Echoes of Belgrade
A path to peace, beyond memories, beyond war.
Finding Zivorad
How did Zivorad come into my life? Honestly, I can’t remember exactly.
At the time, I was researching every form of inner work (evolution, personal growth, enlightenment) and I stumbled across a book called The Dawn of Aivaz.
It was the personal account of Zivorad Mihajlović Slavinski, a clinical and transpersonal psychologist from Serbia. His life story was wild and uncompromising. And strangely familiar: I saw echoes of my own journey in his, moving through spiritual systems, extracting their essence, uninterested in dogma.
I reached out to a Serbian friend named Tanja who warmly recommended him. That sealed it. I reached out and arranged a training.
What drew me most was something he called the Gnosis Intensive, a structured process of self-inquiry using the classic question “Who am I?”
Often attributed to Ramana Maharishi, the method had been reframed for western seekers by Charles Berner in California, under the name Enlightenment Intensive. Osho adapted it. Zivorad, too, and over years of practice, he had refined it further into something simpler, more direct, and more powerful.
Belgrade, 2013
I found a quiet Bed&Breakfast on Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra, just a short walk from Zivorad’s residence in Palilula. Each morning, I crossed Tašmajdan Park, covered in snow and silence. The city felt muted under its white coat, like it, had gone inward for winter.
In that frozen hush, I spent three days with Zivorad, learning the processes he had spent a lifetime refining. His apartment was modest, his presence calm. But what we were doing together was anything but ordinary.
Belgrade, 1991
It wasn’t my first time here. See my previous post here.
Twelve years earlier, in November 1991, I arrived during the Serbia-Croatia war. The same grey sky, the same frozen air, but a different kind of silence. Back then, it was the quiet of tension, not peace. The windows were taped against possible blasts. A military curfew blanketed the city each night.
At dawn, I drove west along the E70 toward the front line. I witnessed Vukovar burning only to keep the disturbing memory of a city pulverized by war. Vukovar became the symbol of the senseless brutality of war. At that time, Belgrade wasn’t a place of healing. It was a gateway to hell.
And yet, here I was again, in the same season, in the same city, this time walking toward a man who’s mission was to dissolved suffering.
Two winters. Two Belgrades. One thread.
Polarity and Presence
Zivorad’s work began with a basic insight: we are born in a state of oneness. Over time, we become aware of our apparent separation from the rest of existence. At some early moment, a division appears. Zivorad called it the prime polarity, the original split from which all later division arise.
Most of our behavior, he said, traces back to this first division. We spend our lives unconsciously reacting to it, seeking wholeness through people, goals, beliefs, or pain. But until the prime polarity is made conscious and the tension between its two sides is released, we remain trapped in the same loops.
His method for unwinding this was simple in structure, and profound in effect.
We would identify the two sides of a polarity. For each, we would recall the mental images, emotions, body sensations, and thoughts it evoked. Then we would go back and forth between both sides, activating each layer, dissolving as we moved. The process was supported by gentle finger pressure on acupuncture points across the face, specific breathing rhythms, and a calm verbal rhythm of recall and release.
It was unlike anything I had done before. Psychological, yet also somatic and energetic. Like a clearing system that didn’t try to change the story, only to let it complete itself.
As we repeated the process, inner tensions began to soften. Memories lost their grip. Time lost its sequence. The idea of “me” became more fluid, more spacious.
It was clear: there was no need to control or correct. Only to let go of the charge that had build up over time rather than adding to it.
With each round, another pocket of tension disappeared. It became easier to rest, easier to listen, easier to remain still. The division that had shaped so many of my behaviors was no longer holding.
What remained was presence and in that presence the clarity of the perfection of everything.
The Collapse of Time
On the final day of our training, Zivorad paused and looked at me for a long moment.
“I usually don’t share this process in short trainings,” he said. “But I think you’re ready.”
He called it UCP (Unification Connection Process).
I had no idea what to expect. I only remember the stillness in his voice. The way the air shifted when he said it.
We sat together. I closed my eyes.
He asked me to bring up my earliest memory. I saw it, vague, flickering, wrapped in a child’s sense of strangeness. Then he asked for the most recent. I noticed how fresh it felt, how much more real.
Then we began.
He guided me to feel both memories, one at a time, by tracking four elements: the images, the emotions, the body sensations, and the thoughts. We did this for the early memory. Then the recent one. Then back again.
Over and over.
Early.
Recent.
Back again.
With each cycle, the content got thinner. The images blurred. The emotions faded. The body sensations loosened their grip. Even the thoughts began to fall apart.
Eventually, I couldn’t tell which memory was which. Then I couldn’t tell if they had ever really happened. And then, there was nothing to process.
Just space.
Not absence in a cold sense. This was open. Soft. Alive.
I sat in it for a while, unsure if the process had ended, or if I had.
When I opened my eyes, everything looked the same. But it wasn’t.
The usual tension behind the eyes, the subtle narrative running under each moment, was gone. My body felt light. Time wasn’t stretching forward or backward anymore. It had become still. And in that stillness, I wasn’t trying to be anyone.
I was just here.
Wipe Complete. System memory not found.
After the process, Zivorad asked me gently,
“Can you recall anything else, from your life between those two memories?”
I paused.
I searched.
And nothing came.
Not a single image. Not a scene. Not even a name.
It was as if everything in between had been erased.
Like a disk wiped clean. Blank. Silent.
And strangely, I felt fine.
There was no fear, no grasping.
Just a sense of being completely present.
Peaceful. Empty. Whole.
I sat in that stillness for a long time, marveling at the calm.
But then a thought crept in, subtle and sharp:
Have I lost it all?
A faint panic stirred.
What if I had gone too far?
What if the memories never returned?
Zivorad noticed the shift in my body before I said a word.
He smiled. Calm, steady.
“They will come back,” he said. “All of it. Don’t worry.”
His words were warm and reassuring, like a hot coffee and a blanket offered by a friend after an traumatic event.
I exhaled.
And in that moment, I understood something deeper.
I didn’t need the past. I didn’t need to remember.I was whole, I existed in peace without all of it.
It would all return, he promised.
But for now, I could just sit in the freedom of forgetting.
And it stayed in that state. For hours. Days in fact.
Echoes of Belgrade
A few hours after the training ended, I found myself walking to Kalemegdan Fortress, where the Danube and Sava rivers meet. The sky was pale. The cold soft. I sat on a stone wall overlooking the water, the old fortress behind me and the city quietly breathing below.
I wasn’t thinking. I was present, listening.
And in that listening, a strange question arrived.
If I could dissolve the tension between the first and last memories of my life, and collapse all the time between, then what about these two Belgrades? 1991 and 2013.
The war-torn city and the snow-covered one.
The fear and the quiet.
The curfews and the coffee shops.
The taped windows and the healing rooms.
Could they also be the poles of a collective polarity?
Could they be processed the same way I had just processed my past and future?
I don’t mean symbolically. I mean somatically. Could I return to the tension of 1991, then back to the peace of 2013, and move between them again and again, not just think about them, but to feel them, to let the images, emotions, sensations, and thoughts dissolve, until something shifted… not just in me, but in the field?
What if healing wasn’t personal at all?
What if personal healing is just a tuning fork that can ring through collective pain?
The Danube kept flowing.
Same river. Different time.
Or maybe… no time at all.
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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
Beautiful. This reminds me of what I learned about, and somewhat learned experientially while studying with a teacher about integrating kabbalistic practice with psychology and energy work. I have not had such a complete experience, but how beautiful and peaceful this is. I think you are right - what if feeling into the one and then the other until it dissolves is how we learn to vibrate this healing into the collective? I want to know more, much more.