Do you have PTSD or suffer from severe trauma ? How about cancer, diabetes, and even covid 19? or maybe you are an athlete trying to enhance your athletic performance ? What if I told you – breathwork can solve your children’s inability to focus in school or help you have more clarity while making multi million dollar decisions in less than a minute? Breathwork can even help you get over a hang over !

I am a nobody. No-body. Because who I am, is alot deeper than my body. My body enjoys fame, acclaim, appreciation, accolades. My body likes to be in great shape. My body takes care of my self esteem, my ego. My body likes to be accepted by others. It is very important to take care of my ego because my ego is a part of me. Only when I have a happy ego can I go past it, not get stuck on the surface, and truly see who I am.

Its been almost a year now that I have been teaching the wim hof method. And the more I teach, the more I come across people who ask me advise on whether or not they should pursue the thought of becoming an instructor in the method.

My question to them is always the same - Why ? What are you looking to achieve ?

These are some of the answers I have received :

• I see how much it is done for you and your life, and you are a great ambassador for the method. So it makes me believe that I too would expand by teaching the method.

• I feel like this would be a gift that I could serve to my community

• I feel that this would be the next step for me to grow spiritually

• I can see myself getting really passionate about this and doing something I love as a source of income/ livelihood makes me really excited

I feel like my life is like a plastic bowl, every time I try and expand and grow, i have to change the shape of the plastic bowl. In order to do this, I have to heat it up beyond its melting point, to help the material become malleable so that I can mold it into whatever shape I want. And every time the heat goes up, the discomfort I feel, screaming through my body and my mind, I realize it's what is needed in order for me to become malleable so that I can take my next shape - I withstand the pain and I get to that point where I'm now malleable. After I change the shape, to what I want it to look like, I cool down and am now again a rigid plastic bowl of a different shape, and this process continues. The only way the pain becomes easier to bear, is when I'm constantly in this state of being mold-able. I'm in a constant fluid state almost, but that takes a consistent heat source to make that happen, essentially a constant feeling of discomfort is always needed to be in this semi liquid state.

And if that state stays for a long time, it's impossible to be a bowl, the natural state would be to collapse into flatness. A state where there is no hindrance to the flow of energy into and out of me. I am not containing anything, for whatever is mine is yours and vice versa. And in this state I believe true connection is attained. There are no limits, no boundaries, we then become one with God.

In all of my workshops, I spend ten to twenty minutes talking about my story, and I almost always get questions after I say my story, and even this passage doesnt really cover it. But if you are interested in knowing more about me, and have wondered what my path was leading into the Wim Hof Method, I wrote this passage about a year ago. Even though not much has changed, I feel like its been ten years since i wrote this - so much has happened since then - I have been on the Wim Hof Method path for some time now, and through that I have grown in ways I would never have imagined I could.

One of the things I love most about the Wim Hof Method, are the people I meet.... beautiful groups of people coming together to understand their physiology and also their boundaries, not only in their bodies, but also in their minds, and realizing that by breaking our boundaries down, we gain so much.

When you open yourself up to being vulnerable, and receiving love - when the walls and filters in our heart are down, we also are open to receiving pain and grief. Whatever it is that flows through us, recognize that it is a blessing to feel any emotion. There is no good and bad - no right and wrong, only the passing of emotion through our minds and bodies - sense it, experience it, honor it and let it go.

I had an interesting experience at work yesterday. There is a ping pong tournament going on at the moment to raise money for charity and so I thought, why not give it a try - its been years since I last played ping pong, and I quite enjoy the sport - I enjoy ANY racket based sport and so I signed up.

Fast forward to match day, I felt a bit nervous walking to the ping pong tables. It had been a long time since I competed in anything, let alone at work. Some how when you are around people at work, there is this side which you are always hoping that doesn’t come out - the competitive side that you believe everyone is going to judge you on.

So here I am warming up, feeling out my strokes, the people around me are actually quite good, and I am in a pool of 4 and it is a round robin style of tournament.

The first match, has me playing another girl. Right off the bat, she makes a comment about me not seeding myself right. I am so confused because my understanding was that every team had a variety of players, and seeing the other 2 players in the group it definitely seemed like we all had a varied level of play. Never the less this girl talked with so much conviction that I felt she knew something I didn’t.

Before I started the wim hof method, I traveled far and wide to experience humility and consistently challenge myself so that when I came home, living as a stoic happened by default.

I put myself through many trials and tribulations to challenge the way I thought, feel meditative when I walked through forests and gain clarity when I sat under waterfalls. Of course the effects lasted for a couple of months after which I had to make another trip or run another marathon before I could bring back that state of mind again.

There's nothing easy about taking a cold shower, or sitting in an ice bath or breathing for as long as we do, but every time I do, I'm overcome with a sense of humility and the realization that the voices in my head never go away, no matter how confident I feel, the voices are always there, standing in the background waiting to jump out during a moment of weakness or lack of self confidence.

Thanks to this method, I get to face my voices everyday, I get to decide the life I want to lead, the people I want in my life and the energy I want around me.

Thanks to this method, I can get this feeling at home, not having to travel far and wide like I did before.

Thank you @iceman_hof for giving us a gift that everyone has access to—through our breath and our cold showers.

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As most of us are aware, the Wim Hof Method has more male followers than female followers. A lot of us can probably come up with explanations as to why that is. I've historically always been in a male dominated environment. Whether it was tennis, engineering, drilling and now the Wim Hof method, I've always been surrounded more by men than women.

As an adult I realize how unfortunate that is and here is why:

Masculinity and femininity are traits, and are different from the concept of being male or female. The more secure a man is in his masculinity the more comfortable he is in exposing his vulnerabilities and can talk about his feelings and thoughts. And the more secure a woman is in her femininity, the easier it becomes for her to take control, lead and be a source of balance and strength. A balanced human being is one in which masculinity and femininity are present in equal proportion regardless of whether you are a man or a woman.

I cultivated traits of compassion, vulnerability, leadership and feeling secure from BOTH men and women who displayed balanced personalities.

I hope that regardless of who you are, you'll start taking notice of your environment, and add a little more balance into your own personality. Encourage the men to be more vulnerable and display their feelings and the women to feel more secure in their own strength.

And if you're a Wim Hof method practitioner, please encourage and support more women around you to try this method out. I am so lucky to have met the most amazing and caring men and strong and daring women through this method who have loved me through this journey and helped me become the instructor that I am. 

Through this method, which is so empowering, I look forward to a sisterhood, filled with love and support for each other. Together I hope we can discover the true beauty and strength that us women have within ourselves. I would like to see a world where there are as many women practitioners in the method as there are men.