I think the moment it hit me to finally see what state I was in was one bitterly cold morning in December when I was shivering my way through a lake immersion session. A beautiful bufflehead duck gently splashed down about 20 feet from me. As it gracefully pirouetted toward me, its moment of tranquility was cruelly punctured by its alarming discovery of my unlikely presence. I must have seemed to it an alien life form that had fallen into the lake and was quickly stunned into paralysis. My low groaning protests of the violently stabbing cold probably didn’t help allay its concerns and it quickly departed. I once heard the late Irish philosopher/poet, John O’Donohue make the simple yet astute observation during an interview of “how remarkable it is to consider we have never seen our own faces.” Had I been able to see my own face these last number of years, I would have reacted with the same degree of startled incredulity as that bufflehead duck did when it encountered me struggling in the same frigid waters that it swims in with such playful delight, so unrecognizable to myself I had become. What that duck witnessed was a state of near rigor mortis I had been in long before its surprise rendezvous with me in the lake that cold December morning.
In March, I passed 120 days straight of getting in the lake we live on here in Nova Scotia for ten minute cold water immersion sessions. I was inspired to try it in the natural setting of the lake we live on after having followed my dear friend, Shereen, into doing Wim Hof breath and ice baths back in my native home of Texas. I didn’t know how long I could make it into the winter when I first started back in mid-November. I just agreed to take it day by day. I had gone for 30 minutes without much difficulty sitting in ice baths in tubs back in Houston so maybe it wouldn’t be too bad. The reality is nothing could really prepare me for the absolute brutality of sitting in actively freezing water where on some days I watch a continuous bloom of ice crystals forming on the surface in front of my face and float away in the current to be devoured by the awaiting rapids within earshot of me. Although a significant motivation for me doing this was to harvest the compelling research-backed health benefits associated with cold water immersion, I was more influenced by my never-ending curiosity to learn. I wanted to see what the marriage between an intense sensory environment and deeply arresting natural wonder could teach me. But perhaps the biggest influence was feeling an inexplicable call from the lake to do something extreme to counter the severity of my inner state of chronic dysregulation which the events in 2020 accelerated from a trot into a full-on gallop.
Culture of Lying
The ice is savagely prejudiced towards lying. It instantly detects and violently ejects lying, falseness, and bullshit upon entry. The first lesson immediately imposed on me on day one in the ice was how much lying had been a part of my life. My meticulously constructed high walls of false confidence collapsed under the crushing assault of overwhelming pain on my senses. My normally placid facial waters projecting self-assurance explode into unconcealable angst and intimidation. The ice forcibly awakens me to how many ways I had been conditioned to lie about or edit my feelings or circumstances so as to shape them into socially acceptable packaging. For years, I couldn’t admit I had struggled with insecurity or felt uneasy with social encounters. I couldn’t confess to suffering from debilitating waves of anxiety and panic attacks that started in middle school and lasted into my early thirties. I wrestled with all sorts of intense and at times overwhelming emotions and never felt like I had permission to not only express them but merely have them as a man. The origins of these deceptive practices took root in high school. In many ways, high school saved me from a tremendous amount of pain I had been suffering for years. But it came at the price of simultaneously tipping my internal emotional climate toward an ice age of dissociation. I entered high school dazed and confused after having limped through the aftermath of the emotional shell shock of enduring a series of unfortunate early childhood traumatic events. I didn’t know how to ask for help and talk about unprocessed deeply dysregulating feelings that had been ambushing me for years with their relentless surprise attacks. Along with the low self-esteem I was yoked to, I arrived accompanied by a huge growth spurt that took me from 5’11” in middle school to 6’3″ and eventually 6’4″ that first year. I was quickly targeted by Coach Hatton to join his freshman basketball team. I had already been watching NBA basketball as well as playing in the neighborhood by that time. To be recruited to play in the best sports program in my large high school was a huge boost to my battered ego. I watched the varsity basketball team go through pep rallies thundering home dunks eliciting the roar and adoration of the crowd and it seized my imagination. It fueled a rapidly growing determination to build my jumping ability so I could dunk. I was bent on reaching this goal I felt would elevate me to the heights of acceptance and visibility I desperately craved. Coach Walker, the varsity head coach, let me stay after school in the team weight-room for hours working out and lifting weights. It worked. Within months I was dunking and by my senior year, I had an impossibly high vertical leap that propelled me to being one of the most popular students in school all largely fueled by my pep rally dunk shows. After years of alienation and social invisibility on top of the unresolved trauma I was carrying, my newfound popularity in high school was nothing short of dangerously intoxicating. I became obsessed with my image and my body became a vehicle for attracting the attention and praise I was starved for. It didn’t help this was coinciding within the booming muscle bound action hero era of the 80s and 90s dominated by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Jean Claude Van Damme that presented men as invulnerable super humans. I binged on all of their movies which further accelerated a rapidly growing preoccupation with working out. I lied to myself in insisting it was all about cultivating good health but what I was really doing was insulating myself from my emotions. This is not even to mention how exhausting it was to try to build up and maintain my inflated muscular physique. I forced myself to drink so many disgustingly nauseating protein and weight gainer shakes in addition to a regimen of constant eating. Because if I did not keep consuming huge amounts of calories on top of the intense weight lifting routine I maintained, I would rapidly lose weight and mass. And with the loss of my muscle mass came an even greater reduction of self-esteem. I completely disregarded the fact I didn’t enjoy consuming food in this manner and how it was actually incredibly stressful to try to force my body into being something it did not naturally want to be. But in absence of knowing how to substantively address my real needs, chasing that superficial high felt too good to give up despite the reality that no amount of cheering and adulation could fill the ever increasing cold emotional void. It was like consuming bags of chips that never truly satisfied and resolved the underlying issue of my need for sustainable nourishment, leaving me constantly hungry for more. The cosmetic surface of my body had become a remote colony on a frozen planet where all of my self-worth had migrated to and it was as if the more densely inflated and hardened my exteriority became, the more I would be buffered from a vast, unexplored, dark internal world teeming with feral emotions. With the support of years of therapy starting in my 30s, I had managed to moderate the most visibly malignant aspects of that toxic masculinity. I had actually grown to feel quite confident as I entered my 40s that I was out of its gravitational pull entirely. I had no idea how much I had been insidiously and covertly brainwashed into my continued participation in it. The brittle charade shattered once exposed to the ice and my ego’s image management program is crushed under its merciless boot of truth.
Elephants and Blind Texans
There is no shortage of irony in a buck naked long-haired bearded 6’4″ man from sunny Texas swinging an axe to break through 4″ thick lake ice in -18°C/0°F weather and yet not being able to fully appreciate the bizarre spectacle he is making of himself. Since no other houses are on the lake and people rarely pass by on the road next to the house in winter, I decided from the very beginning to do the lake sessions sans clothing. I figured what was the point if no one was around. I enter the lake gracefully and ten minutes later, I am transformed into a drunk person trying to pass a walking sobriety test for a cop as I stagger out of the lake and bumble my way up the hill back to the warm refuge of the house and my awaiting hot shower. The idea of wearing and removing clothes seems absurd in that state. My wife has told me how funny it is to look out the window and see the madman I am swinging an axe at the ice in my birthday suit wearing nothing but a beanie. Yet nevertheless, my bufoonish display of high comedy is completely lost on me. There is a peculiar power dissociation has in damaging the capacity for honest self-reflection. Left unchecked, my ego grew a glacial mass of immovable, dysfunctional, controlling behaviors and thought patterns that were grinding up my capacity for self-awareness under the colossal force of its weight. How else could I fail to see how increasingly impatient and irritable I was becoming with my wife over the first year of our marriage? It finally dawned on me this ego constructed glacier was actually a meticulously concealed rigid attachment to a virtuous self-image that felt stabilizing. I came face-to-face with a monolithic need to be seen as a “good guy.” When I finally saw it, it was astonishing to see something so enourmous could hide in plain site from my conscious awareness. It reminded me of the story of the blind men who encountered an elephant and came to vastly differing conclusions as to what they were interacting with based on each touching a different body part, with none of them understanding the actual immensity of the creature standing before them. Because I was completely blind to the possibility of the presence of an elephant, my ego had years to secretly reshape that frozen virtuous self-image into a warped icy lens that distorted how I perceived what were actually hurtful behaviors. What finally started to crack this thick icy lens was my wife’s deep well of patience and compassion being exhausted by my implacable state of abrasiveness thus prompting her to employ the extreme measure of reaching me by striking my hardened surface with the axe of her anger. And I have to say it was akin to what I imagine it to feel like to have an evil spell broken that was imprisoning me in an inaccessible oubliette of distortion. With my sense of presence starting to return, it was deeply unsettling to see what the fog of self-estrangement had been concealing from me. I was mortified to wake up to seeing how I had fallen into this maddening pattern of putting out two conflicting signals. What I verbally espoused as my consciously held core values and beliefs was in direct contradiction to how I actually behaved and communicated to my wife. I would profess to her with genuine sincerity I believed in true partnership and yet I would frequently speak in ways that were disrespectful and demeaning not having the slightest clue I was doing it despite her insistence I was. What the axe of my wife’s righteous anger cracked was fully fractured by the unmatchable power of the ice to ruthlessly pulverize ego charades, even glacier sized ones. But I credit my wife with landing the initial salvational blow of liberation. Upon reading this passage to my wife, she chuckled and recalled a quote from Erick S Gray:
Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she'll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she'll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit!
Swelling from Somebody
In my pre-Wim Hof ice bath days, the only association I ever had to ice and my body was treating an ankle sprain in a bucket of ice when I used to compete in sports. I remember one particular day in early February when I was doing my lake session during a winter storm that was ushering in plummeting bitterly cold temperatures. The snowfall quickly compacted into a brittle sheet of ice as it instantly froze on the recently de-iced water surface, the result of having just gone through a brief multiday warm-up where temps tipped above freezing. The rapidly forming ice sheet was subsequently pulled downstream toward my end of the lake by the river current running through it. I felt a disturbing cascade of needle-like pricks as a long barge of razor-thin ice agglomerated around and tortuously scraped past my neck. This disturbing development is simultaneously accompanied by an eerie waterfall of what sounded like the high-pitched crinkling sound of someone ever so carefully removing the delicate foil off of a chocolate bar in hopes of not waking me from a slumber. I suddenly had a comical association pop into my head of being up to my neck in a giant bucket of ice trying to reduce inflammation in my entire body from some kind of hidden injury. It turns out it was. The ice was removing the swelling effect of decades of exposure to what I imagine Ram Dass calling the “somebody program” that was constantly pressuring me to “make something of myself” telling me over and over I am not enough. My ego had been dealing with the inflammation caused by decades of being in a cultural environment that bathed me in a persistently pernicious disinformation campaign insisting I should strive to be “special.” This brainwashing malware steadily corroded my agency and overrode it with a surreptitious corrupt operating system that externalized my self-worth. To have value, I had to acquire it, earn it, achieve it and go after my piece of the ever shrinking pie before my neighbor does. I must “swell up” and be more than I am. I must be bigger. I must be stronger. I must look better. I must be smarter. I must be wealthier. The ice reduces the inflammation of the somebody program until I am finally back within the natural borders of the body. I feel the extraordinary degree to which it has inflamed my ego in the relief felt by its sudden absence for those ten minutes I am in the ice. As I move through session after session in the frigid water, I feel the movement of mountain sized bergs of grief and dissociation fracturing and calving off of a vast ice shelf in a dark frozen continent of my unconscious. As I reclaim this humble connection to the most elemental level of being, I come to a deeper recognition of how incredibly alienated from myself I have been due to my glaciated interior world.
Magnum's New Model of Maleness
It’s tempting to describe the sensation of being in a freezing lake as numbing but that would be a lazy mistranslation as it’s not numbness at all. It’s my sense of being alive dialed up to stratospheric heights of intensity. That ferocity of “aliveness” reveals the identity of the real numbness to be the pain I was experiencing from feeling bereft of connection to purpose, meaning and deep personal agency. As my daily ventures into the lake progressed, I started seeing how many things in my life I had suffered through that were forced upon me by external influences I did not consciously choose or consent to; in large part due to being afflicted and weakened by the compulsive unsolicited advice entrainment pathology that has become so ubiquitous in the corpus of the collective psyche. This was another layer of strata added to the underlying calcified violation I was already carrying from the unresolved traumatic events of my childhood. As the meaninglessness of this kind of hollow suffering persisted, it began to slowly spread until it became a frozen inner terrain of numbness; a colony of a progressively alienating outer wasteland where people and the natural world have been systematically reduced to being discardable entertainment transactions. I was conditioned to see life as a limited menu of acceptable choices. As a man, I could only aspire to a handful of respectable career options; corporate executive, allopathic medical doctor, lawyer, business owner, professional athlete, etc. There was a limited menu of acceptable mannerisms and emotions that men could express; stoic, tough, angry, joking, confident, aggressive, competitive, critical, shallow, domineering, etc. My natural interests in things like holistic wellness, psychology and a proclivity to want to be sensitive, silly and interested in deep conversations were not modeled by any men in my life or on tv that were credible, with one noteworthy exception. I was deeply captivated and inspired by Tom Selleck’s portrayal of Thomas Magnum on the tv show, Magnum PI, in the 80s. Magnum was an anomalous male role model island in a sea of two dimensional steroid-inflated “ass-kicking” male action heroes. Here was a man who was tall, athletic, good looking, played the same sports I liked (basketball and volleyball) and tough while at the same time being affable, disarming, approachable, gentle and even a bit goofy. In addition to his imposing physical stature, as a former Navy Seal, he was highly trained and skilled in using lethal force. But what I appreciated about him was how he only leveraged his considerable physical advantages after he had made every reasonable effort to diffuse a tense encounter peacefully. He could use his size, strength and skills to physically force the outcomes he wanted but he consciously chose not to. I appreciated how Selleck had an athletic build but wasn’t hyper-muscularized. He passed the “eyeball test” of looking like any athlete would look who exercises regularly. In other words, he was relatable. All of these seemingly contradictory qualities could co-exist within a man without diminishing his appeal and gravitas. The fact that a character like this would not only be on tv but on one of the twenty most popular tv shows in the 80s was incredibly validating to me at a seminal time in my development as I transitioned from a gangly boy into a tall athletic teenager who needed a positive male role model. But although Tom and his character Magnum had a stabilizing influence, it wasn’t enough to translate into giving me permission to be myself. The risk of shame and ridicule was just too great. In fact, I was often overtly discouraged to pursue my fascinations. When I was in college, I abruptly switched from being a business major to psychology my junior year and I was cautioned by some highly influential male figures in my life not to do it as it would limit my earning potential. I did it anyway and graduated with a psychology degree but even afterward, I was told I should look to enter an MBA graduate program at a reputable university so I could get a good corporate job that would be financially lucrative and also present me as more suitable and attractive as a partner to a woman. My innate interests in literature, writing, philosophy, psychology and profound conversation where I naturally excelled were often dismissed as too effeminate for a man (especially one of my size) and a threat to my perceived value as a man. Being young and impressionable, I eventually acquiesced to those external voices and strayed off course into a career in financial services in my early thirties in pursuit of their approval. It led to a period in my earlier adult life where I was filled with rage and terminated with enduring the withering crucible of a depression lasting for over a year when I was thirty three. Looking back, I can see the source of my rage was feeling trapped in a life where I couldn’t be me. I felt pressured to be someone else that was a better version of me. My world increasingly became smaller with each passing year and I was conditioned to believe anything outside of the tiny corral that defined acceptable male pursuits and mannerisms was risky and not to be trusted. My mindset deteriorated to the point where any intrinsic desires and fascinations that would nascently emerge were automatically tagged as defective and cast out of awareness and into my clandestine “oubliette of distortion.” What ultimately made my oppressive reality unbearable, which is what fed into the rage, was that the suffering felt meaningless. The extent to which my spirit had suffered from my constipated psychic state was made clear once I got in the freezing lake.
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
Escaping the Clench
In ice water, the impulsive reaction is to clench and contract all of the muscles in a laughably futile attempt to resist letting the excruciatingly painful cold from getting in. In my clenching and resistance to the ice and my attempts to defend myself against the overwhelming cold, I find the entry point into seeing my unconscious indiscriminate pattern of resisting and clenching internally. The tragic irony was that I was suffering from an autoimmune response where my ego was involuntarily rejecting and attacking my own naturally occurring feminine instincts with the very masculine judgements I was clenching against from without, not realizing I had already been infected by this menacing external threat I was so guarded against. I had been so effectively entrained by my exposure to years of external shaming and criticism that my compromised internal state had become an “inside job.” I unconsciously abandoned my “childish” instincts in favor of fidelity to the more “responsible” masculine qualities of being regimented and scripted because that is what held the false promise of inclusion and acceptance. This abusive captor paradoxically felt safe and I became addicted to the illusion of safety not comprehending I had given up many of my own sacred liberties in exchange. Thankfully, what this oppressor could not break was my curiosity and sense of wonder. Those two vital allies kept leading me back to the lake day after day until one day, almost two months in, I suddenly and inexplicably stopped clenching and uncontrollably shivering. What I was greeted by was astonishing. On the other side of my fierce resistance to the pain of the cold, I was offered the hospitality of communion with the dynamic properties of the water itself. I wasn’t a foreign interloper in this icy world. I was actually her guest. The hostility I had been feeling was not coming from without but rather from within. Beneath the surface experience of pain, there is something holding me. I can feel the soft buoyant texture of the water on my body and skin. I can feel its gentle pressure as it flows all around me in its steady journey to reuniting with the nearby sea. I feel the companionship of a cellular belonging to a larger organism. In this buoyancy, I made contact with meaning. And by finding meaning in my suffering, it ceases to be an oppressive burden I have to carry and paradoxically, offers me something solid to stand on. The buoyancy of the water unlocked access to seeing a buoyancy within me that comes from being in alignment with my will and agency. Although being in the ice is incredibly difficult, it is an experience I consciously choose for myself. Every day when I approach the lake and take my towel off and place it on the bench, I have a strong impulsive urge to put it back on and return to the comforts of the house. I have that choice but I always disregard it and choose instead to get in. The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, said, “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.” Being in the ice has helped me to better understand what he meant. I may suffer but because I intentionally choose to participate in that suffering, there is a deep sense of meaning and joy is found in doing something meaningful. I have never regretted getting in the lake, even on the most bitterly cold days of February. But I absolutely knew I would regret not getting in it. When I reflect on my life, I have rarely regretted moving toward discomfort but there are countless times I have regretted moving toward comfort. The movement toward comfort is so easy to justify as much needed rest and “self-care” but it’s more often revealed as a move to escape the move toward discomfort I would be better served by. The real suffering I have experienced has almost always been associated with allowing myself to feel bullied into doing something out of obligation. Saying yes to something as extreme and intense as a frozen lake feels like a powerful act of agency restoration as there is an oddly comforting sense of recognition after enduring such a humbling and agonizing ordeal that nothing one can face is more overpowering than what nature can bring to bear.
Despair is suffering without meaning.
Finding Freedom
Because the lake we live on is small, the river that feeds and moves through it makes the lake more resistant to ice formation than larger surrounding lakes that more sustainably freeze over solid. It takes a substantial period of considerably low freezing temperatures to overcome the river current’s ice suppressing effects but nonetheless, the harsh cold extremes of winter in Nova Scotia eventually subdue even the formidable resistance of the current and freeze the lake solid. Conversely, a warm up to just a couple of degrees above freezing for a few days is enough for the current to rapidly tear apart the surface ice. As a result, this lake rapidly changes when we have the typical brief flirtations with going above freezing that tend to happen during Nova Scotian winters. I sense my own internal ice formation went unchecked due to the absence of an underlying current of meaning in my life. The lake taught me the body is the gateway to reconnecting with meaning. If I didn’t reestablish contact and connection with my body, I couldn’t have been liberated from my internal ice. It had to start with restoring a relationship with the foundational essence of being me, the felt experience of fully inhabiting my body. For me, there is perhaps nothing more effective for accomplishing this than braving the “radical presence” that getting in a freezing lake enforces. Viktor Frankl said, “Despair is suffering without meaning.” Much of the suffering I’ve endured in my life has been an oppressive prison of meaninglessness associated with feeling an absence of connection between the inner and outer world my soul craved. For most of my life, my body functioned as an inanimate object in subordination to an ego obsessed with external achievement and recognition rather than being a conduit of that vital exchange between the inner and outer life. This kind of suffering was bereft of any underlying buoyancy beneath the pain. Suffering had become an unbearable boulder of soul crushing meaninglessness without the underlying buoyancy of alignment with my will. One of the most beautiful secrets hidden in the severity of the ice is that if one can agree to sacrifice her asking price of abandoning the familiar comfort of the straight jacket of an ego preoccupied with the illusion of security and “knowing,” she rewards with something of immeasurable value in exchange, freedom. In that ten minutes of suffering, there is freedom. For those ten minutes, I feel a levity that comes from suddenly having a huge burden removed from my shoulders, one that had been there so long I had become accustomed to the pain of this oppressive overlord. For that ten minutes, I don’t know or care about who I owe, the employee I am having a conflict with, the guilt I carry about how poorly I treated my wife last year, how disappointed I am in how much I have atrophied due to not working out regularly in two years, how much money is in my bank account, how much I’ve lost in the last three months in my investment portfolio, how I’m going to navigate my business through an increasingly brittle economy, how tired I am of having people mistake bludgeoning me with their radicalized political positions for conversation, or whether or not my slowly deteriorating left knee is going to at some point threaten my love for living a super active lifestyle. I am gifted with freedom from all external claims. Any vestiges of self-importance are pried away and I am reduced to being a humble quivering creature trying desperately to adapt to a hostile environment. In that state I don’t even have a name. I am not an age. I am emancipated from the burden of trying to be somebody. In my newfound liberation from the pressure to be more than what I am, I find surprising relief in the humble simplicity of being just another organism playing its role in the natural order; summoning its internal resources to adapt to the vicissitudes of life that inevitably whip up tempestuous internal weather events from time to time. There is a sense of deep solidarity with something larger than humanity I touch into with not needing to be bigger than I am. In retrospect, I feel what drew me to embark on my daily pilgrimage into the hostile frozen world of a Canadian lake in winter was an unconscious desire to search the barren internal ice-locked landscape I was cursed to wander through, in circles, for signs of a survivor. I found myself as a beleaguered ship surrounded by rapidly encroaching ice and slowly felt the immense pressure threatening to rupture the hull of my soul. Perhaps on some level, I looked at this icy lake with a strange inexplicable sense of familiarity and knew that choosing to subordinate myself to the enigma of her life threatening power would be the homeopathic approach necessary to liberate me from my internal icy prison of radicalized masculinity. I ironically had to move toward death to reclaim life. A hundred and twenty days in a row in a freezing lake may seem like a steep price to pay in gambling on the possibility of freedom with no guarantees of anything other than pain but there was really nothing to debate. As difficult as that experience was on me, I knew what I would suffer from not doing it would be greater than any suffering I could possibly endure in doing it. It ended up being one of the best bargains of my life.
