Thermoception & Deep Freedom

I started my exploration around thermoception quite literally with bated breath. This was in the winter of 2021, in the basement of my home, in the middle of the night. I stood over the running bath water as my son slept upstairs. My mind had been running nonstop- and writing, reading, sleeping, nothing seemed to quell its urgent stampede. I’d watched a few videos online about ice baths and the Wim Hof Method and decided to clandestinely submerge myself in freezing water. I shut off the faucet, cracked a bag of gas station ice on the basement floor and dumped the ice in. Rather than slowly enter and give my brain time to process, I slipped in.

My exploration around ice baths in particular and thermoception in general began that cold night. After months of practice, I wrote a bit about some of my initial takeaways on Facebook back in 2022:

- Submersion reveals the power of the present: now is where past and future meet. Our future is uncertain and our history is unavoidable. How do we take the best of the past to forge a nourishing future? By being profoundly, indisputably alive in the here and now [which I’ve discovered is much easier for me to do in subzero temperatures for minutes at a time!]

- We need to tune in and turn up our attention: Capacity is not about how much time you have to do what you want to do, but is about prioritizing where your attention goes given the finite time we have. Submersion has helped me practice putting my attention on one thing at a time [for instance- how cold I am] and reveling in the universe that exists there.

- Bear witness to your ultimate concern: Tillich teaches that there are an infinite number of preliminary concerns [that email you didn’t get to, that annoying conversation, the WiFi acting up, an annoying meme] that take our attention and destroy our present. Yet- submersion taught me that the impact of preliminary concerns fade fast when you are grasped, inescapably, by something of infinite importance. Shivering in subzero temperatures at first seemed to be my ultimate concern, but with practice it has come to be the case that ice submersion is symbolism of a fundamental reality- this, too, shall pass.

Years later- I maintain what I wrote above.

Thermoception is the human sense system of temperature. This sense system operates internally to perceive the temperature of an organisms body and externally to perceive the temperature of an organisms environment. Nerve cells translate thermal energy into electrical signals that the nervous system understands. Its significance can’t be overstated; it allows for us to live by signaling when to avoid extreme temperatures that could cause pain and death. Unless of course you willingly subject yourself to intense temperate experiences, like I did 2 weeks ago in the White Sands Desert under a heat dome in New Mexico on vacation with my new gf (it felt like 115 degrees).

But the deep freedom of thermoceptive presence lies not in the extreme variations I subjected myself to, but in much more subtle shifts and changes in temperature. I tasted this deep freedom when leading a practice of anointed feet washing earlier this spring. Soaking my comrades feet in cold water, removing them and placing them on my lap as I knelt below them, pouring the lukewarm eucalyptus oil on my warm hands and lathering in between toes and around the ankles under the beating sun while a cool gust of wind brushed the side of my lower back, patting them dry with a warm towel.

The deep freedom of thermoception.

note: This is part 1 of a 4 part series about my exploration of different human sense systems and their relationship to what I call deep freedom.