Relaxing into experience 🥶

This week I took a determined cold plunge into a pool of 50°F (10°C) water. At first it required willpower to submerge. My body was screaming with avoidance. As I sat in the frigid water I noticed the contractions in my body, as if to steel myself against the intensity of cold sensation. So I relaxed the contraction… every place I could feel myself tightening I loosened, surrendering into the sensation. Suddenly I didn’t feel the resistance to the cold, and I didn’t mind staying in for quite some time. I felt still, and eventually, a sense of calm wakefulness.

I think this is a really cool thing that can potentially generalize to all sensations—hot, cold, pain, pleasure; emotions; thoughts; even the ego itself. I’m still exploring this metaphor of relaxing the ego contraction in the face of intense experience the way we can relax the muscle contraction in the face of intense sensation—noticing the sense of personal identity as contraction, and loosening around the self concept to more fully experience whatever is happening in any given moment. There’s a kind of irony in this surrendering into the full sensation of experience without resistance because I’m both more available to the whole human experience, and less organized around any particular story around it. I think this is part of being relateful invites us into—to be ourselves with less resistance and less attachment.

With love, Jordan