Thittato

45 min meditation today, and then a cold shower. Very nice. Seems like sometimes I need to do the Wim Hof breathing, and sometimes I need to do my regular meditation. Both techniques are centered around the breathing process, so I think they complement each other very well.

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and a cold shower today. Very nice.

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today.

Had to do a 3rd session of 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today as well. So nice. I'm going to work night-shift for 4 nights in a row now, so maybe I'm loading up for that. It was nice with some days off work now. Managed to do a lot of fun stuff and get my mind on other things than just work.

2nd session of 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today. So damn awesome. I went to the skatepark with my bestfriend this evening. Finally it is open again. It was super-ultra-awesome. Then I came home and played Chess online together with my Chess-buddies on Skype for the rest of the evening. That was also super-awesome. And now I just had to do a second session of the Wim Hof breathing to ground all this awesomeness. I felt ecstatic while doing it, and paradoxically also very calm at the same time. But the skating was the best. I've been in much process lately, and the skating can really shake it loose like few other things can and bring me into a very expansive mind-state.

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and then cold shower. Nice, nice, and nice.

45 min meditation today. I needed to just sit and enjoy stillness and rest.

3rd session of 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing for today finished. So nice, and needed, today.

Cold shower today, and then I did 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing afterwards. Wim Hof says to do the breathing before the cold, but I find it pretty nice to do it afterwards as well. It seems like I can go deeper into the breathing when I have first been in the cold, especially since showering is a nice way to shake off the morning-grogginess. It was super-nice to do 3 sessions of breathwork yesterday - I could feel I had a lot more punch in the breathwork I did today because of it. I will do 3 sessions today as well. There has been a lot of process lately, so it is nice way to clear out my system and get my power back.

3rd session of 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing for the day completed. Wow. That was nice.

3 more rounds of Wim Hof breathing today. I think I will do a 3rd session later as well. I need some extra punch to my spiritual practice today.

No practice yesterday, except for a lot of guitar-playing. Today: Weight-lifting, cold-shower and 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing.

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today and a cold shower (untimed). Very nice. Maybe now that I have trained with time during this 20 day cold shower all the way up to 3 min and 10 sec, maybe now I can just do them untimed according to what I feel like. I'm thinking about at some point to start to do the breathing exercises untimed as well. Regarding skydiving. I'm still very interested in it, so regarded that course in the middle of August, I think I will just have to give it some space to see whether that is the right thing do to or not. No rush to decide. I'm following a lot of skydivers on instagram, and watch a youtube video about it every now and then, and it seem so fun and awesome. So I guess I can just keep it open for now. At the very least it is a very interesting interest as a spectator and as entertainment seeing all these people exploring how far they can push human activity. But maybe I will get into it too.

Finished last day of second 20 day cold shower challenge. 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and 3 min and 10 sec in the cold shower. I guess I was quite high here in the middle of the challenge with the sense of mastery at my job and the reflections about possibly wanting to become a skydiver. I was also working a lot of overtime last week, and I still feel tired from the combination of all of this that has been going on lately. But the tiredness was worst yesterday and the day before yesterday. Now it is like I'm starting to land from this whole trip I've been on lately. This challenge started as a curve, with it building up gradually, and then there was a peak of energy in the middle, and then a decline. It wasn't only necessarily related to the Wim Hof method. I tend to go through these cycles anyways, but I think there was a clear correalation. When I gather my focus around something like this energy tends to build up. Still it felt smoother and more stable than when I did this the first time. And the crash, yes, it was a little crash, wasn't all that dramatic. It is not so clear I should still go skydiving. I mean, I still have my vacation set up so that I could go and do a 2 week course in the middle of August if I wanted to, but like how I feel now, in a bit more sobered and grounded mindstate, it is still quite clear that there is a feeling of lacking purpose and direction in life. Skydiving could potentially be a cool addition to my personal study in the correalation between spiritual practice, extreme sports, and flow-states, and maybe that has something to do with my purpose, but also it somehow also feels like an escape from what I should rather be focusing on, ie. finding my real purpose. It seems to be this I'm always coming back to. So the whole challenge was sobering. But I think this whole burst of energy I experienced and all the different landscapes in my mind that was opened up because of it will lead to some kind of integration. Especially reflecting on job-mastery was very helpful. There is a sadness that always comes when a high like this fades and I return back to vulnerability. But I think this vulnerability is where growing up happens.

3 more round of Wim Hof breathing today. Very nice.

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today as well, and then 3 min and 10 sec in the cold shower. Tomorrow is last day of this challenge. I have been very tired yesterday and today. Had a lot of night-shifts last week. But the cold shower was still very refreshing. Interesting this time with this challenge is that I don't feel going into the cold makes me weaker if I already feel weak. I'm not sure what to do after I finish this challenge. Probably I will take some days to decompress like I've done before. The interesting thing with both Wim Hofs breathing technique and his focus on the cold water is that they are both highly addictive, and especially in combination. Earlier I was thinking that I was going to go back to my regular meditation once this "winter focus" was over, but then the addiction to this method has brought me back again and again.

Chogyam Trungpa has a famous quote about the spiritual path: «Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish.»

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing and 3 min and 10 sec in the cold shower. So nice :-) This is like doing spa every day.

3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing today, 10 sun salutations, and 3 min and 10 sec in the cold shower. It has been seeming lately, that something in my psyche is getting further into balance. I had bipolar tendencies before. Like I would get really high, and then I would find some idea or mental concept or something and go crazy with my mental masturbation around it, and then I would wake up the next day feeling really burned out and sick of the whole thing I was so inspired by the day before. Now that skydiving is my focus, it doesn't seem like I milk it too hard as a mental concept the way I used to do with these things before. Like the attention and focus that I give to it is seem to be in balance with what it is natural that my relationship towards it is at this point. I guess I'm not trying to hype myself up to be more into it than I need to be at this point. It is like an interesting subject that I'm just studying at this point. It is not like it is the one and only savior that if I can get into it my life will finally end up in heaven instead of hell. So in other words my desperation seems to be gone. My life is fine right now, too. I guess this is why I used to fall so desperately in love before. It mistakenly seemed like I was so close to what would be the savior in my life. So close but so far at the same time. This same thing happened over and over again with the Wim Hof method this winter as well. Like getting a huuuuge kick out of ice-bathing and breath-work and then watching Wim Hof interviews and just trying to squeeze as much out of it as I possibly could. But it seems like I managed to ride out those waves successfully, and now I don't get so high from it, although it still makes me feel very fresh and powerful, but I guess it has turned into something I would say is more stable. Very interesting. Self-love and self-respect is growing, too. I'm finding love in the simple sense of being. Well. This has been a very interesting second 20 day cold shower challenge so far. Only 3 more days to go. I'm looking forward to wrap it up and make a summary out of what this process has been for me. Feels like something that has been intensely rewarding so far.

And here are some of the coolest skydiving photos I’ve found so far. Just had to include them :-)

More on skydiving. So I felt inspired to do 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing after I came home from working night-shift. It has been a really intense period at work lately, and now I will have some well-deserved days off. It was really nice to clear out my mind with some breathing after I came home now after having first cleaned up my appartment. I am thinking so much about becoming a skydiver these days. I really think it is the next step in my personal development journey. Me and my friend actually decided to join that 2 week course that I was talking about a few posts ago, and we had cleared out our schedule for it, so everything was set, but when we called to book it we were told that those early courses were very uncertain because of the Corona-situation, but that later in the summer they thought it was more likely that they were running as planned. So that was a bummer, and my friend is not sure he can keep his schedule empty for this later in the summer, but I told my boss I will take my vacation in August instead, so I think I will just go alone if my friend cannot make it. But the cool thing is we actually made the decision to go, and that felt very empowering. When he was not so sure he couldn't go when we couldn't go to the course we planned, I didn't knew if I wanted to go alone, but now I think this is just something that I have to do no matter what. I'm not saying for certain, because I want to give the process some more space to sort itself out on its own, but it seems like this is what is up for me next. I'm watching lots of skydiving videos on youtube, I'm talking about it with as many people I can, and I'm familiarizing myself with the whole phenomena from all directions, and seeing my own process very clearly leading up to this. I think it is a yearning for just totalt expansion. It is much the same feeling I get both with snowboarding and rollerblading I think, but I need to go even bigger and have even more awesome tools. I need to have the whole sky as my playground. I think there is a yearning in all of us to fly, and this sport must be as close as one can possibly get. I think all the groundwork I've been laying down into getting back into rollerblading and snowboarding as a grown-up will feed very well into this. I wasn't sure why I was having the intuition to get back into those things, there was a very strong pull, but it didn't seem that those things where going to be ends in themselves, but now it seems like it was a preparation for something greater. There is something about this whole thing which is about taking my interest in meditation and expansive mind-states and translating it into some sort of mastery of the physical world and then using my ability to navigate in the physical world to bring me into contact with the same type of experiences that I have been seeking inside - some kind of union between the inner and the outer world. I totally get a lot of those expansive flow-states both through snowboarding and rollerblading, and yeah, even totally with ice-bathing, and now the yearning is to expand even more. So fun to write about this, it makes me feel very expansive, creative and optimistic about life :-)

Hehe! Not a daft question at all. I use the timer inside of the 20 day cold shower challenge inside of the Wim Hof app. It has a nice Zen-bell, and a count-down, and you see which day you have completed, and you get reward-badges after each completed week, etc, so it creates more of a ritualized support-system around the whole thing ?

3 rounds of breathing today (well actually before I went to bed after having worked night-shift, but I count them as today because my goal during this 20 day cold shower challenge is to accompany every cold session with 3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing, so this session is the one I’m stringing together with todays cold shower). I woke up late for work today. Working night-shift again. So I just had to run. Fortunately my co-workers allowed me to go and take the cold shower right now, so it was pretty refreshing to do a cold shower 3 hours into night-shift. This 20 day cold shower allows for 2 rest days after every 5 days, or you have to do 5 cold showers per week, but I wanted to see if I could do 20 days in a row, and fortunately now I’m still on track with that. This has been a really busy week of work working a lot extra, but next week will be more chill with only two days of work and I’m not going to say yes to any extra, so I’m really glad I managed to keep this up during all this activity, and now the last 4 days will be really easy to finish. Incredibly how this helps me process the challenges of daily life. I was totally worn down when I came to work tonight, and now I feel fresh as superman ?

3 rounds of breathing today, and last day of 2 min and 55 sec in the cold shower. Tomorrow will be the start of the last 5 days where cold exposure will be increased to 3 min and 10 sec.

3 rounds of breathing and 2 min and 55 sec in the cold shower. Very tired today. Been working night-shift a lot lately. But it was interesting that I don't resist the cold water when I'm feeling weak and tired. It feels refreshing even when tired.