Floating Away
There’s all the pain, and then there’s the healing. We hear a lot of stories about the first parts of things, the moment of trauma, the stinging words said, the perilous diagnosis, the irrevocable loss. All of those are there, too. But today is only about the peace of letting go.
After having done intense emotional work over the last seven months, I rewarded myself with a lifelong desire: to experience a sensory deprivation chamber. Modern language is so much more gentle than the language of my youth, today it’s called a Float Tank and it’s coupled with massages in a yoga studio. It’s nothing like the movie Altered States, with a sterile lab and lots of drugs. I did have my notebook for after though, to keep a log of my first experiment in sensedep.
I still expected Altered States: fires and ancestors and monsters and horror. Instead I got space to assess the last round of self-accountability and healing that I’ve put myself into and through. Instead, I got peacefulness. Instead, I got to hug my father who died when I was small.
Here is the best I can recall of the time inside:
I entered the water just as the lights and music of the room were fading to black silence. The water is like silk against my body and easy to forget about. I could feel my internal tension resisting the water and areas of my body were becoming fatigued almost immediately, like trying to hold up a dictionary in your hand with your arm outstretched. My neck, my left foot, my entire right shoulder to the diaphragm. The earplug of my right ear was allowing in a small bit of water. My body was moving around, causing my limbs to touch a wall here, there.
I told myself you are 100% safe here and I breathed. I couldn’t hear my heartbeat like I thought I would be able to, but I could hear my breathing inside my own body, and I could feel everything I held tight. The hardest part was allowing myself to let go of the tension, to surrender to the water. I sent messages of love and safety to each place that my body was holding itself against the liquid. I allowed myself to become liquid and as I did, the relaxation moved into a very deep space. I imagined myself floating through space, as I’d always longed to do as a child. I was just part of the stars, looking down on Earth and so perfectly safe there, away from all the pain.
Recently, always, recently also, I’ve been experiencing what I call suffering from a lack of want. I also am always afraid that my real calling, my actual gift is to not exist. This is difficult to describe, it’s not about suicide or death, it’s closer to a total loss of ego, a unification with the universe, a pulling apart of the veil. I fear this, I fear what I will be on the other side of losing the I of things. So as the stars lulled me into dissolution of the self, I just told myself that it’s ok to explore this here. I allowed myself to experience not wanting and not being.
The black of the tank became muddled with very dark blue nebulae, moving like fractals seen without my glasses on, fuzzy and soft. I forgot about my entire body, the wet ear, the left toes. I was all lungs. My breathing became deeper than I’d ever breathed before, there was no gasping, there was no tension, there was only a sensation of fully expanded lungs coupled with fully released breath and the still moments at the top and bottom where nothing at all was happening in my body. There was no emotion or thought or expectation. I probably drifted off to sleep here briefly.
POP! A loud noise jarred me back into normalish awareness. I recognized immediately that this was an audio hallucination, I don’t know how except to say here honestly that I have experienced a variety of hallucinations my entire life and you come to learn their character. You also come to learn that if you lean into them, and past the fear, there is something beautiful on the other side. Unfortunately, the brain usually reacts so badly to these visions that it is lost immediately. Like when you realize you are dreaming and then wake up and lose the whole dream content. I’m practiced at not losing the thread of the vision, though, at moving through the fear without waking, so to speak.
My heart did briefly escalate, a small spike of fear jabbed tension into my shoulder, but my breathing remained at the deep relaxation and my mind went straight into the Litany Against Fear:
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.[3]
I have done this so many times, it works exceptionally well and I returned to the state of peacefulness but with my sense of being and want returned. My first feeling was of the deep tap root of pain that connects us to each other and to our ancestors. It did not make me sad, I was just aware of it. I let my mind wander to my purpose, there was no purchase. There was infinite space. There was pain. There are mothers. There is laughter. I can’t do better than that, although right now I wish I could, in the water, I was fine without having a purpose, it didn’t seem important.
I let my mind wander to my death, envisioned losing my breath, which is still the only thing I can hear. It didn’t seem important either. Death seemed fruitless and so I returned to the blue nebula and not being and not wanting. Things were liminal and empty, lines of poetry surfaced like the tips of seaweed in a gentle tide, without substance, pure nonsense, pure wisdom of one who knows nothing. There was no argument, no ambition, no emotion, per se, only being.
I don’t know what brought me back to a sort of thinking and choosing, to a wanting, if you will. But I began to experience the sense of my body and it’s movement. I flexed and stretched and felt each place of sore muscle, of groaning ligament, I cradled these parts of my body and sent them feelings of love, healing, strength and adoration. As I was bringing my legs together, I felt something, something real, between my legs, right at my vulva. There was no fear reaction, but pure curiosity. I reached down and felt the object.
I realized that it was one of the soft round “hockey-pucks” that control the lights from within the tank if you want to turn on the lights for a bit, somehow it had fallen off and floated flirtatiously to my sweet spot. I picked it from between my legs and tried to place it on the small lip of the door, but it fell off again and back into the water. I retrieved it and blindly found the spot where the attendant had left a dry towel wedged between the wall and the handrail. I set the button cover on the towel and it rested there. What is notable about this very small activity is how much intense effort it took to achieve. I could feel all the muscles of my face activated in solving this tiny bit of work. I wondered if all our work took this much focus from our inner peace.
I went right back into the state of relaxation. It’s as though I can’t resist it. This sort of blissless bliss. A space where nothing is expected. I invite thoughts to arrive. I go back and forth between allowing exploration of my shadow self and past trauma. It occurred to me that with my body in this state of unusual relaxation, I could sort of test my physical being. I could re-envision my great traumas in life and see where that pain lives in my body because the body would tense against the memory.
As I begin actively inviting the old traumas to be re-experienced, I intermittently remind myself that I am in a 100% safe space. Not because I had to, but because it felt good. I asked the peacefulness to let me know if each trauma was done, still echoing, or still living. This took a lot of time, and the details aren’t really that important here. The primary trauma, breaking my leg, did take a number of re-envisionments before my body released all trauma reaction. I slowly spent time seeing the injury from all angles, and avoiding no part of it, from before it broke to after. When I was able to see the whole memory without a body reaction, I moved to the next memory.
Most of my memories held no bodily reaction. I spend so much time wondering whether or not I am healed from a thing. It feels dangerous to believe I’m healed, to believe I’m healthy and can trust myself. But this was a state of pure honesty, and permission for the body to react in the absence of all other stimulus and in a 100% safe space. I allowed myself to trust this process and was able to let go of a number of traumatic incidents and losses very peacefully. They will always be part of my past, but they stayed in that tank with the water.
Some of them immediately made my whole body tense and my brain jump right back into high alert, problem solving, heart wrench. OK. So those I still need to work with, but in the tank I just let them go and promised them I will continue sending them love and grappling with understanding. I promised I will work until I can see the good in every thing that has happened. I promised that I will work until I forgive the people, the past, myself.
I also lightly explored people I love and felt this immense joy and excitement about sharing and engaging in the world with them. Here I actually found want which is a very good feeling. In this calm and looking forward, my brain suddenly awoke and announced:
THE DEAD.
There are a lot of dead people in my life. I decided to spend the rest of my time recalling them and surfacing memories of them to hold and cherish. Of course the first is my father. I drew his face into the room and reached out in my mind’s eye to embrace him. As we hugged, an incredibly bright light formed around us, halo, glow, pure nonsense, pure joy. Of course, he is light and good and happiness itself. I opened my eyes out of habit.
It was the light of the tank coming on to announce my hour was up. I laughed.
I let go of a lot of pain in that room, and took pure joy out with me.

