Mark Welte is a yoga-guided writer who has been practicing for over ten years and teaches in the San Francisco area. He aims to spread greater vitality in others-in mind, body, and spirit-through yoga, and help to de-mystify the ancient practice. Plain-spoken and humorous, Mark helps make yoga and its benefits accessible to everyone-including his wife and daughter! Reach him at . ilfaunoyoga@gmail.com
Most people associate the practice of yoga with a routine of poses and a few minutes of meditation done in a room warm enough to illicit from the yogini a NyQuil cap of sweat, all packed into a 60-to-90 minute session. A yoga high follows, sometimes a frozen yogurt, too, and we're off on our blissed-out way.
That isn't the kind of yoga experience that San Francisco athlete Edison Peinado is used to. In "Fast Eddie's" world, the routine consists of one action repeated thousands of times and meditation that lasts hours, conducted in an environment of salt water ranging somewhere between 53-60 degrees Fahrenheit. And it goes on for over twelve and a half hours.
Eddie is an open water swimmer who this past summer completed the crossing of the English Channel. The feat is paramount in endurance sports, and calls on every fiber of the athlete's body and mind. Re-loading on food and supplements "mid-practice" is mandatory to keep up one's body heat and energy reserves. But sometimes even packet after packet of various "goo" supplements aren't enough to ward off the cold that drives down deep into the bones: "for the first six hours my stroke rate decreased and I started feeling hypothermic, and my boat crew could see my teeth chattering." Six hours is for most people only halfway through the swim, at best. And after months of training and thousands of miles and dollars to get to the swim itself, quitting is anything but an option. So how did he do it? How did he find the strength to keep warm and strong enough to finish?
The answer is a little-known meditative technique practiced by Tibetan monks, called Tummo. It is a discipline of the body, mind, and spirit that actually generates heat as an effect. Stories abound of Tibetan yogis sitting in the freezing cold with wet sheets draped around their nude bodies, and drying the cloth not once but several times. Tummo is a Tantric practice in which the yogi consciously gathers the body and mind's energy, and directs it toward a specific purpose. It is a variation of Kundalini yoga that cultivates an inner fire that burns away not only ignorance and ego, but apparently the usual physiological effects that usually accompany sustained immersions in cold water. "I visualize suns warming up my chakras, making them spin rapidly, and sending heat throughout my entire body," says Eddie, who now lives half the time in Chicago (he is an airline pilot with an ORD hub), and has yet to buy a winter jacket for four years now.
Check back tomorrow to read about Eddie's experience with Tummo as he swam the English Channel, and how he'll use it again next week for an Alcatraz swim fund-raiser for the South End Rowing Club.
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http://www.examiner.com/yoga-in-san-francisco/swimmer-uses-tibetan-meditation-to-cross-english-channel
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