Note: This essay draws on the innovative lexicons of Herbert Guenther, Ian Baker, and Bruce Tift, whose work has shaped both the language and conceptual framing throughout. Readers interested in clinical research on Tummo practice and its applications will find additional resources in the appendix. If you’re interested in learning Tummo, Peter McEwen and Lama Karma Justin Wall are offering a four-week course on foundational subtle-body practices drawn from Rangjung Dorje’s Zabmo Nangdon.
Unless the vitally important body is compliant and energy flowing freely, the pure light of consciousness will remain obscured.
— Jigme Lingpa
I. Morning Chill
Each morning, I feel the familiar twinges of resistance as I gaze into the pre-dawn autumn darkness. Maybe I’ll finally take a day off. I deserve a break. The drowsiness lifts, my village of senses coheres. I lumber outside in just shorts and Birkenstocks, hips stiff and lower back whispering. The climbing crash pad is waiting in the backyard. I settle onto the cushion, scantily clad and cross-legged, and immediately the cold finds me. My shoulders pull inward, retracting toward my core in search of warmth. My face aches. My eyes blaze, scanning for relief.
A pair of rabbits watch from the fence line. One hops closer, curious or indifferent. A jay lands, broadcasting its morning scolding. The rabbits stare back, unreadable. I begin with a single word: “Recognize.”
My morning nod to the Mahāsandhi teaching is to see that everything is radiant cognizance. I register not just an awareness of the freezing air on my skin or the contraction in my shoulders, but that I am woven into the whole field of phenomena. Otherwise, my resolve collapses back into recoiling from cold—fixated, tight, desperate.
I begin by moving into the first posture, Dispelling the Problems of Prana. The entire trul khor sequence will ask more than this, but the body needs to be coaxed into flow.
I see my breath materialize in the cold air, clumsily anchor my attention, and finally release into quiet with a wordless inhale. I massage the legs, rotate through the core, take sweeping leaps side to side, then trace the torso’s plumb line.
Inspiration builds. The city sleeps. Only rabbits and jays stir while the sky brightens, mottled and radiant. Gratitude surfaces for teachers who trusted me, conditions that make the contemplation possible, and friends who call me out when I’m full of shit. My warm body meets the crisp October air—half-naked, ridiculous, alive—while the ridgeline sharpens and squirrels peer from the garden.
The initial posture resolves into the next. Streams of breath retention, visualization, and movement converge, and the body begins to hum.
I slowly draw in breath, feeling it pool in my lower abdomen. The diaphragm firms. The pelvic floor engages, a subtle lock sealing the container. Inside, something flickers: a solar warmth in my midsection, faint but insistent. Lunar and solar currents threading through the side channels, an illuminated spike of red energy coaxing prana toward the centermost stalk. I imagine myself enclosed in a crystalline bubble, translucent and permeable. No fireworks yet. Just the quiet mechanics of breath and intention, milking energy from the periphery toward immolation at the core.
I hold. The retention deepens. The body begs to clench: the urge to exhale, the tightness in my chest, the flicker of panic that I’ve held too long. But I stay and open into the recoiling sensations. The prana moves. Not dramatically, but enough to feel the current shifting, the heat gathering, a coalescence builds, effort unwinds.
Then, collapse of self-sense. Hearing remains. Seeing remains. Being remains. Concepts dissolve, leaving undivided, vivid, and incandescent presence. No Peter left to marvel or file it away as progress. Just a proclamation of open experience: vast, immediate, and utterly ordinary.
Tummo
I first encountered Tummo in the early 90s, combing through Mind & Life conference transcripts for rational explanations of anomalous experiences. This led me to Herbert Benson’s 1982 Harvard study, published in Nature, documenting Tibetan monks who could raise their peripheral body temperature by up to 15°F through breath and visualization alone. Working in freezing Himalayan monasteries, Benson’s team watched monks dry cold, wet sheets with body heat—a feat that would induce hypothermia in untrained individuals.
What interested Benson wasn’t the spectacle but the mechanism: these practitioners could voluntarily trigger vasodilation, widening blood vessels and directing blood flow through focused attention. This contradicted assumptions that meditation only calmed the nervous system. Follow-up studies revealed distinct brain activation patterns during practice, and later research identified different techniques producing different thermal and neural effects.
What Benson emphasized throughout his two decades of research was that the heat generation was merely a byproduct. As he explained: “Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There’s another reality we can tap into that’s unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world.” His work demonstrated that studying these advanced forms of meditation could “uncover capacities that will help us to better treat stress-related illnesses”—validating what contemplative traditions had maintained for centuries about the mind’s capacity to influence physiological processes once thought entirely involuntary.
A 2013 study by Dr. Maria Kozhevnikov at Gebchak Nunnery in eastern Tibet (above 4,200m altitude) validated and expanded this work. Her team identified two distinct types of g-Tummo practice: Forceful Breath (FB) and Gentle Breath (GB), each producing different temperature patterns and neural correlates. The FB method, which combines intense concentration with specific isometric exercises and breath retention, showed reliable increases in axillary temperature from normal to slight or moderate fever range (up to 38.3°C), accompanied by increases in alpha, beta, and gamma brainwave activity.
The research is compelling and the monks are impressive, but framing this as exotic spectacle misses the point. Benson was interested in stress-related illness. I’m interested in something adjacent: how we invite and tolerate complex experience without falling into reactive self-soothing.
The connection isn’t abstract. Stress-related illness can emerge from unskilled efforts at self-regulation, from our unconscious attempts to dissociate from intense emotional and sensation-level experience. We reflexively withdraw from what feels intolerable—reaching for our phones, picking fights, spiritualizing discomfort, numbing out—and that withdrawal can create secondary problems. What the Tibetan monks demonstrated wasn’t superhuman physiology. It was the result of training the nervous system to remain present with intensity instead of trying to escape it—a capacity that can be developed through consistent engagement.
Most of us are working at our edge most of the time. Disciplines that expand capacity are worth investigating. What matters is whether they help us hold contradictory experience without reflexively reaching for familiar formulas or collapsing into reactivity.
My bias is practical: more moments of openness, embodiment, and relational presence contribute to both personal and societal wellness. Meditation isn’t the right fit for everyone. I’m more interested in what works than in philosophical certainty. We need adequately accurate perception to avoid costly mistakes, but no single view captures reality’s full complexity. Adaptation brings these trainings to life
What works has to align with what actually matters: your intentions, your priorities, your life. And your life is relational. People around us unconsciously broadcast their dysregulation, which makes self-regulation and co-regulation essential skills, not optional upgrades.
Meditation on the essence of mind is good. But for immediate results nothing compares with the yoga of inner fire.
— Milarepa
I find Tummo to be a potent and underused source of stress inoculation, meditative stability, vitality, and aliveness. It’s one of the most diverse methods in Vajrayana Buddhism. I appreciate the imaginative challenge of the visualization component, the embodiment-focused postures, and the dynamic, evocative quality of the breathwork. For me, it’s a fun, effective, and varied way of working with embodiment.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Current to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.