‘Tummo’ practitioner breaks ice-immersion record

An appreciative crowd stared in awe at Hof’s tantric feat on Saturday.

By Charlotte Cowles

“Do you think you’ll make it?” shouted a woman bundled in a long fur coat.

“I’m not thinking!” responded Wim Hof, clad only in shorts, standing neck-deep in 1,550 pounds of ice. The crowd cheered and clapped their gloved hands.

Hof, a 38-year-old Dutchman, is a famed practitioner of “tummo,” a Tibetan tantric meditative practice of controlling one’s body temperature in cold conditions. On Saturday, he broke his previous world record by spending 72 minutes immersed in ice.

The feat took place on the street outside Chelsea’s Rubin Museum of Art, an institution dedicated to the art of the Himalayas and surrounding regions, on 17th St. between Sixth and Seventh Aves. Hof’s performance was the first part of the citywide Brainwave Festival that explores how meditation, art and music affect the brain.

As Hof stood on a platform in a clear six-foot-tall cube filled with ice cubes, while Dr. Kenneth Kamler, a New York microsurgeon, observed his physiological response to the cold with blood pressure and body temperature monitors. Kamler then explained to the crowd what would normally happen to an untrained person under the same conditions.

An avid climber and outdoorsman, Kamler is an expert on injuries sustained by cold, having been on Mount Everest during a disastrous 1996 expedition where he treated the frostbite and hypothermia of the surviving climbers. After Hof’s performance, Dr. Kamler and Hof spoke together inside the museum about the mental and scientific aspects of tummo.

When Hof first emerged from the museum to enter his cube of ice, he was shirtless, shoeless and should have already been freezing in the 36-degree January weather. But he still climbed resolutely up to the platform with nary a goosebump on his bare back.

“You can’t do this at home, Johnny,” said Donny Sunshine, 39, a photographer from Brooklyn, to his 4-year-old son. The crowd watched breathlessly as men continuously dumped large bags of ice cubes around Hof.

“We were going to go to the museum, and we saw this,” Sunshine added. “People are praying to him—it’s amazing. Isn’t it beautiful, Johnny?”

Kishu, a middle-aged woman who lives on West 35th St., had all 10 of her fingers crossed—her pinkie and ring fingers, her middle and index fingers, and her two thumbs—to symbolize the five elements. “Say the prayer,” she reminded onlookers. “It’s very useful—he’s no need for central heating.”

As the minutes ticked by, Hof stared calmly forward, only his head visible above the tower of glistening cubes. A countdown clock hung on a nearby tree, and the crowd intermittently left to warm themselves inside the museum or seek hot drinks before coming back to check on Hof’s progress.

“How are you doing in there?” asked someone from the crowd.

“Just keep it cool,” said Hof calmly in his lilting Dutch accent. The crowd became jubilant.

At one point, a prize was handed out for the best “cold” pun: Ivan Shore, from the Upper East Side, joked, “Are the cameramen using freeze frames?”

After 71 minutes and 50 seconds, the crowd counted down from 10, and several large men tipped over the cube so that the ice spilled out the bottom. Hof, with red-hued skin and shaking slightly, stood and raised his hands triumphantly over his head while the crowd whooped. He did have a goosebump or two, but he downed a Red Bull and easily walked back into the museum to towel off and ready himself for the discussion with Dr. Kamler.

The crowd still buzzed after Hof had gone inside. Many people even picked up ice cubes that had been in his bath and sucked on them.

“He touched Johnny when he went by,” said Sunshine, “and you felt something, right, Johnny?” Johnny nodded, an ice cube dwarfing his mittened hand.

Inside the museum, Kamler stood onstage and explained the scientific aspect of the body’s response to cold. “What we saw here today defies Western medical science,” he said. “There’s no way for us, really, to explain what Wim did.”

Kamler also talked about his experiences on the 1996 Everest expedition, “when a storm took the lives of 12 climbers and inflicted some terrible cold injuries.” He then described in detail the body’s response to severe cold, explaining the different stages of hypothermia and frostbite as the body’s temperature lowers from 98.6 degrees to below 85 degrees.

Then Kamler discussed the body’s response to meditation. On a large screen, he showed an image of a normal brain activity next to an image of a brain activity during meditation. The comparison of the two scans revealed that during meditation, brain activity decreases notably in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that processes space and time. “This explains how people are not oriented to space and time when meditating,” said Dr. Kamler. “This controlled disorientation is perhaps part of how Hof is able to detach himself from feelings of cold.”

There is another step in the equation: “For a normal person, the body responds to cold by diverting the blood vessels from the skin’s surface to a deeper layer below your body’s fat,” he said, “kind of like tucking your feet under a blanket.” However, Hof manages to keep the blood flowing through these blood vessels so that his entire body stays warm and never begins the processes that eventually lead to stages of hypothermia and frostbite. This particular exercise is unique to tummo meditation, the specific tantra that Hof practices.

Blood flow is not controlled by the autonomic nervous system—in other words, it is not a body function that one can voluntarily manage, like speaking or walking. “We have to speculate,” Kamler said, “that Wim has figured out how to control it.”

Hof then joined Kamler onstage, dressed comfortably in a zip-up sweatshirt and loose pants. He still wore a symbolic white bandanna tied around his head.

“Science goes as far as it can go,” Hof said. “We are humans, and humans can go further. It is totally natural what I am doing. Beyond our normal standards, but still natural.”

Hof explained briefly how he had grown up in relative poverty with eight brothers and sisters, but became inspired by one of his siblings to travel and study Eastern practices such as yoga and meditation.

He said he simply felt a calling to do this. “Everybody has his own gap,” he said. “It was like a gap that needed to be filled.” Hof was walking in a park in Holland one day when he felt inexplicably drawn to an icy pond. “I felt an attraction. So I took off my clothes, and got in. I felt a rush. It was like a drug.”

That same pond became his meditation spot. “I would sit in the fetus position under the ice. I could hear the ice,” he said, making cracking noises. “I felt no anxiety. I would stay in the park every day, and undress between two trees so that no one would see me.”

Unlike most tummo practitioners, he never had a guru, or guide. “The guru is inside,” he said. He is the only non-Tibetan to have mastered the practice.

“Everyone can do paranormal things in themselves,” he said. “Learn to follow this inner guide.” While Hof encouraged the audience “to grow and challenge,” he also cautioned the audience against ignoring fear. “I have a trust for natural fear, which you need,” he said.

Hof seemed overflowing with goodwill and good advice for the group of people who had gathered to listen to him. “You can always develop spirit. You can always develop mind. Consciousness grows; it is open for everybody,” he said animatedly. He was also modest about his ability to inspire. “I get a lot of attention—I don’t care. Tomorrow the people are gone because the show is over,” he said, prompting a laugh with a wave of his hands. “I just want to give you some strength as you give me strength.”

Dr. Kamler asked Hof, “Do you need physical challenge for spiritual growth?”

“It is really not of great matter in comparison to [the importance of] tuning up—to meditating,” said Hof, adding that it was a matter of personal need. He then pointed to Kamler. “You are a doctor. You spend a lot of time with books. You need physical challenges to balance you out!”

Kamler and Hof went on to talk about Hof’s attempted summit of Mt. Everest in 2007, during which Hof wore nothing but shorts. He made it remarkably far, all the way to the 21,000-foot second base camp, before he got frostbite on one of his toes. Hof had not spent any time acclimatizing beforehand, and cites this as a possible reason for not being able to go farther.

“The veins! They weren’t flexible!” he said with consternation, meaning that he was not able to stimulate blood flow as readily as he normally would.

At the end of the lecture, Kamler brought a thermal imaging device onstage and pointed it at Hof’s hand while Hof demonstrated his ability to use tummo to raise or lower his body’s temperature at will. The device read his hand’s temperature as Hof lowered it from a normal 98 degrees to 87, and the audience gasped as the results from the device showed Hof’s hand changing from a healthy warm red to a cool yellow.

Hof was still his cheerful, modest self. “That should be about it for me,” he said, once his hand had reached 87 degrees.

He waved off any admiration. “It’s about changing your attitude towards cold,” he said, grinning and launching confidently into the words despite his accent. “There’s no hocus-pocus.”