About Us

Stop, I say, Just stop. The memories are hurting my stomach, so I curl up tighter, and try to think of something positive, like the fact that the sun is out.  Start small, Abraham Hicks says, just bring up the energy by one percent.  I grab the TV controller from the second shelf down in my husband's night stand. I'm just going to look it up, this cold water thing, I want to see people go into the cold.  

 I click onto a youtube video where people are jumping 20 feet into a waterfall, lots of people one after another.  The camera moves five feet to the side of the jumper on deck. Where I see a strong man with gray hair and beard, eyes that look old and young, joyfull, and serious beating a drum.  His proportions are as if Bernini had sculpted him from marble. He belongs in the Plaza Navona in Rome, that is Wim Hof, I conclude.  As he sits there beating a leather drum, he stops for a moment and says,

 “let the body do what it knows how to do.”

My mouth fills with saliva, because I’m fixated to the point that I’m not swallowing it feels like I’m witnessing an ancient rite of passage or the initiation of the alchemical process. My sternum tingles and tickles, the sensation I get when something draws me in like a magnet, something animalistic, sexy, and fearless.  I sit up, knowing that I’m about to do something I never imagined I would do.

Down to my pond I go on my son's four-wheeler.  I speed into the crunchy, frost covered grass, frozen chards fly from the ground onto my bare feet and legs.  I swing my leg over and my foot breaks through the thin frozen surface of the ground.  Holy hell, the mud that squeezes through my toes is cold. If my feet are cold now, this is going to shock me dead, which sounds like a relief.  I start to run, so that I won't have time to think. There’s ice around the edges of the pond. A few more cold nights, and I would have to take my ax to the surface. I don’t want to slip and fall on the frosty white dock and slide into the ice water haphazardly,  so I make my muscles rigid as my feet touch down on the dock.  My right foot reaches the end, my toes grip the edge, and my left foot springs me forward up and over the freezing water..  There’s no turning back now, I think, as I look down at the pond water half a meter away. Bits of leaves still float on the surface.

My feet smack into the ice water, a thousand needles prick the back of my knees, then my spine, nipples, armpits sting me awake. It feels like ice cubes have been shoved into my vagina freezing me from the inside out. I gasp, air enters my lungs. I’m alive, I realize, and now I’m going to walk on water and get the hell out of here. My feet hit the shore and I notice that my skin is red, but I’m not cold and there’s a warmness in my solar plexus that is traveling up my spine, belly, chest and throat, like when you shake up a carbonated kombucha.  I smell the pond and the grass, and notice how the birds sound oddly harmonious, their song penetrates my stomach and radiates through my extremities; I feel the air in my nostrils, and the pebbles beneath my feet. Everything is quiet, my mind is quiet.

I have been doing this exercise for 137 days straight.  I listen to Wim’s books on Audible over and over, and fortunately, my kids like the sound of his voice.  I want to go to a workshop… I would like to go to one where I could meet Wim, but that scares me.

I fill out the paperwork and I get a space in the 2022 Winter Expedition in Poland.  

“I’m going to Poland”. I say out loud to myself sitting in my car in front of the coffee shop… I am going to Poland…. confirmed.