COLD WATER

Day 1 and half of Alex Manzi‘s Free Your Mind Retreat…

The day started with a morning group walk & a dip into the COLD Mediterranean sea.

I’m new to the cold water game so had my own (quiet) reservations but I didn’t allow the thought of not doing it enter my mind at any point, I was all in.

I can’t say those first few moments were comfortable but within a few minutes, i felt pretty good, my brain felt alive and I was grateful to be where I was.

The interesting part of this experience was back at the house as a group, reflecting on all of our own thoughts around the activity.

I shared that I had had apprenhensiveness when it was first suggested and this grew as we made our way to the beach but at no point did I consider not taking part… I recognised that this partly came from a place of insecurity, not wanting to appear ‘weak’ but also that I had a deeper knowing that this experience was going to be really good for me.

I shared that whilst in the water, initially my thoughts were ‘rah, how long do I have to pretend to be enjoying this’ and ‘When can I get out?’ Then however, after a few minutes, I settled in to it and began to embrace it.

The discomfort came in waves, so after around 10 minutes my thoughts moved to ‘ok this is cool, i think i’m done but I don’t want to be the first to get out…’

As we went around the group and everyone shared their thinking around the experience, it became clear that we all had very similar thought patterns… those little voices in our heads were more often that not saying the same things. Those annoying or at times insecure thoughts were not unique to me and a very shared experience.

What also came out of this was a realisation that enduring hardship or a challenge collectively made the process ‘easier’ and increased resilience. We all shared that the fact that we did it as a group, enabled us to push out of our comfort zones with a lot more ease than if we had been alone.

I then zoomed out and looked at this from the point of view of the human experience. Obviously we all have different circumstances, lives and histories and no 2 of us are the same, but our thinking… our thinking is so often shared. Those loud, invasive, judgemental, insecure, sometimes cruel thoughts that we FEEL only and exclusively plague US, are all just part of the very human experience of thinking and having thoughts. We perceive our experiences as negative but they are very normal and not unique.

This simple exercise of just sharing our thought processes around our an experience allowed us all to see past the seperation that the Human Brain perceives, the perception that we are all completely disparate and understand that life is a series of collective thoughts around a collective experience. It highlighted the importance of sharing our thoughts, both negative and positive as well as vulnerabilities, if for nothing more than realising that we aren’t alone in them and allowing others to see the same.