S02E08 — AUG2020

My Esoteric Funk

Hello world and welcome to the twentieth edition of this rather gajin newsletter.

After a three-hour convo with a person I just met, they told me I should sometimes write about this topic cause it might be interesting and helpful to other people too.

I contemplated a lot on that idea for the fear of creating something that might look like a bro-science mumbo jumbo. This text gives just a tiny glimpse of referenced disciplines and doesn’t even remotely paint the full picture. Note these are my experiences and my experiences only, so be skeptical and don’t make any conclusions solely based on this text.

Ok, let’s do this.

✦

Some dramatic books to add up to the atmosphere

I never particularly liked my school teachers, but I was always fascinated by the folks who knew something that others didn’t. From an early age, I had a tendency to act as an apprentice.

First to my neighbor who had the most amazing workshop and tools in his garage. I would spend hours with him working on my school DIY projects. Later on, that would be my father’s friend, a software engineer, who taught me how to install Linux. And finally, that would be my twelve years older friend who is a self-taught musician, who showed me the ropes of music production.

I was always that annoying kid, hanging around adults like a tick, asking a ton of questions, and absorbing everything like a sponge — whether useful or not.

My childhood curiosity re-sparked when I met my ashtanga yoga teacher Vairagya Ranko. Smaller frame full of lean muscles, grayish hair always tied in a bun, he could be anywhere between 40 and 70. But his gentle build and smiling eyes are deceiving. He treats his practice as a life calling and makes zero compromises about it. He’s in the shala (studio) each morning at 5 AM and practices for two hours, then he practices with students for the rest of the day. His shala is like a sanctuary. There are strict rules and almost no talking. Only his old poodle is allowed to do whatever she wants. He treats everyone with the same level of rigorosity whether you are a pregnant woman or an older person, he’ll try to squeeze the maximum out of you. You either align your body, your mind, and your gaze or you go home.

The most fascinating thing about him is that each year he spends six months in India learning yoga from his gurus—for him, yoga is a life-long practice which he started as a teenager. We never spoke about this, because I was always genuinely afraid of him, but I’d have like a million questions to ask.

Yoga never became part of my daily routine even though I gave it three or four decent shots. Either I can’t find the time, or I don’t have a company, or I don’t like the company or something else. So many excuses — so me. 

After my anxiety overdrive, desperate and intrigued, I decided to give meditation a go. I remember it clearly, the first eight sessions were like sitting with your eyes closed. Nothing special. It’s not like I knew what I was supposed to experience anyways. But the ninth session was the tipping point. It is when I slipped into a sensation I never felt before. It was beautiful this time. That’s when I figured there is “something” for me in this, something I can’t explain but I want to commit myself to in order to explore it further. Later on, I would learn it was pointless to try to explain something unconscious with words because they are a byproduct of consciousness. Go figure.

I never skipped a day since then. It is part of my day, but each time is a bit different. Just recently I had a very long conversation with my friend Bojana about how there are both “good” and “not-so-good” periods in meditation practice. But that’s the thing, at first I thought it is all about escapism — getting to the dream-like deep layers of the mind and being happy up there. But it’s actually about being aware of your thoughts and feelings in everyday life, post-meditation, regardless of how pleasant or unpleasant those feelings are. 

It changed me a lot and helped me cope with fear, doubts, anger, happiness, various situations in relationships, at work, etc. It made me more and less empathic at the same time, helping me to realize what are my boundaries and what are someone else’s.

I never went beyond Andy Puddicombe’s teaching, mostly because I feel like even after six years I’m still at the beginning — a monkey mind.

Around the time I started the practice of meditation, I also started visiting this Russian chiropractor guy Igor Krokis. In his fifties, always with a smile on his face, weird burn scars on his hands, and some obscure tattoo here and there, he’s one of the most fascinating people I met in person. His Serbian is more Russian than Serbian so I had trouble understanding him at first. But little by little I would learn to understand him so we could actually talk during our therapies. Our topics spanned from pyramids, aliens, Helena Blavatsky, his Egyptian friend who makes unique etheric oils, to why we should avoid eating bananas on an empty stomach. We’d always touch upon Nature. I anecdotally call him the druid because he’s one of the rare people who strongly believe in natural ways of healing with herbs. He’s the guy who introduced me to the amazingness of ginger tea, and I’m eternally grateful to him for that.

He also told me how there’s important literature that’s not on the Internet, and how I should learn Old Russian in order to read those scripts. And once again I found some excuses why I can’t do that, though I tried. I tried reading “The Da Vinci Code” in Russian, and the Russian book about healing with herbs from the picture above. I actually read that one whole, with the help of Google Translate ofc.

Anyways, each time I’m about to pay him a visit, I get so much excited because of our discussions, besides feeling great after the therapy. And I would always prepare my agenda in advance because I have very limited time with him and want to cover and learn so much. 

In the summer of 2015, I vividly remember that day, when the YouTube algorithm suggested to me, now legendary, Vice documentary on Wim Hof The Iceman. Already hooked on the whole “esoteric funk” I watched it once almost breathless, no pun intended. And then I watched it again. And then I was like “I want whatever this guy is having”. But it was only around September of 2017 when I did my first breathing exercise. 

It was the worst sensation since my first anxiety attack. I was home alone, laying on the floor, dripping in sweat, and feeling I was going to suffocate. Thinking how if I died like this it was not going to be a pleasant scene for my fiancée when she got back home. At one point my whole vision turned purple. It was super unpleasant and it almost never stopped to be, but I was also very stubborn. Little by little I introduced cold showers and Wim’s yoga poses for enhanced blood circulation. 

One side effect of Wim Hof’s method on me is an abnormal boost in self-confidence. I felt like I had an indestructible shield suite. By February of 2018, I was running on 0Cº. And I never ran before, and definitely not during the winter. This eventually got me into distance running and it’s generally a positive side of a confidence boost. The flip side is that I almost got into two separate street fights with the gangs of pickpocketers, but that’s for another story.

So yeah, with the extensive and regular practice I managed to do some unimaginable things like laying naked in the snow for a couple of minutes or going without breathing for three and a half minutes. But the main benefit is that my circulation is better, I’m not “cold as a snake” anymore, I had maybe three headaches in this time period and those were some extreme situations, and my stomach never hurt. In general, proper oxidation of the body has various positive effects.