Medieval Monasteries & Digital Wellness
What on earth can we learn from ancient monastic life for our digital wellbeing? Surprisingly, there are a lot of connections.
The late afternoon sun was giving way, lowering, the monks, quietly reading, sensed this shift as they sat in the reading room of the monastery in medieval England. Sure enough the bells tolled. A quite rustle of books closing and robes shifting. Over eight centuries later in a sea of cubicles at a Boston software company, app chimes sounded and the room was filled with the sound of laptop lids closing and the rustle of backpacks opening.
While these activities may be separated by centuries, they are united in purpose. How do we manage our attention in an increasingly complex world? How do we maintain a sense of being and wellness where digital technologies persist everywhere?
What can the practices of medieval monasteries, where many of the same practices are carried on to this day, tell us about wellness in the digital age? Are there lessons we can learn that these ancient practices can help us with today that we’ve lost or ignored?
One could also draw upon Buddhist temples and practices or Hindu Matha’s as well. For simplicity I have chosen ancient Christian monastic practices, not because of any religious preference.
If we look at, for example, much of the thinking and guidance we read and hear regarding attention management, we see something amiss. Much of the advice is around what today is called “attention hygiene”, such as decluttering the desktop from apps and files, or closing unnecessary browser tabs.
While these approaches are helpful, they are just a process of elimination, rather than cultivation of attention hygiene. Visual attention is more nuanced than just elimination, it also includes the idea of “mindful seeing”, that it’s not just about our attention, but rather what neuroanthropologist Merlin Donalds calls “cognitive ecology”. All the facets of how we see the world, not just apps and tabs.
This is why ancient monasteries paid attention to what we see as a whole. The very architecture of monasteries considered our attention. Specific sight lines and visual barriers or what we might today call attention landscapes.
Monks were taught what they called “custody of the eyes” or in Latin, custodia oculi, a rather sophisticated way of attention management that is more holistic in nature. The monks were taught where and how they should direct their gaze down to the minutiae of daily activities. Anthropologist Edwin Hutchins theorised that our perception is not passive, but that we construct it through learned practices.
We see parallels today in both the architecture of information and tools like Focus Mode in iOS and Google’s Digital Wellbeing tools. While these are helpful and a right step, they only address a part of what our full human attention means. This includes spatial awareness and the movements of our body.
Another added element to this greater concept of focus includes silence. For ancient monks and even into today, silence wasn’t just about being quiet for contemplation, but about creating space for being present. Today, that would mean not just silencing notifications, but finding space, perhaps in the living room, for space to be present. You might try a cave like the ancient hermits, but that might be a wee bit damp.
Monasteries included the physical aspect of attention and the mind as well. Anthropologist Thomas Cordas calls this “somatic modes of attention”, where different cultures train the body to attend to the world. The monks had very complex and elaborate postures and movements from how to adjust robes when sitting to body form when praying.
Cistercian architecture provides an example of the spatial aspect of these concepts. They had (as most monasteries do to this day), the chapter house for community gatherings, the scriptorium for intellectual work and the cloister for contemplation.
A modern comparison might be families who have a no-phones rule at the dinner table or businesses that no longer permit phones in meetings. Wellness clinics and spas do the same.
In the monastic world this was what we might today call “context switching”, where physical movements, sounds (bells to signal changes) and intentional spaces all came together. They had an intuitive understanding that attention isn’t just mental but embodied. Much more sophisticated than our binary view of an on/off world of today.
Monasteries also understood the division of activities such as labour, prayer, community, prayer and contemplation in conjunction with creating spaces. The Rule of St. Benedict was a sort of “liturgical order” to the day, a deeply understood sense of the rhythm of time combined with the other practices. The Rule was an alternation between work (opus manuum) and prayer (opus dei — not the organisation.)
We also see these ancient monastic elements in modern office designs where some have quite workspaces (scriptorium), collaboration zones (chapter house) and transition spaces between them much like the cloister walk.
Much of modern wellness practices and teachings, while valuable and helpful, tend to focus on the individual, within limited time frames and like software companies with Focus Mode and Digital Wellbeing. All useful, but they might be more valuable with some of the ideas of ancient monastic practices, including those of Buddhism and Hinduism.
In the end it is entirely up to us in how we form and practice wellbeing in the digital age. It is not a problem technology can solve. For it requires mindfulness, architecture and the structuring of time. All human things. We might benefit from creating clearer boundaries between our different daily activities and rituals (rituals are not just religious), creating our own rules and practices.