How to Practice Misogi (Cold Meditation) in Your Shower
By: Joe Hunt
Tags: Self-awareness, Life Lessons, Mental Health, Self Improvement, Mindfulness

For millennia, shamanistic and nature-based religions have made heavy use of the elements in their spiritual practices.

And the fact is, whether we’re aware of it or not, many of us have also long engaged in such elemental practices — often ritualistically and religiously.

Think bathing in the sun for hours on end. Doing breathing exercises. Going to the sauna. Subjecting the body to intense pressure, strain, and workouts. Or hiking in winter.

Traditionally, such practices as cold and heat exposure were believed to cleanse ourselves of impurities and act as a restorative balancer between mind, body, and spirit.

And in the modern-day, we’re starting to see these claims being backed up by science (apart from the spirit bit).

But here’s the thing. There’s a major difference between how such practices are typically approached today and traditionally.

We often don’t see such activities as meditative practices and ways to connect to ourselves and nature, but rather as tools to improve our health and wellbeing by reducing stress or getting a tan or breaking a sweat.

One such elemental practice that’s joining this health-boosting craze is cold exposure.

Cold exposure has a tonne of benefits, from enhancing immune function to aiding weight loss. But before science got its hands on it, for thousands of years cold exposure has been used to bring us closer to and into greater harmony with ourselves and nature.

One such tradition that has a long history with the cold is Shinto. Japan's oldest and still most practiced nature-based religion, Shinto is known for its practices called misogi or “cold water purification”.

Misogi sounds more sophisticated than it is: squatting under a freezing waterfall, standing in the sea in winter, or dousing yourself with ice water.

But like other Shinto practices, misogi has a special purpose. It’s practiced to help bring us into direct, unmediated communion with nature and to cultivate greater harmony within ourselves and with the natural world.

This approach to healing through engaging in practices that bring back balance to mind and body, as opposed to problem and treatment-based methods, has much in common with the Buddhist practice of mindfulness.

The Mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young found this out directly, when, during his 100-day initiation into the secret practices of Vajrayana (a kind of practical version of Buddhism), he had to throw a bucket of ice water over himself three times a day, in the middle of winter.

Rather than focusing on analyzing, fixing, and cultivating things in order to find solutions, like in many Western methods, such practices are instead focused on restoring imbalances that may be causing us to forget or not see the reality of wholeness and connectedness that is present in the first place.

With the modern world often leaving us feeling out of balance and out of touch with nature, cold exposure can work wonders. Let’s get into how to (and why you should want to) make this ancient practice a regular part of your routine by taking advantage of your own private waterfall a.k.a. your shower.

1. Eat the freezing frog

We all know we could take a cold shower if we really need to, say when the hot water isn’t working or after a really hard workout. But knowing this and actually proving it through doing it regularly are two massively different things.

Typically, we have the choice not to take a cold shower. So it almost seems stupid and even masochistic to purposely subject ourselves to one when we have the choice not to.

And it is. If we only consider exposure to water as being about cleaning our smelly bits.

Eat the frog is a principle from the productivity world that has come to mean taking on the most difficult or challenging part of your day first.

It comes from something Mark Twain once said: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

The idea is that if you eat the frog, the frog won’t eat you. Meaning you won’t spend most of the day procrastinating and avoiding what you really need to do. You’ll gain momentum and a sense of achievement from the get-go.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see eating the frog as being about facing the most horrific task possible first. It’s not about getting through your taxes as soon as you can so the day can‘t get any worse from then on.

It’s more about the mental space you get yourself into by consciously choosing to do something difficult and eat the frog. In doing so, you take advantage of the night of sleep and don’t spend your day being eaten up by “Resistance” (more on that soon). Right from the start, you banish or “cleanse yourself of” doubt and you know it in your bones that you can face anything the day throws at you.

Tip: I find writing harder than taking a freezing cold shower. So every day I write, workout, and take a cold shower in that order. With the demon of not being able to write off my shoulders, there’s much less reason why I can’t handle a measly bit of cold water. More so, I’m much less likely to be in my head and therefore gritting my teeth and enduring the pain, and instead breathing into it and feeling the water.

2. Willpower vs limitless power

Cold showers are often talked about as a way to build mental strength.

In this way, you might think that cold exposure is all about willpower. It’s about putting on your motivational playlist and beating your chest and gritting your teeth until the timer is up.

Some people even recommend clenching your jaw or tensing all your muscles to help you get through cold showers. As if you didn’t make the choice to be there.

The way of willpower can be highly effective for enduring difficult feats. But it does little for improving your relationship with difficulty or helping you to welcome it.

Defined as the “capacity to override an unwanted thought, feeling, or impulse”, willpower is a limited reserve. All of us have access to it, but it’s typically constrained by conditions like emotion, energy, stimulants, and other external inputs like music that’s present in any given moment.

Real power is not relying on any external conditions to deal with the unwanted and control your experience, but rather, meeting the experience, no matter how difficult, and being able to embrace it fully with calm and equanimity.

You see this difference in high level mixed martial arts fighters. Some have to get really angry and revved up to fight, and then puff out after a few minutes. While others are composed and relaxed from the start and barely change their expression or level of performance throughout the fight.

Now, I couldn’t fight my way out of a paper bag, but it’s clear for anyone to see that these two types of fighters are relating differently to their experience. One is trying to get through what they’re facing, the other is choosing to meet it head-on.

This is the fundamental difference between enduring a cold shower using willpower, and welcoming it as a meditative practice with mindfulness.

In the second approach, it doesn’t mean everything will be all pleasant and fuzzy. The difference is you’re welcoming the feelings, thoughts, and sensations that are present, instead of trying to ignore them, push them away, fight them, or otherwise try to change them. You’re letting them in and allowing them to be there.

Tip: Not using willpower doesn’t mean you can’t use other means to help you be more present with the cold. The idea isn’t about dominating the cold and going hard or going home. It’s about being with and responding to the cold. So grunting/chanting, deep breathing, jumping around, and warming yourself up with exercise beforehand are not cheating if they help you actually be with the cold rather than simply endure it for longer periods.

3. Make a friend of Resistance

No matter how much calm and equanimity you have, there are just some days when you really don’t want to take a cold shower.

After more than two years of more or less daily cold showers, I still often have these days. But by recognizing I’m not trying to dominate my experience with willpower but instead become more in touch with it, I can recognize such thoughts and feelings as what Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance”.

Resistance is a universal, impersonal force that appears in the face of any worthy or challenging endeavor. The problem is, it often feels incredibly personal to the point it hijacks the driving seat and feels like it’s us.

According to Pressfield, Resistance will use any means necessary to stop us in our tracks and make us feel incapable. Including using internalized negative tapes from our childhood or the past against us. We thus identify Resistance as being our thoughts and our limitations and shortcomings, and then feel trapped and unable to take action.

This is how deceptive Resistance can be. But Pressfield says we don’t need to suppress this voice or push through. We don’t need to fight with it at all, because it’s not your thoughts.

It’s not you.

It’s Resistance.

There will always be Resistance in life. Especially if you want to do anything meaningful or worth doing.

You can make an enemy or close and faithful friend of Resistance. You can come to recognize it and get familiar with it by meeting it by doing things you don’t want to do like, for instance, taking a freezing cold misogi shower. Make a friend of Resistance, instead of fighting it, and you will become unstoppable.

Tip: Resistance won’t be a friend if you don’t respect it. Start slowly and gradually by splashing cold water on yourself before stepping in, practicing with milder temperatures first, and not expecting too much of yourself. I also make sure the room is warm and begin with hot water. Gradually these conditions matter less and less, but when starting out, Resistance often takes hold as we’re holding ourselves to too high or unrealistic expectations.

4. One lifetime, one moment

What do you want from your life?

I need to ask myself this question on a daily basis. Otherwise, I can easily while away the hours doing meaningless tasks and before I know it, the day is over.

When you ask the question of what do you want from your life regularly, you close the gap between what you want and what you actually do.

It’s easy to have a nice idea of how you want to live your life. But like the difference between knowing you can take a cold shower and actually doing it regularly, we may still continue to ignore the everyday moments that actually make up our lives.

If you ask it regularly and sincerely, the answer to what you want from life shouldn’t look any different from how your life is today or how you are in this very moment.

This is the principle of “one lifetime, one moment”, or “ichi-go ichi-i”, a Japanese saying from Zen Buddhism.

Ichi-go ichi-i is about fully appreciating this moment. And in doing so, as life is just a series of moments, making sure we actually live—not imagine we are living—life to its fullest.

Without ichi-go ichi-i, we may be more likely to succumb to Resistance and get lost in its endless doubts and excuses. We might be more likely to not eat the frog and opt for comfort over discomfort. We might be more likely to keep putting our plans for life on hold until a better day.

This is especially true when so much of modern life is oriented around achieving and maintaining comfort, pleasure, and stability.

If we truly succeed in getting rid of the uncomfortable and unwanted and are just left with the pleasant and pleasurable, then we may never want to step outside this fabricated world.

We may continue to relate to difficulty by pushing it away or gritting our teeth through it, and we thus may never feel fully able to appreciate or take advantage of the life we have in this moment.

Resistance is a sign of something worth doing. And most often, if not always, it’s also a sign of discomfort. This doesn’t mean we have to suffer to find any meaning in life. It just means that pleasure and comfort aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. And that we can learn a different way of relating to difficulty that includes it as a valid, expected, and even welcomed part of life.

This is the beauty of cold showers.

Taking a cold shower isn’t just something you do for mental toughness or the health benefits or the pride of knowing you can do it.

It’s a millennia if not eons-old practice that helps us to wake up to and inhabit each moment of our lives.

Because ichi-go ichi-i — each moment is unique unto itself, never to be replicated ever again.

And as long as we are fully here to live this moment, and the next one, and the next, then the rest of life will take care of itself.

Tip: All of life is precious. But it often doesn’t feel this way when we’re stuck in the rhythm of enduring or avoiding the bad and craving the good. Disrupt this habit by regularly including conscious discomfort in your life. If there was ever one tip I could give you (and myself) it would be don’t think about it too much. Your life might be over before you decide. Just do it. And get used to just doing it.