Break Up With Your Phone

It is a peculiar thing, really, that the little slab of glass and circuits we call a smartphone has become our closest companion. We consult it more often than our partners, trust it more than our memories, and crave for it frequently and at odd hours. The strangest part is that for all this devotion, the phone mostly rewards us by stealing our attention, nibbling away at our concentration until our brains have lesser focus than a goldfish.

Here's a 2-minute song and music video to help you break up with your phone. The words and visuals train your monkey mind to free itself from the phone’s addictive grip. (Double tap to play)

3 Simple Tricks: It turns out the cure for our smartphone addiction is surprisingly low-tech. A walk in nature can reset your mind more effectively than any app update, while the simple act of noticing your own breath is like hitting the refresh button on your brain. And if you actually try learning something new, instead of doom scrolling, you’ll feel more alive than ever. The great realisation, is that life becomes infinitely more interesting the moment you stop staring at it through a screen.

Check out our collection of activities that combine nature, mindfulness, and fun so you can take back the control over your own mind as well as life.

https://healingforest.org/2020/11/27/mindfulness-activities-exercises-groups/

Please share the film and activities with those who need to see it.

Touch of Life

With screens adding so much focus on our visual sense, our other senses are slowly declining. Ironically, the touch-screen is keeping us out of touch with real world experiences. Here's an activity for our readers, who don’t have time to click on the link given above. Try this when you get a chance to be out in nature. It will heighten and develops your sense of touch through a beautiful experience.

Museum of Touch: Take a walk in nature, alone or with friends, and build yourself a small “museum of touch.” As you wander, collect touch memories.

• Find something soft.

• Find something hard.

• Find something cool to touch.

• Find something warm.

• Find something rough.

• Find something smooth.

Keep your eyes closed when you can, and let your hands do the noticing. You’ll find that bark, leaves, stones and streams all have personalities far more interesting than glass and pixels.

If you’re in a group, save one last experiment for the end: close your eyes, shake hands, and see if you can recognise a person simply through their handshake. You may be surprised, for your sense of touch remembers far more than you think.

Nature Art & Nature Artists

Nature has been making art for far longer than we have. Sunsets, seashells, frost on a window pane. Observing nature art or better still creating it ourselves is a great way to break away from our digital prisons.

When we stop to notice, or even try our hand at arranging a few leaves, stones, or twigs into our own small masterpiece, we find ourselves slipping gently out of the virtual world and into the real one.

Here’s out collection of some incredible nature artists and their inspiring art: https://healingforest.org/2022/01/30/artists-for-nature-10-amazing-nature-artists/

*A special shoutout to two of our regular readers, who are also nature artists and reached out to us from our last post. | @jocelynfriis | Mayank Soni

Next month, we curate a selection of calming nature poetry. We’ll also show you how to create your own nature poetry walk to sharpen your senses and deepen your connection with the natural world.

*If you are a poet or love nature poetry, leave a comment with links to your own work or a nature poet that you’d like us to feature in our next post.