Your body temperature goes through rhythmic cycles during the day.
When your temperature is high, your physical and mental performance are faster.
Controlling your body temperature could prove useful in certain daily situations where external heat or cold has reached extreme degrees.
A passing 'grade' for a Tibetan lama from a lamasary school is to go out onto a frozen lake stark naked and with his body heat alone, evaporate the moisture out of two water soaked blankets! Such extraordinary feats are quite possible when you master complete control over your bodily functions.
Even though your normal body temperature is 98.6°F, your finger temperature varies between the 70's and the 90's.
To alter the temperature of a finger by several degrees in a few minutes of concentration is just as easy as thinking about it.
As you learned in "Exercise Electromagnetic Field Awareness," just thinking of one of your hands increases the blood volume to that hand.
Focused thought to other areas of the body can bring about an increased blood volume into those areas as well.
When blood volume increases, the capillaries in the skin dilate and the temperature of the skin increases.
When blood flow decreases, the blood vessels in the skin constrict and temperature decreases.
As an exercise, take an ordinary medical thermometer and tape it to your forefinger, or even better, use a Radio Shack thermometer with 9 foot cord and sensor thermistor that can be taped to your finder.
You can easily read the digital display in 0.1 degree increments.
Now raise the temperature of your finger by extending your conscious awareness into it.
Experience the feeling of the tape and thermometer touching it, but ignore the thermometer completely.
Now do different visualizations (sun's rays, hot water, campfire, etc.) to raise the temperature of the forefinger and just "feel" it warming up.
Coincide this process with deep, steady abdominal breathing.
If you forcefully try to 'will' your finger to get warm, a bodily reaction of 'fight or flight' results in a constriction of the blood vessels in preparation for violent action, and you achieve the reverse effect -- coolness.
The more relaxed and calm you feel, the better your success.
After 4 minutes, retape the thermometer or thermistor to your other forefinger to see which hand is easier to regulate the temperature of.
To make your fingers cooler, visualize digging with your fingers into the icy snow of an avalanche that has partially engulfed you or visualize some other stressful scene or dangerous situation.
Detail the experience with fear, anxiety or other negative emotion to effect a constriction of your blood vessels.
Sometimes just thinking of putting your hand into icy water or in a snowbank, or imagining it already frozen in an ice block will accomplish the same cooling effect.
You might notice that one hand is easier to effect a temperature control than the other.
Also a woman's hands tend to be colder than a man's.
Practice using 2 thermometers, and make one temperature go up and the other go down.
Afterwards, practice with other parts of your body.
When you can successfully regulate your finger temperature, you realize the same techniques of temperature regulation can be used on other parts of your body as well.
Biofeedback experts have found that regulating the temperature of your finger also normalizes the blood flow in the capillaries of your head to relieve cloudy thinking and headaches caused by dilated or constricted blood vessels.