A Year in a Floatation Tank, this is how it changed my life

What happens with Sensory Deprivation?

No sound,

no sight,

nothing to feel,

no sensory impressions.

Only the smell of polyester,

merging with something else that I wasn’t able to clearly define.

And the drops on my forehead.

The water almost impossible to perceive around me.

That wonderful weightlessness,

the floating in space.

If there is one year in my life that had a great impact on me, it was 1991, about twenty-six years ago, when I lived in a floation center in Middelburg, the Netherlands and had the opportunity to enter a floatation tank almost every day. That egg shaped tank. That sensory deprivation device. It changed the way I understood intention and choice, the incredible resilience of our bodies, our human potential of telepathy, how we are not our body, the creativity that emerges when you can let go of overwhelm of your sensory circuits, our incredible abilility of extrasensory perception, and above all the deep passion for life that I started to feel, like golden liquid in my body.

The first few minutes I was still releasing my thoughts and my neck, somehow the two were linked together. As soon as I released my neck my mind relaxed and my brain entered a different state. Thoughtless I became the perceiver. Usually right after I was able to surrender my neck in the trust that my face would stay above the water for me to breathe.

Then the trembling would start. First gently, but sometimes strong and wild. My whole body would vibrate from the inside out. I loved it, and I loved to hear my own breath below the water. Until my body decided that it was sufficient, my body had become now another body, my energy-body so to speak. Not dense and physical, but a direct reflection of my body being able to move wherever it wanted to. I never perceived it so strong as in that tank.

And it always went like this: first I had the sensation that my feet would gently glide down until I had the perception of standing up, immediately after I would ‘fall’ and started to spiral. Spiral, spiral, spiral faster and faster without getting dizzy. Always this ‘tunnel’ would appear around me. This tunnel that I started tumbling into. It was not so much a sensation from tumbling down or up yet there was a sense of falling. And then, Voila, I was in another reality.

After a few months I discovered I was able to guide myself into specific experiences. If I had the intention of just relaxing my body, that would be it. But if I steered myself towards a particular experience, then that was exactly what I would get. I became better and better at it. I was able to gear myself towards re-experiencing my birth, traveling into my past and future, getting deeper insights into and heal a physical issue I had (with my skin), getting a sense of tremendous freedom and possibility, traveling to other places on earth and developing my intuition. Each time the experience became more multidimensional, more layered and I would move quickly from one state to the other.

It was something about the water, the water as an amplifier for telepathic communication, the water as a cleanser, the water so life giving and oceanic. I saw hundreds of people enter the tank, and interestingly enough their experience would always depend on their intention and expectation. Always there was this sense of timelessness, yet the experience never lasted longer than an hour usually. After each experience, I became so much more sensuous. So much more able to feel, hear, smell, and perceive things. To hear the thoughts of my lover or my dog. I would be so much more in my body, so much more connected to life, being able to smell the desire to grow in plants, the abundant energy of nature, and I could feel the hunger for love in a child’s bones.

And that became my mission. I started to offer ‘sensory deprivation retreats in Hawaii’ and offered classes in developing extrasensory perception, to fill the need to let go of overwhelm.

Many years later when I had my extraordinary experiences with my lover who had passed away and communicated to me through my laptop (like I describe in my book Forty-Nine Days, A Sensuous Journey in the Modern Afterlife) I had to think about those experiences in the tank and how they had formed me and gave me a foundation in the understanding of who we are as beings with a body, and how this multidimensional aspect changes the linearity of things. How we can move so quickly from one state to the other.

I often wonder about all our digital overload, all those visual impressions, all that consuming, the numbing it does, the vital importance of the release of all that comes to us, and to let the body do ‘it’s thing’, to create.

So what I do now? At some point I exchanged the tank for the Hawaiian Ocean. Now I make sure to float everyday in the endless ocean on Kauai, releasing all that overload of sensory information.

And I love it!!

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Christel Janssen is author of Forty-Nine Days, A sensuous Journey of the Modern Afterlife and leads Spontaneous Movement writing retreats on Kauai. christeljanssen.com