It's 6 AM something.

You sit down on the floor. Open the app. Pick a ten-minute meditation session. Press start. Eight seconds in, you shift your legs. You hear the neighbor's door close and your brain follows it — where are they going this early? You catch yourself. Pull your attention back to your breath. It stays for maybe 2 inhales. You're replaying a conversation from yesterday. You don't even notice you've left your breath. When you do, you open one eye and check the timer. 7:43 remaining. You close your eyes harder, like that helps.

You try the breath again. Your back hurts. You fix your position. Ten seconds later it hurts again. A car passes outside and now you're thinking about whether you need an oil change or what to eat later.

You open both eyes. Stare at the phone. 5:12 left.

You close the app, open Reddit, and scroll for 30 minutes.

Maybe you're just not the kind of person this works for.

Maybe you're just stuck in a "spiritual prison".

I know that morning. I lived it for seven years. I'd wake up, do three rounds of Wim Hof breathing — fully in, letting go, thirty times, then hold. My body would feel lighter. My thoughts would slow down. And I'd think: now I'm ready. But three minutes into meditation, the first thought crept in. Five seconds later, another. There I was, playing ping-pong between my mind and my breath. Every single morning.

When my practice felt broken, when I couldn't focus or reach the happiness and peace I was seeking, I immediately thought it was something I was lacking.

So I studied more. Read more books about spirituality. About meditation. From sages and gurus that had walked the path. Eckhart Tolle. Ram Dass. YouTube videos about spirituality every night. If you put them together you'd have a film longer than my actual practice. I tried longer breathworks. Cold showers every morning because someone on a video said it would reset my nervous system. I journaled gratitude lists until my hand cramped and I still felt nothing. I recorded my own affirmations, "bended" my reality by manifesting.

Some of it worked.

That was the worst part. Just enough progress to keep me searching.

The books worked as guidance, pointers or solutions for "the next step." They gave me new insights that I didn't have before. But it also kept me on an endless cycle — failing, seeking help in a book, trying again, failing, seeking the next video, the next technique, the next protocol, the next teacher who finally had the missing piece. And every time I found something new about raising your frequency, gratitude, or changing your thoughts, it felt good.

For an evening. Maybe a week.

But that was just mental masturbation.

A nice meal inside my spiritual prison.

A dopamine kick and relief from the pain of failing on my path towards peace.

If you're reading this, you already know. Because this is another book. And part of you is hoping — again — that this one will be different.

It might be. But the thing that finally changed everything had nothing to do with my mind.

That same Monday, there was another war I didn't know I was fighting.

I prepared my breakfast:

Granola, yogurt with berries, bread with margarine, avocado, ham and cheese on top. A glass of homemade juice — spinach, lemon, apple — just like I saw them do on Instagram. Followed by a cup of coffee later, while staring at my computer screen. I could feel the rush of energy and desire to get things done from that first sip.

But 2 hours later, I felt hungry again. Not in my stomach — my stomach was fine. But my mouth was watering, my tongue swept across my teeth, and my hand was already reaching for the fridge.

An apple and protein bar. Perfect.

That put out my cravings for another hour and made me feel motivated again for 30 more minutes.

This cycle went on for a long period.

I thought I was eating well. The juice was green. The eggs were organic. I was doing everything the internet told me to do.

For a while, it felt like progress. I'd already cut the worst stuff years ago — the fast food, the late-night junk. This felt clean by comparison. But the crashes kept coming. The restlessness kept coming. And at some point I stopped asking what to add and started asking what was still in the way.

That question changed everything.

I looked at my "healthy" breakfast and realized I'd never actually questioned it. I'd just layered things on top of each other because someone online said they were good. Granola — sugar. Juice — more sugar. Bread — spike, then crash. Margarine — processed. The protein bar — basically candy with a label.

My body was on a roller coaster before I ever sat on the floor to meditate. And I was blaming my mind the whole time.

So I stripped it all back. Not to follow a trend or a protocol. Just to find the baseline. I cut the sugar, the snacks between crashes, the seed oils, the processed stuff I'd never questioned because it looked healthy. I kept it simple — whole foods, nothing engineered — and gave it thirty days.

The restlessness — that constant low-level itch under my skin, like my body couldn't settle — started to fade. And it wasn't about what I added. It was about what I removed. The things my body had been fighting while I was trying to sit still.

The noise I thought was my mind was actually triggered by my body.

The itching, the aching, the restlessness — it was my body the whole time. Once that was gone, the only things left to sit with were real.

Each time I sat down to meditate after that, something was different.

I didn't change the environment, posture, or technique.

But meditation didn't feel like something I tried to achieve. It was my natural state of being. It became effortless. It felt like someone lifted a cloud from my mind and threw it away. I was just sitting there. And of course I got stuck in my mind now and then. But I wasn't as restless. My body felt calm.

I sat down. Pressed start. Eight seconds passed. I didn't shift my legs. A car passed outside and I heard it — just heard it. It didn't take me anywhere. My back didn't ask me to move. I didn't open one eye to check the timer. I didn't need to.

Everything I'd been forcing for seven years just worked.

This was meditating times five.

You're not failing spirituality. You were trying to find stillness while your body was on fire.

The next time you sit down at 6 AM and press start — the noise will come.

But the problem was never your mind.

It was your body.

All Love, Tomas

P.S. Something called The Subtraction Protocol is coming. If this piece hit home — stay tuned.