It started with noticing
On medical advice I began keeping a diary. Not for breathing — just to track what was happening. Over time I started seeing patterns: certain people, situations and internal states kept turning up before the worst stretches. Not vague ones. Reproducible ones. That got me interested in the relationship between attention, state and how I actually felt.
The meditation experiments
One of the first systems I took seriously used geometric cards with short phrases you’d hold your attention on and repeat. Two of them stuck with me: “the healing side of pain,” and “drop your expectations.” I spent a long, intense period repeating that second one, and my subjective experience shifted more than I expected. That’s my own experience, not a medical claim — but it convinced me attention was a lever worth pulling.
Where mantra broke down
Here was the problem: repeating a phrase worked when I was alone and still. The moment I had to work, listen, or hold a conversation, it fell apart. I couldn’t disappear somewhere quiet every time my mind needed to settle — and my life at the time was nothing but meetings, calls and pressure. So the real design constraint became obvious: whatever I built had to work while life was happening.
The pieces that actually worked
Later I came across a practice that used seven breaths, visualisation and traditional seed syllables tied to chakras. The chakra imagery didn’t land for me — I didn’t naturally believe in it or picture it. But underneath it were parts that clearly did work: the breath count, the structure, the sound, the felt vibration, the visualisation, and above all the synchronisation of those things at once.
That became Formula
I kept the elements that were practically effective, dropped the ones that weren’t, and arranged them into something repeatable I could run anywhere: seven groups of seven breaths — forty-nine in all — linking breathing, counting, visualisation and internally repeated syllables. On the inhale you breathe, count and picture the number; on the exhale you carry a syllable. Attention finally had a precise job to do.
The traditional pieces it draws on aren’t mine, and I don’t claim they are. What’s mine is the particular structure, sequencing and synchronisation — and the insistence that it work in an ordinary, demanding day rather than only in a quiet room.
This is a personal account of how the method came together — not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a promised outcome. If you have a health condition, work with a clinician.