SAN JOSE, Calif. – As one of the nation’s largest yoga conferences got under way last week in San Francisco, many of the tech warriors driving our tweet-bombarded, app-devouring, Facebook-frenzied culture were firmly ensconced not in their cubicles but in the downward-facing dog pose.
In the heart of the Valley of Digital Distractions, mindfulness is the latest coin of the realm.
“The speed at which information is coming at us can get overwhelming,” says Google’s Gopi Kallayil, a marketing manager for Google+ who also teaches a popular weekly yoga class for stressed-out Googlers. “I’m seeing more and more people in Silicon Valley moving to yoga as a centering, anchoring ritual because it gives them a respite from that relentless onslaught.”
From Google’s “Optimize Your Life” program that helps employees unplug from the digital grind, to the valley darling Asana, a Web-based productivity-services firm that lists “Mindfulness” at the top of its corporate-values list, everyone’s getting into the awareness-raising act.
Deborah Burkman, who leads yoga retreats and “urban-wellness” programs for companies, has been teaching meditation at Twitter, the microblogging behemoth that practically embodies the frenetic digital drill so many people are caught up in.
“Twitter’s really into this,” she says. “There’s a whole mindfulness program they’re trying to build there. Like a lot of companies, they’re concerned about the well-being of their employees, and they’re big believers in trying to have people be consciously connected.”
Burkman and others see the tech tsunami unleashed in recent years by the explosion of smartphones along with the social-networking “always-on” phenomenon as a double-edged sword. “It’s like we’ve created this Frankenstein, where all this incredible technology can either be used for good or can take over our lives,” she says. “Companies like Twitter are having an active discussion about how we can use technology in a way that’s helpful, but without suffering from its negative effects.”
Despite the recent buzz in the media about yoga sometimes causing injuries, the yoga trend seems to be increasing right alongside the rising digital din of our society. A recent study by Mediamark Research & Intelligence found that the 4.3 million Americans practicing yoga in 2001 had mushroomed to nearly 14 million last year.
Kaitlin Quistgaard, editor-in-chief of San Francisco-based Yoga Journal, which sponsored the conference, said, “We saw a big boom in yoga practice at the onset of the recession, when people seemed to be looking for a way to take care of themselves in ways they hadn’t done before. With so many distractions in our life, just taking 10 minutes to focus on your breath can be enough to reset your day.”
Jennifer Prugh, owner of Breathe Los Gatos yoga studio in Los Gatos, Calif., has been teaching for 12 years and offers 82 classes a week to keep up with the growing demand by harried techies for inner peace. There’s a downside, she says, to having so many of our waking hours sucked up by screen time on PCs, tablets or smartphones.
“It’s wonderful that we’re all connected all the time, but it can also be horrible,” says Prugh, many of whose clients are senior executives at local tech firms. “To be part of that virtual conversation is fantastic in some ways, but when you go back to alone time there’s almost this guilt you feel, like you’re missing something or not working hard enough.”
Christina Enneking, one of two dozen students in Prugh’s yoga class on a recent morning, said: “The whole idea of moderation is lost as we get sucked into our smartphones.”
Dr. Amy Saltzman, a Menlo Park, Calif., physician who teaches meditation as part of her holistic-medicine practice, calls yoga and mindfulness meditation antidotes to Silicon Valleyitis.
“In my medical practice,” she says, “I see a lot of people who are extremely anxious because they’re always leaning into the future, worrying about it and exhausted. It’s that next-new-thing obsession that many in the valley suffer from. And with all that stimulation, we get rundown and end up all over the map.”
Facebook and Google, of course, have plenty of precedents when it comes to new technologies that seem to threaten to overwhelm us. Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg, who’s on the yoga conference panel Sunday called Digital Distractions and Your Practice, says many generations have had to cope with technological change. What’s different now with the Internet and personal computing, he says, is the ubiquity of the firehose-blast of data.
It’s not as easy to unplug as those yoga videos might suggest. Marti Foster, a yoga therapist from San Jose who teaches at Santa Clara’s Applied Signal Technology and other companies, says many of her high-tech students are practically being texted, tweeted and friended to death. “It’s just chatter. And it’s causing a lot of stress for people because it’s so addictive.”
Yet despite the toll it’s taking, Foster says “the minute they leave class, they roll up their yoga mats and check their status updates on Facebook.”
What’s a Silicon Valley yoga instructor to do?
“The only thing I can do is demand that for this one hour their phones are turned off,” she says. “But even doing that is a big deal for some of my students. They say, ‘But Marti, I’m expecting an important call.’ “
