Attending Josh Korda’s Dharma Punx NYC meditations exposed me to body scanning techniques, loving-kindness practice, and others. For years I practiced this type of meditation. There are passive forms of meditation that require nothing more than for the person to sit still, focus on the free-flowing breath, and patiently wait for transcendence to arrive.

I have practiced many different types of meditation over the years. It is based on “cold exposure, conscious breathing, and the power of the mind.”Īs I read Hof’s book, I wondered whether it would be possible to apply some of his methods to my own practices to achieve results. He writes of ordinary people able to acclimatize to altitude to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, of ordinary people able to endure extraordinary cold without even a sweater. Hof is unique in that he claims he can show ordinary humans how to achieve extraordinary feats-if they are willing to put themselves up to the challenge and perform his exercises daily. Typical athletic memoirs recount the years of dedication, the early morning trainings, but they don’t propose to offer their readers a path to the sub-two-hour marathon or triathlon greatness. When you read an athlete’s memoir, rarely does the athlete claim to have the ability to teach you how to follow in his or her footsteps. What’s unique about Wim Hof is that he claims that the preparation can be the same in all cases. In many cases, the drive, passion, commitment, and obsession is similar in all feats of human excellence, but the specific activities differ. I’m fascinated by people exploring the outer limits of human ability, and am especially fascinated by the methods these figures have used to achieve these heights. The book is part-memoir, part workbook, offering readers exercises to help them become superhuman.

In The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Full Human Potential, Hof reveals how he has managed to perform extraordinary human feats of cold exposure, like climbing Mount Everest in shorts and a t-shirt. I decided to take a closer look at Wim Hof given that he’s published a new book. I’d only heard about Wim Hof occasionally in popular culture and in the occasional endorsement I’d hear among surfers looking to increase their ability to hold their breath underwater (an important skill if you plan to surf big waves). He has been followed by journalists looking to “expose” him as a fraud only to find themselves transformed into believers and promoters of his method. He has been written about in the prestigious science journal Nature.

Wim Hof has been studied, doubted, and believed.

Wim hof method results