There are more than a billion iphones in the world today, so in one sense, more of us are connected than have ever been in the course of human history.  Yet despite the connectivity of our technology, many of us, and many people in the world, are less connected to sources of meaning and regulation than we have ever been in our evolutionary history.  We are disconnected.  What’s missing from many people’s lives is real authentic connection.  Connection in deep and meaningful ways to ourselves- to a deep sense of who we are, what’s in our hearts and minds.  To a real sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves- a community, a tribe.  And meaningful connection to nature.  To the land, to the animals, the plants, the trees, the sky, the moon, the sun.  Our nervous systems are designed for connection, optimized for it, you might say.  And we yearn for this connection.

At the heart of meaningful connection is the cultivation of mindful awareness.  A quality of presence that enables us to stabilize our attention in a calm, accepting, non-judgmental way…an enhanced attention to the lived flow of moment-to-moment experience.  With this tool of mindful awareness, we can bring our attention inward, to our deepest needs, and outward, into our relationships with one another, and the world around us.  Applied Mindfulness exists to help people harness this quality of attention, and then direct it to the things we care most about.  Our experiential workshops and trainings help people develop the tools and competencies to be more deeply present with themselves, the others in their lives, and the natural world.  This brings a range of benefits, from stress reduction, to emotion regulation, to increased empathy, and a deepened sense of purpose, vitality, and meaning.  We do this work with adults, and with children, and we help adults learn to do this work with children and teens.

There has been a quiet revolution underway for the past 10 years, and it involves our relationship with technology.  This is technology of the Silicon Valley type, which has slowly infiltrated our lives, capturing evermore of our time and attention.  It has become more and more deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, and the lives of our children.  The iphone was introduced 10 years ago, and since that time, Apple has sold more than a billion iphones that accompany us wherever we go.  We sleep with our phones; we take them to the bathroom.  The research suggests that we check our phones up to 150 times per day.  Our screens have transformed from televisions that sat dormant in a room, to devices that we carry with us and can watch anywhere.  Find yourself in any public space, and the likelihood is that people are not talking to eachother, but plugged into their phones.  More and more of our conversations take place through the emotionally-flat medium of texting.  We don’t know our friends phone numbers anymore, yet we spend hours upon hours curating our online selves through social media.  If we have a question, we ask Google or Siri.  Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Instagram,- these have all become part of our daily lives.  A startling number of us are showing signs of behavioral addiction.

And so the questions is this: are we actually choosing how to design our relationship to all of this technology, or is it re-designing us?  Do we fully understand that there are armies of highly skilled, highly paid people out there designing our technology to be irresistible?