Declutter Your Mind, Body & Spirit

On the quiet revolution of putting down your phone and picking up your life.

────────────────────────────

Monika’s musings and observations from the front of the yoga room.

01 — THE ACCUMULATION NOBODY TALKS ABOUT

We live in an age of spectacular distraction. Screens in our pockets, on our wrists, mounted on our walls. Notifications arriving like an impatient houseguest who never stops knocking. Most of us have accepted this as normal — even necessary — without stopping to ask what it's costing us.

It's costing us depth. It's costing us real connection. It's costing us the ability to simply be somewhere — not document it, not multitask through it, not half-experience it while scrolling through someone else's half-experience. It's costing us ourselves.

Decluttering your mind, body, and spirit doesn't require a weekend retreat or a sabbatical. It starts with something deceptively simple: choosing presence over performance. Choosing to be here, fully, more often.

Less multitasking. More non-tasking. More just being somewhere like you mean it.

02 — THE YOGA MAT AS SACRED GROUND

If you've ever walked into a yoga class, you already know it's one of the rare spaces in modern life explicitly designed for presence. No performance review. No inbox. Just breath, movement, and the disarmingly honest conversation your body starts having the moment you slow down enough to listen.

But here's something worth sitting with: the yoga mat only does its job if you actually show up on it. All of you. Not most of you, with the rest of your attention orbiting your phone across the room. All of you.

Put your phone away from your mat. Not on the corner of your mat. Not face-down next to your water bottle. Away. Across the room. In your bag. Let it be a stranger for sixty minutes.

» Consider this: Imagine walking into a yoga studio where every person had their phone sitting right next to their mat. Glowing. Buzzing. Pulling. Doesn't that feel immediately, viscerally wrong? Of course it does. Because you already know, somewhere deep down, that presence is the whole point.

And your smartwatch? Leave it behind — or at minimum, put it in dark mode with the screen off and notifications silenced. You may not notice the little flash of light on your wrist mid-warrior pose. But the person on the mat beside you does. That tiny rectangle of light is a pebble dropped in still water. The ripples reach further than you think.

Yoga is one of the great teachers of this principle, but it doesn't have to be yoga. A long walk without headphones. Swimming laps. A slow morning with coffee and nothing else. Any practice that asks you to be in your body, in the moment, without a screen mediating the experience — that's your sanctuary. Guard it accordingly.

03 — THE PEOPLE IN FRONT OF YOU

There's a version of this conversation that's about wellness routines and self-care, and that's fine. But the more pressing version is about the people sitting across from you at dinner. The friend who drove forty minutes to catch up over coffee. The parent who called just to hear your voice. The child who wants to show you something small and important.

When you're with someone in person — actually in person, physically in the same space — put your phone away. Not on the table face down. Away. And stop glancing at the texts rolling across your watch. Every time your eyes drop to that screen, even for a half-second, you are sending a message louder than anything you're saying out loud: something else might matter more than you right now.

People feel this. They may not say it. They almost certainly won't say it. But they feel it, and it accumulates, and it erodes something that is genuinely hard to rebuild.

Think about how you feel when you're with someone who is completely, unhurriedly, attentively with you. No phone checks. No watch glances. Just — there. It's rare enough now that it feels like a gift. Be that gift.

Let the people in your life feel as important as your yoga practice feels on your best morning. Because they are. They are more.

04 — LIMIT YOUR SCREEN TIME. ACTUALLY LIMIT IT.

This isn't a soft suggestion. Screen time is one of the primary sources of mental clutter in contemporary life, and most of us are carrying far more of it than we'd consciously choose if we stopped to look. The average adult now spends somewhere between seven and ten hours a day looking at screens. Seven to ten hours. Let that breathe for a moment.

Use the screen time tools on your phone. Set limits. Make your phone charge in a room that isn't your bedroom. Delete the apps you open out of habit rather than intention. The news cycle will continue without your constant supervision. The social feeds will scroll infinitely whether you're there or not.

What you get in return for those limits is not boredom. It's spaciousness. It's the mental breathing room in which your actual thoughts — your own, original, uninfluenced thoughts — start to surface again.

05 — PRIORITIZE IRL. WHEN YOU CAN, DO.

We've become so accustomed to the digital simulation of connection that the real thing can feel almost effortful by comparison. A text is easier than a phone call. A phone call is easier than showing up. But the returns are not equal, not even close.

In-person connection — flawed, awkward, real, unglamorous, present-tense human contact — is one of the most powerful things we know of for mental and physical health. Not a close second. The real thing.

So choose it, when you can. Make the plan. Drive the distance. Be slightly inconvenienced. Show up to the yoga class instead of the app. Have the conversation face to face instead of in a thread. Eat dinner together and leave the phones in another room like it's 1987 — because nothing has been lost by doing so.

The decluttered mind is not an empty mind. It's a mind with room for what matters. The decluttered life is not a stripped-down life. It's a life where your attention and your presence are directed deliberately — toward your breath, your body, the person in front of you, the moment you're actually in.

────────────────────────────────

START SMALL. START TODAY.

Leave your phone in the car. Take one class where you're fully there. Have one meal where no one checks a screen. Sit with someone and let them feel like the most important thing in the room — because in that moment, they are.

Presence is the practice. The mat is just where you remember that.

────────────────────────────────