I recently went to a SPA place to take a one-hour-long floating session and it was a great catalyst to a train of thoughts that stayed with me for a few days. I decided I’d not keep it to myself only and share them with the Hive community. This will be something about the time and the lack of it; about how sometimes a week can seem like an eternity, while at the same time months and years go by as quickly as you wink.
You see, it was back in April when I was thinking about what to gift my girlfriend to, as her birthday was approaching soon. I had a few ideas, but one of them was to give her a new experience. This is something that we try to do: instead of giving things, we prefer giving each other memorable experiences.
Since we both work and travel a lot, and also try to juggle other things at the same time, we sometimes find ourselves caught in a constant rush. I usually am the first to notice when we start to lose the balance—or at least I am the first to voice my concerns, because usually it quickly becomes obvious that we both feel the same, or at least in a similar way. It was exactly that case back then in April, so I thought I’d buy as a voucher for a floating session for two.
It actually surprises me when I talk about this with my friends, as I was pretty sure that while maybe not the most popular thing to do, it is at least somewhat widely understood that floating exists and what it is—more or less. However, most of people I talk with need some sort of an introduction, so I’ll do it here as well.
Floating is considered to be one of the wellness procedures. I hate that term, but well. Simply put, floating means entering a sensory deprivation chamber that is filled with water, and lying there in the water for anywhere from half an hour, and up to a few hours. In the chamber you’re completely cut from any external stimuli. There’s a complete darkness and a complete silence. The water is a very strong solution of water and epsom salt, which means the water is able to hold you afloat easily. Moreover, the temperature of the water and the air is kept at around 36,6 degrees Celsius, so you don’t even feel that you’re in a water.
In general the experience that you get is supposedly similar to floating in space with no gravity. I say supposedly, because unfortunately I’ve never been to space. You quickly lose any sense of the external world, and enter a very deep relaxation, or even a meditative state. The guy who works there told us that it has even been studied, and floating makes your brain produce theta waves—these are the same waves that you have just as you fall asleep. I’m sure you know this state—when reality starts to blur, unfiltered streams of thoughts starts to flow, and you suddenly unlock access to some deeper parts of your memory.
Okay, okay, but what write about it all now, when my girlfriend’s birthday was in April? Well, the answer is simple… It was only this Thursday that we finally managed to actually make us of the voucher. Yes, it took us almost 5 months. It’s not that we couldn’t do it earlier, but there was always something else to do, or hard to find the time in our schedules, or it just wasn’t the right time.
In the end I think this was the right time. Spring and Summer were hard for me, which I described recently in Finding My Footing. Now with Autumn coming in full swing, everything starts to slow down and hide in itself. It is a perfect time to hop into the floating chamber and spend an hour traveling towards the within.
Maybe I am too old to still be mind-boggled by that, but I am—the strange relativity of time. I remember when I first took a floating session a few years back. It was one-hour-long and I was a bit unsure what to expect. Taking into account my somewhat hyperactive personality, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to relax and will get bored. Because that’s really something I struggle with all the time—my mind races all the time and wants to jump to the next thing just as it finished with the previous one. No time to be bored, no space for the unknown.
And guess what. When I went into the chamber, it definitely didn’t feel like an hour. More like 10 minutes—tops. It was really mind-bending. I remember my first impression:
Huh, now I understand how those monks spend their entire life just meditating and it doesn’t get boring. They just have a completely different sense of time. Their entire life is just as long as mine or anyone else, but they spend it mostly in this state where it just goes by so effortlessly.
This time it was just the same. With no clear points of reference from the external world, and only relying on what comes from the inside, the time flies quickly. Thoughts race through my head, but I do not try to catch any of them. I am their passenger of sorts: they come up, take me from wherever (or whenever!) I am, lead me somewhere, and then leave me there for others to take me from there.
I could describe it as a sort of daydreaming. It maybe is a bit worrying, but I really do have to close myself for an hour in such a floating chamber to finally hear my own thoughts and feel like I regain my contact with my subconsciousness. And what a ride that is! But let me stop here and instead encourage you to try on your own!
My girlfriend is also very positively surprised after taking her first ever floating session. I remember when our session ended, her first words were:
There’s no way it is an hour already!
She described her experience as feeling like she was adrift in a space and also that the entire experience was a bit psychedelic, and that she felt like thrown into a sci-fi book.
It is a little bit like you were in a different world. It is a state that you want to get back into.
I guess the main takeaway here is that in today’s world, where there’s always something happening, and we’re constantly bombarded with stimuli, it’s important to create spaces for silence and meditation.
For some it will be enough to just sit down quietly in their room, but others—like me—will need something stronger, that will, in a way, force them to meditate. Floating sessions are a great way to try. Because maybe you don’t even realize how much you lose because of the rush that you’re in since you wake up until you fall asleep. And there are vast, beautiful internal landscapes waiting to be explored.
If you’ve never experiences that—try floating. The worst case scenario you’ll at least rest and relax.
Today's article is supported by the music of Dead Can Dance.
