In this short teaching, Eckhart Tolle proposes a practical mindfulness technique for people who spend much of their day in front of screens. He suggests taking 1‑2 minute "presence breaks" every 15‑20 minutes: look out a window at the sky, become aware of the breath, and feel the "inner body" – the aliveness that pervades every cell. These brief pauses create a qualitative shift in the surrounding energy field, preventing the mind from becoming cluttered by constant screen interaction and the emotional turbulence of social media. Tolle also points out that negative experiences online, such as a harmful tweet, can become opportunities for disidentifying from the mental image of self and for spiritual awakening. By repeatedly withdrawing attention from the screen and returning it to the sky or a simple object (e.g., a potted plant), one can gradually develop the skill of maintaining a background sense of presence while still engaging in work, typing, or phone conversations. Over time, the attention to the inner body can be held simultaneously with screen activity, allowing a subtle, continuous connection to spacious awareness without losing focus on the task.
Chapters
Look at the sky through the window and feel yourself breathing. There's nobody who is so busy that they cannot take 1 or 2 minutes and look at the sky and feel themselves breathing. And you can feel immediately the qualitative difference in this energy field from Being engaged, looking at the screen, and having a— basically what it is, you have a cluttered mind, and it clutters your mind more and more, stuff goes in. And then you have even emotional reactions to the tweets that other people make, and then you put in your own. In the hive mind, people's lives can be destroyed by one wrong tweet. Well, yes, not really. That can be a great opportunity for disidentifying from the mental image of who you are, if you, let's say, You put out the wrong tweet and 200,000 people say you're a terrible human being and then you lose your job. That's a great opportunity for spiritual awakening, but there are easier ways. So, going into your everyday life, so let's say you've managed to deal with these devices, you're limiting yourself to some extent, limiting the use. And then, of course, depends what your job is. There are many different kinds of jobs. Many people these days interact with computer screens as part of their job. So it's important to periodically, as much as possible, have brief moments when you withdraw your attention from the interaction with your screen, and you might need little reminders on your desk or wherever you are, So that every 15 minutes or so, or every 20 minutes, you can have 1 or 2 minutes of spacious presence rather than— to take your attention away from it, look at the sky through the window and feel yourself breathing. There's nobody who is so busy that they cannot take 1 or 2 minutes and look at the sky and feel themselves breathing, and then you go back to the screen. Or put a potted plant next to your screen and look at that periodically and sense its presence. Or just feel your body, your inner body, You all know what that is. Feel the aliveness that is in every cell of the body. The body is being pervaded with this sense of aliveness. It's alive. So your attention goes from mind into the inner body, and then you may develop the ability— may not come immediately— of even while you're interacting With the screen, you can have a remnant of attention in the feeling of the inner body. You can have some of your attention remaining in the energy field, so you can feel as you sit there, you feel your inner body even while the mind is engaged in interacting with the screen and you're typing. And you can— this is a skill, it's an incredible skill if you can develop it. At first you have separate things, you have interaction with the screen screen and then you take your attention away from it. And then after a while, when you've done that for a while, you can bring them together so that you don't completely lose the connectedness with presence. You don't completely lose yourself in that device, so that even while you are writing and And whatever it is you do on the screen, you can still feel in the background the inner body, maybe 10% of your attention. It's hard to verbalize that, you have to experience it. And that is the same when you are talking on the telephone. That's, uh, can you have some of your attention in spaciousness?
