Can Float Therapy Break Through Your Subconscious?
How deep beneath the surface will it take you?
Step 1. Enter the private bathroom.
Step 2. Declothe.
Step 3. Step into the shower — rinse away the outside world.
Step 4. Open the soundproof chamber door
Step 5. Step into the next hour of your life.
Whether that hour will feel like an eternity or 15 minutes, you can’t really predict.
The chamber was small, just large enough to fit a bath for one. Freshly showered and completely nude, I entered to the hum of relaxing, ethereal music and low lights. The air was warm and humid. As my feet slipped through the surface I found the water likewise attuned. I shut the door behind me.
This, was a float tank: a 5×8 space with just enough room to stand upright, filled with water more densely salted than the Dead Sea.
WHAT IS THE FLOAT?
No sound, no light. Water and air temperature perfectly aligned so that once you settle into the water, densely salted to keep you afloat, you lose awareness of which parts of your body are submerged and which are above water.
Float therapy is said to bring the mind and body into a state of deep relaxation, with the capacity to be both meditative and transformative. Initially, I assumed the human connection to water was the basis of this (admittedly capitalistic spin on the otherwise very free, thousands of years old practice of meditation) experience. Like that affect the ocean has over us — an experience of calmness and connection.
Instead, I would soon realize the floating sensation intended to simulate the zero-gravity kind.
Complete sensory deprivation is the goal of Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST), the acronym coined for float therapy. Back in the 50s, American neuroscientist, biophysicist, and hallucinogenic experimenter, John C. Lilly, designed the tank to cut off all external stimuli as a means to examine the origins of consciousness.
Lilly sought experiential answers to a centuries-old philosophical debate: in the absence of stimulation, does human consciousness, in fact, exist?
FLOAT INTO THE ABYSS
Blissfully unaware of the consciousness consideration, there I found myself, effortlessly afloat among 1,000+ lbs of Epsom salt, dim mood lighting, and the kind of ethereal music reserved only for spas and wellness centers. Settling into the water, my body and mind fell into a state of relaxation almost immediately.
Slowly the light and echo of music subtly faded into silence and infinite darkness.
It wasn’t long before I lost sense of which stretches of skin were submerged and which were above water. The experience suspends you into the purest sensation of floating, without a clear up or down, near or far.
Are my eyes opened or closed?
Soon the distance between minutes passing became as distorted as space and my position within it. I found myself every so often drifting an arm to the side of the tank seeking a glimmer of grounding, touching just for a moment. As illusions hit me, swirling my thoughts in a circle, I lost track of what was a dream and what was conscious thought.
Repeatedly I ran through the sensation of floating through space, a feeling of calm within the silence of the universe. Perhaps all just an illusion, my mind making the easy association of the experience of weightlessness among complete darkness. Or maybe the absence of stimulation did quiet the waking mind. Awake, but in a state that allowed the subconscious to rise to the surface.
As I lay floating, I found this state of detachment, but also greater connection. Detachment from the outside world, and at the same time a deep connection to not only myself but something bigger, something beyond me.
AFTERMATH
At some point, I’m told after one hour, a dull light began to re-illuminate the world. Music trickled in. I emerged. Rinsed off. Reclothed.
I hadn’t come alone, and was surprised to find that my counterpart felt like only 20 minutes had passed inside the tank. For me, the time had stretched on in there.
Even so, there was a lightness. Physically the body felt loose, airy. Mentally and emotionally, there was a sense of calm.
Afterward, we stopped for coffee, sharing our individual experiences, basking in the positive afterfeels. To my complete surprise, before I knew it, tears were watering up my vision. Words choked out of my mouth as if from another source.
A realization was spewing out: the need to let go of the current writing trajectory I was on.
It was acceptance.
Truth be told, at this point in life, I was feeling lost. Floundering. The perpetual cycle of doubt and fear is inevitable for any creative I suppose — the highs, the lows. I was at the low point of the cycle — questioning writing goals and directions, grappling with the sinking suspicion that I would need to make a big pivot.
My current direction was going nowhere.
In fact, it felt exactly like floating through a dark mass of water with no light or sense of grounding in my own body. Like this experience, where the temperature of water and air align just so that the division between the two becomes hazy. Every familiar sense numb.
The distinguishing of one against another blurred so indefinitely that you have nothing to do but to be still. All you want is the smallest glimmer of light, some outside indication of direction, but in the end, no outside stimuli can help.
The metaphor was not lost on me.
SUBCONSCIOUS RISING
Seeking direction is not unlike treading water in darkness. We want to feel in control. We want to see where we’re going, to turn the light on and illuminate the right way and give the mind some peace and understanding. But it isn’t the mind that needs reassurance to get there.
It’s about letting go. It’s about listening within.
None of this actually came up during the float, but I don’t think I’d be remiss to infer that the free subconscious communicates with us indirectly. Sometimes it’s a feeling we have to decipher, a kind of energy. Like little bread crumbs rather than full sentences.
Maybe Lilly’s experience was successful, at least about the strength of our subconscious over the conscious mind when external stimuli are removed. If you open yourself to it, the sensory deprivation brings us closer to the stillness, quiets everything for a closer connection to hear our deeper self.
You have to be still, to sit in the silence and embrace what comes up within you.
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