Use it or lose the body’s most important muscle: Danielle Harper

Danielle Harper believes yoga is a pursuit that cannot be faked, bought or done for you by your iPhone.

Danielle Harper is a health and wellness expert who hails from Los Angeles. In addition to a BSc in Neuroscience, Danielle is a certified Gyrotonic pilates and yoga teacher and is the founder of Alma Studio in Havelock North.

OPINION

“Intelligent. Powerful. Innovative, from the inside out.” It would be understandable to assume these words describe an Olympian, a Nobel laureate, or a cutting-edge scientist, but in fact, this is the tagline for the new iPhone 16.

Apple is unveiling its Apple Intelligence, and this phone’s capabilities are truly disturbing from a yogic perspective.

The iPhone 16 can summarise your emails. No comprehension is needed. It can rewrite your own emails and texts, making them more concise and grammatically correct.

No grammar is needed. It can even remember who you went to lunch with three weeks ago on Thursday or what mountain you climbed seven years ago in Peru. No memory is needed. It can do all of this effortlessly.

Using a pen and paper to write helps you to learn and remember better than typing.

The claim is that the time saved will make you more efficient, but I would argue that quite the opposite is true.

We lose what we do not use — and if we hand over these basic functions of our brain, what will become of us?

With each generation of iPhone or similar technology that comes to the market touting more and more features and capabilities, we ourselves are becoming less and less able, less and less accomplished, less and less connected.

There was a time when I could rattle off the phone numbers of every single person I knew— that is no longer a skill I possess.

Although some might argue remembering phone numbers is useless information, I strongly disagree. Remembering those phone numbers was a simple brain exercise driven by necessity.

There are many other examples of technology robbing us of our ingenuity in the name of innovation and progress. As technology progresses, we digress, becoming shadows of ourselves and our full capacity as human beings.

I probably hold this opinion due to my practice of yoga. Yoga is a pursuit that cannot be faked, it cannot be bought, and it cannot be done for you by your iPhone.

It is a deeply human pursuit. It connects us to our “beingness”.

As antiquated as it may seem, using a paper map to navigate is proven to get your brain working in ways that protect your hippocampus, the brain's memory centre.

To achieve true enlightenment, you have to put in years of practice. Nothing else will do. Twenty years into my own practice, I still consider myself a student. Yoga humbles you. It makes you climb the mountain and then realise that you did it all wrong, so you must start again.

Only to realise that the mountain you climbed was a mere molehill — and the mountain still lies ahead. On your 10th, 11th or 100th try, you start to realise you are starting to ascend the base of the mountain.

Yoga requires persistence, determination, curiosity and a humbled ego. It requires you to hone yourself and all your faculties into a tool for your soul’s expression.

There is literally no way to cheat because in this game, you are the opponent. If you cheat you are cheating only yourself, and you will never summit that mountain.

Gym rats will express a similar sentiment. Putting steroids and Ozempic aside, for the most part you cannot fake big bulging muscles and low body fat. These are things you earn through hard work, determination, commitment and hard effort.

In the process of that effort, you don’t build only muscles; you build your character, self-esteem, sense of purpose, your sense of self.

Whether it is Apple Intelligence or some other artificial intelligence, our own intelligence is the muscle we should be flexing and working on each day.

Our brain needs to be engaged in order to stay healthy. In our drive to make our lives effortless, we are losing the very fabric that makes us human — effort, struggle, exertion and labour of love.

I challenge you to put more effort into your life and fewer shortcuts. Stop using Google Maps to drive to a new destination, stop saving information on your phone, and stop autopopulating your life. Flex your brain and it, too, shall expand.