NATURAL high

Pippa de Bruyn (left) sits in an ice bath during a cold water therapy workshop at Veld and Sea at Cape Point Nursery.

of an equally extraordinary wilderness, populated with creatures as surreal as any I have encountered snorkelling in the Galapagos or off the east coast of Africa. As astonishing as the biodiversity spawned by the Cape’s cold waters was the fact that the authors chose to dive without wetsuits, believing that the naked skin gives a more authentic connection to the oceanic wilderness. Reading Sea Change was a game-changer for me: not only was the frigid ocean rich in treasures, but it could be explored wearing nothing but a swimsuit and snorkel. If I could just learn to deal with the cold.

in her 70s told me she had asked to join the Mermaids after she spotted them while walking her dog; only once in the water did one of the Mermaids discover she was the mother of a close friend.

On my first day I arrived more or less the same time as Tasmin and Wynne, Mermaid founders and first movers of the Atlantic seaboard submergers, having started six years ago. As I waded into the translucent water, I gasped, cold water searing my skin. Wynne intoned: ‘Healing… oxygenating… rejuvenating… elevating...’ She cocked her head. ‘My Wim Hof mantra.’ I felt a deep ache settling into my ankles and toes, my wrists and fingers. ‘Best keep moving,’ Tasmin said. ‘It’s quite cold today.’ We paddled further in, and after another minute or so I felt the ache receding, blanketed by a pleasant kind of numbness, a spreading calm. Looking up at the imposing peaks of the Apostles jutting into the leaden sky, elation started to flood through me. A real hoot-out-loud high, as good as that of any one of the silly narcotics I’ve consumed over the years. Better, in fact. If their patter about Wim Hof was to be believed, this was immune-boosting, stress-relieving and fat-burning. Plus, call me a cheapskate, it was absolutely free!

I paddled over to the breaker wall where a seagull was browsing for breakfast. Unbelievably, it allowed me to get to within a metre before it stopped to eyeball me. I floated, motionless. After a few seconds it dipped its beak back into the seaweed, luminous in the receding tide. Below me, fish flitted over boulders, the water so clear I could see them crusted with sea urchins and anemones.

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In winter the Camps Bay tidal pool becomes a portal into another world, where cormorants swim sleek as snakes and seagulls forage within metres of Mermaids.

cold, or a spiritual response to the immersion in nature, or simply the delight at scoring a mental victory over instinct, but the elation I felt lasted several hours, as did a wonderful mental clarity. The very next day I was back, and every day after, even on the mornings when the mercury dropped to 9°C. After half a century of indolence and ill-discipline, I had finally found my thing.

I didn’t join any of the groups, though my eldest daughter, who experienced the same rush after her first immersion, began to accompany me on an ad hoc basis, as did a few friends. Regardless of who I was with, the atmosphere at the pool was always convivial, a sisterhood of sorts. ‘You’ll see, when it gets too warm in summer, you’ll miss the cold,’ one of the Mermaids remarked as we removed wet costumes, as quickly as frozen hands allowed. ‘My husband took me to Zanzibar last December. It was terrible. Even the showers weren’t cold enough. I had to order buckets of ice and make myself an ice bath.’

With the advent of spring we slowly dispersed into the open ocean. I rotated between treading water at Bakoven in the company of cormorants sleek as snakes, or swimming the length of Clifton 4th, stopping to watch whelks feast on mussels on my favourite boulder.

As the summer wore on, I relished the days on which an offshore wind would cause an upwelling of cold. On days when water temperatures rose, sometimes to as high as 20°C, the water felt lethargic, less life affirming, almost claustrophobic. The Mermaid had been right. I missed the cold, and the clearheaded focus it brought.

Wim Hof was 17 when he felt an overwhelming urge to jump into the freezing Beatrixpark canal, Amsterdam, and experienced a clarity of mind that was to change his life. With repeated exposure to cold, he developed an appreciation for breathwork, and set about developing a breathing practice similar to the ancient Tibetan technique known as Tummo, in which monks enter a deep state of meditation to enable their ‘inner heat’.

Cold water therapy and breathwork helped him overcome personal tragedy (his wife committed suicide, leaving him to raise four children), enabled him to achieve extreme feats (he’s set 21 Guinness world records) and launched an enormous following of what is known as the Wim Hof Method (WHM). This included

the likes of Scott Carney, an investigative journalist who set out to debunk WHM but ended up an acolyte, writing a New York Times bestseller called What Doesn’t Kill Us instead. In fact, I struggled to find anyone – journalist or scientist – willing to denounce him. Given how restorative I had found cold water, my interest was piqued. Which is how I came to find myself squelching in the Cape Point Nursery one rainy day in February.

It was rather odd to be holding up a pH test strip against the leaflet tacked outside the loo – rather like checking a paint sample, only coloured by your own urine – but that is what we did periodically that day, checking our alkalinity before and after the breathing exercises. Alex Vliege, our WHM trainer, was warm and disarming; his passion for the Method infectious. The participants – about 20 odd, an equal mix of male and female – hailed from all over; at least a third were foreigners. We all had slightly different reasons for being there, but understanding the breathwork was core: simply put, the way you breathe regulates how much oxygen you are able to supply your cells with, which in turn creates a cascading biochemical chain reaction. Accordingly, when you withhold air, you kick-start survival mechanisms (similar to exposing yourself to extreme cold), and this creates a ‘fighting fit’ body.

We lay prostrate, Alex padding barefoot between us, listening: ‘Breathe in through the nose and deep into your stomach, feel the oxygen travel to where it needs to be… now exhale, through the mouth.’ I lost count of how often he did this before he asked us to fill our lungs to capacity, then, ‘Hold your breath now, hold, hold for as long as you can…’ And he’d count. ‘Now exhale completely, and stop; don’t breathe. Keep your lungs empty for as long as you can...’ This last part was surprisingly pleasurable, and the entire exercise left me feeling light-headed and trippy.

But all pleasure evaporated when I traipsed out into the chilly outdoors wearing a cheap swimsuit – and came face to face with a woman wearing the identical style and colour. Distracted by shallow thoughts – ‘Do I look fatter? Did she also pick hers up on sale? Does everyone know these were on sale? What am I doing here?’ – the hooha horse stance meditation didn’t focus me. I had to face my ice tub with nothing but my dips in the Atlantic to prepare me. I slid in, felt the familiar burn, the ache in the extremities… Breathing into my stomach, I visualised my breath fanning coals in my chest, and waited for the high. Breathe deep, and wait for the high. My homegrown mantra. Little knowing then what it would see me through.

You can study the WHM online (wimhofmethod.com). The next WHM workshop in SA will be held by Alex Vliege and yoga and meditation facilitator Helena Mercera at Veld and Sea, Cape Point, on 16 January 2021; advance booking is essential (veldandsea.com)

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FAIRLADY / JUNE 2020