Relationship Reset:
Create a Conscious Relationship with Your Phone
A conscious technology and yoga course where you move from mindless to mindful.
Getting to know our relationship with our phones and ourselves is essential for modern living. We have never been more distracted or less present in the lives we claim to care so much about. Every ping and ding, pulls us out of the moment and into a collective dysphoria of distraction. We often don’t get quiet enough or still enough to notice this. We go about our days unconsciously anticipating the next dopamine hit with a heightened sense of attunement to our phones. It has become one of the most connected relationships in our lives. It is with us all the time. We are dependent without realizing it.
This course helps you realize where you really are in your relationship to your phone supported by your own data. Through a combination of self-inquiry exercises, yoga, meditation, habit research, discussion, and information on our technological lives, this course helps you create a conscious relationship with your phone (or any other screen).
First, we have to know where we are. We begin with a gentle self-assessment and observation period to help us get more familiar with our habits. Then, we venture into our values, beliefs, and wishes, to help us create a connection with our deeper priorities. After some experimentation with your own habits to gain more insight into your own experience, we start to walk to road towards a new perspective and plan to move forward.
Do you wish you had more time for the things you love?
Or a deeper connection to your life?
The premise here is simple, we all want to live healthy, happy, engaged lives that feels loving and fulfilling. In some ways our phones have helped us to do that. In other ways that we often don’t notice, it doesn’t.
Have you ever noticed that feeling that no matter how much you do there is always more to be done? Or, that you simply cannot get ahead? Is your anxiety worse than ever? Do you find yourself zoning out in the middle of a conversation or pulling out your phone in the middle of conversations with people you love and having no idea why you did? Do you want to have better boundaries around your giving of yourself and your energy? Does every ping and zing of your phone make your heart rate increase? Have you tried to decrease and manage your phone use on your own but to no avail?
I could really go on forever here with these questions. Our phones are simple so intertwined with our lives we can no longer see where we are having a natural human response to life or being guided by our phones. One of the ways we can start to learn is to create a more conscious relationship with them and how we use them in our lives.
I know for me, as a highly sensitive person, at the beginning my phone was exciting and helpful, now it makes me feel disconnected. Ironic right? Do you feel similarly?
It’s easy to feel like phones are so ubiquitous that nothing can be done about it, but I don’t believe that. In fact, I believe we have the ability to create and craft more of our everyday experience than we think. I’ll guide you towards this in the context of your own lives in this course.
Tech is here to stay. AND, we have choices in how we use it in our lives, if only we can get still enough and pay attention to our experiences. I use tech in my everyday life, just like you do, and have been on this journey of conscious tech use since 2015. I have experimented, had successes and failures, fell down rabbit holes, fallen off wagons, and got back up again to try again. It is a journey. It evolves as we do and as technology does. We are making a conscious effort here with this course to offer you tools so you that you can make choices around your values (and lives) and create a plan that is right for you as we step into the next generation of our technological lives.
A little history…
It all started with a “noticing.” I wasn’t reading books anymore, so I started to wonder why. In 2015, I began to observe my tech habits with curiosity, noticing how they changed my life. During this year long exploration and self-investigation, I noticed I needed to make some big changes. I always have an eye on the collective horizon, and I thought I can’t be the only one and thus, a conscious tech and yoga month long course was born. This course was an “in person” course that utilized the yogic tools of self-study and awareness to create meaningful lasting change in how we use technology in our lives, specifically smart phones.
As the world has changed so have we, we’ve gone virtual. If you struggle with staying engaged with the people in your life and find yourself more focused on your phone (or other tech), then this course is for you. This course uses yogic practices to create awareness, help you develop an intentional plan for yourself and give you tools to re-frame and reset your tech experience.
How Does This Work?
This course is a combination of recorded (audio & video) and written content with a live virtual group meeting each week.
Each week, through the course platform, you’ll receive a set of lessons comprised of a combination of yoga, meditation, awareness practices, nervous system support, guided relaxation, worksheets, and activities. Lessons are released on Sundays and you can go at your own pace throughout the week. Each week works around a particular theme in the process of creating a conscious relationship with our phones. Live meetings are on Wednesday nights (EST). Live meetings are a space for discussion, to share what we are finding in our assessments, share ideas and practice together. Journaling is also an essential part of this course and prompts will be provided throughout.
In addition, our course platform also has a community group connection option. Meaning this course will have a dedicated private online group, not on social media, where you can connect with your course cohort if you choose. It is 100% optional. The course content is also delivered on this same platform, but in a different section, so you can engage with the course content without engaging with the online group if you choose. You can design your own experience.
Do I need a lot of yoga experience for this course?
No yoga or meditation experience is necessary or required. All yoga practices in this course are of a gentle variety to support your nervous system and do not require any advance knowledge or familiarity with yoga or meditation practice.
Is this course for me?
This course is for you if you want to -
Become more aware of your screen and phone use
Change your screen use
Reclaim your time
Reset your relationship with your phone
Learn about your daily habits
Be more engaged with your offline life
Apply yogic practices off the mat
Use your technology more intentionally
Have ever wanted to break up with your phone
Figure out why you end up in the scroll vortex
Want to make a deeper connection with yourself
Live a more balanced and harmonious technological life
Want to live in alignment with your values
Feel more satisfied in your interactions
Are simply curious about this topic and conscious tech use in general
Love a personal experiment and self-study
This course is not for you if…
You do not think this topic is an issue for you, or you don’t think your phone use is a problem, or you are not willing to entertain that it could be
You want to take the course in order to tell someone else how to use their phones, or tell them how much they need it
You want to shame others
You are unwilling to look inside and consider your habits and actions with an open mind
Are not willing to learn through your experience
Are not interested in self-exploration or investigating your own beliefs
You are looking for a quick fix
Are not available for the weekly meeting
Do not want to discuss your experiences in a group
Do not wish to make changes in your life
Do not like to experiment
You are not curious about your relationship to the world around you and how you interact with it
FAQ
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6 Weeks - Summer 2023
July 9 - August 19th
Content Released on Sundays
Live Meetings on Zoom -
Wednesdays, 7:00 - 8:30 pm (EST)
July 12, 19, 26
August 2, 9, 16
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Weekly Live Group Discussion & Practice (90 Minutes)
Yoga, Meditation, Mudra, Awareness Practices, Guided Relaxation
Worksheets and Exercises
Journaling Prompts
Self-Inquiry Practices
Pre-recorded on demand practices released each week
Resource List For Further Study
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Through a dedicated teaching platform portal. This platform houses the course content as well as a group to connect with your fellow students. This course does not use social media.
Upon registration and payment, you will be invited to join the platform. Once you create a login, you will have access to the course materials and private group for your cohort.
Lessons will be released on a weekly basis on Sunday.
Content will be in the form of audio, video, and written content.
Weekly live meetings will be on Zoom.
Throughout the week you will observe yourself and study on your own through lessons in the portal. On Wednesdays, there will be live meeting to practice, discuss, and reflect with each other.
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This course is six weeks long. In order to have time to explore and let our experiences breathe, the schedule is spacious.
Each week there will be several activities, lessons, and practices, anchored by the live group meeting on Wednesdays.
This course is designed to integrate into your life, to make it accessible and not be overly cumbersome. Some lessons are short, some take a little more energy. 15-30 minutes or less a day, a few times a week, not including awareness is what we are looking at.
Expect to spend 2-4 hours a week depending on how deep you want to go and within the context of your own life.
Self-observation and awareness is a key component of this course and that is hard to estimate time wise, but it is integral and does take a time and energy commitment on your part.
Weekly meetings are 90 minutes on Zoom.
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The price of this course is $150.00
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This is not a digital detox. This is about using your phone in a healthier more conscious way, not cutting it out completely.
With that said, as a part of your experimentation, you may wish to discontinue a particular app, or feature for a short amount of time to gain information about your experience. However, that is not the goal of the course, only a particular tool for awareness.
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Absolutely not. Phone, screen and technology use is a fact of life in this era. Ignoring that fact or shaming or blaming or trying to get you to suppress that reality is not the goal here.
The intention is to take a better look at our use through the lens of awareness and supportive yogic practices, so that you can more readily make the choices that are right for you, your life and your values.
Once we have the full picture, learn more about the tech, and know where we are, we can then make a plan to move forward in a conscious and integrative way.
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Yes. It is a part of modern life, so yes we talk about it. However, it is not the focus of the course. We are looking at overall use here within our lives, not at only one style of app. Social media apps are not the only ones that cause use to land in a scroll vortex or doom scrolling, causing us to stay on our phones longer and longer. If conscious social media use is of interest to you, you will find information in the course about that too.
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It may be ironic to teach a conscious technology use course online, but the truth is that it is simply the best way to reach the most people.
However, this also brings to the forefront one of the realities of conscious tech use, this is not a detox, or a sabbatical, this is learning how to have a healthier relationship with your technology as we move forward into an ever expanding technological age. The journey is not to remove it from our lives, but learn how to integrate it and make conscious choices around its use in our life.
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No, in fact, I love it. It fascinates me. I don’t always love what I believe it is doing to society and us as humans, but I think that is more a factor of it still being “new,” and us not knowing how to integrate it into our lives in a healthy way yet, rather than it being the technology specifically. Though, ask me about AI and I might have some other views…
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I still hear from people who took this course when I ran it for the first time. They still use the tools and methods from our time together in their every day lives.
They continue to shift their habits and views all these years later based on the foundation created by that course.
Now, many years later, more tools, and information later, my intention remains the same for you - to take away tools that you can use in your life for years to come as tech continues to change. We are created a foundation for your conscious tech use that will evolve as you and society do.
How you use the tools and information in this course to support your life will always be up to you. It is my intention that they always be of value and accessibility for the life you actually live and the context in which you life it.
So while this is a course, it is not a one and done type of thing. Yes, the course is six weeks together, but the tools and perspective shifts will remain valuable throughout life.
I have a question that was not answered here.
No, problem! Reach out directly below.