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A HippieJock field note from the Wim Hof Winter Expedition - December 2025

What stayed with me

I went to a Wim Hof Winter Expedition in Poland earlier in 2025.

What stayed with me most from that experience wasn’t the cold challenges or the breathwork. It was the agape love that emerged over the week as we took on those challenges together, in groups of 25 adventuresome hippie jocks. All the groups together amounted to roughly 400 people. A real sense of brothers and sisters formed while we did hard things side by side.

We challenged ourselves to get into cold or frozen tubs, rivers, and lakes—dark and alive, bordered by snow, the water beneath or flowing through ice. We climbed a mountainside into wind, skin exposed, breath visible, doubt quietly negotiated rather than defeated.

The physical challenges mattered.

But what mattered more was that we were doing it together—looking out for, encouraging, and helping one another.

When breathwork didn’t quite land

At that Winter Expedition, the breathwork, for me, was usually secondary. Sometimes relaxing. Sometimes powerful. But often chaotic.

I followed along as best I could, though I frequently felt out of rhythm. Long breath holds varied greatly and often felt impossible, and to me, of little import. The room sometimes carried an unspoken hierarchy. Who could hold longer. Who saw colors. Who “went somewhere.”

I had no such agenda, and I wasn’t sure I was really getting the point.

No visuals.
No altered states.
No transformation narrative waiting at the finish line.

My goal was simple and honest: stay present, maybe rest a little, and make it through.

This time was different

At the Wim Hof Winter Expedition last week near Åre, Sweden, Wim led two breathwork sessions. The final one on the last afternoon of the event went for about eight rounds, lasting an hour or so. From the first minutes, it was clear that something had shifted.

Not toward looseness or spectacle, but toward clarity.

The breathing was measured without being tight. Specific without being constraining. Intentional without being performative.

Precision in service of openness

The session began with deep, grounded breaths. Belly rising. Chest expanding. Each inhale followed by a relaxed, flattening exhale, flowing directly into the next inhale. A dozen or so of these breaths set the rhythm.

Then the breathing accelerated and built in depth, a fire-like rhythm that woke the animal without panicking it.

We were then led to take a full inhale, a full exhale, and hold.

The holds were not extreme. They were accessible. Long enough to quiet the noise. Short enough to keep everyone inside their bodies. When Wim guided us back with a shared inhale—if you hadn’t already taken one—no one was left behind. A brief hold followed on that last inhale, and then a group exhale.

Two hundred and fifty people breathing together in sync. No one trying to win. No one trying to disappear.

Not precision for its own sake, but precision in service of openness.

What followed

What followed was unmistakable.

Clarity.
Availability.
A nervous system exhale big enough to let something primal and expansive stretch its legs.

For a brief window, Wim spoke. Not to persuade or instruct, but to point toward self-mastery, love, happiness, health, and strength. Equally toward our inner warriors for good and trust, and our inner children to play.

He spoke of integrating heart and mind instead of keeping them locked in a tug-of-war of fear and greed. Of strength that doesn’t need to dominate. Of bodies that already know how to make and keep us healthy.

No script required

It didn’t feel ideological. It didn’t feel religious. And yet it felt profoundly spiritual.

There were deep emotional releases and a palpable sense of love among all 250 of these brothers and sisters.

No one was asked to believe anything specific. Christians, Buddhists, skeptics, seekers, the uncertain and the seasoned were all present in the same field.

The breathwork didn’t hand us a script. It didn’t demand allegiance. It simply created the conditions under which people could recognize something familiar but often forgotten.

Health, happiness, and strength stop being goals. They become side effects.

Why it felt universal

Love without intoxication.
Unity without erasure.
Strength without posturing.
Play without frivolity.

The kind of play that shows up when the organism finally believes it’s safe.

What struck me most was how universal it felt. This wasn’t a peak experience reserved for the unusually gifted, the breath-hold champions, or the physiologically or spiritually extreme. It felt, quite clearly, like something everyone in the room had access to.

A different kind of mastery

In the past, the cold proved to me that I could endure.

This time, the breath showed me what it feels like when the nervous system is no longer braced for impact. When the shoulders drop. When the jaw unclenches. When the inner Viking and the inner child stop arguing over who’s in charge and realize they’re on the same team.

When baseline stress drops, inflammation quiets. When threat perception softens, clarity follows. When people feel safe, they don’t collapse. They expand.

Health, happiness, and strength stop being goals. They become side effects.

That’s what made this breathwork transformative for me. Not because it took me somewhere else, but because it brought me fully here—into my body, into the room, into a shared, wordless understanding that didn’t need to be defended or explained.

No drugs.
No visions.
No performance.

Just human animals breathing in a way the body remembers, discovering that when interference is removed, coherence shows up on its own.

That feels like a kind of mastery worth practicing.
And a kind of play worth protecting.