I’ve been trying different types of meditation for a few years now. I started with a really basic technique I read somewhere, where I would just focus on breathing for a preset time interval; in beginning even 10 minutes was too much, later I settled on 20. I wasn’t very dilligent though, and later I substituted it with much more frequent, but worse in basically every other metric, cigarette breaks. May sound funny, but the whole experience of lighting a cigarette and taking the first smoke is one of the fastest induction methods to a semi-relaxed/meditative state that I know.

I was working in an outsourced call center for insurance companies, and we were allowed smoke breaks basically whenever the boss wasn’t paying attention, which was rather often. Working in a call center is one of the most kafkaesque jobs there is, it is just so purposeless and stupid. Even though I managed to find quite a few loopholes to work less (that could be an article for itself), I was still very stressed out after every shift. The fact that I was at the same time volunteering at the Clinical Center of Serbia for a chance to get a job there wasn’t very helpful. Either way, instead of meditating like before, I was using smoking breaks to quickly go to a better, quieter, more meaningful place for 5-7 minutes at a time. It did work.

Fortunately, after some 10 months of toiling in that god forsaken place, I was liberated - I had a pylonidal sinus cut out. Google it up if you’re not saving your appetite. Medical leave started in December, and suddenly, I had so much free time to think about life. I didn’t use it well at all, but I did learn some Italian and I went to Bologna for a post-doc. I was still smoking, but less and less, and it wasn’t anymore an introspective ritual as before. It remained a more social thing (as it still is in Balkans), with friends and alcohol, which says, a total opposite of the reason I started smoking regularly. I had no more moments of alone time with my thoughts. The ample free time that I did have in Italy, when I moved into a small but overly expensive loft apartment, I filled up absolutely with games and youtube videos.

Then the pandemic struck.

I happened to be in Belgrade at the time, by an incredible stroke of luck and italian bureaucracy. The following three months can be described as an overabundant satisfaction of the lower parts of the Maslow’s pyramid, and a complete disregard for anything beyond. I learned to cook okayish, I was still receiving my italian salary, and I was living with my girlfriend. Instead of thinking, I was smoking and drinking. There I realized how easy it is to descend into mediocrity and a BMI above 25 - cheap food and alcohol and some kind of entertainment is all that is needed. Fortunately, an ephemeral wave of optimism spread across Europe by the start of June, and I went back to Italy to “work”. No real work was done, but I did go to beach a few times. By September were we finally starting the studies planned by the projects, which actually is very cool. Then I started meditating again.

I went back to the 20 minute breathing exercises, but I wasn’t satisfied with that. Guided meditation was always out of the question - nobody else can create a program for my brain that I myself couldn’t outperform. Then I heard about the Wim Hof breathing. It is a very cool little trick, but the actual revelation for me wasn’t the actual technique, rather one small detail: all parts of the process (inhalation, exhalation, apnea, their number and duration) depended not on some arbitary external standard, but solely on my own body and mind. I didn’t even read the original, I read something else and then I slightly modified it based on this revelation.

It goes like this:

1. Inhale deeply
2. Exhale passively
3. Repeat until feeling tingling in limbs
4. Hold the breath after the last inhalation
5. Release when feeling like doing so

This makes the body the guru of the mind - all the steps are dependent on the non-neocortex pathways of the CNS. Depending on the state, every new session is going to be different, and more can be learned from it. The duration can vary from 3 to around 15 minutes, and steps can be modified arbitrarily (tingling doesn’t have to stop the breathing cycles at the 3. step, for example). I started doing it just in my office chair, and later also after training.

One big issue I had when meditating before, were the “schedulable” thoughts. Those are the things for which I didn’t have time during the day to figure out, and now during meditation solutions come up; these need to be executed at a later date, but there is nothing that I could do right now, sitting on a chair at home, meditating. Before I would either ignore them and possibly neglect some important task, or interrupt meditation to work on it or schedule it in the calendar. I came up with a better solution: a notebook. Before meditating, I position a notebook and a pen next to me. During meditation, if a particular “schedulable” thought would come to my mind, I would write it down. I would then continue meditating. The act of writing it down frees the mind of it. It is very effective for a more concentrated meditation.

I am still evaluating the usefulness of actually doing something about the crap written down, instead of ripping the page and throwing it away at the end of the session.