Photo Essay: Two years of Living in DC without Social Media or Wifi
Dropping out of real life and diving into ancient-yoga life, in our Capitol
I was walking home from a morning of teaching and practicing Ashtanga when I heard a male voice call from across the empty street: always on your phone. He wasn’t hollering at me; he had the tsk-tsk tone of an uncle shaking his head, but I couldn’t recall ever seeing him before. I called back to him: not always! And just laughed, kept walking, considering his words.
My days were were scheduled during those first months and years of teaching yoga full time. I was still in the productivity-mindset from years of IB classes in high school, pre-med classes at Duke, running, working, and studying in multiple neuroscience labs at Georgetown. The time I spent walking from teaching 6am and 7am classes to practicing Ashtanga next to my teacher at 9am, then home for lunch at noon — that time was valuable to me. I would catch up calls and emails, feeling efficient that I was exercising and working and commuting all at once.
But for the next few days, I did not take out my phone while walking home from the studio. I did my full primary practice, working through the challenge of standing from backbends to earn my way into second series, and after savasana, I would hug my teacher good bye, change my clothes, and walk home without taking out my phone.
The mental state I experienced was brand new. I could see the row houses and coffee shops that I passed regularly, I could feel a freedom of just walking without pressing myself to do more. And with that extra attention to my actions and environment, I realized that the man who had called out to me was a barber in the corner shop just two blocks from y DC apartmentt. The shop windows were enormous. One side of windows were facing the boutique gym where I taught five times a week, and the other side faced the small street I habitually walked to and from the Ashtanga studio for practice every morning, Sunday through Friday.
I had never looked inside the windows, never noticed who was noticing me, because my mind was busy being elsewhere, somewhere more important: online, at work, not present.
A few days later, I lay awake in bed, contemplating the content of the facebook post I had made earlier in the evening. I realized that even without my phone in my hand, my mind was not present, even in one of the sweetest times of the day: just before dreaming. I got up, without thinking about the decision I was making. I quit my facebook account, tapping out “spiritual reasons” when they asked why I was leaving.
I didn’t tell anyone I was quitting social media. It was a decade of facebook, since the moment I had received my college email address in summer of 2006. Strange things happened: my parents got accounts, all our family in India got accounts, the people hiring us were watching us, and suddenly we had to clean up the solo cup photo albums and rambling threads of conversation that grafittied our facebook walls. I wasn’t sorry to leave. And I wasn’t doing anything half-way.
Over the next months, I pulled back my internet usage to 20–30 minutes daily. I had an enormous influx of mental space and energy, not to mention physical time. I started hiking Rock Creek Park every afternoon, leaving my phone at home and enjoying the trees, the sound of the creek, the family of deer I became familiar with.
Wandering through life without wifi, was, to me, the science of yoga. What I wanted to know, was testing, was experimenting with my life to discover, was this: is yoga for real? Could these ancient, ancestral practices work for me today?
I cared because the only goal that seemed worth devoting my life to was one that would take a lifetime. The ultimate goal, the maybe-unattainable goal was enlightenment. I knew wealthy people, successful leaders, happy families, brilliant individuals but that’s not what I aspired to. I wanted the inspiration of doing what I had never seen done. Buddha was a legend, and the Dalai Lama a close second, groomed his whole life to be the influence that he is. Where were the lady enlightened? And why was the world still petty? I wanted to become enlightened to teach enlightenment so that we could all live in a happier, peaceful world. And that begins with individual people living happier, peaceful lives. And I had bookshelves of the original yoga and Buddhist philosophy books that told me exactly how to become what I wanted to see.
So I studied, and I considered what that what I was reading, and the changes in the world since the time of the Buddha, and hundreds of years before him, Patanjali and the authors of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita. The ancients were anatomically and ancestrally my identical: slim cut Indians. But they lived in an atomized, spacious land, where it was possible to leave home, wander from villages to forests and back again, floating in and out oof nomadic groups of ascetic who had never heard of LSD or Burning Man.
I wasn’t drawn to the wander lust, glitter-painted, drug-veiled adventures off my fellow free spirits (though I admire them to no end). I wanted the nitty gritty solitude of the yogis who taught before the books were written, who presumably didn’t care about what they wore or who double tapped their asana photos. So when I dropped out of social media, I tuned into the teachings. I did the insanely hard work oof breaking addiction to tecnology, the sensitive work of staying in touch with friends and students, the invisible work of maintaining constant meditative mindset, and the joyous work of not caring fro my clothes, appearances, branding. I taught private yoga lessons, realized that I had natural aptitude for learning instruments and creating art, and took the time to read anatomy and alternative medicine textbooks cover to cover with greater clarity than I ever had as a pre-med student at Duke. I became adept in not only knowing the philosophy but living it.
Moving to Manhattan was a deep water plunge back into the real world of fashion, finance, and Facebook. I reinstated my social media accounts, reconnected with family, restarted my career as a teacher. But the lessons I learned off-the-grid are real, and this I believe: so is enlightenment.
