Freedom from the Smart phone!

Well it finally happened, I finally ditched the iPhone! It’s been a long time in coming and it’s early days but nonetheless the step has been made.

Two years ago, during the first lockdown I finally deleted myself from Facebook, Instagram and What’s App, not least because I have reservations about Mark Zuckenberg but also because I was losing hours of my life to social media and felt a slave to technology, constantly at the beck and call of others. It was ridiculous really as there were numerous ways people could contact me, phone, email, messenger, personal and biusiness What’s App and on the list went. I wanted to be free!

This was a process too. It took me a while to play with the idea and reach a point where I was tired of the energy of social media and the demand it made of my time and regain my freedom again - after all there was a life before social media. It’s not a decision I have ever regretted, albeit I do pay someone else to maintain a Beinspired Facebook account for those students/clients who prefer to receive updates this way and I’m grateful to her for doing so. I did try to delete this account too, but I realised that that wasn’t then serving those who prefer the social media approach so a middle ground was found.

The phone has taken longer. We are conditioned now to believe that we need a phone to exist here on Planet Earth. I fell for this as much as anyone else and wondered how I might cope without it. I have a friend who has an old style mobile telephone and another friend who doesn’t have one at all and I spoke with both of them to gain their perspective and to assure myself that life can continue without a phone. Both assured me that it could and that I might be happier not being a slave to it. Both said that other people have more of a problem with it than they do, which is what i found when I deleted my Facebook accounts.

I started to pay greater attention to my phone usage. I was aware that it frequently distracted me from being present to the children and this was one of my motivations to ditching it. Despite my best efforts not to be distracted by it, I would still find myself regularly checking it. Over the years it has been a bug bear of my Dad’s, even though he can also be distracted by his own, but such is the nature of mobile phones, it becomes normal to check them frequently throughout the day and lose time pottering around online believing it essential to be doing so at that time.

I noticed too how it impacted my stress levels, just as Facebook had done for many years. I felt a pressure to respond to messages promptly and be at the beck and call of others, instantly resolving perceived problems regardless f were I might be shopping or on the beach with the children. I could lose easily lose an hour engaged in endless back and forth messaging, getting caught up in it so that once again I found myself frequently saying to the children, “give me a minute, I’ve just got to respond to this…” and missing their moment to give my energy to someone else, albeit online, instead.

I started playing around with leaving the phone at home but this was edgy for me; what if I needed it, had an accident, one of the children required immediate medical attention or something happened to a family member? I noticed how my phone became my security and safety, how I felt safer having it with me. This really showed up at night. I like to wander about in the dark, here on Guernsey, but also on Sark and it was the various trips to Sark last year that made me realise how much I would rely on having my phone in my pocket as a form of protection when ambling about at night, because I had this notion that I could always phone someone to come and help me if I got, hmm, attacked?!

It was this false sense of phone security that was really my obstacle. That and the ease of the camera and staying in group chats with my family through Signal. The iMessage facility was helpful too, albeit I realised that this was partly the distraction, as it was all too easy to type out big long messages to friends, rather than just catching up with them in person.

Then Elijah and I went to Avebury back in February and some of you may have read that blog post, but certainly the universe got involved. Basically my iPhone was old and losing battery easily so I had to keep charging it throughout the day. However in this instance I’d actually forgotten to take my phone charger with me and this sent me into a spin, here I was in the UK with Elijah and a hire car and a phone losing charge quickly - what would happen if I needed it?

I was distracted stressing about it and approached a couple out at West Kennett (when I should have been enjoying this long barrow instead!) to ask where i might buy a charger. They directed me to the nearest town of Marlborough and so I decided we’d head there and get the charger so at least I knew I had one, before continuing our neolithic stone journey. On the way to Marlborough however the car started playing up and showing warning signs and telling me to seek immediate assistance. I was thrown into a total spin and panic did indeed set in, my stress levels elevated significantly and my skin, which wears my stress, was flushed red with the drain on my adrenals.

I managed to park the car, find a phone shop and buy a charger. We then settled in a cafe and bought a drink while charging my phone. I phoned the emergency numbers given to me by the hire car company but none of these worked. I accessed their website hoping for a different number but again I couldn’t get through to anyone, the offices were apparently closed for the weekend. I phoned both Ewan and my Dad back home in Guernsey, but neither one of them were able to help either and I was left wondering what to do, but beginning now to have a sense that on some level this was a test from the universe, because it was all about the phone!

So I composed myself and pictured the car surrounded by Reiki. I realised that despite having a phone, a phone was not helping me. My greatest concern was not making it Glastonbury later that day and having my plans ruined. I realised that I needed to let go of this, that is the universe wanted me to stay in Avebury for the whole trip then so be it, there would be a reason for this. That decision made, the pressure to sort the car eased a little. But I was aware that, by chance, I had parked next to a Police Station so I decided that if the car continued to show an emergency light I would go into the station and someone would be able to point me in the direction of a local garage.

Needless to say when I started the car there was no longer an emergency light showing. It had been a test and a significant one too. I realised that the phone had not been able to help me and all my notion around it keeping me safe were indeed flawed, just an idea in my mind. I realised again that the universe is really our only true support and it will always guide us towards help should we need it. I know this to be true from previous experiences, of people appearing at just the right time, earth angels and things just working out somehow in some strange ways!

Back home on Guernsey it still took me a further three months to come to terms with letting go of the phone. In the interim there was another trip to Avebury and Glastonbury, this time with Eben. I can’t roam on my contract and I felt liberated not being able to check my phone when out and about, especially as we visited a good few play parks and ordinarily I might sit down and check my phone while Eben played, but not being able to do that meant that I was much more involved and present to him. It was liberating!

I felt lighter, not carrying around the thought that there were messages that needed my response, because I could literally do nothing about it unless I sought a WIFI area. I noticed how much I went to check my phone forgetting that I couldn’t receive messages and I realised then the extent of my phone-checking-addiction. I started to enquire further into this, why did I want to be distracted, what was wrong with my present reality, why did I need to keep dropping out of it? I started considering that it was no different to Eben and the way he lashes out to create a dopamine hit as his brain messaging doesn’t always work like other children.

But this isn’t like a chocolate hit, a burst of serotonin and feel good feeling, I never felt good from the phone hit, it was just something that I did because I did it, because it had become a norm in my life, to check messages, look something up online, somehow orientate my brain in a different way. I started reflecting on how the phone is affecting my brain chemistry and my thought processes and therefore my perception and the way I see the world.

I also gave some thought to the health implications of smart phones because they emit radiofrequency energy, a form of non-ionising electromagnetic radiation, which - apparently - can be absorbed by tissues close to the phone. The amount of radiofrequency energy to which you might be exposed depends on many things including the technology of the phone, the distance between you and the phone, the extent and type of mobile phone use and your distance from cell phone towers. 

In 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified mobile phone radiation possibly carcinogenic, meaning that there ‘could be some risk’ of carcinogenicity, but no one really wants to admit or accept this. More often than not if you research mobile phone and cancer on the internet, you’ll find reports of the lack of data to substantiate this. One of my mum’s friends sadly died from cancer which had started in her breast, the breast against which she kept her phone, lodged as it was in her bra. She always believed her mobile phone was the cause of her cancer.

In addition to the potential connection between mobile telephones and cancer, scientists have also reported concerns about the impact on brain activity, reaction times, and sleep patterns and more studies are being carried out on this. However it’s a bit like trying to scientifically validate the benefit of Reiki to health and wellbeing - there’s no impetus to it simply because it massively challenges Big Pharma and Big Pharma pretty much control the world alongside Technology companies and those very wealthy individuals like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who’ll do all they can to ensure that people stay addicted to technology, as much as Big Pharma will always promote ‘science’ as a God - in the end we become slaves to technology and drugs believing we cannot exist without them.

I mean when you think about it, of course mobile telephones must affect us, how can they not? It’s known that when mobile phones are used very close to some medical devices (including pacemakers, implantable defibrillators and certain hearing aids) there is the possibility of operational interference. There is also the potential of interference between mobile phones signals and aircraft electronics, this to the extent that some countries have licensed mobile phone use on aircraft during flight, using systems that control the phone output power.

But alas, still we are encouraged to use our phones. Recently on my return to Guernsey from Glastonbury I sat at Southampton airport observing what was happening around me - mostly everyone was sitting head down looking at their phones! A family member, at the age of 16, was visiting the island last summer and was wearing a phone carrier, so that her phone was virtually strapped to her, and she did indeed spend much of the evening constantly checking it. We are breeding a generation who zone out, rather than zone in. It’s all about the external and not the internal - the world has gone mad and back to front, we are losing touch with what’s real.

I noticed my boys getting caught up in this. The iPad is the bane of my life because on the one hand it is extremely helpful and Elijah does a lot of learning from it, but on the other it is a complete distraction and he can lose himself in online games rather than out playing imaginary games with his brother. It was this that also prompted me to give a good look to the mobile telephone because how could I lecture him, and indeed Eben (albeit he self regulates and gets bored of the iPad quickly) about their iPad usage if I was constantly checking my phone.

And so with this all in mind, I knew I just needed to get on with it, helped by the fact my phone was dying and safe in the knowledge that my brother is visiting for 10 weeks this summer so the family group chat seemed less of an obstacle, real life communication would be much easier! I started leaving my phone at home and getting my mind used to the idea that I could easily live without it. Anytime I doubted that, I gave it consideration to see if there might be another way around it. The camera became the obstacle but I realised that I had existed with a separate camera previously and could do the same again.

Beltane, the new moon and the solar eclipse were soon upon us and the combined energy was most definitely one of signifiant change, in my life as much as in everyone else’s. Current soul contracts are all coming to an end and we are being asked to let these go so that we can adopt new contracts for our ongoing transformation and growth. I see this clearly in my life and I know that many of you are going through it too. It’s helpful to see it as that, that one part of our life has now been lived and it’s time to let to let it go, rather than buying into the drama of something being wrong or needing to be fixed. There is nothing wrong and nothing needs to be fixed, it’s just a significant time in planetary and soul shifting.

Anyway, I had it in mind to let go of the phone on 1 May, because for some reason I let go of smoking on 1 May all those years ago, albeit I wasn’t conscious then of it coinciding with Beltane. But of course Beltane brings with it this urge for spring cleaning and I suppose I had tapped into that in terms of spring cleaning my lungs with the stopping smoking and now spring cleaning my energy field by letting go of the mobile phone turbulence created. I managed to find a simple Nokia telephone and priced up cameras for that eventuality, but taking it one day at a time, just in case…

I the procrastinated, I couldn’t work out how to use the Nokia, my brain and hand are both used to touch screen and the Nokia is old style tapping out the letters one at a time, so that text messaging is painfully slow. Not that I could work this out either, or how to actually turn the phone on, fortunately Elijah had paid attention in the shop and watched what the shop assistant did. He also taught me how to unlock it. Ewan kindly set up the date and time and worked out how to sent a text, mainly as he has to help his Mum do this on her old Nokia! I now understood why her messages to him are always so brief. Some of you have no doubt noticed my brief and poorly written texts since the swap!

I procrastinated some more, none of my contacts had transferred across and it was a painful thought having to re-establish them. And yet there was a certain liberation that came with this. I trawled through my contacts on the iPhone and realised that so many of them are redundant now, a couple of people even passed on, and here I’ve been lugging all that energy around with me. So I scrawled down only those contacts I actually keep and decided to add them in when and if I actually need to make contact with said individual - a process and enquiry in itself.

Then lo and behold the universe intervened, this was on bank holiday Monday, 2 May. I had spent an hour writing out contacts while hanging out at my folks’ house so I was sort of ready to transfer to Nokia but still I was holding out a bit longer through that last residual uncomfortableness of letting go…Then we went rock pooling and for the first time ever in the history of my mobile phone usage - and I was one of the first to get one back in my early twenties so over a good twenty years now, one of those Ericsson bricks as they were at the time and all my friends laughing about the pointlessness of it, because none of them had one and this was before WIFI and social media and internet, when a phone was just for a phone, even text messaging was in its infancy - my phone fell out of my rucksack and into the rock pool!

I grabbed it as quickly as I could but the damage had been done, while the phone still worked, as the day progressed, the water seeped further into the screen and the touch facility stopped working on all areas of the screen and I could no longer operate messenger, for example. I realised the universe was encouraging me on and with that I switched on the Nokia, moved across the SIM card and let go of my iPhone, popping it in a drawer with the intention that Eben can take a hammer to it at some point - he loves destroying things!

We’re a week on and while texting on the Nokia is still painful, I do feel incredibly liberated, there is much greater freedom. I’ve noticed that people text less, mainly because I direct them to email instead, and because I am not encouraging it. There is now only email and text, no Signal, so even less ways that people can contact me. I’ve noticed that I’m more inclined to phone family members to make arrangements and ask how they’re feeling. I’m also less inclined to pointlessly surf the internet. If I need to email or go online then I just use my laptop, at home, and when it’s convenient to the family so there are automatically better boundaries around this, something I’ve been trying to put in place for years now.

I appreciate it is early days but I do have a sense that there is no going back now. I realise how much of our current world is an illusion, how we are conditioned to believe that technology is helping but how we instead become a slave to it. We are continuously encouraged to look outside ourselves and distract ourselves from looking in. All we wish for in this world is within us and it’s around feelings of love, joy, connection, peace and happiness.

We all know this. But it is one thing knowing it and another thing living it and I really feel that the energy is currently encouraging more of us to live it - to appreciate that our inherent grief is about our separation from all the joy, pleasure and abundance of the universe which is our inherent gift - the universe longs to give us all our heart desire’s, all or deepest joy and pleasure, yet our minds have been conditioned to believing that we are not deserving of this, and that it has to be hard work and material instead. I guess the fact you’re reading this, and all the way to this bit means that something within your is also stirring to this greater truth.