments?

But then who’d take my daughter to all her after-school classes? So many classes.

I had better stick around.

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The journey to the spare room experience had begun many months earlier.

(This essay is the third in what has unfortunately become a four part trilogy (sorry). Read the story so far here and here.)

I had begun meditating to tackle my phone use, but by now I was really enjoying myself. I had taken to meditation with the zealotry of a middle-aged man who gets into cycling one month and fills his garage with bikes the next. There was a tonne to learn and I read every book I could lay my hands on - Joseph Goldstein, Shinzen Young, Culadasa, Rob Burbea… the list went on.

Short of time in my busy life, I had decided that my train commute was a great time to practise. This was before the high vis vest - I was just a guy on a train with his eyes closed. Internal eccentricity only.

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From all my reading I had learnt that there were hundreds of types of meditation. I devoted my morning commute to a practice called noting.

In meditative noting, when you become aware of a new thought you quickly put a simple label on it. The goal - in part - is to reinforce your distance from your thoughts. It becomes clearer and clearer that thoughts just arise, and that “you” didn’t originate them.

It’s kind of fun, if you want a new secret hobby. So you would catch yourself thinking about eating cheese and you would come up with a simple label. Like “hunger”. Or you would wonder where you’d be in ten years’ time and you’d label it “future”.

Of course, labelling means categorising, which isn’t straightforward. I worried about a stupid thing I said to Clive at work. Should I label that as “work”, “Clive” or “replay” (a category I invented for when my mind revisited all sorts of stupid things I said)?

As I refined my categories, I noticed that a lot of thoughts ultimately manifested in ways I could use my phone. Things I could check. Things I could fix. I started labelling more and more thoughts as “phone”.

Bored? Use the phone. Worried about work? Check something on the phone. Worried about some health thing? Check it on the phone. Worried about anything? Distract myself using the phone.

So many mental processes led to “use the phone”.

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I guess it makes sense. Phones are infinitely available. And they are infinitely malleable. So they can evolve into whatever your brain wants them to be. They aren’t just an imprint of our darker nature, but of our whole nature.

My fear of being chucked out of my tribe? LinkedIn. Scanning for danger? The news. The human instinct to check under a bush for fruit? Let’s see what’s next on the scroll.

And with every use, the mental wiring supporting instinctive phone use was reinforced. The mind loves continuity - and soon enough the main reason to pick up the phone was that I did so before.

It was like all the reasons to use the phone were mountainous catchment areas feeding a fast-flowing, irresistible river.

This was all too easy to imagine as I sat on a train trundling to Waterloo surrounded by a carriage full of people using their phones. Some use looked deliberate, but it was mixed with an unthinking use very familiar to me: the quick opening and closing of apps, continual refreshing and re-checking. The mind just keeping doing what it did before.

When I stopped and meditated, it was as if I’d dammed up that river. I felt the weight of it pressing against my body like a wave.

In the silence, my mind invented a thousand reasons to just go with the flow. I imagined a whispering Evil Advisor living in my head. (Good thing I keep this sort of thing to myself).

The Evil Advisor was clever, it didn’t just shout “pick up the phone”. It came up with endlessly creative ways of getting me to pick it up. Starting with practical reasons, it would cycle through more and more until - ever wily - it would get me in the end: “Master… did we definitely message your mother-in-law about after-school pickup? We must check whether your daughter is safe!”

Time and time again the Evil Advisor won out. More and more often train meditations ended with “just one check” and before I knew it found myself absorbed in my phone.

Very often I couldn’t remember why I picked it up.

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No matter, I thought. I was enjoying the challenge now. I would try something new - back to the books.

But there was no easy answer.

Meditation is considered a science by its practitioners. Their view is that they watch the mind closely and draw conclusions about how it works.

But of course much of the writing predated the phone. And serious meditation practice seemingly rarely overlaps with heavy phone use.

To me it felt like the phone wasn’t just another compulsion - it was perhaps the biggest change to mental life in thousands of years.

I felt like I was in uncharted territory.

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During my commute meditations, I only picked up the phone when I forgot what I was doing. So my best guess was that I needed to build up my focus to extreme levels so I never forgot. Divert more power to Main Engineering.

Training to build up focus didn’t feel possible on a busy train. So I set my alarm early, before the house woke up, and meditated in the spare room.

In the quiet of early morning I would focus intensely not just on the breath, but on the exact sensations of the breath on the tip of the nostrils. I became - in the words of those who follow this approach, a connoisseur of the breath.

(And I enjoyed it. Except for the day when Jumble came and sat next to me and farted, something that was extremely challenging to treat with equanimity.)

I carried on, spending hours exclusively focused on the breath at the nostril. I could detect ridiculously fine details and hold my undivided attention on it for longer and longer.

Until that morning in the spare room. I had been reading yet another book by a meditation author, Leigh Brasington, which recommended taking a short break from focusing on the breath to see if one could find some inner joy within. I tried it.

And that’s when the happiness exploded inside me.

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I never want to speak disrespectfully about the experience of finding joy amid meditation. Clearly it was extraordinary, and it was a great comfort to know that such emotion could be within reach, independent of conditions. To this day I can still occasionally search inside me and find joy and amplify it - and I can still raise a smile when I do.

But to nitpick for a second - this extraordinary focus didn’t help me with what I set out to fix: my phone use.

However powerful my focus got, it never felt portable. It was something I could only achieve in benign conditions. There was little I could transfer to my daily life - once off the cushion I was back in the real world of dog sick and giving lifts. And amid all the distractions I just kept on automatically picking up my phone.

It felt like the end of the line for my meditation practice as currently framed.

I had already begun reading about a different approach that seemed more convincing as the answer. Prior to this I had been sceptical about some of the more extravagant claims around meditation. Having tasted spontaneous joy, I took the other promises of the ancients far more seriously.

Not ideas like reincarnation or connectedness - without disrespect to them, I can only report that I still haven’t found much to support them.

But I did wonder what else might be true.

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Don’t wonder for long! Read the final part here.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) feel free to share the joy of Phone Free Will.