Cold Truths | Hot Pursuits
“In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe.”
There are specific aspects of our environment that we can interact with in ways that allow us to transcend the limits of our psych-physiological capabilities as we know them.
While we can’t exactly peel away the layers of our physical environment (objectively speaking), it seems abundantly possible to step over the line of hard, physical logic and coherency when it comes to our own potential.
With enough effort and focus, we can leverage the metaphysical sides of the more ineffable parts of our reality - and this can serve to teach us a lot about who and what we really are.
“In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe.”
- John Archibald Wheeler
Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days - a feat that shouldn’t be possible for the human body to come close to achieving; his ability to bypass metabolic stress alone (not to mention the countless other variables at play) instantly resets what we know/knew to be the limits of our physiological capacity.
Herbert Nitsch free-dove almost a thousand feet, holding his breath for 9 minutes and somehow staving off a guaranteed pressure-induced nitrogen narcosis (along with oxygen toxicity and lung collapse).
Conditioning in such examples is an obvious factor towards a temperament of expectation, but it’s not always required. And where it’s lacking, resilience or resolve seems to compensate.
Angela Cavalli lifted a 1964 Impala off her teenage son, holding the 3500-4000lb (trim dependent) car for several minutes.
Anna Bagenholm survived being trapped under a frozen stream for an hour and a half, sustaining the lowest recorded body temperature in medical history.
But it’s at the intersections of conditioning and resilience where we see even-greater, oft repeated feats that reshape the boundaries of human possibility and capability all the more.
“The method is based on the principle that the power of the mind works in connection with the body to impact human capability in a profound way… Programming in and of itself is something that we are doing on a daily basis… It leads to corridors that take us deep into ourselves.
- Wim Hof
Wim Hof has become the low hanging fruit of such discussions, but even then, he demonstrates the wild ways by which we can play beyond the limits of what we know to be possible.
His interactions with the cold — emblematic but apparently not inspired by the Tummi meditations of Tibetan monks — shows how consciousness can be employed as a tool to bypass internal and external restrictions.
His claim to fame sprouts from his ability to intentionally reduce inflammatory responses to endotoxins, carried by a seminal study from 2014, and he spends his days teaching those motivated enough to follow him to sub-zero mountain peaks in shorts and flip flops — all of which has been fueled by his specialized breathing technique.
He has, countless times over, proven that he could use his consciousness to influence his endocrine + nervous systems, and to thermoregulate specific parts of his body or prompt his immune responses.
Any scoffs are better spent engaged in his trademark breathing technique; if executed properly, it brings about an undeniable physiological response, replete with audio-visual distortion, physical sensation and psychological clarity.
My curiosity over the whole practice prompted me to seek answers from a neuroscientist about how the exaggerated breaths/holds could spur such a response re: pH balance, blood alkalinity and neurochemical firings.
It’s a real, tangible experience that can be used to recalibrate our focus within our environment — made especially vibrant when paired with cold exposure.
You’re the alchemist, you’re the one who’s doing it, you’re in control; what happens in the body now is a chain of chemical reactions”
- W.H.
But looking beyond Hof’s cold-loving manipulation of reality, at the other end of the mercurial spectrum, is heat.
Whether it swells in saunas or sweat lodges, heat has a similar potential to influence functions that adjust the perceptual lenses of our sensory experience and, accordingly, our ability to adjust our interactions with the world around us.
“The soul’s errors are corrected through discipline and understanding”
- Galen of Pergamon
Galen of Pergamon (129 - 216 CE) was a Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher whose work has helped to shape Western medicine.
His boiling curiosity led him down some ground breaking veins of anatomical discovery. Through his trauma care of Alexandrian soldiers, he was quick to develop a skillset that led him to become a physician for emperors like Marcus Aurelius as he authored over 300 contemplations on the body’s purpose and design.
Galen saw the body as just that: a purposeful design, with each organ crafted for optimal function — head to toe and mind to body.
And his work has demonstrated the possibility of transcending the limits of what we knew to be physiologically (and psychologically) possible - particularly through heat exposure therapy.
Galen used hot baths to manage psychological function, seeing a potential for heat to evolve the capacities of the mind and body exposed to it.
To overlay a modern understanding: he came to understand that heat can activate the transient receptor potential (TRP) channels, which reduce inflammation and consequently enhance neutral signaling - an effective and non-pharmacological prompt to greater function.
Requiring no more effort than Wim Hof’s breathing technique (with admittedly less pronounced results), anyone who immerses themselves into a scalding hot bath can attest to the cascade of sensory effects - of thermal stress working to achieve psychological benefits which redefine human mental capacity.
If it wasn’t so effective, we’d see no reliance on the part of so many cultures on their own hot pursuits: Finnish saunas, Russian banyas, Japanese Onsen; smoke ceremonies, Waon therapies, Temazcal lodges.
Like cold, heat is just another element of our natural world that we can stand to gain from our interactions with - one that helps us to focus our alignments or adjust our perspectives.
“We must burn with love for the truth to illuminate our souls.” - Soren Kierkegaard
Temperature is but only one example of how we can interact with a prominent variable around us to uncover some kind of truth about ourselves.
There are other elements or parts to our environment that we have become quite good at leveraging: the ability to feel and create music, to bend light or mix color or defy gravity. Arts and sports are testaments of our fixation to push the parameters of our own psycho-physiological interactions with physics.
In all facets of reality, we seem to have much more of a capacity to move through space and time than we seem to realize - we just need to ride the right waves of motivated interest or passion to witness how obvious this premise is.
