Adding Bliss

What's The Craziest Thing You've Ever Done?

"In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure."

- Bill Cosby

Every year on January 1st, hundreds of people of all ages converge on the beach in Coney Island, Brooklyn to participate in The Coney Island Polar Bear Club's Annual Swim benefitting Camp Sunshine, which involves stripping down to your barely "mentionables" and plunging into icy cold water.

It's a 103 year old tradition started by Bernarr McFadden, a health enthusiast who touted the many physical benefits of swimming in icy waters.  

Are there really any health benefits to doing some thing that every cell in your body is telling you is wrong?

Well, it depends on who you ask.

Europeans have been reaping the "benefits" of cold baths for hundreds of years, due in part to limited access to hot water. Some swear it increase circulation, creates an all natural high, improves skin, hair & nails, boost fertility  and testerone levels in men and creates a general feeling of well being. Even James Bond does it.

The Thrombosis Research Instutite of England published a study in 1993 that found that male subjects whom regularly engaged in cold showers registered increases in white blood cell production  & testosterone. Another study showed that cold showers can be used to treat depression. This is probably not enough to make you strap on a bikini, zip up your Uggs and cannonball head first into wintry waters but it makes you wonder.

FYI, most physicians do not recommend swimming in 34˚ water for any length of time.

I'll admit that I've always wanted to try the polar dip but never quite pulled the trigger. So this year I decided to accompany my friends Katie and Adrienne who decided to take the plunge so I could see what I would literally be getting myself into. 

Enjoy the photos and scroll down to read about the crazy thing I'm planning to do this year...

 

What Will Your Six Things Be This Weekend?

"Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination" - Jim Jarmusch(stolen from this book.)

Every Friday I'll be featuring ways to spend your weekend Adding Bliss neatly organized into the six blissful categories of: Spiritual Bliss, Chronological Bliss, Physical Bliss, Intellectual Bliss, Financial Bliss & Relationship Bliss.This genius idea was lovingly borrowed and modified from one of my favorite blogs.

 The hubby and I have decided to make 2013 the year of Living Well Below Our Means. So this weekend I'm going to try my hand at couponing. I'm hoping to someday graduate to extreme couponing but I'm taking baby steps. I'll be sure to keep you posted.

In the meantime, please check out these awesome things I found to keep you entertained until Monday...

Why?

 

** UPDATE: 12.15.12 I have edited the post to remove the name of the individual responsible for this atrocity. No one asked me to, but I made the choice to do so because I didn't want the focus of this post not to be the crime itself but it's effects, my personal feelings about the tragedy and what we can do as a global community to move forward and make things better. Speaking of making things better; as promised I listed a few ways that everyone can help to comfort the families directly affected and work to make sure awful events like these never happen again. Thanks for reading! ***

As most of you know a terrible tragedy befell the people of Newtown, Connecticut and our entire country. A gunman, entered an elementary school and opened fire killing 27  innocent individuals including 20 children, between the ages of 5 and 10 years old.

And the only thing that courses through my mind is why?  Why did this happen today? Why does this keep happening?

Spiritual Bliss: How Almost Losing Everything Helped Beth Find Her Bliss...

 

 

Featuring Adding Bliss guest blogger and one of my personal heroes: Beth Ann Caputo

The night before my bronchoscopy, I sat alone on the black leather couch I shared with my ex-boyfriend and tried with every fiber of my being not to cry.

Choking back tears always proved to be a serious feat for me and this time around was no different. I grew up in a household where talking about our feelings was as therapeutic as prayer is for an Orthodox Catholic. As an adolescent, I would have melt downs over an array of trivial issues several times per week. No matter how absurd, my parents always encouraged me to let it all out. At the time of my bronchoscopy, I had spent the past year living in a small seaside town in Ireland. Similar to where I live now, it provided a warm, inviting place to live but walk into any pub on the Main Street and you'd find people drinking away divorces, affairs and business deals gone wrong. Faking it became a new way of life. I judged these people; I considered them broken. Yet, there I was that night, wondering when my boyfriend was going to come home from the pub to tell me it would all be okay.

If I had a crystal ball that year, things around 7 Aubrey Court would have been a lot different. I would have known that eleven months after setting foot on the Emerald Isle I'd be faced with my own mortality. I'd be bald, over weight from steroids and poisoned. I'd see myself alone in a hospital room, struggling to move from the bed to the bathroom due to the tube that stretched from my left side into a device that was used to drain excess fluid from my lung and prevent it from collapsing after surgery. The sphere's reflection would show my body lit with tumours, the cancer in its earliest stage. Knowing this, I would have given up the fight for approval that I would never win. I would have found the strength to stand up for myself, buy a one way ticket to John F. Kennedy Airport and never look back. If I knew that my 23^rd year was potentially my last, I would have stopped making choices that made me unhappy.

Instead, I lost her.