Practicing Disconnection

By now, I hope you will have a good sense of why I think this kind of practice is essential to a cthonic, land—based, immanent spirituality — at least, if you want to live within its deeper levels in the hours of your days. So this section will offer advice to those who are interested to try.

Start slow. This is hard. Like the other practices, this is about daily habits, grand gestures, and ways of being in the world. Disconnection is not an act, but a way of life – an ongoing commitment we are working towards. And it is purposeful — not about sacrifice for its own sake, purity, perfection or politics — but seeking certain kinds of outcomes. If you try a practice and the outcomes are uninteresting or too challenging, stop. At the same time, Disconnection is intended to be difficult: try and notice the difference between experiencing discomfort and experiencing harm. Keep checking in with the original Disconnection essay to see if what you're trying supports those outcomes, and devise your own techniques if preferred.

Internet

I am a big fan of Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism — he writes about managing your digital life as a form of personal philosophy, and offers advice. I found it extremely effective for resetting my relationship with the thing.

His template is to begin by staying offline for 30 days (with the exception of things you can't avoid — work, emergencies, contact with loved ones). Once that period is done — you then begin to re—introduce technologies, one at a time, but only if you have a specific need you highly value; and as you do so you think carefully about how to set the technology up to get maximum use from it and minimum harm (for example, how do I use this to stay in contact with my friends, but refuse to participate in an algorithmic scrolling game designed to stick me to a platform all day)

Some tips for phones

Critics of the internet identify the smartphone as a particular problem.

• Set your mobile phone to greyscale
• Log out of social media apps on your phone, and only use them on your desktop
• Put something else in your bag for the moments you usually reach for your phone: a book, a craft project
• Experiment with leaving your phone at home when you go about your day
• Begin to mentally monitor how often you turn to it, when and why. Set a challenge: I check notifications no more than once an hour, say. This is hard, but will get easier with time
• Bring alternatives for what prompts you to use your phone: a wristwatch, for example
• Replace ‘bad scrolling' with ‘good scrolling’: I find my eBook reader and the Duolingo language learning app have the same tactile qualities and effort level as evaporating into social media, but are more grounded and wholesome to me. They keep me neutral or perk me up, instead of draining.
• When you notice a regular ‘danger zone’, set a commitment around it: If I look at my phone in the morning first thing, my whole day derails. Replaeing it with a new behaviour is easier than abstinence.

Notice what you do value and keep doing it. Your phone is a tool, it shouldn't be hijacking your entire psyche. I tried switching to a dumbphone, and it didn't work becaue i thought about it so infrequently I forgot to keep it charged. This was, of course, the goal. There is no taboo against messaging your friends, using a health—tracking app, a digital map or camera. We are looking out for the ways the internet tugs at us, beyond just using its tool—like functions.

Being Offline

Challenge yourself with increasingly long periods of time spent offline, aside from highly essential things. One day a week can be a good religious routine; and the week leading up to a ritual can help you focus into the right state.

Newport advises 30 days away from the internet to get all your habits and patterns out of your system, before re—introducing technologies one at a time. I found this effective, but you may want to try tackling components of your digital life one at a time and reduce out gradually.

I've spent periods of my life living without the internet at home, and honestly? I adore it. Would I do it now? I'm less clear about that, because I have rediscovered my love of music, film and reading through it, and I need that for my life to be as full as it can be. However — I have now been engaged with Disconnection since 2015, so my control over my digital habits is very high, and the negative side—effects which bothered me when I began have all but disappeared. Getting to this stage allows me to set less strenuous rules for myself — so long as I can maintain a level which pleases me, I find I do not need the intensity of months away from screen. As you begin this work, consider that early days might demand of you a total absence, but that it will not be forever: you have time in your life to experiment with this.

I remember that I used to find about three days offline was necessary to begin feeling different.

Always pre—plan what you will do in time offline, making a schedule or a list of possible activities. You WILL be bored. I find that starting the day with gentle housework is very effective, and then moving on to a hobby project – or planning a Walk or some Reading.

Subjectivity

• Experiment with a paper journal or a local digital journal for recording what’s going on, or roughing out ideas
• Experiment with ‘slower’ social media: blogs, dreamwidth, personal websites.
• Look at the websites you do use, and be ruthless about blocking and unfollowing anything with bad vibrations. People who squabble, who post untagged discourse, who are constantly dunking on bigots, anything which derails your day & cludges up your psyche.
• Begin exploring the hand—crafted internet as a way to spend time online outside of social media patterns.
• Think about what it means to not share a thought, photo, moment or experience with the web.

Loneliness

• One thing I feel is key is challenging the sense of persistent availability. The internet has no time, and so one tends to lurk on it in case something is beginning. If you train yourself to always be keeping on alert for it, it is very hard to halt that monitoring behaviour during ritual.
• Is there anyone as an individual you can talk with? By telephone, over text, in DMs, in person?
• Set your calendar for the day or week, and put in the specific times you'll be online to socialise and how. The other blocks of time, commit to NOT socialising in these moments, to doing your own thing. Try and do it fully or not at all.
• Can you research for upcoming events to attend (online or off) which will be concrete, finite social time with others?

Digital everything

• Begin asking: is there a way to do this without using the internet? Make it a challenge and a game.
• When you wonder the answer to a question, do not look it up straight away.
• Begin returning to physical media, expanding the textures of your life.
• One thing I find very challenging is the flat texture of life when mediated through a screen — because everything is there, from books to tutorials to social time, leisure time, work. There's never any reason to be offline. And so, slowly collecting vintage knitting instruction books, hand—writing recipes into my own notebook and the like become important to me, to have at least some parts of my day which are not a digital interface. I need this to stay alert and alive — otherwise, the lack of variety drains and shrinks all life down to a bit of sitting.
• Another reason is because needing the internet to solve little problems can act as a trigger to getting sucked into its orbit; for example, you need to know the time, but while you're at it let's just check...

Always know why you are online

• If you find you just kind of Are, notice that and interrupt yourself.
• If you had an actual task to do, take a break from the screen for ten minutes, consciously make a list of what your actual steps are, and set an alarm for when you will stop for another break.
• Practice noticing what times and reasons tend to produce bad internet use — boredom, stress, straight after dinner, on the bus home; and what times and reasons support good internet use — periods of focused time, or moments where you feel something valuable has happened there. One by one, begin filling those gaps with something else which is equivalent.

Passive Consumption

• Algorithmic consumption leads you effortlessly down predetermined paths. This erases anything outside of those paths from existence; and you get into the habit of using the internet because you wish to stumble upon good things. But while the things are good, the endless lurking for it devours life. Reintroducing a bit of friction can be a way to consider what we encouter more deeply.
• NEWS: Get a source of news, and make a predetermined time to consume it. That could be an actual newspaper, a subscription from a news source, or a curated list of people you trust to have the news. Avoid lurking about refreshing breaking news unless it's something you truly need to know moment—by—moment.
• MUSIC: I am very opposed to Spotify and the like due to their poor payment of artists, among other things. What brings me happiness is seeking out human curation: reading album reviews, listening to DJ mixes, putting on radio shows, scouring fan websites and asking people for recommendations whenever possible. I couldn't tell you why this matters, only that it does. I suppose something of the conscious and the substantial? It feels deeply meaningful to me that now my music is on my harddrive, a collection of digital objects that I can organise and maintain long term, instead of this infinite ephemerality — an insistence on time and place. Perhaps its just being 30.
• FILM: you can replicate this with film, or books, or whatever it is you love. For some reason, though, I've never had difficulty continuing to seek out and curate these, and it seems less sinister than what has happened with music. I'm not sure why. We already call for Reading, and I've found that trying to divert read some garbage on reddit time towards sitting with my eReader brings a groundedness to these moments where I desire quiet.
• POLITICS: join an on—the—ground group doing actual work in your area. Avoid absorbing discourse and feeling like the digital conversation is the work.
• LEECHBLOCK: or other similar extensions allow you to set granular rules for your browsing; such as no more than ten minutes a day on this site or no social media during my mornin routine. I found that these alone did not help me — I also needed to make strong personal taboos, check in with why offlineness was important to me, and use other techniques as well.

Other Challenge Ideas

Adopt these practices one day a week, for a whole week, for a whole month, or as a permanent life choice as seems achievable to you. Try them one at a time. Choose ones which interest you. They will be difficult, but make a commitment and notice the difficulty as part of the experience. Remember the goal is not to one day have all these Disconnections running simultaneously – they’re just varied routes to give you unusual sensory and psychic experiences which are pivotal to our craft.

You may find some of them don’t work for you – they have no impact, or the impact is too negative to continue. Discontinue that activity. You may also discover that they have various effects – note these down, because you may need to replicate them in future to draw on.

Disrupt your usual journeys

Use public transport more often for routes you could drive. Walk more often on usual trips (even if just part of the way. The lore stresses almost constant walking, and the perceptions of time and hereness that perceiving your world as a net of footways produces.

I used to take one day a week to walk home from work, albeit I couldn't do the whole distance, so I would set off by foot and wander a bit on the way, or hop off the bus somewhere interesting. These days felt long and filled with possibility and strangeness, and I still remember parts of them with vividness. It's to jolt you out of the everyday whenever possible.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there...

Ken Knabb

Do a wilderness solo

That is, find a natural place, and sit there doing nothing. Start with a period of half an hour, and work up to a full 24 hours. If you have heavy weird planned, longer. On this, read Splendid Isolation. The other Disconnection techniques here — learning to cope without checking your phone, knowing how to keep yourself OK in nature without help — support working up to this.

No Electric Lights

Experience life by the clock of the sun for a little while, adjusting perceptions of night and day, as well as fear and the night; meditations on the sun and the moon and darkness, and living in the strangeness of fire and candles.

Plan days out

You can expand time by doing more novel things within it. Consider the long childhood summers in the lore, spent strolling in the hills and not doing very much. You can recreate that time of living, including its sense of freedom and endlessness, just by choosing to make space for that kind of emptiness again. The Disconnection here is from your wonted pattern of living — opening yourself to chance encounters and discovering what you find to fill boredom.

Adopt a difficult survival habit

Buying no new things, only mending; baking all your bread; growing your own vegetables; and so forth. The Disconnection here is time travel, and feeling the shape of your life adjust around new rhythms and connections to the Old Gods and our ancestors experiences of the infinite. You don't meed to adopt these permanently or dogmatically — just for as long as you are learning something from them.

Join a Living History company who run events just for members (i.e. not one of the education or performance focused ones) and spend periods of time in the past.

Entertainment without electric

Learn songs, learn to whittle wood, learn card games, learn stories. Fencraft always calls you to spend increasingly long periods of time hanging about in the countryside not doing much, and so begin these campfire skills.

Not the internet

Gaming, the television, porn. Survey respondents in Newport's book said that they thought it was important to include Netflix in their 30 Days Off The Internet experiment. There's all sorts of things in life that have this sticky, static quality; if you don't feel on top of your use of it, make that part of your Disconnection work.

We're looking for all things in moderation here; as ever, not to moralise about a thing as a concrete good or bad, not to make judgements about its social worth, but the ways the impact on your life as a whole, the proportion of time you spend on it; whether that feels good to you; whether it's reshaping you in ways you dislike; whether you can encounter deep magic without its distraction.

To make absolutely clear: this religion taboos other things with an obssessional quality so you have space for it to become your obsession.

Take, for example, the common neopagan desire to have magical dreams or otherworld journeys. I find it is common for me to dream about computer games; if I do programming before bed, I develop the ability to teleport and time travel in the dreamspace. Grotty conflicts follow me there, the loops of living life into the otherlands.

The case for Disconnection is clear: to fill your dreams with Pagan things, one must be absolutely saturated by them, making your encounters with nature, folklore and sensation more intense by far than competing moods. You do this by organising your life and time around actions, thoughts, images and feelings which make the spiritual predominant.

If this is too much, then remember that Fencraft also has a Solar and Lunar path, celebrating different ways to the divine.

What about central heating?

Most of the suggestions on this page are going to strike you as needlessly difficult and anti—progress. But I wouldn't recommend anything I hadn't tried and found both doable and purposeful.

One thing you should NOT do is attempt to live without heating. There's a limit, and that's it. I've done it and — it was spiritually stimulating, and I did find the kinds of Disconnections that are useful there, feeling life shape itself around the cold and learning so much more about how to resist it. But also so grim, so impossibly grim.