Spiritual growth comes from treating daily life and spiritual practices as one and the same. To do this requires accepting reality and responding to life’s events with calm awareness rather than reacting out of desire or fear. By surrendering to the present moment and acting without personal motive, one can achieve true spiritual evolution and live in harmony with life as it unfolds.
True spiritual growth comes from ceasing to constantly focus on yourself—I, me, and mine. Instead of getting caught up in personal likes and dislikes, you can learn to serve the moment in front of you with your full heart and soul, without expecting anything in return. To do this, you must gradually become comfortable with both positive and negative experiences by letting go of inner resistance. Understand that spiritual practice is not about seeking rewards, but about deep surrender to the present moment and serving that moment as your gift to God.
It’s been half my life—literally half the years of my life—lifting my chin for pictures, anticipating the critical gaze of a digital audience, offering my presence half-heartedly to the world around me to to draft a clever caption, choose a flattering filter, and watch as my phone tells me if this time my work will be rewarded with worthiness.
Too many nights avoiding myself, letting the blue-light-lullaby of my screen become a substitute for true soothing. It’s been half my life; holding up the mirror of comparison to everyone’s best days and hottest takes, highlight reels curated with effortless nonchalance, and now the mirror of comparison to a perfected self made in the algorithm’s image. It’s been half my life of fractured attention, commodified vulnerability, fury, and fear taking turns with despondence.
What if my real life stopped being my body or the land, and became the non-place I devote my hours to?
And it’s been half my life wandering daily into the galleries of artists’ and thinkers’ most beautiful ideas. Half my life keeping far-away loved ones close.
It’s true that the Internet gave me my career, my marriage. It made visible the threads of similarity across a quickly dividing globe. It showed me life-saving examples of people who survived what I needed to survive and it broke my heart open at the things no one should have to.
I like to misquote Carl Jung when he said something almost like “a paradox is our most valuable spiritual tool.” I’m not interested in finding the elusive, singular hack that will make screen time less alluring forever. I’m not interested in a lifetime of cycling through eras of detox and excess. Vacillating between the high of a new regimen and the crash of shame when social media works once again, exactly as it was designed.
I’m a therapist. I know that hacks can be tools, or bandaids. A self-help, step-by-step, sales pitch plan can feel like salvation, but it’s not the medicine of being in an evolving conversation with yourself. I am more interested in making art. I’m more interested in learning to tolerate the tension between social media’s danger and its magic. I’m more interested in learning to like myself, unsolved.
And when I’m learning the same lesson, again, the hard way, I know that my allies in finding safe passage through the digital age are art and writing. Creativity is how we imagine a different future.
So I wrote us this book. It’s a place to start that conversation with yourself about what is really happening between you and your screen; who profits from the ways it harms you, and how to protect the parts of it that are genuinely good, because parts of it are.
So if you are ready to join me—an art psychotherapist who both loves the life her phone enables and desperately needs to put it down—we’ll make some art. We’ll sit in the stunning and maddening paradox, and we’ll find creative ways to author our own definitions of real wellbeing when we choose to be on social media.
And together we’ll find the art of thriving online.
Consciousness is the foundation of all meaning, because without awareness, nothing has significance. People mistakenly identify with their ego, which is simply a collection of thoughts and self-concepts they are aware of. This false identification leads to tremendous suffering. True spiritual enlightenment comes from recognizing that the self is not the ego but the pure awareness behind it.
The mind can act as either a prison or a liberator, depending on how we use it. By holding on to uncomfortable past experiences, we trap ourselves in suffering. Expanding our thoughts beyond ourselves allows us to break free of the prison of mind. Through this process, we canliberate our consciousness, experience peace, and ultimately achieve enlightenment.
Embracing deep truth involves being willing to look at human existence in relation to the universe—we are all on a small planet in the middle of nowhere for a brief moment in time. To avoid facing this truth, we make up personal beliefs and create a self-concept (ego) that leads to tremendous suffering and conflict. The key to living truthfully is to let go of the ego, embrace the vast reality of life, and focus on serving life instead of serving yourself.
