The Physical Path to Exploring the Hero Archetype With Wim Hof and Jordan Peterson

And then it's an awakening because our thought, "Oh, it's wrong, it's wrong, it's got to be wrong," if you think it is wrong. But if you take it on playful, and that's what I do, right, then there is no thought. I make it ridiculous. This hostile force is so negative, overwhelming, called primordially, uh, primordially again to us that it is dangerous. And all I make it a laughing joke. And then you see everybody having fun.

That's only in the night when they came to me after fatiguing travel from uh, wherever they come from: Hawaii to Australia, to New Zealand, to Japan, to Russia. They all come there, and it's fatiguing traveling. They feel renewed, and they sleep like babies. That is the night number one. And in the morning, they are excited, but they also like, "Oh, what happened? I don't know, maybe I cannot believe what happened that I bumped into the breathing."

And then you hear the biggest yelling of releasing trauma. And I go to the ancestors and everything because I know how to uh, open up the closed-up proteins because of truth. What do you mean that you go to the ancestors? What do you mean by that? That is anything that is genetically encrypted in our gene expressions and closed up is because of our genetical past.

Okay, so why do you specifically refer to that as the ancestors? What made you think that? Because we are the ancestors within our DNA, we carry every information of our ancestry, like 13, like possibly a hundred, and as long as it is not solved, it's still within us.

Okay, I've just written a new book, and there's this—it's not out till March—there's a section in there. There's an old mythological idea that the hero has to rescue his sleeping father from the abyss, from a terrible monster. And I construed that in the book as the ability to awaken sleeping ancestral forces, likely coded genetically as a consequence of voluntary exposure to stress.

Yes, points that we come together, Jordan. This is what I do right now in San Francisco, showing through uh, bringing back the primal primordial condition of the cell together with the cold shock heat shock proteins. What happens, right? You do it practically.

Yes, yes. And you do this if you go regularly in the cold. Then you're the activation of those cold shock proteins that are also hard because it's the same thing. It's through the hypothalamus, and it works. Boom! Right? We get connection, and then suddenly you bring a protective shield around the cell.

What happens inside? The war is over, guys. We can go into repair. And then you neurosignaling. We talked about neurosignaling. I was able to bring a cold water on the skin, skin temperature not going down.

That is, how long can you do that for?

How long can I maintain? As long as it takes. As long as it takes! That is the power of our mind intention. It's a real undiscovered area of psychiatry which I have uh, discovered together with a professor Vaibhav Divakar and professor Otto Muzik in uh, Detroit.

Do you have to eat?

You have to eat more because of that?

No, no, no, absolutely not! It's the power of your intention. Your intention is able. This is a general universal principle of our mind—only not awakened, it was not discovered. The first time somebody ran the four miles in a certain incredible time, a year later, 20 could do it. That's in the mind.

So what we find is if we expose it to people, then they beg, they change their paradigm. The paradigm—this is what they say: Wim Hof has found the secret of placebo. Placebo is no longer just over there; it's now a controllable healing force whenever you need it. It's the top-down regulated interception; it's in within our will. That's the new science, and that brings us back to the ancestry.

So first, we made this cell protected by a shield, activating the cold shock heat shock proteins. Then inside the cell, you get a logical signal: "Hey, there is no war anymore, energy is not needed to get inflammation out of here or to deal with inflammation or oxidative stress."

Oh, let's go into the uh, the closed-up proteins of our ancestry. We can work it out now because now it's silent, now it's nice, now we got the energy pieces here. This is the principle—a general principle of nature: when you are wounded, you retract.

But if you are a warrior, you can even keep on shooting with the lack of shot; that adrenaline cortisol mode just keeps on going. That's our society; that is also wrong. There is no peace; there is no ability to retract. No more work needs to be done daily—uh, how do you say, uh, this, uh, yeah, whatever work needs to be done all the time. It protects you.

Your people in Poland, the first day you have them go outside in the cold for a long period of time with no shoes on, for example, and they wake up the next day and you introduce them to the breathing.

If someone's doing this at home, like if I wanted to start this tomorrow, I'd get up and have a cold shower and I would do that voluntarily, as facing the stress. Okay, and then how would I do the breathing? Would I do that after the shower? Would I do that in the afternoon? When would I?

You do it whenever you are completely rested, like relaxed, because the breathing will open up your physiology deeply. If you go into deep stress while being kind of okay, that is—

The breathing exercises are a workout because the vascular system is more activated than somebody who's running. You see, uh, lately I did a research with paralyzed people. Amazing!

I can't—I can't do it when I'm relaxed because I'm never relaxed.

So but you can—you can. Maybe you will directly intervene into the neurological anxiety going on. Whatever is on the loose, you will be able to create an extra altered current within an electrical current, the nervous system, I mean. So does it not matter when I do it then? Like, I could do—

No, it does. If you need me, I'm there! Anytime you can call me. We have a Zoom and we do it. But you don't need me.

I like to talk with you because you got a great experience in words and contemplation and a lot of expertise. And I think we coincide a lot, like just now about the stress—the ancestry—that took me like 15 years to figure out because I've read all these stories. They're ancient stories.

The first core element of the hero's journey, which is the proper journey through life, is voluntary confrontation with what is unknown and terrifying. That's the human way. And one of the consequences of that is the rescuing of the dead father, or the hurt father, or the sleeping father.

It's like it's a fundamental element of Egyptian mythology, for example, ancient Egyptian mythology, and it's part of the idea of the dying and resurrecting god. It's entangled up in that as well. And it wasn't until recently that I figured out that the consequence of voluntarily facing stress is the awakening of abilities within you that are part of our ancestral heritage.

And so that is how you become a living avatar of the great heroes of the past. But I never—it never occurred to me that you could find high stressors of a, say, physical type so close at hand. I never—I never really put that together.

The idea that cold stress, for example, would be sufficient to start that process. What about heat stress? I found saunas were actually useful for me. What about fasting?

Yeah, not starving—all those work great! Fasting is for mises, heat stresses, or mises—the cold stress. But the breathing really, it—the breathing techniques—let me compare it.

It has been compared in brain scan studies of people doing four hours of mindfulness a day for years. They could not get as deep as a person practicing this type of breathing exercises. Go into the depth of the brain; they could not get into the depth of the brain, even after years, four hours of mindfulness a day.

And these—what we did; we went deeper inside the brain than those people. So this—and that's in 30 breaths!

Yes, this exercise, which began with going into the cold, it made me—that's the first thing. Then you learn that through prolonged deep breathing you learn to control the biochemistry inside; to shake off the stressor, which is the cold. And thus, for a long time in cold water, you find it out and it's all based on experience and sensation—and it works!

Okay, then I began to disconnect the breathing from the cold. Cold—I still was doing, et cetera, but then I did these breathing exercises at home, and they blew my mind. Anything that I had read in all the ancient scriptures, I saw plenty—oh, oh, oh, and deeper!

And now I found that these breathing exercises are able to go where our paradigm of medical science thought of as impossible, and I'm showing this now.

I know you are practicing conscious control over a semi-unconscious function when you're exerting control over your breathing. And breathing is strange because it does occur unconsciously, but we can also modify it consciously.

So it's right at the—it's right at the, what would you say, the border between consciousness and unconsciousness.

Ah, interesting! Yeah, it's a good point! A good point, uh, it's a good point of view! And we modulate our—we modulate our breathing voluntarily all the time when we're speaking, and so it's also associated with the voice.

Amazing! Yes, that is so! And done! We saw in the brain scans in Germany, in Hanover, one of the best two brain scans of the world. Doing this breathing, normally, we have a willful control over sixty percent of our neural activity in our brain.

And now they saw hundred percent neural activation within the brain done consciously because we were doing the breathing exercises!