The Monk Who Won't Hand Over His Phone
by Nikolai · 12 July 2026 · Spirituality & Meaning
Nikolai, a former Orthodox monk, returns to city life with an unconventional spiritual practice: keeping his phone visibly on the table without checking it, as a form of modern contemplation. He leads a small weekly group in a café, teaching not digital abstinence but resistance to the impulse itself. For him, this is a more honest path to inner stillness than retreating to the forest.
Nikolai spent three years in an Orthodox monastery near Novgorod before deciding that monastic life wasn't his path, and returned to the city with a habit that's stayed with him since: he never lets his phone out of sight, even while praying. To many who know him, that looks like a contradiction. To him, it's the opposite of one.
At the monastery he learned that the old monks never understood prayer as an escape from the world, but as a practice of staying still in the middle of it. His problem with most modern mindfulness advice is that it suggests exactly the reverse: switch everything off, go into the forest, disappear for a week. Nikolai finds that comfortable but dishonest. Most people can't afford a week in the forest. They have to learn to find a place of stillness inside themselves on the subway, with the phone in their pocket, with the next message able to arrive at any moment.
He's started meeting a small group, every Tuesday evening, in the back room of a café, where he doesn't teach people to "put the phone away," but offers a much harder exercise: leaving the phone visibly on the table, turned on, and still not looking at it for twenty minutes. Most fail the first time. Some manage it by the fifth.
"The desert fathers didn't have phones," Nikolai says, "but they had thoughts constantly screaming for their attention, just like our notifications. The device was never the problem. It was always whether you learn not to follow every call."
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