3 Perspectives To Get Off Your Phone & Feel More Alive This Month

with relationship and digital wellness coach Libby Hoffman

Pause and reflect: Think of the last big mess in your house, your bedroom, your kitchen.

How long did it take you to clean it up?

In a conversation with my sister, I once said: “I can’t sleep until my room is clean.” She replied: “Oh really? I just crawl beneath the covers even when my bed is full.”

Which one are you?

This is not an article to shame your cleaning habits, but rather a thought experiment on the interconnection of maintaining, designing and savoring space, and complementary to that, your own inner world.

Aliveness resides not just in what a space is or is not, but in how we relate to it.

Let me rewind a minute.

It’s 8 pm in March of 2022. I’m sitting at the top of my driveway in Hawaii having just gotten off work at the dance/aerial silks studio. I’m sitting on my phone. I know I need to eat and shower but it’s the first time I’ve lived in the countryside and it’s almost pitch black outside. I’m also living alone for the first time and I don’t feel like walking from the dark of the night to the dark of the house. I don’t feel like cooking or eating alone, so despite knowing I’ll be up at 6 am for a Zoom call, I sit in the car, scroll, breathe, and stall all decision making.

Piled up dishes and procrastinating living in the safety of the pillow, the screen, the front seat — a hunger lingers. I know there is something more for myself and my life — I’m the type of person who up and moved to Hawaii — but I can’t put a finger on it, and so, I sit.

Sitting is not inherently a problem. In the Buddhist world, when we sit together, that’s called sangha, and the world is craving this kind of centered non-doing more than ever.

Stillness creates awareness.

It takes sitting in the stockpiled room to see the need for reconstruction.

It takes sitting at the still wheel to at times realize how hard being out of motion feels.

Pause is not a problem. And neither is pain.

But both become birthplaces of suffering, when we file the moments away and fill them with distraction.

So here, I am taking a moment of pause, to acknowledge pain, and to call us into greater clarity with ourselves and what might be possible this April, in even the next 30 days, if we saw ourselves, and these simple moments differently.

We live in a time few us live a technology-free moment. My invitation to you is for an hour a day, to shut off your devices entirely. Rather than focus on tech detox, I’m going to point you toward being with what comes up in the aftermath.

Here are 3 perspectives on letting “sitting” with stillness become an entry point for deepened aliveness with yourself and others.

Lean into the beauty of complexity.

Firstly, can you be curious rather than judgemental in the face of complexity. Your complexity as a person is not reducible, nor is it made to be quick-fixed by a single app, article, job or lover. Yet so often in the silence of a moment we jump to a “solution” to our own noise.

What if that complexity wasn’t a threat, but an invitation? When you start overthinking, imagine: “Would I try to think my way out of or into holding a baby kitten? Or looking at a beautiful sky?” Is your mind not as beautiful, intricate or emotional as such that you would rather reduce yourself to thoughts rather than allow yourself to sit in the sensation of being you?

Consider your mind as home. What does it need right now?

As you sit with yourself, consider the perspective of your mind as a home. So often we’re upset about a mess. But in a house, isn’t the mess of a room often just evidence it was well used? A dirty kitchen must be cleaned, but can we hold that in tandem with gratitude for what was savored, lived in, and enjoyed?

We’re quick to judge our own internal conflicts as evidence that something is wrong, and slow to appreciate the work or play we are taking on. As you consider your mind as a dwelling, you can free yourself from singular thinking about what you ought to or should be feeling, thinking or doing, and instead wonder about how to deepen the experience of what already is. Does your home need to be cleaned? Prepared for something that is coming? Or savored and enjoyed?

With these questions, what options open up in the time alone with yourself? Practice noticing not just over the course of a day, but 30 days.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed: What wants to be transformed?

The third perspective to consider is the potential to transform at an energetic level. Until we tap who we want to become, and how we feel now, we have little roadmap for guiding ourselves into anything different than what we’re already in. We multiply more of the same, whether that be from our own state, or what we’re mirroring of others.

Only when we pause to consider: How do I want to feel can we activate the awareness we need to change. And from that awareness a new choice also becomes possible. This choice is a small process for transforming energy–we take the acknowledgement of the stuckness or emotion and allow it to inform new action. Larger change can require more complex processes: from walking outside to dancing to phoning a friend, allowing ourselves to cry, or working more long term with a coach or therapist. But the reality is: if we don’t pause to observe, if we don’t identify a new emotion, and if we don’t take one step to move toward that, we are sitting in the same energy.

What energy will you create the next 24 hours from? What about the next 30 days?

Tapping into your aliveness doesn’t just mean hopping on a plane or creating a drastic life change. You can start with noticing the moments.

So in your next moment of stillness, listen, look, and lean into the potential for greater play.

Your aliveness lives here.

My name is Libby Hoffman. A few months after those nights in my car, I made a choice to leave my job and got my first 2 bedroom apartment in a small city a 5 minute walk from the ocean. I few months later I started my training in something I wanted to do for years: relationship coaching. Today, I am a holistic coach with a focus on relationship and somatic (mind, body) healing.

If something resonated I would love to hear from you.

If you would like to reconnect to your aliveness in group, join my workshop next Friday April 5th here.