How Floating Helped Me Heal

I started floating earlier this year. I had heard about floating as a concept a few years back but the idea of being in an enclosed tank in utter darkness was enough to keep me away. Now I’m not quite sure where my fear of darkness and claustrophobia comes from but I can see it in action when I’m in an environment that’s dark and/or lacking space. It’s been my body’s default response ever since I can remember. I decided to float to have a deliberate way of spacing out from the world. At any given time, you oscillate between your roles in the topside world and the spiritual world — at one moment you could be thinking about your grocery list or goals in life and yet another question what your purpose is in life and why you exist in the body you do. I find this capacity of human beings to traverse between various layers of our own depths and experiences so riveting — I mean one moment we could be laying out the agenda for a meeting and yet another thinking about how many years our universe has left. I’m sort of like a camera lens in this perspective, I can zoom in and zoom out however many times I like and my aperture decides how big or small the picture gets in my head.

Floating is one of the things I do to deliberately step out of my role in the topside world and go within — so deeply within that there’s nothing but myself and darkness, nothing I can clutch on to. I started in April and decided to do it on a monthly basis because to produce any kind of change, you have to be doing it repetitively. In my first few sessions, I remember nothing but extreme fear lying in the tank by myself. My body’s instant response to the darkness was immediately reaching out for the light button which caused my heart to race twice as much faster and created deep anxiety and fear as a result of it. It always took me 20 minutes or so to calm myself down and bring myself to a safe space within. It’s funny how I knew I was safe, there was nothing I needed to be afraid of and yet my body’s conditioning was so strong that it reacted to the stimulus of dark with panic and anxiety. It was like the code of my operating system ran on a fixed input (being my environment) and produced a fixed output with truly no regards to whether it was unsafe (no variable). After a few sessions, I started to love watching my body do what it was doing from the outside (third person perspective) — I eventually started talking to my body and creating a safe space for it. I nurtured it and conversed with it every month, making it feel safe and protected, knowing it had nothing to worry about, it didn’t serve me to grow anxious to an environment that wasn’t unsafe. It was putting me in “fight or flight” mode every time I lay in that tank and it had to be eased into the fact that the response was overheated. 8 months in and now when I go back into the tank, I lie in utter peace. The lights are off, the tank is shut and I feel nothing but calmness. I can feel my breath, my heart and I can just lay there in bliss knowing I’m a sentient being and just being able to feel is so GRAND. Floating helps me go so deep within that if I’m carrying crucial unanswered questions or battling with something in the topside world, I can bring it with me in the tank and ask myself what the course of action should I be taking and truly, I get extremely informed responses. Almost as if my deep, higher self comes out and explains the puzzles of daily life then tells me “Off you go”.

Now I consider floating a spiritual exercise. It’s my way of shedding my topside skin and getting into the tank knowing I’ll be heralding my deep intuitive self. It’s my way of being grounded in reality and accepting that nothing in life comes close to the experience of breathing and just being. This has really got to me thinking about all the things I wish to be doing in my day to day life to create harmony between my worldly self and spiritual self and some of those things include trekking in wilderness, traveling by myself and meditating. It is so important to find ways to create a relationship with your inner self, otherwise life is just passing you by and you get pulled into all directions without truly finding your bearing.