announcing: reclaim your mind

Hey! Big news: the book is done. It’s called Reclaim Your Mind: Seven Strategies to Enjoy Tech Mindfully and you can learn more at my website. Here’s the first section of the book to give you a taste. Enjoy! -JV

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At Home in Two Worlds

I love technology, and sometimes I love to get away from it.

As a kid in the eighties, I got excited about learning new magic words for the DOS command prompt. I remember that feeling of awe when I was able to code my own little games in BASIC. As I got older, I used early instant messengers like ICQ to flirt and hand-coded a Geocities website for no purpose other than to explore.

I waited way too long for images of my favorite anime characters to load, and even longer for MP3s to download. I spent countless hours waging epic ten-hour online battles that left my eyes feeling like hot coals. This was back when the only way to game online was to use a fax modem and a landline to trick PC games into thinking you were on a local area network. The lag was awful, but it worked.

If you’re too young to recognize any of this software, I’m talking about the ancestors of modern digital life. So, yeah, I’m pretty techy. But I also grew up with deep exposure to yoga and meditation, since my parents immigrated to Canada from India. I saw my father meditate often, and my mother worships Hindu deities, like Hanuman, the monkey god who tried to eat the sun.

I visited Hindu temples and experienced many of the rites and rituals. Meditation and yoga felt more like a part of my heritage than esoteric practices. But let’s be real, it was something my parents did, so at best I ignored it. At worst I did what most teenagers do: I rolled my eyes.

As I came of age, tech became my love language. My well-earned digital flirting expertise was clutch when I met Krista, the woman who would eventually become my wife. We were guarded in person, but had long, deep conversations in text. We bonded over video games. By then, I played a lot less than I did when I was a kid, but I made up for the missing screen time at work.

I studied psychology and learned how to apply it to design. I was making tech easier to use, and the job had me swimming in emails, project management, and digital design tools. Spending all day on a screen, I came to find out that working on a computer wasn’t all that different from video games. My career quickly became an RPG with dollars instead of experience points and real skills instead of equipment and magic.

The design work was exciting at first, but it got stale quick. Helping a business improve its conversion rate wasn’t as fun as saving the world in Final Fantasy. Soon even my favorite tech hobbies started to feel meaningless. I slipped more and more into distraction. Work all day on a laptop, then come home to the warm glow of my TV, phone, and that same laptop.

I felt numb.

A search for meaning led me to some questionable choices, but it also led me back to meditation. It helped me feel less numb, even if only for a few minutes, but I didn’t fully commit to making it a consistent part of my life. I was too busy.

For a while, my life was swinging like a pendulum between the dull comfort of modernity and the inward pursuit of something deeper. Over time, the split focus started to take its toll on me. I was spending all my personal time trying to cope with a stressful professional life that felt hollow.

Things started to change after I spent the better part of a year paying attention to my breath. It wasn’t at a remote mountain retreat center amid the trees, as you might expect. My body was suspended in a tech research lab, where I was wearing biosensors, surrounded by loudspeakers. On paper, I was trying to get my graduate degree. What I was really doing was bringing distinct parts of myself together.

My thesis project involved designing, building, and publishing about an experimental technology for mindfulness called Sonic Cradle. It was a sensory deprivation chamber where participants composed layered music through breath work, and I meticulously designed it to sneak people into a state of mindfulness.

I meditated with Sonic Cradle for hours every day, occasionally pausing to tinker with the algorithm. Up until that point, I’d only dabbled with meditation. A research lab was a strange place for my first period of sustained practice, but it had a profound impact on me.

I found I could feel again, finally experiencing some of the emotional depth I usually ignored. I began to meditate more consistently and went on many silent retreats. I experimented with every style of meditation I could find, from evidence-based training programs to ancient traditional practices. Sonic Cradle wasn’t just a springboard into a deeper personal meditation practice; it also ended up being the seed of a new career direction and lifestyle.

I left the university and joined a start-up where I helped design and launch Muse, a brain-sensing wearable device that gives the user neurofeedback during and after meditation. Sonic Cradle and Muse turned out to be the first two of about fifty mindful technologies I’ve helped create and improve over the years, many of which you can find in academic journals, app stores, and store shelves.

So here I am, at home in two worlds. I never picked a side. I’m still infinitely curious about every new app, gadget, and content drop. Yet I also love silent meditation retreats, long to spend time in monasteries, and try to stay in the present moment. As a parent, I celebrate my son Oliver’s love of technology while coaching him to think and feel deeply and make good choices. In my professional life, I thrive at the intersection of mindfulness and technology.

Can I be a true meditator if I go home and play Zelda? Do I really fit in the tech world if I refuse to profit from things that distract, isolate, or divide us? Does occasionally staying up late to watch silly videos or an extra episode of TV make me less qualified to teach mindfulness? Are Krista and I failing as parents because we love playing video games with little Oliver?

Of course I grapple with these questions. But any time I try to abandon tech, I feel like I’m abandoning my very nature. And on the other hand, whenever I give in to tech fully, I feel mindless, distracted, and frustrated. I wrote this book because I’ve lived both ways and found neither to be wholly satisfying.

I’m fascinated by technology, yet I yearn for a calm, peaceful life. This dual interest led me to draw insights from both camps and experiment with a mindful way of being with technology, not against it. For my entire adult life, I’ve been trying to figure out how to live mindfully and love technology at the same time.

On my journey so far, I’ve found seven strategies that have helped me heal my relationship with technology and, ultimately, with myself. I think you might find them useful too. They will help you nurture a secure, guilt-free relationship with technology. I won’t recommend you get rid of your phone, give up on knowledge work, or renounce social media. Instead, we’ll explore practices and approaches that help you forge a healthier dialogue with technologies you intentionally choose to include in your life.