Cell Phone Meditation

“Really,” Carrie asked incredulously, “you want me to meditate with my cell phone on? I thought mindfulness was about shutting off our devices and finding some peace and quiet,” she challenged.

“It’s great when you can do it,” I responded, “but we can’t always turn off life.”

I first learned this meditation from the psychiatrist Mark Epstein when he taught it at a conference on Meditation and Psychotherapy to an audience of over 500 people in New York City. His teaching reminded me of John Cage’s famous and controversial composition, 4’ 33,” where the performer sits at a piano without touching the keys for the length of time prescribed in the title. The “music” that the audience hears are the natural sounds in the room, sounds that we usually devalue or dismiss. Epstein writes about this practice in his newest book, The Trauma of Everyday Life. I have found it to be useful in the consulting room as well. It challenges our ideas that mindfulness is about silence and shutting off, rather than opening to all forms of experience.

This is my adaptation:

• Turn on your phone so that every call, voicemail, text, or email will make noise.
• Sit comfortably, eyes either open or closed.
• Allow yourself to simply listen to the sounds around you – including, of course, any sounds your phone might make.
• No need to push them away, just allow yourself to listen to the sounds as they are.
• Imagine that you can listen to the sounds with your entire body, picking up 360 degrees of sounds, above, below, in front, behind—all around you. Listen with your entire being.
• If your mind wanders, no problem, no judgment, just bring it back to the present moment.
• Notice how you are responding to the sounds. Are they irritating? Unpleasant? Can you stay open to what arises in you?
• Let yourself rest in the music of the moment, knowing that this moment is unique and this constellation of sounds will never be repeated.
• Take a deep breath, wiggle fingers and toes, stretch, and open your eyes if they have been closed. Try to bring this quality of openness into your next activity.

Carrie was a young physician who entered treatment to find a more skillful way to manage her anxiety. She had been going the “big pharma route,” as she put it, but was worried about taking too many meds. She had always been anxious, but her symptoms increased during her residency. The sleep deprivation made everything worse. “I’m always afraid that I’m going to screw up, make some life-threatening mistake, and really harm someone.”

She had tried some drop-in classes at a local meditation center, but practices with the breath increased her anxiety. “It’s hard not to control my breath, it’s like I’m trying to micromanage it. Once I started to hyperventilate and I had to leave. It was really embarrassing.”

Carrie and I turned on our phones and practiced together. With every “ping” of a text or email, with every call, she would startle. As we discussed this after the meditation, she became interested in her reaction. “You know, each time there’s a message coming in, I assume that it’s bad news. Some emergency, a disaster. And the funny thing is that it’s often a friend suggesting a drink after work.”

Carrie kept working with this practice, paying attention to what happened in her body when she was paged. “It’s almost like I go into cardiac arrest,” she joked. “I stop breathing, my whole body tenses up and I start to sweat.”

“Can you listen to your feelings as well?” I asked. She sat quietly, then began to cry. “When I was in college, early one morning, I was still asleep and the phone woke me up. It was 5:00am, it was my mother, who never calls early. ‘Daddy died,’ she said. That was it. Over, just like that. No chance to say good-bye, sorry I was such an adolescent brat. I really do love you.” She paused. “I think that with every phone call, especially now that I’m a doctor, there’s a part of me that anticipates death and disaster.”

As we continued our work together, Carrie became aware of what she was adding on to the sounds, and how she was creating more anxiety for herself. “Now, when the phone rings or I get paged, I say, ‘This is just a sound. You don’t know what it means. Don’t assume the sky is falling.’”

References

Epstein, M. (2013). The Trauma of Everyday Life. New York: Penguin Press.

Susan Pollak, MTS, Ed.D., co-author of the book Sitting Together: Essential Skills for Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy, (Guilford Press) is a clinical instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School