Wim Hof Breathing Exercises

 The Life I Will Be Living Soon

I had been putting off delving into the Wim Hof breathing exercises the way someone might put off going on a diet or starting a jogging program; a quarter mile the first few days; then increasing up to 2 miles every morning, type of thing...

It was probably the nicotine vapes and the alcohol telling me: "We're very worried about being neglected and eventually forgotten about, should you embark upon such a discipline, to be honest with you, Daniel.."

"And, what about us?" complained the white powdered doughnuts in the vending machine near the lobby. "We give you eczema, but we think we're worth it."

The Gab About The Jab

Wim talks about the therapy, for which he has acquired the nickname of "The Ice Man," which involves basically jumping into an ice cold lake; perhaps even through a hole punched through the ice covering it.

 

His contention is that; when a human being is put in this particular stressful environment; all petty concerns and anxieties are instantly replaced with more root concerns like gasping for the first breath upon being submerged.

Then, the mind's focus upon regulating the body's temperature takes center stage and one can tap into the deepest part of the brain, where functions that science has previously considered to be disconnected from consciousness can be manipulated; things like the immune system, the lymphatic system, the heart rate, etc.

 

One of the stories Wim tells is of a scientific experiment that was performed on him; where he was injected with some form of bacteria; and was able to consciously rally his immune system against it; and then 15 minutes later, blood was drawn from him that had no trace of the bacteria.

 

Other tales exist of him spending something like 17 days hiking to the top of some Himalayan peak, barefooted and wearing only a pair of shorts; much to the astonishment of a group of other hikers whom he encountered there; who were all bundled up in parkas and wearing gloves.

 

It crossed my mind that he, of course, might have been perpetuating a hoax in order to be able to get enough suckers to subscribe to his Youtube channel, so he could monetize it (did he bend any spoons with his mind while he was on that mountaintop? type of thing) and that, instead of floating in frozen water, in touch with his auto-immune system, he was sunning himself on a beach and counting the money.

 

But, the proof is in the pudding, as they say (although I don't recommend eating pudding, as it is typically loaded with refined sugar and hydrogenated oils).

I have done the breathing thing 3 times now, with 3 "rounds" each time.

The first time I had been guided by incomplete information and was leaving out a few things, like the 15 second "recovery" breath, to be done after the laying there for 2 and a half minutes with no air in the lungs part.

I woke up at about 4:30 a.m. this morning.

It had been a fitful sleep. I had fallen asleep during the football game, with my last memory being waking up briefly to hear that the Pittsburgh Steelers were losing 38 to 14 or something.

I got another couple hours of sleep, after letting Harold in from outside, where he was parked right by the door in the "fending off the cold" posture that cats take when they tuck all their limbs in under their bodies and wrap their tails around themselves. 

I'm sure that Harold would have preferred to do that under one of the buildings, or at least on top of grass and soil that would offer more insulation; and so the fact that he was thus situated on the concrete landing right outside the door to the parking lot meant that he wanted to come inside; or alternately, was doing his own Wim Hof sort of thing; to connect with the deepest part of his "reptile" brain.

It was the former, I assume, by the way he scampered inside with a meow.

He was sleeping next to me when I woke up after the game had ended and "Meet The Press" was being aired. For those who might have missed the early morning airing of it.

The first voice I heard (I wasn't facing the TV) laid out a laundry list of the failures of the Joe Biden administration; giving him the sole credit for the infrastructure bill.

Then the host defended the administration while hurling accusations at "the Republicans," with the overall effect being that nobody was right and nobody was wrong. It was a wash that just left the effect of having wasted an hour listening to "Meet The Press." It had been just fascinating enough to keep me awake through it.

The real problem is the setup through which a few large corporations are headed by CEO's who are making such obscene amounts of money as to become the richest individuals in the world; and that they all have boards of directors, who are elected by stockholders, who vote on what their salaries should be, as members of the board of directors; and that stockholders who hold millions of shares get to cast millions of votes for who should be on said boards of directors; and the whole ship of fools is perfectly content to have shows like "Meet The Press" give "the American people" the impression that the real debate is upon who is right or wrong between the 2 mainstream political parties.

When the real issue should be the dismantling of the corporate structure whereby a few individuals are super rich and looking down upon earth from their own rocket ships upon the suffering of a great number of impoverished people, American and other, the corporate heads don't really make a great distinction; all nations have been brought under their auspices.

So, give the people their "Meet The Press"s so they can tune in and see where "the world" is at; and then can choose a side and take to the streets in protest; one group against another, blithely ignorant of the fact that both sides are being equally screwed by a third minority group of elites. Equality for the masses, at last! Jeff Bezos can look down and see it all pretty clearly from his rocket ship.

But, the silver lining, I believe is that; even the richest man in the world is going to have to die some day and leave it all behind; and all he will retain is his soul; maybe not even that, if he doesn't believe that.

When I was as small as 6 years old, I used to try to imagine not existing.

It seemed impossible to not exist; because how would I know that I didn't exist? I would have to exist to some extent even to be aware that I was gone, I thought.

I would manage to be able to picture not existing for a split second and then would return to my thoughts with a start.

I guessed that the analogy is that people aren't afraid of going to sleep, because they do so, looking forward in joyful anticipation of the next day. They can't wait for it to be early morning with the sun rising and the birds chirping and a fun day ahead of them; why not just go to sleep and not have to while away the hours waiting upon the sun and the birds. That makes perfect sense; plus the fact that, if you are physically tired enough then sleep will overtake you; like a thief in the night, it will come and steal your consciousness.

And so, the 10 richest people in the world are all going to die. And, try as they might to instill their values in their children; who have never seen working blisters unless they are on the fingertips that they use to text on their phones all day, every day; they are invariably going to have to leave their fortunes to them.

And, what is to stop one of their children from concluding: "I'm going to be the total opposite of my father; I grew up witnessing how rapacious and greedy and unhappy at the deepest level he was; and so, I'm going to take the whole 1.4 trillion dollars he bequeathed to me and give it away! 

I'm going to spread it amongst all the people of the world ..except for the white people because they already have their money, it's in the color of their skin..

And, I'm going to restructure all 1,300 corporations that my dad owned controlling shares in, and dissolve the boards of directors and make the CEO a minion of all the workers, rather than the other way around; and turn all the corporations into Co Ops, run by a democracy of the workers; and this will raise the standard of living of everyone on the planet!"

All the money in the world won't buy insurance against a nut case child like that; blame the wife's family all you want...

It would only take one generation to revolutionize the whole capitalist system as we know it...I thought, as I drifted back to sleep, some time after Meet The Press ended...and this up and coming group of screen staring gender fluid types is a fertile ground for producing the next revolutionaries... 

Then, I woke up during a half hour, at least, long infomercial for some kind of generator.

I usually tune out infomercials; but this one kept me intrigued; as it brought me back to what it had been like here when the power went out 11 days.

"Who could have foreseen an ice storm in Houston, Texas?" asked one person who was probably paid for her endorsement. 

But, thanks to her (I-forget-the-brand-name) generator; she had been able to watch her shows and eat microwaved popcorn, while her generator-less neighbors wailed and gnashed their teeth.

In California, the government periodically shuts down the power grid to combat wildfires, or something, someone was saying. 

With the mighty generator, though, all you have to worry about is the fire. Your garage door will still open to allow you to get out of there.

And, on and on, as I drifted off to sleep, with visions of sitting in my 93 degree room with an olive oil based candle providing the only light; and the batteries that I had taken out of my TV remote powering a little pocket radio tuned to the news and info station. All the talk was about the hurricane; which had apparently taken priority over the coronavirus, which was barely mentioned

I woke up the final time around 4 a.m., pretty sure that I had gotten one of the variants of COVID. I had kind of a throbbing headache in the back of my head and some congestion in my lungs.

So, I did 3 rounds of the Wim Hof deep breathing exercises, wondering if Wim would have recommended doing them when sick.

I felt better afterwards; enough so that I decided to sit down and peck away at this blog post.

It's been really weird, lately, waking up feeling something that I have come to associate with "coming down with something," that in the past has been the harbinger of a worsening fever, and a cough, with my lungs becoming more and more congested, so that by the end of the day I just want to wrap up in a blanket and take Alka-Seltzer cold and flu remedy. But this thing just goes away after a cup of coffee; and most certainly after 3 rounds of breathing exercises.

It's also interesting how in the vaccine mandate debate, each side seems to fall pretty neatly along the lines of "blue" and "red" states.

In Massachusetts, (the only state that didn't vote for Nixon in 1972) where my mother lives; the vaccines seem to be viewed the same way we did the ones we all got in school, back in the late 1960's. They were probably mandated, but they didn't feel mandated. We had just put a man on the moon and brought him back safely; and now this very same science was bringing us a miracle of modern medicine; and we would all be protected.

Those vaccines for measles, mumps, chicken pox, small pox, and maybe even "German" measles, were all lovingly administered by school nurses, and we all felt fortunate to be living in the U.S.A. where medicine was so advanced. We were aware that kids in less fortunate countries would just get sick and die. 

We pictured those kids; all skinny, with pock marked brown skin, living in grass huts on poor soil, wrapped in toga-like garments; without the faintest clue as to how to put a man on the moon; dying. 

We knew that every 29 cents that we dropped in the Unicef box placed by the principal's office, would suffice in providing a bowl of rice and a cup of milk for one of them; and that there were courageous groups of people who went out like missionaries, braving the dangers of whatever poisonous snakes were indigenous to their nations; to vaccinate as many souls as possible. Nurses dressed like Mother Theresa. So, we all felt fortunate to be getting first dibs on the syrum.

I Meet Lee Harvey Oswald's 3rd Grade Teacher

Fast forward to 2012 and I was walking through Algiers Point, Louisiana, right across the river, probably on my way to their library, which was one of the only branches that opened on Sundays, and I encountered a slight, elderly lady who was in the process of lifting cases of bottled water out of the trunk of a car.

I offered to help her.

After looking me over, and maybe because of the guitar on my back, she accepted my help; but asked that I just place the water on the porch just outside the front door of the house.

We got into a conversation after she asked me what I did for a living and after I had told her about busking, and after she had said "Oh, that's not a living!" after I told her how much money I "usually" made doing so; adding that it was an alright living if you hadn't any bills to pay.

She said that she had been a school teacher, right there in Algiers Point for something like 55 years. She even had Lee Harvey Oswald as a student in her 3rd grade class, she mentioned.

Her tone was kind of defensive of him; as if he had been a good kid and probably not capable of killing a president of his own volition -he had been put up to it, or was trying to impress that girlfriend he had in Mexico City, who was sympathetic to Fidel Castro.

But, then she started to talk about how an unusual number of her students had died of cancer, with many of them not having even made it through high school. She blamed it upon the Kennedy administration having sent them a polio vaccine that came in sugar cubes, to make them palatable to the kids, I guess. There was something wrong with those cubes, she had always thought.

So, I guess conspiracy theories are nothing new; dating back to at least the Kennedy administration...

She gave me 2 dollars for helping her with her water, which I mentally adjusted, for inflation, to 10 dollars, since she was old enough to remember when 2 bucks was a lot of money, just for toting a couple cases of water a distance of 20 feet.

I couldn't help thinking that; while we were feeling so fortunate in our Catholic school in Massachusetts, to have our school nurse give us vaccines so we wouldn't become like the children on the Unicef boxes; there were those down in the backwaters of southern Louisiana, like this lady who was teaching Master Oswald his 4 "r"s (reading, 'riting, 'rithmatic and rifles) who was also fomenting the suspicion that a high incidence of cancer in the children of Algiers Point could somehow be traced back to "Kennedy's" sugar cube vaccines -not industrial pollutants from other red states flowing down the Mississippi River, that those kids probably ate a lot of fish out of, or anything like that. Nope; Kennedy, and his damned pink sugar cubes!

I don't know if that brings this post full circle from where I started it 9 hours ago; with a short break to go up front to check on the cold water situation; but like the Mississippi River in Algiers Point; this is where it ends.

Addendum: The hot water is not working throughout the whole of building A, and not just in my apartment. I had wondered if they had shut the water heaters off in all the non vaccinated apartments. I suppose me going out on Bourbon Street without a mask and mingling with tourists from all over the world has got Tim the security guard a bit spooked. He can't help it; he spends his whole shift staring at his phone which is giving him a steady diet of CNN and local "news." I've seen the local news the times I failed to shut the TV off after watching Jeopardy and 25 Words or Less; and you would think that we were in the middle of another Black Death, from listening to their newscasts. 

But, I could be triple vaxxed and boosted and still come back here and give it to him. Then, he would just be yelling: "You need to stay off Bourbon Street until this whole thing is over!!" The Tim's of the world are just a fact of life.