Technology is tricky. Though most inventions have been made and are still continued to make human life easier, however, if you look at it close enough, you would see the complications it has brought in our lives. It’s immense. Even if you could leave your laptop aside for a while, there are mobile phones. How do you get away from them? Smartphones, social media, and the almost constant availability of Wi-Fi network make it almost impossible to be disconnected from the virtual world.
Of course, we don’t mean technology is a bad thing. In fact, it may even be one of the best things that happened to human kind in terms of staying connected, running businesses, and creating visibility. There is nothing that you can’t possibly find online these days. You can even connect to your long distant cousin who has given up the worldly pleasures and is now a certified yogi living it up in a mountain city somewhere in rural India. Speaking of yoga, if there is one thing that has actually been affected due to the constant availability of technology is yoga and the goodness it brings with practice.
How could you possibly imagine lying still in Shavasana when your mobile phone keeps beeping? How and when do you draw the line? In fact, where is the line?
At times, it would just be good to put a reminder on the phone asking us to put it down, look around, breath, smell the roses, and just smile. And maybe then we would actually do it because our Smartphone says we should. Mobile phones are wonderful, they are a necessity. They keep us connected. But, maybe we do need to keep it in our bags and away from us when we are at a yoga class trying to learn a new posture.
Technology and gadgets that bring technology into our daily lives are all necessary evils. They can be the worst kind of addiction, even worse than drugs and alcohol. To train ourselves against using them requires a lot of discipline and self-parenting. We may even have to assign a friend to snatch it away from us and hide it somewhere as and when required.
Also, constant use of laptops and mobile phones stress our mind and body. Routines such as restorative yoga can help ease that stress. It’s not time-consuming yet it teaches us how to relax and how to relieve stress out of our system. It may even be a good idea to dedicate some time every day to this routine and to disconnect from the world. This will bring you in connection with yourself and at the least, it will help you unwind after a tiring day.
Yoga also teaches us to slow ourselves down a notch. Of course, we don’t mean the speed because you can’t really slow down when you only have 10 minutes before the airport counter closes or 5 minutes before the last bus to your work departs. What it means is to stop adding panic to an already tense situation. The fact is it will take the same amount of time it takes to complete a task whether you panic about it or you don’t. So you might as well try the latter.
There is always going to be something preventing us from attending to ourselves. There will always be something important to do, some place important to be at, and something that needs immediate attention. But, so do you. Yoga teaches you self-love and that should be the main purpose of life.
