9/20/2022 0 Comments Waking Up
In the introductory episode of Cold Water, Hot Coffee, Nate Scharff outlines the concept of the show, which will provide disciplines for starting your day with clarity and purpose. He explains how the show came to be, and the inspiration for its name, which came from his own daily practices of starting the day with a cold shower, and then sharing a cup of hot coffee with friends. “One of the things I learned from this process of repeatedly getting up early and moving through something through a self-discipline practice is that our power is way greater than our day-to-day physical manifestations, how our body feels, or even our mood. We can power right past those things,” Nate says. He did this by creating a daily ritual in which he takes a cold shower as soon as he wakes up and remains in it until it doesn’t feel cold anymore. His second practice is having a nice cup of hot coffee, which he recommends doing in the company of friends. Nate spends a moment introducing himself, explaining the background in which he grew up with hippie parents, his attempted rebellion against that lifestyle, and then subsequent rediscovery of its benefits. He closes the episode by reminding listeners to be careful about the beliefs we take on about ourselves, and to not let them limit us. Key Topics:
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00:12 Nate Scharff: Welcome to Cold Water, Hot Coffee - disciplines for starting your day with clarity and purpose. I’m Nate Scharff, your host. If you've been looking for ways to get inspired, if you've been looking for a way to get your head off your pillow in the morning without groaning, if you question why you're here or what you're doing, or how you ended up the life you're living, you've come to the right place. This podcast exists to invigorate your mood, and clarify your mission. Welcome to Cold Water, Hot Coffee, a cold-slap start to your day to get you awake and alive. And this is episode one. The topic title is waking up. Let's get right to it. 00:56 I started Cold Water, Hot Coffee as a journal to a daily practice that I had started a year earlier: Cold showers at 5 am. You see for the majority of my life, my days had always started with a freight train of anxiety that rip me out of bed panting and sweating. No nightmares, no thoughts. Just a Kodiak bear on top of my chest, ripping me from my sleep. I tried everything to beat this brutal start to my day. Western meds, side effects. Therapy, expensive. Yoga, chanting, breath work supplements, plant medicines, sound baths, silent retreats. All these efforts, they never really got rid of that morning bear of anxiety that woke me up every morning. I was 56 and I had resigned myself to this plague, this illness. And I assumed that I was somehow broken. One evening, I was reading a paragraph on morning rituals in a book titled The Flow of Eternal Power. It was a Kundalini yoga book that focused on breathwork. This humble read turned out to be chock full of simple routines for improving mental health. There was a chapter on morning rituals. And it had a few pages that detailed the benefits of a cold morning shower for mental wellness. And in that book, they said it's the first thing you do every day do not pass go, do not collect $200. You go get that cold shower every morning and you stand under that cold water until the water feels warm and your body is adjusted. Now, I just installed a simple cold water shower in the courtyard at my house to rinse off after surfing. So, there was the next morning greeted with my usual 5 am Kodiak bear with anxiety. But this morning instead of curling up into the fetal position and hating my life. In my condition. I stumbled buck naked, dazed to that outdoor shower. It was dark, it was December, and it was 24 degrees outside. That's cold for a Southern California boy like me, planted my feet. I turned that handle and blasted my face. I was outside. I was howling at the stars. I was getting fearful. Three minutes later, I turned off the nozzle and took a deep breath. Wow, anxiety gone and wow, I'm effing cold but I'm awake. And you know what? Awake is better than anxious. This simple daily practice of waking up and starting with a cold shower was about to change my life. I stuck with it. Because it was working. I would blast that morning flu out of my head each day. I still woke up with anxiety, but it just didn't matter anymore because now I had the cure. Now, don't worry. My shower is in a walled private courtyard. And I explained my practice to my neighbors. I got a laugh and a thumbs up, Hoot away morning cowboy. So, there I was, like a neighborhood rooster. Everyone got used to me crowing at 5 am and hooting it up. That cold slap icy morning ritual became my daily pattern interrupt to a lifetime that had been plagued with anxiety and anxious thoughts. There was no drugs. There was no therapy, just a simple outdoor shower. First, I dreaded it, then I accepted it. And eventually, I loved it. Months later, I was free of anxiety and evangelizing to my friends the benefits of cold showers. We all began sharing other practices. Everybody seems to be getting healthy, happy, and full of energy. And that's what Cold Water, Hot Coffee is about. I want to help you shed the mental and physical rocks that keep you burned out and bored. We're going to learn rituals and disciplines that'll help you weather the storms of shifting moods, circumstances, relationships, health, and even finances. We're going to meet people who are living their mission and waking up excited to live that mission. People who found the keys to their mental cage, unlocked that cage, tossed the key, and are now living free and clear. That's the mission of Cold Water, Hot Coffee, sharing simple and powerful daily disciplines that keep us awake, productive, and out of the mental quicksand that holds us back from an abundant and joyful life. So that's the cold water part of this title, getting awake. The hot coffee part was ritual number two, if I haven't mentioned it yet, I'm an extreme introvert, most comfortable at home, tending to my trees, and listening to my Zen meditation music. Isolation comes pretty easy to me, but too much of it, and I do start to get a little depressed. So, I surf in the mornings with friends, and we often gather for coffee after recounting the session highlights, and then we all head off to work, community support, laughter, exercise, cold water, and then hot coffee. You see when you get up at five, and you do the fun stuff first, stepping into work at 9 am, it's an easy transition. Bring it on, bro, because I've already had my fun. So, through the simple daily rituals, I found things that we all want freedom from anxiety and depression, freedom from work burnout, and in its place, joy, calm and gratitude. So that's this podcast, Cold Water, Hot Coffee. It's a venue to hear from people with similar rituals that keep them healthy and happy. We will explore the links between the body and the mind. The cold and the hot, the dark and the light, the fear and the courage, the sorrow and the bliss, the loss, and the love the cold, hard failures and the bright shining successes. arms open for all of it. Yes, let's do this Cold Water, Hot Coffee, time being awake. 06:54 Hey, good morning. Welcome to Cold Water, Hot Coffee. I'm Nate, I'm your host. And we're starting the day today. Day starts every day bright and early with a cold shower. Here we go. Every morning, you get that cold blast your body. This is about being awake, it's about being alive, massage those lymph nodes, get that water all over you until you're fully awake. This is the cold water part of Cold Water, Hot Coffee. So that's me doing my morning baptism, bright and early, tried to get my girlfriend to record that. And she said, ‘Nah, you’re nuts, you can do that one yourself.’ One of the things I learned from this process of repeatedly, getting up early and moving through something through a self-discipline practice is that our power is way greater than our day-to-day physical manifestations, how our body feels, or even our mood, we can power right past those things. And I think a lot of us, myself included, if we don't feel good, or if our head isn't in the right place, we're probably not going to proceed. What I learned through this simple practice of just getting up at 5am doing a cold shower is everything I want is on the other side of the temporariness of how my body feels and how my brain feels, and we can move past them. The other thing I learned is this wonderful Garden of Eden, have time of abundance to be more specific by getting up early and doing something healthy. Your productivity starts early in the day, like at 6 am and I would find that by 9 am, if I went straight to my laptop after my cold shower, I was almost done with my day. And the other thing I would find is that I'd be going to bed by 9 pm or maybe 10 pm. And those bad habits I used to have in the 10 to midnight or 1 am hour were gone things like checking my phone and scrolling through feeds and going down some YouTube rabbit hole of videos, all that stuff because I was going to bed earlier because I was getting up earlier. And that old adage of early to bed, early to rise makes a man or woman healthy, wealthy, and wise. I'm like wow, this actually, Ben Franklin, you nailed it. It's true. Get up early, go to bed early and you have way more productivity. And when you have time abundance, you don't feel an urgency. You make better decisions. You're more calm, you're not rushed. You make less mistakes because you're not in a hurry. You have all the time that you need. And that's a wonderful feeling. So, I think we can all look for opportunities to dispel the illusion that we don't have enough time. I just don't have the time. I don't have the time to work out. I don't have the time to learn music. I don't have time to paint or sculpt or whatever it is you want to do, work in my yard, you can dispel that myth. And it starts with getting up early and creating some time abundance for yourself. All right, so that's me taking a cold shower. 11:23 Oh yeah, single source is the good stuff. Oh, yeah, it's alive. Hot diggity dog. Let's do this. So that's me making coffee in my house. My go-to half Mexican decaf, half Peru single source from Pannikin Coffee, the best! The funny thing is, before I took cold showers, I couldn't even drink caffeinated coffee because my anxiety was so bad. It would just put me over the top. So, a few months into my cold water practice. I realized I had no anxiety. And my girlfriend drinks caffeinated coffee, and I've taken sips of it and realized, wow, this doesn't bother me at all. So that's me having my morning cup of coffee at home. No surf that day. But most mornings it would be with my friends. 12:14 I want to take a minute and tell you a bit about myself. So, I'm your host, Nate Sharff. My friends call me N8r. My students call me Prof Nate. Yes, I'm a business professor by trade. I'm a spiritual seeker by disposition. I guess I'm what you would call a contemplative personality. Kind of a high-functioning introvert, and a product of Bohemian hippie parents who met in college in the early 60s. Do you ever look through old magazines and see those grainy old photos of hippies, young hippie parents and bearded vests carrying a shirtless toddler who's wearing Indian moccasins and not much else? Yeah, that's probably me. And then as a young adult, I spent much of my time huffing and puffing, trying to reject that portion of my life. I wanted suits and strategy meetings. I wanted business travel, I wanted money, like the adults that I live with as a child, I strove to move on, get a career and get serious and put the 60s behind me. But the fact is, I never really left the 60s. Not in my mind, at least. I mean, how could I? I was formed in a cloud of pot smoke and the Grateful Dead, surrounded by bikers. Beers and shirtless women were as common to me as Sesame Street. And truth is, I loved my childhood. I was the center of attention. I was this mascot to a large tribe of stoned and loving young idealists. I felt like the child sun god, and everybody was orbiting around me. Those formative years left me with a different mindset. I have this ongoing waterfall of thoughts and ideas that never really shut off. It was late in grade school where I started learning I need to keep most of this torrent of ideas to myself. I'm drowning other people with my ideas. I started getting trips to the nurse's office and furrowed brows and consults with school counselors. Terms are being tossed around like add OCD, PTSD, my rebellious single mother was unfazed. No, it's just him. You know, he's reading Vonnegut, in your class is reading effing Green Eggs and Ham. I think he's bored. She didn't care about labels. F the man and the institutions he lives in. This was one of my first life lessons. You only have a problem if you think you have a problem. Thank you, mom. 14:49 This lesson reminds me that we really have to be careful about the beliefs we take on about ourselves. It can be so easy to slap on a bumper sticker of a limiting belief to our identity. I'm no good at math. I'm not attractive. I'm no good at sports. I'm too big. I'm too small. I have fill in the medical diagnosis here. No one will ever love me. I will never have abundance. Oh my god, the inner monologue. How do we get it to shut up? And who invited it into our head in the first place? Why is it so easy for us to let our imagination run free with bad shit and negative labels? And why is it so hard for us to let our imagination run free with spending time imagining how good life can be? How much we are learning and improving and growing, and how many solutions are possible for every possible challenge that we face? When life gets hard, and I've had a physical, financial, relational, or other setback, I'm reminded of the concept of impermanence. This too shall pass. And that holds for both good times and bad times. Maybe instead of saying, I have insomnia, I can say, This body I'm in is currently experiencing insomnia, it will pass. Instead of slapping on a bumper sticker that says, I have depression, we can say I'm in a low-energy state right now. It will pass. We can be our own fan base. And sometimes, ourselves is all we have, stay focused on where you're going, and not necessarily where you are right now. So, you'll learn more about me in subsequent episodes. You can always get more of my bio by going to the website, coldwaterhotcoffee.com, click the ‘About’ button. I want to thank you for listening to our first episode of Cold Water, Hot Coffee. I'll close by saying we are here to help you reclaim your teenage fire. Remember, you are not done yet with life. Let's fill the tank. Let's get back on the road. I hope you will come with me. Thanks for joining me for Cold Water, Hot Coffee.
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