A cure for disconnected minds: it’s all in your hands!

“whose hand is this/that has never died?”

-Thich Nhat Hanh

“the key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with your inner body-to feel it at all times”

-Eckhart Tolle

Connection: this has, arguably, never been so important an issue, so critical at this time, for at this time we are possibly at a juncture that might see more us living of our lives powerfully digitally connected, which is to say living in worlds that promote a certain disconection and distraction[1] from the experience of being, worlds that demand our attention to be fleeting and hyperstimulated by technology and the clickbait of social media, producing increasing amounts of unease, anxiety, loneliness and depression.

We are in danger of becoming lost-more lost-in what Tolle calls our “incessant mental noise…that casts a shadow of fear and suffering.”[2] Lost also in the past, what the sage Krishnamurti[3] calls “psychological time” where we ruminate about our past woundings, worry about a precarious future, and so we become caught up stories that loop around and tighten the space inside our minds.

Increasingly we are being driven to find meaning in things and doing, yet this is an endless quest for a specious happiness that fades as quickly the sugar rush it gives us. Perhaps we might find a deeper quality in our being.

If we are distracted from ourselves-and hence the natural world-how might we reconnect? How might we ground and root into our embodiment?

How?

Get out of your mind.

Look into your hands.

Let your attention direct itself into your hands. Be patient and keep trying; with a little practice you can achieve a felt sense of your hands. Nothing? That’s okay, feel into nothing and experience it changing. It will.

Practice this; you are reconnecting with yourself, beyond your thoughts and thinking mind, past your distracted and fragmented self. This is connection. This is the power of presence. Your embodiment, your felt experience-sometimes known as soma-this is the Connection Absolute, the life that’s here which we disconnect from and distract ourselves from.

The Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh[4] takes this a step further. He suggests that our hands prove we have a sense of unending life, since our hands in a very real way are the cells of our parents’ hands, and their parents-and of our children and our grandchildren; a vast unbroken line of embodied connection travelling back to The Big Bang and forwards to the end of all things, alive in the life that’s here and now.

Get out of your mind, look into your hands!*

(*this also works right throughout the body)

[1] Cal Newport Deep Work & Nicholas Carr The Shallows

[2] Eckhart Tolle Practising the Power of Now

[3] Jiddu Krishnamurti Freedom from The Known

[4] Thich Nhat Hanh Present Moment, Wonderful Moment