Published: 23.01.2026
I meditated for 41 minutes today. Did it right after coming back from the gym, and for the first time in a long while, I didn’t feel drowsy. I started with deep breathing. I would inhale, hold it, then exhale and hold again, repeating this for 20-30 counts. After that, my breath became the anchor for the rest of the meditation. Whenever I got distracted, I brought my attention back to it.
I was fairly quick at catching the moments when I drifted, but it still felt incredibly fragile. It is almost unbelievable how easy it is to lose the intention of simply observing the breath. Sometimes I would lose focus after five or six counts, sometimes after ten, and the strange part is that I would not even remember where I had left off. During this, I noticed two distinct kinds of distractions. The first is when a thought arises during breath observation and immediately turns into a chain, one thought leading to another without much resistance. The second is stranger because it doesn’t have a identifiable trigger. I will be paying attention to the breath, and then it feels like some internal reshuffling happens. In a split second, I lose track completely, and I can’t even trace how or when it happened. Lately, I have also been thinking a lot about this idea that there is my body, there is my mind, and then there is an observer. For a while now, I have been noticing this observer and calling it consciousness, the being, the awareness, the energy - what have you. I can sense that it is distinct from both my body and my mind. The body is where sensations live (like pain, touch, and physical emotion). The mind is where these experiences are encoded, where thoughts and representations exist, and where the notion of time seems to live. What I cannot understand is why evolution has designed the body and the mind in a way that makes it so hard to remain aware of this observer. I assume there must be a reason for this, because ideally self-awareness should confer an evolutionary advantage and be favoured by selection. Because in the world we live in today, so much suffering comes from compulsive thinking. Just being aware that we are not our thoughts should bring peace. It should make us less reactive, more gentle, and calmer, and in turn improve the quality of our decisions. But that is not how evolution seems to have shaped things. On a side note, one theory I have about the emergence of consciousness (even though it is not scientific, but more spiritual) is that maybe humans were given a body and a mind because consciousness is trying to understand itself.