Have you ever heard of floating? I don’t mean just floating on the wind or floating in the sky or floating on a pillow. I mean floating as in getting into a giant pod of water and epsom salts and just … floating. You may hear it referred to as a sensory deprivation tank. It’s about as close as you can come to that. You float in darkness with no sound but your own breathing and the beating of your heart, the water so perfectly temperate that you can barely feel it against your skin. And you just … float.
I discovered floating a few years ago while I was off work for the Christmas holiday. I had walked by this place several times. Total Zen was the name on the sign. I looked it up online and found that they offered these float pods. Now, anyone who is even remotely familiar with pop culture will have seen something about these sensory deprivation tanks on one show or another. I remember they featured in an episode of The Simpsons as well as an episode of The Big Bang Theory. I thought, what the heck. I’m always up for a new experience and the price wasn’t horrible. So, I made an appointment for my first float.
The first thing I will say is that I went into the experience with no expectations. Sure, all the things I’d seen about these tanks would make one think you’ll spend your time in some hallucinatory state like you were tripping on LSD. Even though that was the way I had seen it presented in fictional media, I did not expect to have that experience. In fact, I did not have any idea what to expect.
The first thing that surprised me was you are expected to float naked. I don’t know why that surprised me, though. It only made sense. I was told that you didn’t have to float naked but wearing anything at all can detract from the experience. After all, you would feel any swimsuit you would wear and the point is to feel as little sensory stimulus as possible. Besides, you are in a locked room and inside a closed pod. Why not be naked? So after quickly showering to remove any residues of shampoo or other stuff on my skin, I put the earplugs in and stepped into the experience.
It feels quite warm and pleasant as you close the lid of your pod and lay down in the water. A soft pastel light shines so you can orient yourself to the center of the pod. The salts in the water provide ample buoyancy for you to float without worry. My pod has a rubberized button that I pushed to turn out the lights. Then, I extended my arms to either side of the pod to steady my body as the water calmed from the slight sloshing caused by my initial movements. Once I felt it was calm, I let my arms float away from the sides of the pod and just … floated.
The newness of the experience, of course, had my heart and my thoughts racing. What was this going to be like? Would I hallucinate? What am I supposed to do now? Even my body was tense with some kind of expectation. But it only took a moment for me to realize that what I was doing was wrong. The most important aspect of floating is relaxation. So, I slowly relaxed every part of me, starting from my neck and working my way down. Next, I concentrated on my breathing. With the earplugs and the enclosed pod, I could hear every breath, which made it easy to begin relaxing my breathing. As my breaths slowed, my heart rate eased as well. Before I knew it, the concentration on my breathing had allowed all my other racing thoughts to disappear. And there I was.
Floating.
For nearly sixty glorious minutes, I just floated. I let myself do nothing but relax in that space and I let my thoughts wander wherever they felt like going. If something negative tried to intrude on those thoughts, I just pushed it away into the void that surrounded me. At some point, everything became so calm, the temperatures became so perfect that I couldn’t tell the difference between the air above me and the water below. What I sensed was a sort of membrane, just the surface of the water where it touched my skin. And in my mind, it felt like everything around me had vanished and I was floating in a vastness of universal emptiness. To paraphrase Hamlet, I was bounded in a nutshell and counted myself the king of infinite space. Nothing and everything. All at once and never.
I’m sure every person’s experience with floating is different. I know mine changed over the next few floats as I grew accustomed to it. I developed techniques for myself that allowed me to reach the most relaxed state more quickly. Sadly, Total Zen had to close their doors last year and I was without floats for some time before I found another place that offered floats. It’s a bit further from my home than Total Zen was, but it offers the same oasis of relaxation that I have come to desire when I need a short break from the world around me. We all need a little something like that nowadays. If you find you have a location to float near you, I highly recommend you give it a couple of tries. The first one is for testing the waters, so to speak. By the third, you’ll be an expert at relaxation. You might even find that it floats your boat.