Psychedelic reactivation from icebath!?

[Kazman]

So yesterday evening I experienced, very unexpectedly, the highest state of consciousness I ever reached without psychedelics.

It was the climax of an spiritually, erotically and emotionally intense weekend, I'll do my best to recount the events leading up to my samadhi in order to try and perhaps re-create it, maybe some of you can shed some light on how I was unconsciously working with powerful principles. I'll provide some graphic examples for your enjoyment. This got quite long so there's a TL;DR by the bottom.

So, first off, I had remained sexually continent, ie not ejaculated, for almost 3 weeks. Then on Friday morning me and my wife did our sadhana morning practice which sometimes leads to sex. We started with sharing our emotions and feelings and planning some weekend activities, did movement / yogic warmup and then had sex in the bed. It was slow and beautiful, after some time I slowly built up to just about my point of no return and filled her with semen for the first time in weeks, she got some kind of emotional release and started to cry, I don't think that ever happened before for us during sex. She said it felt like she released some fear and anxiety.

The day proceeded like normal. We hung out with our neighbours and had dinner with them in the evening. When we got home and put our kids to sleep, we smoked weed and improvised around the mantra Satanama for 20 mins or so, it was spectacular. Then she wanted to watch a movie but I was so happy to be out of my weeks of sexual continence I exclaimed that I wanted to cum in her mouth. She was really open for that, even though we don't do that too often, and she started to blow me. I fucked her face quite brutally and exploded in her mouth, it felt amazing. We watched a movie but I fell asleep almost immediately.

The day after, we were going to visit a couple we've exchanged partners with three times prior to this and have dinner with them. First we needed to leave our kids at my mom's place. I made up a lie about how me and my wife was going to eat at a tapas-type restaurant, don't know where I got that idea from. When we arrived at the other couple's place, they had prepared tasty tapas-type food for us, a funny coincidence.
After eating we again sang the mantra Satanama with them, then we did a tantric practice where one person would lie in the bed while three others simultaneously gave them loving touch with the elemental energies in this sequence: Earth, Water, Air and then Fire. We took turns and got five minutes each. After that, a foursome soon followed. Nothing too tantric about it, just fucking each other, spitroasting, the girls making out and going down on each other and so on. 

I found it hard to focus 'cause partner exchange is still quite new to me, every time my wife starts moaning and screaming I get very distracted and it's hard for me to focus at being with another woman in those moments. After the other guy came inside my wife he needed some recovery-time, and then he chatted with my wife while I proceeded to fuck the other woman. It was a lot easier and we got quite into it. After a while it made my wife feel uncomfortable and she expressed the need to have me by herself, so we ended our erotic intimate dance. The four of us proceeded to talk together for quite some time, it got late and we took a cab home.

My wife was looking really tense and only answered anything I said with 1 word sentences in the cab so I knew something was wrong. When we got home she explained how she felt a lot of insecurity and that it was really painful and she was sure that I didn't care for her as much as for the other woman. It was a bit unexpected since we had been with them 3 times before, and no insecurities had arisen the past two times. The first time, however, almost ruined our life, but we worked through that. I was scared to experience the wrath and suffering from the aftermath after the first time we fucked that couple, but that period taught me many things and I knew how to work through this.

I shared my passion for my wife with her and expressed with academy award-winning level delivery how our connection was the highest and most spiritually valuable thing in my life. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't acting, all I'm saying is I expressed it fully, with really strong emotions, trembling voice, tears in between, apologizing for making her feel this way, re-stating my original intention and my full commitment to the expansion of our love. We ended up hugging together and she felt a little better. It was almost 4am. We went to bed and since I was interrupted during the foursome I still hadn't ejaculated and was ready to go. Her pussy was sore but we went with touching ourselves and mixing dirtytalk with me telling her how beautiful and sexy she was and how much I loved her. Then we came together and I exploded all over her chest. 

The next day, the Sunday, we had a lot of deep talks in the morning about our emotions and things were fairly okay, but fragile. If I'd been clumsy I could've easily gotten into bad territory but it went all right, although she was almost trying to pick a fight a couple of times. I wanted to have sex with my wife in the morning to reconnect, she also kind of wanted it but in the end it didn't happen, we had coffee and cleaned the house instead. Then we picked up our kids who had been staying with grandma during the Saturday night and went home again, and we were then guested by my wife's parents who brought dinner with them to celebrate my mother in law's birthday. It was really tasty-tapas type food, again an interesting coincidence.

My wife, her mom and our kids went to the sauna after dinner. Some time had passed and my stomach didn't feel very full so I decided to also go to the sauna. It felt nice to sauna. I usually don't drink much but both Friday and Saturday evening I had had a couple of glasses of wine and beer and that had given me some hangover-anxiety, combined with the emotional toll of having difficult discussions together with my wife. I find that sauna really helps against anxiety.
I was horny and still kept having plenty of flashbacks from our night with the other couple so I masturbated and came by myself in the sauna. I then got the idea to fill the bathtub with ice water so I went out of the sauna, cleaned my hands and started filling the bathtub which takes about 7 minutes.

I already felt kind of finished with the sauna and it was 70+ degrees celsius so seven more minutes wasn't totally easy. To endure, I started to massage my scalp to have something to focus on. I also started breathing more intentionally, almost like shamanic breathing / wim hof breathing.  Deep quick breaths and an intention to relax and let go on the exhale. I did this in the hot sauna and it was very challenging, after a while I decided that the waterline had risen enough in the bathtub and I exited the sauna and went into the water. I stood with my feet in the water, it felt really cold even though I do this once a week, it was especially cold since Sweden has entered an extraordinarily cold period recently and the temperature outside my house affects the water temperature. 

I started doing what I usually do: sit down in the water, then blocking my nostrils and ears with my fingers and went underwater for about ten seconds. Then I put up my head above the water and relax. I take as relaxed, deep and slow breaths  as possible, usually ten followed by dipping my head and then ten more breaths.
This time I didn't do it as normal though. As I started breathing I felt WAY more relaxed then I usually do, my breaths were also waay slower than normal. After ten breaths I was so relaxed I didn't want to change what I was doing so I kept breathing, although my breath was now so slow that I almost didn't breathe at all.

I've sometimes tried to attain "the breathless state" by doing spiritual energy circulation exercises and focusing at my third eye and pushing the tongue upwards, I can sometimes feel a shift in perception and a lowered breath and lower pulse, but this was on a whole other level. I felt like I was dying, like the water was consuming me, like I was freezing to death, but I was so relaxed and numbed that it felt pleasant. I surrendered to it and my eyes rolled upwards. More and more expansion. A numb tingling feeling in all of my body. Such bliss and expansion. Fear brought me out of it. First it was the fear that I was going to pass out in the bathtub and drown, so I sat up. And as I sat up, I realized that I was in a very unusual state of consciousness. I felt exactly like I do in ALL my psychedelic trips at the stage where I've just remembered that nothing exists / I am all that exists. The terror of insanity and solipsistic nonduality. It was extra frightening since I wasn't prepared at all for it, and it led me to think thoughts such as: "it's forever this time, since it wasn't induced by a psychedelic. FUCK, I'm enlightened for real this time and there's no going back. I can go to my family but they won't be able to comfort me out of this because I know they're an illusion."

I stood up in the bathtub and went into the sauna again to recover some warmth. I took great care to move slowly and not fall over, my body felt a bit like a separate thing. My skin was very red from the cold water. I sat down in the sauna but the fear and loneliness wasn't endurable, I strongly felt the need to be close to my wife. I dried myself with a towel and put on a robe and went to her, walking like a partially functioning human. She was reading a bedtime story to our daughter in our bed and I lay down beside them. I was shivering a lot, but I sometimes do ice baths so they didn't think it was too weird. My wife asked me if I didn't want to go to the sauna again to get more warm but I was able to utter that something had happened and that I felt very scared and that I just wanted to be close to her. 

I slowly warmed up, started to feel like myself again and I was able to go downstairs to say good night to my in laws, take some vitamins, brush my teeth and go to bed. By that point, the fear had left and instead I marveled at what had happened. Somehow I'd reached a really powerful level of consciousness, some kind of energy activation, that I before only got to through psychedelics. More to come.

TL;DR:
I did sauna+breathing exercises for some time until I was really exhausted, went into icy water, expanded my consciousness WAY more than what normally happens somehow and remembered that nothing exists.