The Origins of Stone Fire Ice

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unparalleled psychological trauma to the world and, like many others, it deeply affected my already precarious life. I entered the pandemic already grappling with the emotional turmoil from my failing marriage, life experiences, and the uncontrolled chaos of my ADHD, all of which created a perfect storm that threatened to break my mental health.

Serendipitously, during this tumultuous period in my life, I discovered a documentary about Wim Hof on YouTube. His story of overcoming both the external traumas of his wife’s suicide and his regrets through cold water immersion, resonated deeply with me, offering a glimpse into a possible mystical method of renewal.

Interestingly, my initial encounter with cold plunging wasn’t through Wim Hof but was rooted in my childhood. My father now 87, was an early adopter of healthy clean living and daily weight training long before it became popular. (More on his influence at another time.)

He was always challenging the neighborhood kids to do healthy, and sometimes crazy, activities like seeing who could endure sitting in the leftover ice from our Fourth of July celebrations the longest. He even converted our mudroom into a steam room, encouraging us to playfully alternate between the steam and rolling in the snow. These practices, which seemed like just fun and games at the time, were, unbeknownst to me, my first foray into the world of thermal contrast therapy. They unknowingly laid the foundation for my interest in the profound physical, mental, and spiritual benefits of fire and ice.

In the summer of 2020, while visiting my parents, my sister Susan came home and jokingly said to me “I joined a cult and you’re gonna be part of it!” She and I began swimming daily with some neighborhood friends. All of us were encouraged to do so by my friend Karen’s mother, Elfriede Karbiener, who has since passed. She was a huge influence on everyone who met her. Elfriede was a first-generation German immigrant who had an unmatched self-determined vigor for life. She was a lifelong fitness enthusiast as well as a runner and swam year-round in the Long Island Sound and pushed Karen to begin to do the same.

As my friends began to buy wetsuits to swim into the fall, I thought this would be a great time to try out this cold therapy I was learning about from Wim Hof. As the temperatures got colder, I swam and waded without a wetsuit through the winter of 2020. This group of friends would later grow into the Baby Seals 365 Wild Swimming Club on the North Shore of Long Island, NY.

When I returned home, I found myself encountering the cold more and more, running bare-chested in winter and plunging into the frigid Hudson River. As I began feeling the positive effects it was having on me, I started to wonder if there were others like me in my community. This led me on a quest for a community of like-minded individuals, where I eventually met my friend Parveen, who was also on a transformative path with cold water therapy. She had recently started seeking others as well and started a free cold plunging community later to be named The Greenwood Lake Ice Buddies, which I helped build through our weekly consistency that offered all of us a sense of belonging and shared purpose in difficult times. This community experience aided in the cleansing of my past and the start of a new chapter in my life.

The short-term and long-term physical and psychological effects of nature, fire & ice therapy have increasingly been studied and found by the scientific community to help people earn their superpowers to prevent disease and extend the human lifespan.

My journey has since further been enriched by the discovery that my own religious and ethnic heritage included an ancient ritual known as a Mikveh. A Mikveh is a Jewish ritual bath used to achieve purity and the likely precursor for Christian Baptism. This tradition, deeply embedded in Jewish culture, highlights the universal and cross-cultural significance of submerging oneself in water for spiritual and physical renewal and rebirth. In addition to the psychological effects of water immersion, the colder temperature triggers the release of catecholamines, a cocktail of chemicals that give one a sense of well-being and introspective clarity.

While Wim Hof did not introduce me to the concept of cold exposure, his teachings were instrumental in unlocking its secrets. This profound connection with nature and the therapeutic benefits of water is why I am passionately engaged in sharing and exploring this practice with others who wish to experience this unique communion with the natural world.

Sharing my journey with others, I realized how many other people are being drawn to nature for conscious meditation and insights from the natural elements, as cultures around the globe have done since the dawn of humanity. This reconnection to our primal wisdom, encoded in our DNA, became the foundation of what would evolve into a conscious practice of engaging with the elements through the Stone Fire Ice Lifestyle.

This elemental lifestyle that so many of us have already been practicing in our own ways, not only reflects a return to our ancestral roots but also offers a path forward to healing and rejuvenation in the modern world.

Having had these experiences and later visiting other more established clubs in the area like the New York Dippers Club and the North Fork Polar Bears, I began to enthusiastically encourage others to visit these communities as well. Finding them was harder than it seemed, and that was the inspiration to create the Stone Fire Ice worldwide cold plunging map to help people find their tribe. It can be found at www.stonefireice.com.