Can you warm yourself with your mind?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
From what I've read, g-tummo is very likely not the Wim Hof Method. I've never trained with a monk claiming to know g-tummo. The son of Wim Hof loudly told me "The Wim Hof Method is not Tummo!" (almost a direct quote from memory, probably paraphrased). So I'd argue that back in 2014 or whenever it was, they were of the opinion it was something else. I'd be willing to bet they've never met a g-tummo monk either :)
A good medical YT vid on the WHM [1].
From my experiential point of view: the WHM doesn't warm your body, you simply don't get cold, nor do you feel cold (you're too high on adrenaline to have any normal sense of temperature). Sometimes I did feel a warmth boost, but that's not the main "working thing" behind his method. I use it whenever I need an adrenaline boost, or don't want to feel cold.
When is it handy or fun to get an adrenaline boost on purpose (my experience)?
1. When you have a headache (free painkiller when nothing is lying around)
2. When you're at a party (no drugs needed, the WHM is a drug in its own right)
3. When you're having sex (a lot of adrenaline kinda changes your personality a bit :) )
4. When you're cold
As for Tummo, generally there are a lot of preliminary practices you need to go through before being taught it, which can take the practitioner a lot of time and is probably why you don't see it around in lay communities in the west. For instance, the preliminary practice of ngondro can take people something like 6 months in full retreat to finish, or years if mixed in to daily life.
The Yuthok Nyingthig lineage of Tibetan medicine practitioners does things on faster timelines though, in my experience. [1] [2] My acupuncturist is a former monk and teaches Tummo to small groups here in NYC from time to time, although he hasn't done it in a while and I didn't find out about him until after the last group of his had started. You'd still probably want to have had a daily meditation practice and some physical yoga asana practice before beginning I'd imagine -- just sitting in the 7-point posture of Vairochana that you see the monks from the article sitting in requires a pretty open body to get into and maintain. The first time I took a course in Tibetan Nejang I had difficulty with maintaining that arm and shoulder position, even after years of sitting every day in padmasana.
>From my experiential point of view: the WHM doesn't warm your body, you simply don't get cold
Does not compute. Have you violated the Laws of Thermodynamics?
Anything that reduces that vasoconstriction (or actively dilates your blood vessels) will significantly delay the onset of frostbite. On net your body will lose heat faster as a result, but that can be offset by engaging other systems in your body responsible for generating heat.
So it's not like you're an inert lump out in the elements. You have the caloric equivalent of several gallons worth of gasoline in your body somewhat readily burnable (obviously at the tail end you'd start to look a little worn out). Systems like Wim Hof give you the ability to consciously tap into that energy reserve with enough practice.
Also think about tiny animals like squirrels out in the elements all winter. Yes natural insulation plays a small role, but let me give you a fur coat and some nuts and see how long you last. ;) Not to mention surface:volume ratio much worse than humans. They're natural Wim Hof masters.
One of the things I learned very early in life in the winters of tahoe was how to consciously raise the temp of my feet/legs in the cold winter nights by just thinking about it.
I am far less good at this as I have gotten older, but I am familiar with raising my body temp by thought alone.
I've also meditated to instant healing before.
I was ~18 at the time and I had done a crap load of sit-ups to the point I damaged my abdonminal muscles, to the point where I couldnt even stand up straight and was just hunched over.
I went to meditate and breate, very similar to WHM...
After some time meditating my body got the super tingly feeling one gets right before astral projecting, my body took in a swift breath, my back arched and all my abdominal muscles tingled and were instantly healed.
I have yet to do this again though, and I have been meditating in earnest recently to attempt to do the same thing again.
What is astral projecting?
I have heard anecdotes of self-healing before, it reconciles with my internal model that induced muscular relaxation + increased bloodflow via neuro-stimulation can facilitate healing and also reset any "knots" lingering around. Similar to how massaging, accupuncture and cupping can help recovery.
Although many find this unbelievable perhaps because it is hard to measure/study and the knowledge to body control is locked behind unscientific martial arts and requires years of training. Seems like we are starting to tease out reproducible findings via things like Wim Hof and mass interest in yoga. I'm excited to see what we may discover about our own potential - just like how [1] debunked scientists' assumptions about pupil dilation
The illusion that your mind escapes your body and/or visits other planes of existence etc. It has been replicated successfully in lab conditions many times over and is proven to be just an illusion.
If anything call it https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/hypnagogic-h... but not "illusion".
"Hallucination" is a judgmental term; it may be appropriate when it is involuntary, or what you see is harmful. People with schizophrenia have hallucinations, and (in all cases I have known personally) suffer for it. Thus, "hallucinogen" is a judgmental term about a chemical, where people taking one for the beneficial effects call it an entheogen.
I’m not clear why you linked it, honestly. I fail to understand the jump from “astral projection” to “hypnagogic hallucinations”.
Was your intent to just say that sometimes the medical profession uses the word “hallucination”? That doesn’t give the word positive connotations, especially with laypersons.
I think that self healing is lit. "mind over matter" and the mind can induce both healing or harm to self based on your thoughts.
What’s your best guess as to why no one got frostbite?
> Risk increases as air temperature falls below 5 F (minus 15 C), even with low wind speeds. In wind chill of minus 16.6 F (minus 27 C), frostbite can occur on exposed skin in less than 30 minutes.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/frostbite/sym...
It sounds like you were at very high risk of exposure, especially with even a slight wind on exposed skin.
The effects of WHM and cold exposure have been scientifically documented. I think the YouTube video I linked to also says a thing or two about it.
But yea, we were with 12 people that day, none of us got it. The group before us (a month before), also 12 people, none of them got it. All of us were males between 18 and 25, I think... Can't fully recall, the paper I linked to states it more clearly (though it may mention only 18 of us since 6 of us were trained for the case when people would drop out but none of us did).
Anyway, prelude out of the way - are you sure it's adrenaline that WHM triggers? When we did it, it was essentially CO2-purging breathing and triggered an endorphin high, like a mild MDMDA effect. Either way, it definitely made ice-bath dunking more tolerable (part of the experience is a stadium full of people all going outside in flipflops and sitting in paddling pools full of ice), but I definitely felt the cold.
But I can see why you say it's a mild MDMA effect, the WHM does a lot more than just adrenaline, but I simply use it for that. And I definitely notice the adrenaline effects of it as well. But I do agree there's more to it.
Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress. But humans store >2x as many calories as other apes, per unit body weight. And Americans, on average, store way more than normal people, because we are fat.
My warning, is that this may be a similar problem to consuming alcohol in the cold. You feel warmer, and even have more calories to burn, but according to myth busters, it tends to be a net loss due to radiative effects. And likely is exponentially worse the colder it gets.
Though as with everything relating to health, I'd like to see some data/information to confirm my naive bias/opinion.
Unfortunately, I'm not a doctor, all I know is a bit of neuropsychology from my undergrad.
Not quite. If we assume that the human body is a black body, the radiation loss is proportional to (T_body)⁴-(T_outside)⁴, where T_body is the body's temperature and T_outside is the temperature of the surrounding[0]. So not quite exponential but still pretty significant.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
Wim Hof not only claims that his method will keep one warm, but also a lot of other health benefits. Very few of these have any scientific backing. Hyperventilation's effects on inflammatory responses are well known.
His claims regarding arthritis, MS or even Parkinson's are not only spurious at best to be kind in wording. I would personally call them bullshit. There is just no scientific evidence at all for these claims.
Ensuring through deep breath that your chest muscles are moving and warming and by that warming your blood is nice - but not more. There are no studies scientifically researching the method with multiple subjects. Only studies that look at him (and his twin).
So we have "studies" with n=2 and massive claims from him. While he sells his books/seminars/method.
People have died attempting the Wim Hof Method (one example [1]).
To me - this person is good at PR. Knows how to sell these days. And how to be a personal brand. I have to give credit for that.
[0]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2017.1... [1]: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/wim-hof-breathing-...
It seems that a proper scientific mindset would declare something neither true nor false until a study is done.
As to whether 'bullshit' is justified, I dunno. I just see that as being a bit blunt phrasing-wise.
I like bluntness, as it often helps to cut to the core of things.
But I try as best I can not to be blunt against people, but ideas/hypotheses.
That's true but it doesn't mean what you're implying it means. You're suggesting that saying "We don't know" means there's an equal probability that the thing will turn out to be true as there is it'll turn out to be false. That's not what skepticism in science means. It's entirely valid to say "The chance of this being real is 0.01." and then use science to prove it it's false. You might turn out to be wrong, and that tiny chance shows that the science was worthwhile, but most of the time you'll just end up showing that your intuition was correct.
In this case, it is entirely logical to me that breathing can modify circulatory patterns pumping more blood to your joints, thereby promoting healing for arthritis. I'd personally be surprised if there was zero benefit, but I respect your right to a different intuition from mine.
I'm less confident about any similar benefits to something like MS although perhaps circulation to the brain could be similarly helpful. I'd recommend withholding judgment until we have more science, but again, that's my intuition. If you don't want to improve your breathing, you certainly don't have to.
By this logic, people with tachycardia would be much faster at healing, right? Since all that you can do with breathing techniques directly (without discussing how this might affect your mind etc.) is to increase your pulse and maybe arterial pressure. Why exactly increased pulse would reduce the inflammatory auto-immune response that is the cause of arthritis is beyond me. If anything, I would expect increased blood flow to increase the auto-immune response and make the arthritis worse.
I am not open to explanations that breathing fast/deep in itself, through the extra blood flow that it can obviously generate, are directly therapeutic for arthritis. This was, by my understanding, GP's preferred explanation.
Deep breathing actually tends to slow your heart rate down. I don't know what it does to overall blood flow rate. But, I wouldn't be surprised if it directed more blood flow to your capillaries and other areas that don't typically get great blood flow, similar to how your body pumps more blood to your extremities when you are warm.
General advice, keep an open mind. When people say things that give you an emotional reaction, ask yourself if it's possible you are getting that reaction because you are afraid they might be right.
> There's a reason practitioners are blinded in a double blind trial.
Well, yes. That's to avoid experimental bias by the experimenters themselves.
> You can say "this is probably wrong" before you start experimenting, but it's not scientific at all.
There's a threshold before you even engage with speculation. Speculation is good, but as a scientist one must decide to what to spend time on.
> [...] as some might hate to admit it, it is simply based on logic and intuition.[...]
What to do experimentation, trials, etc. on is mostly based on pure conjecture. But that's not contrary to anything that's been said ITT. Conjectures generate experiments, but these conjectures usually have *some* grounding in known physics, biology, whatever. (This a very poor explication of David Deutsch's brilliant exposition on this point of epistomology in The Beginning of Infinity.)
"mindfulness" is a corporate re-packaged and whitewashed variant of buddhist meditation tradition. It misses the point spectacularly and actively seeks to cultivate a harmful mindset. This is not something to refer to positively, or to use as a benchmark.
This is some impressive hand waving. You said literally nothing meaningful here.
> This is not something to refer to positively, or to use as a benchmark.
Lots of people find it benefits them. I would absolutely refer to a treatment that people find useful as positive.
> ”mindfulness" is a corporate re-packaged and whitewashed variant of buddhist meditation tradition.
This still says nothing meaningful.
“Whitewashed” is nonsense when discussing a meditation practice that’s not based on race. (Maybe you mean “westernized”, but that doesn’t create the same visceral response that bypasses critical thinking.) “Corporate” is not an actual criticism, either. It’s again an emotional appeal. The fact that some companies make money from a thing does not make a thing bad. You can check out a book from the library for free if you want to avoid giving a corporation your money.
Given that you took the time to respond and still couldn’t be bothered to say anything substantive, I am left to assume you actually don’t have a real criticism, but an axe to grind.
That's how it's supposed to be done, but generally I don't see that happening... cough COVID19 cough.
The GP did say that the "bullshit" note was their personal opinion though.
Bertrand Russell might disagree. You don’t need to weight all conjectures equally or even entertain them without sufficient explanation or evidence.
Here’s his Russell’s Teapot thought experiment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
It is like if I create a study showing that black cars with a combustion engine need gasoline to run.
Someone later stating that red cars with a combination engine can run on pure water from the tap doesn't warrant a new study.
Do we? This is news to me. Do you have any studies or explanations as to how this is the case?
If I claim that if you burn $1M it'll rain for a year, it's falsifiable, but we don't really need to test it. The burden would be on me to demonstrate scientifically how this hypothesis has any merit before it's reasonable to test it.
Your own link speaks of multiple health benefits to hyperventilation and cold exposure, and of studies with multiple Non-Wim participants, even while coming across biased itself.
As well, Wim constantly advises people clearly and consistently not to practice in water more than an inch deep by themselves. Constantly.
> The Wim Hof Method is also linked to reducing symptoms of diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, asthma, sarcoidosis, vasculitis, and several autoimmune diseases.
https://www.wimhofmethod.com/breathing-exercises
No references cited, curious to know what it's based on. "Linked to" is quite a vague phrase.
To me it makes sense, my (non-expert) understanding is those diseases are cases where the body is attacking itself. The immune system is a balancing act, it is blind to what is really happening, it has to rely on a threshold of when to respond to what it senses as danger. When I breath hold and/or expose myself to cold, I feel like I am giving my body a small taste of death, recalibrating my body to what danger feels like.
What is your expertise on this topic?
This makes the study definitely n > 1.
But there is neither a plausible mechanism nor any data that gives credit to the health effects his teachings shall provide.
This isn't fault of Wim Hof method. He warns about the risk of fainting (which isn't a problem on its own) near a body of water (where fainting becomes a problem) all the time.
Luckily though, he does recognize that to some extent. Because of that, he sometimes does research with actual scientists, and I have talked to a few of them. IMO those claims you can trust, or at least trust as much as any scientific claim.
[1] Fun fact: one of the first comments I made on HN was about the WHM :)
Does WH recommend using his method for breath-holding underwater? (I don't know)
Hyperventilation causing deaths underwater is well-known and not specific to WHM
No, he explicitly says don't do that. Just one example:
I feel it's cold, but it's not uncomfortable or painful for me. I'm doing this daily since hmm 10 or more years - walking in shorts, t-shirt, almost all year long (something longer if it's cold, cold meaning less than -15C or less than -3C and extremely windy). Similar story with rain - just get wet, it's fine. Hiking, running in one layer instead of 3 layers as most folks would do... It helps me with overheating which I tend to a lot. I have also a simple recipe if I'm actually feeling cold - just do whatever you do faster (your muscles generate a lot of heat as a by-product), no need for extra layers. Lately I also monitor my core body temperature when doing any kind of activities - definitely not getting cold inside even though I'm "underdressed" by popular opinion. (Note I'm also not a risk taker, so in extreme conditions I always have some backup layers with me, in case "do whatever you do faster" method could not be implemented anymore).
I wouldn't give anyone any advice out of this though, I'm not a medical professional.
I'd agree it's somehow mental discipline - I can also ignore pain, it's there, but well I don't have to act on it, it does not have to have any reaction. It used to be a cool party trick back when I was a teenager... Again, not a medical professional, if you experience pain, it's body trying to tell you something is wrong, most likely you should listen to it.
I started doing this in elementary school, and ever since, I've been pretty much unbothered by the cold. Even if it drops well below freezing I'm comfortable in shorts and a T-shirt. I don't even get goosebumps.
Unless I'm very hungry at the same time. Then the cold can start to get to me.
Yes it is possible to ignore cold.
Not the wim method but something else.
Also possible to teach another person to ignore cold within a few minutes.
Did it on a bus and they were able to do it almost immediately.
Was a fun experiment.
Every fall and winter I make a point of letting myself get a little cold, and as a result I'm much more comfortable through the winter. It's a nice superpower to have.
We live in a society obsessed with comfort but it's good to make yourself uncomfortable from time to time.
Anecdote time. In college in FL, I met a fella from one of the northern M states. First winter down here he was in shorts and t-shirts and the rest of us had jackets and coats. Time goes on and his first summer down here I see him and he looks a hot mess, like someone dumped a bucket of water on him (now, in FL there's humidity so you're sweat doesn't work. This was ... worse. He was sweating like crazy) and I asked, "you okay?" He replied, it's the fucking heat, man! Time goes on and it's winter again. Now he's in pants and a jacket or coat (depending on temp) and I'm like, you cold? He's all, fuck yeah! I told him the Florida summer will do that to you. Makes the cold intolerable.
That movie endless summer has it backwards. Surfing almost everywhere is better in the winter. It's just that winter in Hawaii is pretty warm.
Where I live we surf in the great lakes in late winter, starting about now actually till end of April.
While you're in the water with a wetsuit, it's not too bad. Water can't get too far below 0ºC but the air temperatures are often way below freezing, and the windchill can be brutal, because lake surfing is dependent on wind.
Getting out of my 5mm wet-suit in a parking lot in February taught me what it really means to be cold.
Since then, conditions I would have thought of as cold are much more tolerable.
Now if I have to take out the trash in the winter and there's fresh clean snow on the ground, instead of wrestling with winter boots I just go barefoot.
The secret to not feeling cold is that when you're cold, just let yourself be cold through and through. Don't fight it.
This is exactly what I do too, and I've talked to people who approach the cold in the same way. However, I've also found it completely impossible to teach, and a statement like the above just makes people angry unless they already understand what it feels like to do it. (Especially if you try to tell them while you're already out in the cold.)
If you're eager for something, the cons feel less so, and it probably triggers a positive reaction. When outside in the cold, if I'm mentally low, I start to crumple and shiver.. but when I'm up.. I don't care much and just move more so to get warmer.
"the dog has to be pushed outside" What? No, if it's that cold, you keep the dog against your body, and you both benefit.
Anyway, in these times of competition for attention, the written word is losing. Therefore, it is increasingly important that what is written is succinct and meaningful. This "article" talks about stuff without reaching a conclusion. It's like a trailer for a movie that doesn't exist.
Yes, people have demonstrated that they can gain some level of control over their own calorie burn for self-heating. How they do it is still a mystery, just as how much of the mind works is still a mystery.
Tell us how. Don't say, "Oh here are some more people who do it" in 2000 words.
has never been the New Yorker house style.
I agree more how would be a treat. I assume Kozhevnikov’s agreement to keep the how confidential was an impediment.
But a couple things I noted:
* G-tummo meditation, she went on, is not a state of relaxation but arousal. She thinks it may increase blood flow to the brain. G-tummo is difficult, requiring years of dedication to master.
* Try “visualizing your fingers in hot water, or yourself in a hot environment,”
There is more how in the corresponding Plos one article https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I'm pretty sure they are saying they need to convince the dog to go outside to urinate. I don't think you really want that on your body when it is cold outside...
I remember some memories where I had a dog, he was cold and shaking after swimmimg, embracing him.
He still kept shaking and when I thought of a thing that made me feel warm (kind of shivering/vibrating feeling) and goosebumps he immediately stopped shaking. After a few seconds he starts shaking again. Repeat this process on countless occasions, always the same result.
But it's kind of hard to set up scientific methodology to prove things with n = (enter convincing amount of subjects) where there are many subjective sides in the experiment (e.g. Thinking of something that makes you shiver/goosebump is hard to apply at scale as for many that is result of something subjective and different for each individual)
I'd love to see some organization to set up an experiment though.
Why would you? It works, it's a teachable method. To my mind, the inquiry doesn't have to progress far beyond that. Unless perhaps you value doing things solely for knowledge, which is something academia stopped doing ages ago (and arguably never really did).
Take an infrared thermometer, point it at the part of your body that you're visualizing heating up. Observe the results. Took me five seconds to come up with this experiment.
It's communicating people how to visualize/think of something that gives the feeling. Because the feeling is subjective and even I as the person experienced it have hard time explaining it. It's much harder to explain it to others and make sure they did correctly.
I don't need results anyway, I _know_ it works so there isn't a chance that "I won't like" the results. I just want more people to benefit and an incorrect experiment may block them, not me, from proceeding further.
Deep breathing. Not slow, but full and continuous inhaling and exhaling to the boundaries of lung capacity.
Physically and mentally relaxing. Shivering is a way to generate heat through motion. To counter it, and stimulate chemical heat generation, relax all the muscles. To relax mentally, something like breath meditation.
Mental/visual. Imagine being warm, like on a hot beach laying on the sand.
Hope this anecdata helps someone. I wouldn't count on it replacing warm clothes, but it's nice in a pinch.
In is full, out is normal.
Disclaimer: I've trained 4 days with Wim for one of his landmark experiments. I was one of the guinea pigs.
The only thing that still annoys me is rain and hail at times. But as a chilly/shivery person the issue was always cold temperatures for me. That issue is gone. I say it with surprise because I still think it sounds crazy. Before 2014 it had such an impact on my life and suddenly all that misery just drops to zero.
Spiritually though, I didn't notice a lot, I'd rather stick to meditation for that. And whatever people may say, IMO, the Wim Hof Method is not a meditation. It's a combination of two breathing techniques + an optimistic trained/taught mentality about the cold being your friend.
Oh, I also sometimes use it as a natural painkiller when I don't have one on me and start to get a headhache. You know since the adrenaline-like state includes some actual adrenaline [1] :)
One "issue" with the WHM is that you need to keep doing it to stay in the state. It otherwise wains after 5 minutes or so. Because of this, it's impossible for me to be social in a normal sense, since breathing in a very specific way + talking at the same time is about as tough as beatboxing while singing (which I know how to do as well :P). Which means: it requires a lot of practice and trickery.
[1] Research shows you get a lot of adrenaline in. It's in the publication I was a guinea pig for: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/20/7379.full.pdf
I'm more likely to go swimming, even when the water is cold.
I'm more likely to take a cold shower, which has many benefits.
Just generally being uncomfortably cold less often, as others have mentioned.
And that general good feeling of "I didn't think I could do that, but I did!"
I similarly remember willfully altering my heart beat at the doctor's office on several occasions as a practical joke. I wonder if the two situations are linked in a significant way?
I do wonder how effective I actually was, as it isn't really something I have thought about for literal years.
I look at it like how a boxer reprograms themselves not to flinch when a punch is thrown at their face through repeated conditioning. Instead of instantly regretting the cold, you learn to accept it and not pre-program your reactions to it. Since most people live in 70 degree temps all the time, walking out into sub-freezing weather with minimal clothes is an instant shock to them.
I am just some weirdo that walks around in the cold barefooted and in shorts all year around, and no expert in reprogramming their parasympathetic nervous system or commanding my white blood cells to attack things. The WHM method just allows me to do it longer and in colder weather. YMMV and all that.
Sounds like some serious hyperventilation - I wouldn't recommend doing that as it can lead to cerebral hypoxia
WHM is a neat little technique with lots of bells and whistles attached to hit. No more no less. I enjoy applying it from time to time for what it's worth. But don't expect any revelations or enlightenment. And I never had an experience coming even remotely close to a DMT trip.
There are many similar techniques btw - they all boil down to hyperventilate, then stop and let CO2 build up (some with lungs empty some with lungs filled) and have oxygen be released to the cells in a little Oxygen shower. The more you read and think about it the less exciting it gets. It's nice - yes - but very limited. Much more healthy in the long run is slow breathing. But it's not as exciting and it's not marketed by a would-be-shaman who rambles on about philosophical ideas and curses all the time.
> As I contemplated whether it could help me cope with the cold, it occurred to me that using this sacred technique to avoid discomfort might not be in line with its origins in Buddhism, a religion in which suffering is acknowledged and accepted.
Buddhism is all about the complete cessation of suffering, so that part’s not technically correct. The Buddha did talk a lot about renouncing physical comforts and not creating unnecessary suffering in harsh environments, though.
The core body temperature part of this phenomenon is actually the less interesting part here. It’s not too mind boggling that activating certain nervous pathways will stimulate certain metabolic activity and perhaps alter blood flow via hormonal means.
Where it’s really cool (read: even more practically useful in your everyday life) is to explore the effects on the mind. It’s not controversial to claim that picturing a warm fire inside your body will bring some degree mental comfort in cold or very cold conditions. However for most people, this would hard to sustain.
One would look around, see the snow, remember how thin one’s clothing is, and be interrupted with the cold sensations making contact with the skin. Further thoughts about how cold it is are likely to arise, and the nice belly fire and the comfort it provided is no more. One might even start to imagine the lack of warm blood going to the extremities, the cold penetrating down to the bones, and frostbite setting in, even if that's not the case yet.
It’s easy to imagine how, with a trained mind, one might have a greater ability to sustain this internal mental fabrication (buddhism calls this saṅkhāra) of an internal fire. Not only strengthening it and maintaining attention on it, but de-prioritising the amount of mental activity devoted to thinking about how cold it is (i.e. mental fabrications around the cold - like it reaching the bones).
Why it's useful to explore this, is to consider that in ordinary life we are doing this sort of thing constantly - it's simply that it's to a lesser degree, and in subtler ways. The implications of that to our quality of life are enormous. Ever notice how the world looks different when when something good happens, or you are feeling optimistic, versus when things aren't going so well and you're more pessimistic?
The extent to which we put together our experience, and, by extension, how we can begin to have some influence over that as a conscious process is sorely, sorely underestimated.
I believe, and this could be wrong but I have read a good bit of his stuff; the "WHM helps such and such problem", is mostly based off his students who have came and said that they felt better after practicing cold and breath techniques. Wim never claims to be a scientist, in fact many times when someone asks him a direct question he says something along the lines of, "I don't know, that is up to the scientist to discover", I am just here to guide.
One of the comments below talked about how Wim's friend had cancer, and then he said WHM helped him with his cancer, but then he died from cancer. This is such a moot and pointless comment to make. Doctors every single day help people with cancer and they still die. Does that mean the effort to help was worthless?
Should one not attempt any safe methods that are mostly harmless and have some known benefits when facing a terminally ill sickness? No one dying of cancer is going to be harmed by holding their breath and taking a few cold showers, if anything it probably brings some relief to the constant pain that is chemo and cancer treatments (speaking from experience).
I've been thinking how to do it again but haven't had a good idea on how. I've tried biofeedback with a thermometer that goes under my tongue but I could really use one that records continuously.
In this state (which lasts 5-15 minutes), I can go outside shirtless in 23F weather (sub-freezing) and it feels like a balmy 70F. My outer senses don't go numb, but I have the odd experience of not experiencing cold. It's almost as if my sense of touch is overloaded in these moments. I don't feel any numbness, but I don't really feel anything at all. It's like my brain stops caring about the sense of touch or temperature and I feel everything in a very dull, flat way -- the dial turned to 1. Incredibly cold things like touching and handling a block of ice feel like room temperature. I also don't get red or have any symptoms you'd associate with the exposure to the cold.
I'm probably dying of something rare and don't know it as it comes on with any overly stressful or exciting experience. It makes intimacy interesting -- "baby I'm on fire".
I don't practice to generate heat but certainly see that as a side effect. I wonder if these Monks and Yogis can stay warm the entire day or just during the meditation practices
Biofeedback is a relaxation technique; training involves hooking you up to a device that measures galvanic potential in your skin and converts it to an audio tone. Stress and relaxation have opposite effects on a number of measurable body phenomena including skin resistance, skin (extremity) temperature, heart rate, and others.
I’ve practiced biofeedback regularly since and can rapidly lower my heart rate and increase my skin temperature at will. I wouldn’t depend on it to ward off frostbite but I usually don’t need gloves and my wife gets jealous that my hands and feet are almost always warm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tummo
Tummo is also a tantric practice for inner heat, developed around the concept of the female deity.[1][3][4] It is found in the Six Dharmas of Naropa, Lamdre, Kalachakra. and Anuyoga teachings of Vajrayana. The purpose of tummo is to gain control over body processes during the completion stage of 'highest yoga tantra' (Anuttarayoga Tantra) or Anuyoga.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/sx7by...
From the title:
> An Indian Yogi filmed by Indian Army personnel while patrolling in the Himalayas. The Yogi can be seen Meditating, chanting the name of God and bursting with ecstasy while being accompanied by a dog in the beyond survival clime of Himalayas.
I have no doubt its possible to trick the mind into re-regulating.
> the water inside the squirrels becomes a supercooled liquid.
Does that mean that if you grab a squirrel and shake it, it freezes instantly?
I've been trying for a few years to get friends engage with TA, given the extraordinary benefits I've gained from regular practice (I've thought about writing a simple guide to TA, something that is missing in English), but “meditation practice" in the broad sense seems to capture people's imaginations better. Oddly enough, I might add, since TA is easy to understand and "scientific," while meditation is rooted in an anachronistic spirituality, with sources, even modern ones, that are largely incomprehensible*, and gurus/guides that are terribly unappealing and look like they are living outside this world.
*Right Concentration was recommended for understanding jhanas, but I found it a very challenging reading. I mean, we teach general relativity to ambitious high school students, I am sure we can do better with meditation/jhanas etc.
The urban legend of “you only use 10% of your brain” isn’t true, but the thing it was based on was closer to the caveat “while relaxing”.
I always had this personal and funny analogy in my mind of CPU thermal throttling where brain works more slowly in heat to prevent generating more heat.
This actually makes total sense.
Temperature adaptation
It has long been known, especially thanks to WEIZSÄCKER's experiments of over 100 years ago, that under hypnosis the feeling of well-being and skin reactions are determined not by the actual external temperature but by the subjective setting. Exercise under progressively more difficult conditions is not presupposed. Spectacular demonstrations are particularly dangerous in this field. If the hypnotist for "stage requirements" makes his subject face enormous temperature changes in the space of a few minutes (in one case I personally observed 60 degrees Celsius), profuse sweating with copious elimination of liquid is followed by a sensation of intense cold: a drastic procedure that, in addition to exposing to infection, almost necessarily involves more serious diseases, rheumatic for example. Instead, gradual habituation gives rise to almost absolute independence from external temperatures.
For example, for over 20 years I have endured the hot-humid climate of the Earth's most torrid areas and extreme temperature changes without feeling ill or getting sick. I can safely say this having lived in the tropics for several months. Therefore, I will report how my gradual adaptation unfolded.
Since 1945 I have eliminated my hat or cap in winter. If necessary (even while walking) I would repeat:
"Ears, nose and skin of the head are and remain pleasantly warm."
After two years, I was forced to cover my ears for a few minutes only infrequently, at times of extreme cold. Since 1946 gradual elimination of the coat with the formula:
"The skin is pleasantly warm, the cold is strongly indifferent to me".
Since 1948 the stimulating action of the cold air on the skin gives me pleasure; since 1949 I have not contracted a cold since a stay of no more than thirty minutes in the cold air, while a stay in a relaxed sitting position in a too cool working environment is still unpleasant for me. Since 1950 elimination of gloves, at first with the formula:
"Hands stay pleasantly warm".
After two years, adaptation to the temperature was established automatically, without the formula. In total, it took me seven years to achieve almost absolute independence from the outside temperature. For sensitive individuals, special complementary formulas are recommended, for example:
"The air ride leaves me completely indifferent".
In the humid heat of the tropics, the formula renders good services: "The skin stays dry and cool".
When it is very hot, sweating, as a natural defense mechanism, should not be suppressed; therefore the formula is indicated:
"Sweat leaves me completely indifferent".
In a patient threatened by the danger of overheating (heat stroke) the self-induced deep sleep acted favorably. In 1960, during a car trip of many hours through the Sahara desert, with a temperature inside the car of more than 80 degrees, I was helped by the formulas:
"I feel good, pleasantly calm and cool >> and "I sleep hard and deeply">.
Typical phenomenon, during the whole trip extremely realistic iced drinks. On arrival, I was the only one (out of 20 participants) who was free of ailments. After drinking twelve bottles of ice-cold lemonade, I was immediately able to work, while all the others had to go to bed. The most important general formulas would be:
"The skin remains pleasantly cool"
"Heat is strongly indifferent to me".
The effects of autogenic training on temperature adaptation in people who have been practicing for years can be summarized as follows: Low or high temperatures are not bothersome; additional clothing or air conditioning systems, at least for time-limited temperature changes, are unnecessary; common colds or infections do not occur or become very rare (to the author, for 25 years).
Other book on AT I'd recommend not available in English are Gisela Eberlein's and the Handbook of Autogenic Training by Hoffmann.
Same thing.
Pranayama is a science that's thousands of years old. It's much better to go directly to the source than some bastardised commercialised western version:
http://www.yogebooks.com/english/atkinson/1903sciencebreath....
Pranayama is a thousands of years old religious practice laden down with ritual and unscientific concepts such as "vital life force".
Wim Hof has, by trial and error, distilled the essential parts of it into a modern practice free of religious baggage.
Win Hof claims he spent decades intensely practicing Yoga and refining his techniques. I don't know if that's true, but I absolutely can believe that in principle someone can improve on thousands of years old religious practices doing that.
On a side note, I wonder what the general reception amongst the tech community is to Tesla's eccentricities e.g. opening and closing a door thrice before entering a room. Of course, these are mostly seen as expressions of OCD and ignored but I wonder if there isn't any connection between these impulses of Tesla's and his particular genius? I worry that in the process of stripping away superstitions we might accidentally take away more than we desired and lose the authentic character of progress.
Sometimes, and non-scientists everywhere do this, the truth is intermixed with the false so deeply that the truth is even used as evidence for the false.
That’s not even remotely what I said.
First, true things are true even if no human has learned them.
Second, science is not just western. China, India, Japan, both Koreas all have their own space programs, for example.
Third, the west was nothing special until it started applying (proto-) scientific methods. Miasma, spontaneous generation, demonology, etc. were all common false beliefs that scientific investigation disabused.
Fouth, science doesn’t even try to prove anything true, all it tries to filter out falsehoods to a reasonable likelihood — “Does substance X have an effect?” a non-scientist may imagine a scientist doing some tests and “proving” it works, but the reality is closer to “Null hypothesis means it is indistinguishable from the absence, alternative hypothesis is that it is different from the absence, can we reasonably reject the null hypothesis with this quantity of evidence?”
This last one is key, and why the west isn’t e.g. trying to conquer literal Hell in the name of Jehova etc.
> science doesn’t even try to prove anything true
I agree with the second statement and not the first.
Most ancient cosmology is wrong, for example we know absolutely that the sun is not a chariot pulled across the sky despite that being part of Hindu, Norse, Baltic, Chinese, and Greek theology. This despite Eratosthenes figuring out it was 93 million miles away. Why didn’t they ditch the untrue beliefs?
While the West had four elements, the East had five, because nobody had the tools to look for roughly a hundred, not that it stopped people trying to turn lead into gold (which we can in fact do now, but the ancients didn’t have nuclear reactors).
No microscopes to look for germs to suggest that misama wasn’t how disease spread. Aztec blood sacrifice doesn’t really help maize crops grow or the sun travelling across the sky. Pork and shellfish goes off quickly in hot deserts like the Middle East, but we’ve got refrigerators and health inspectors now.
The story of Noah’s Ark was taken seriously for a very long time, because nobody had any idea how many species existed and how that number was so large it could not possibly fit into a boat that small.
Some ancient Greeks argued that we could see due to light coming out of our eyes, a belief which is (IMO surprisingly) common today: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12094435/
False beliefs are the default. How do you go about eliminating them when they don’t feel any different to true beliefs?
Science is the best answer to that question that we’ve got so far, and when we find a better one we will use that instead, just like we switched from “verification” to “falsification” when we realised verification wasn’t actually possible.
I thought you were talking about all beliefs, but it sounds like you are talking about a subset. Everything you said makes sense.
It's not a science, it's a practice with a long tradition. Those are very different things.