As time passes, subsequent generations have tended to comment on the increased complexity of modern life. This is not surprising, as the number and variety of technological devices in contemporary society has relentlessly increased ever since the industrial revolution. However, there have also been hidden consequences of adopting the latest thing – of course cars were preferable in many ways to horses and carts, but the consequences of so many exhausts was not even imagined for decades.

Ironically, the very first cars were electric, but petroleum gained a foothold and eventually won out, and then protectionism of that technology became a ‘thing’; if electric had had a century of unencumbered development, human-caused climate change would likely not be nearly as advanced as it is now, though other adversities would likely have emerged. Likewise, had the harm of smoking not been swept under the carpet for so many years, many lives would not have been lost to disease.

As consumers, none of this was our fault – we weren’t told the facts, but as they have emerged, we need to act as informed, wise people, particularly as the latest squeaky-clean technology – social media – has been shown to be both toxic and addictive, and particularly harmful for young people.

Kendo has long advanced meditation as a supremely effective way of gaining freedom from dependence on any pernicious mental process, everything from our own nagging doubts to doom-laden memes, a.k.a. negative infectious ideas. It’s incredibly effective, even against the internet – to use a technological metaphor, every time you meditate you’re re-booting yourself and getting a fresh perspective on life.

However, Kendo’s path to self-empowerment includes developing an active discrimination to use in real-time, having a working filter that blocks harmful memes before they can adversely affect us – after all, we can’t meditate all the time. This is where Kyu Shin Do can help.

In Kyu Shin Do, as we go into meditation we visualise placing all our concerns distanced away from ourselves, so that we can be independent from them as we seek the stillness of Zen. As we come out of meditation, we re-acquaint ourselves with our worldly concerns, but we have a new perspective on them, and our intuition will usually have given us new insights on how to deal with them.

This is how we de-toxify social media. By remembering that it has an agenda – to ensnare you by annoying or offending you – at face value that seems annoying in itself, and we rightly feel that something should be done. Ultimately, something will be done, but that will take time, and in the meantime we lose nothing by enhancing our discrimination against such unethical actions against us.

So, when you next do a Zen Kyu Shin Do meditation, include the suspicious motives of social media among the problems you distance from yourself, and you will emerge with an enlightened discrimination towards the technology.

Kendo does not propose shunning social media, as it has many positive aspects, including keeping in touch with friends and family and sharing positive ideas; instead, he advocates using it for these very reasons, as well as to keep up to date with modern technologies, as this will give us the best chance of setting a good example of responsible social media use to young people. This is infinitely preferable to leaving them to struggle alone in metaphorically shark-infested waters, with a technology that would otherwise be unfamiliar to us.

Again, Kendo’s Zen Kyu Shin Do empowers you to be an agent for positive change in a world of challenges, even those we haven’t yet imagined.