#222: What a feeling
I walk out of the Spa and burst out laughing.
I feel so good.
Cold air brushes my face and my wet hair
My body feels light and clean
I feel taller than before, like there’s a rod down my back.
I’ve just completed a gym session and finished it off with 2 rounds in the sauna and 2 cold ice cold buckets of water poured over my head.
I’m standing outside of the spa in the countryside and I feel amazing.
I laugh I feel that good. Is this real?
I’ve always loved a sauna, but in the last 18 months I’ve fallen deeper in love.
I love the space. I love the heat.
I love the lack of distractions. I love that my phone could barely survive in there.
I love that my mind wanders and drifts back.
I love that I’m half naked, accepting of my body.
I love what I can listen to, how I get drawn into a conversation that’s not even mine, or lost in a sea of my own thoughts.
I love that I can feel my body, my whole body - pulsating. I love that I can feel my heart, working.
I love that I can feel my skin, the sweat sliding down it, my body weeping.
I love the release.
When I stand outside after. I sit and feel my body pulsing. I can see the blood coursing through my system. I can feel it.
I feel alive and in touch with my innate aliveness. My body.
The shock of the cold water makes me inhale sharply depending on how slowly I walk into it.
If I walk in slowly, if I feel my feet on the floor. The coldness doesn’t bite in the same way.
If my mind is drifting, I’m shocked into the present. Shocked back to my breath, to my feet on the floor, to the cold water biting against my skin.
My skin comes alive in a new way, tingling against the water. Resisting it’s cool.
After 30 seconds I settle, lean my neck back into the cold water all the way up to the tip of my ears and I feel my whole body relax. I am here.
I’m alive.
Everything slows. I can see the ripples in the water. I can feel my feet on the floor. I can hear the sounds of the spa, the jacuzzi splashing, machinery whirring, people talking.
A final head dunk under water. A big sigh. A slow, mindful walk out.
I sit. Feel my skin dancing.
I feel coldness in my bones. In my legs, in my sides. I feel energy, an electricity within me.
I am alive.
And I’ve been doing this two to three times a week for a year.
Very few practices give me such a palpable shift in my mood and energy.
A long yoga session, a run, a good coaching session, rowing, a long walk.
I enter feeling tired, drained, in a negative mood and I return feeling completely different. Not many practices reset me completely.
The Sauna and Cold Water reset me completely and I’m hooked.
I feel amazing, I feel alive. I laugh at how good I feel because I actually can’t believe that I feel that good every single time.
Both practices together, with movement before take me to my truest state. If I am tired, then I will feel tired. If I am happy, I will feel happy.
I can’t hide in the sauna, the cold water exposes my true senses.
It’s a purifying and cleansing practice for me that has become a staple part of my week.
This is nothing new and I’m one of the many converts, although I don’t take the plunge in a bucket of cold water in my back garden every morning.
Cold water immersion, like many things, is beginning to be sold as another performance hack and growth tool.
I do feel the performance benefits, but like many things capitalism gets it’s hands on, it’s subtly sold as another way to perform at your optimum and therefore make more money or achieve greater status.
It’s more than that for me.
The heat and the cold water help me to feel. Simple. They expose me to my truest, purest, rawest form of me.
I don’t see it as a 5am wake up tool to smash my day. The heat and the cold are powerful presence practices with an intensity that is able to deeply and profoundly shift me into presence and engage with how I truly feel.
It’s got me thinking, what other practices make me feel alive?
What completely shifts my energy?
Whatever it is, that’s what I want to be doing more of.
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Writing
Who am I?
Writer, founder, husband, always tanned.
Wannabe poet, imposter, taboo buster.
Thinker, philosopher, not a drinker
Joker, chancer, bad dancer.
shoulder chipped Stokie
champagne hippie
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best ones.
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