Searching for Mindfulness
It is Tuesday noon on the campus at American University in Bulgaria. Recent graduate Boris A. Angelov, who now manages a business accelerator program in the university, is ready to leave campus for the winter break. But before Boris leaves Blagoevgrad he plans to give two interviews within two hours.
What makes Boris such an interesting person to talk with? He has many diverse interests, which include philosophy, literature, mathematics, and yoga.
Bobby, as his friends call him, was interested in magic when he was a kid. Eventually, he became bored with unrealistic magical tricks and attempted to find real magic in the world. Bobby experimented with the Law of Attraction, visualizing desired things in order to manifest them into his life. “I was curious enough to learn if there is anything else that we are missing in our everyday life,” Bobby says.
As Bobby was searching for more practical things that would work in reality he discovered meditation. In addition to meditation, he started yoga practices. “Yoga helps you become still in a more natural way,” he says.
During the last years in high school, yoga became a part of Bobby’s everyday life. Later in college, he wrote a research paper, comparing Eastern practices and Western philosophy. Writing a paper, he found out about an Indian guru that organizes yoga workshops worldwide. Bobby decided to take a leave of absence from studies in the university and went to India “I wanted to go to the source of all this [Eastern practices, meditation]. I decided to do a one-month program of Hatha yoga in India. The program mostly includes physical exercises that aim to bring your body to stillness,” he says.
To maintain interest in meditation, Bobby used different applications, for example, Waking Up, by neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris. “There Harris talks about benefits of meditation in terms of physics,” says Bobby.
“Usually one begins meditation by focusing on the sensation of breathing, but eventually the practice opens to include the full field of experience — other sensations in the body, sounds, and emotions,” writes Harris in his online blog.
“None of these weird things that I was interested in could provide me with a job. In order to find a job, you have to graduate with a certain degree,” says Bobby, laughing. As he was good at mathematics at school, Bobby graduated AUBG with a double major in Business and Computer Science. Now he is managing a business accelerator program in the university and plans another trip to India.
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Tamara Knyazeva studies Journalism and Mass Communications at the American University in Bulgaria. After talking to Boris she downloaded a couple of apps for meditation as well.
