Wim Hof walks

If you read the Jan. 5 edition of The Press, you know where I’m going with this.

Cold isn’t all that bad. In fact, getting a little chill in the bones can be just what you need to keep that inner glow going. At least that’s what practitioners of the Wim Hof method are banking on.

For those who missed Elli Goldman Hilbert’s article “Nature-plunging and fire-breathing,” the Wim Hof method is a tripartite method of breathing, cold therapy, and a philosophical “commitment” to the first two.

For local practitioner and teacher Brock Cannon the practice can look like wading into Lake Coeur d’Alene every winter day and “fire breathing” (which sounds a lot like the ujjayi breath traditionally used in yoga). The benefits of Wim Hof can be physical, reportedly re-strengthening your body’s natural ability to adapt to the elements, boosting your immune system, sleep, and even hormone levels. People like Cannon also appreciate a mental boost; in addition to the endorphins the body tends to release during the (careful, practiced) cold exposure, many find it also quiets the mind — particularly the anxious one.

I’m no Wim Hof expert, but I am a cold convert.

Winter walks have become my favorite. After the raggedly frigid air settles into your chest, you start to feel at peace with it; you’re as much a part of the chill as it’s a part of you now. The snow covers everything like a blanket of calm, wrapping around your mind and soothing it like a child. The quiet settles in, shushing everything.

When you move to keep the blood pumping, the cold takes on a different feel. You don’t stop noticing it, but it does feel new. The sharp, biting feel goes away and instead the experience begins to feel like an exercise in sensation, as if you were re-acquainting yourself with the definition of the word itself.

Where you sense it changes, too. At first you feel like you’ve cannon balled into arctic waters, surrounded and painfully aware of how much warmer you are — were — than your surroundings. Then the cold fills up your chest, and warms just a little. After a while, however, the cold fades into the background, just barely perceptible at the outer boundaries of your body. You become two selves: an inner body, which is surprisingly comfortable, quietly exhilarated in the blue-cold world, and an outer body, which is almost silent even as you maneuver through snow berms and ice. The outer you knows the cold is there, but the inner is running the show by now, and it’s glowing all too much to care.

Once you get past the idea that it’s “too cold,” you figure out quickly that it almost never is. If you’ve got a good coat, hat and scarf (wear it over your mouth if you have asthma), you’ll find out just how blissfully mind-quieting the cold can be.

As for immune-boosting super-benefits, well, I wouldn’t skip your annual check-up. But for the inner mind, the magic is real.