By Glenn Perry
The experience of floating in quiet darkness in a floatation tank produces several benefits, including reducing anxiety, increasing creativity, and spurring deep relaxation and restoration, research shows.
Neuroscientist Dr. John Lilly created the first tank in 1954 at the National Institutes of Mental Health Lab in Bethesda, Md., to probe the frontiers of human consciousness. In 1972, Glenn and his wife Lee worked with Lilly to perfect the floatation tank, founding Samadhi Tank Co. and the commercial float tank industry.
Floatation tanks are soundproof, lightproof enclosures with less than one foot of water heated to skin temperature. Epsom salt dissolved in the water allows a person to float effortlessly in what feels like zero gravity.
”The tank eliminates distractions including sound, light and the experience of gravity,” Glenn says. “This enables us to focus our mental energy intentionally or simply allow for drifting and exploration – an ultimate break from everything.”
When the brain isn’t distracted by sensory overload (smartphones, laptops, email, newsfeed, TV, traffic, etc.), it becomes free to enter expanded states of consciousness. Researchers at Laureate Institute for Brain Research (LIBR) in Tulsa, Oklahoma, have documented a number of benefits, including:
Huge reductions in stress and short-term anxiety.
A deeply relaxed meditative state.
Changes in brain networks that allow people to learn new associations between sensations such as breathing and heartbeat and relaxation.
Experiences vary from person to person, and each float produces a different experience. In their new book, “Floating in Quiet Darkness,” Glenn and Lee Perry explain how floating helps people reboot the brain, access a sense of deep calm and reconnect with stillness and creativity.
I open the door of the Samadhi floatation tank. I step in, kneel in the solution, reach my left arm behind me and roll back on my rear, and bob to the surface in the salt solution. This floatation tank is an enclosure a little larger around than a twin-sized bed and chest high. It contains 10″ of water and hundreds of pounds of Epsom salt. When you get in and lie face up, it pushes you to the surface, so you float like a cork, weightless like an astronaut floating in space. It has a door you can leave open or get rid of all distractions of noise and light; you can close the door. It is skin temperature, so you are neither hot nor cold.
Many people have fears before trying something new, but here you are in control and can get in and out whenever you want and use it in whatever way is comfortable for you, with the door open, towel in the door, or closed.
It is pleasantly cool. I like it that way. I assess my mental and physical states and find nothing unusual.
Very soon, my mind goes to some garden projects. During the previous two days of this 5-day program of floating up to 2 hours a day, I had worked out what to plant, where, and when. Now I am working on the details of a new irrigation system. With an occasional distracting thought about a tank design question, which I shelve, I work out the watering system.
Then I address the pressing design question that has been wanting to grab my attention. I am working on designing a new tank model, which will be our best yet. I need to work out how to handle controlling a function the floater needs to be able to manipulate while floating. I define what I want the requirements to be. I do not need the answer now but only to define exactly what the problem is. I come up with all the requirements for the problem; I have developed the habit of asking the Universe to assist in helping me solve a specific or multiple problems. I lay out what I want and what I need and then let time go by. After I have completed that design question, I look around for what to handle next.
Without floating, these problems would likely remain part of the incessant mental chatter we all experience. This chatter consists of all sorts of things; unprocessed events from the past, concerns about the future, unresolved project actions like what I have just been working on, and uncompleted aspects of relationships. Often the first thing that comes up when we float is thinking about these things.
When the mental chatter subsides, the number of thoughts reduces significantly. I experience space. I move out of my mind into an altered state. This seems to be where my creativity comes from.
I notice my breathing and put my focus there. After 15 to 20 minutes, I noticed two recurring areas of discomfort: in my left shoulder and along one side of my bicep. I focus on both of them, noting the exact sensation and where it is. After a while, the pain subsides. I move to a body position where the discomforts disappear. There is usually a position I can find that offers relief. Often if I wait a while and then go back to the previous painful position, the pain has amazingly disappeared.
Each day the discomfort of my shoulder and arm is less than the day before, and meditating on pain helps me develop better concentration, so distractions influence me less.
I get an urge to get out. I think, “Can I stay a little longer?” Over the next 35 minutes, I do this three times, and the fourth time I get out. On this float, as I am scooting forward to the front of the tank and rolling onto my right side to sit up, the answer to the design problem pops up. Sometimes it happens in the shower or in another float, or during the day. It is seldom that I don’t receive an answer. Often if an answer doesn’t come, I have to change the question because I have been working on the wrong question.
Centers are operating where people can experience floating. Most provide single occasional floats of 1 to 1-1/2 hours. The advantage of sequential daily floats is that there is a cumulative effect of doing it every day with extending the floats to 2-3 hours; the floater is able to access an altered state that is fleeting with occasional shorter floats. Longer floats and even sequential shorter floats increase the chances the floater will experience this altered state and that it will stay with them a while.
This altered state has many wonderful benefits. It is one meditator’s work to get to and often do when they make a five-day retreat with frequent meditations each day. In fact, meditators generally find it is so much easier doing while floating partly because, for most people, it is the most comfortable they have ever been, and there is a total lack of distractions.
Lots of us have problems that need solving. When we are solving problems, generally, we do not think outside the box. We limit ourselves to what we are familiar with. When we are in this altered state, we are able to think outside the box. For creative problem solvers, it is an enormous asset to be able to do that. One floater who recently did this program said this ability to think outside the box lasted for several days after he had ended the program. Additionally, he said he could sense what was going on with people far more clearly than he usually could. It was all so important for his work that he is planning on doing this program once a month.
Another floater who has done this for years attributes long floats to connect him to his real purpose in life and allow him to accomplish it better. He thought these benefits were so valuable he has since floated 2-4 hours almost every day.
Important and useful to know and covered in our new book, Floating in Quiet Darkness, is that we can clear old mental, emotional and physical traumas that interfere with our current performance in this altered state. I think the most important result of this program is that it allows us to fall in love. What do we fall in love with? Everything, the whole Universe. What could be better? Perhaps even better is that being in this state is so much fun, like stepping into the shoes of your favorite actor.
And when I get out of the tank, I am walking more gently on the earth, I am a little kinder to my fellow humans, and I appreciate everyone a little more. Everything is right with the world. I feel a deep, deep sense of inner peace like never before. And the influences of the outer world don’t affect me.
