Cold Water

Day one hundred and seventeen, Turkey. In the old hermetic teaching, water is one of the five elements, alongside fire, air, earth and the Akasha principle. It takes up what you would rather not carry.

Hold your hands under cold running water and picture it drawing the bad thinking out of you, and it behaves like a magnet in liquid form. There is one rule: afterwards, don't go looking for the thoughts to check whether they have really gone.

The whole thing works better if you train the concentration daily. Holding one image steady for seconds, then minutes, is a beginner's exercise for students of hermetics, and the Tibetan tradition asks for the same discipline in its own words.

If you would rather not be that precise about it, jump into a stream.

You know the feeling. Everything is lighter for an hour afterwards, and nobody has ever explained to me why.