Float Sixty South Loop is coming in late Spring 2018.
Tim Smith interviews Gloria Morris on his Mouth-to-Mouth with Time Podcast. They cover several topics and have a great conversation on how Float Sixty came to be and the power of floating.
Learn more about pregnancy and float therapy. Kirsten and Lena run both a birth center and float center up in Alaska. They use floating to help their clients through their pregnancies with great results. Kirsten and Lena talk about the benefits floating can have for pregnant women, and discuss what risks may be associated with floating while pregnant.
David Stansberry wrote a compelling article on the impact of floating for people suffering from fibromyalgia.
Here is an excerpt - click the link for the full article: “Fibromyalgia is a pain condition that affects between 2 and 10% of the population in the U.S. It generally affects more women than men at a ratio of 9:1. One way to treat not only the fibromyalgia pain, but also the stress and anxiety that may accompany it is trying float tanks for fibromyalgia. “
Cover of Where Chicago June Issue
Float Sixty featured on Page 21 -
Float Sixty was featured this week in the Chicago Sun Times lifestyle magazine SPLASH: http://splash.suntimes.com/2016/04/14/6-ways-to-shape-up-for-spring
Author Amber Gibson highlights Six Ways to Shape Up for Spring:
"Look and feel like a million bucks — for much less — this spring with a little help from theselocal spots"
Printed Version
This month's cover is graced with the beautiful Sarah Wood and her courageous story of surviving Breast Cancer:
Sarah Wood, wife of Chicago Cubs Kerry Wood
Float Sixty billed as "The Healing Waters"
By Kyle Dowling: Kyle Dowling is a writer based in New York City. His work has also appeared in Playboy, COED Magazine, Psychology Tomorrow, and The Smoking Jacket, among others.
As it gets harder to live in the moment, without distraction, some swear by a forced shutdown.
It's an environment entirely stripped of stimuli. Even gravity feels nonexistent, inside a tank filled with nearly a foot of water and just about 800 pounds of Epsom salt. Like the Dead Sea. You climb inside and lie floating in the darkness.
To experience complete sensory deprivation is, ideally, to delve into one's psyche. It forces contemplation of facets of life, that -- similar to less "heavy" types of meditation -- is meant to leave us healthier and happier. The theory is that removing yourself from all external stimulation allows your mind to suddenly dial down the RPMs, resulting in heightened in-the-moment awareness, creativity, and clarity.
Comedian and Fear Factor host Joe Rogan has been effusive in his praise of the tank. "I think it's one of the most incredible pieces of equipment for self-help and introspective thought that you could ever find," he told me. "It's been one of the most important tools for me in personal growth for understanding myself, how I am, and what effect I do have on other people."
Rogan got into sensory deprivation in hopes of achieving psychedelic experiences without taking actual drugs. He's attained that, and, in the process, gained innumerable reasons to keep floating. "People don't realize how much everything is a distraction," he says.
The experience in the tank, though, can be "brutal and unflinching in its portrayal of you and your reality," said Rogan. "That's a terrifying thing to a lot of people -- the fact that you're alone with your unconscious thoughts, with everything that's truly troubling you. It's the only time that you are untethered from your body."
He's not alone in describing that untethered feeling as a potentially intense emotional experience. Your mind begins to run rampant. With nowhere else for thoughts to go, whatever problems, worries, or guilt sits in the back of your brain has to be confronted. As it's been put before, inside that tank, you have to face yourself.
"It can be uncomfortable in the sense that you really can't run away from any of the things that are subconsciously troubling you, but I love that," Rogan said. "I'm not a big fan of running away from reality. I like handling all of the issues that bother me in order to go through life truly happy. There's a lot of people out there with ghosts, a lot of demons haunting their mind. In my opinion, this is your chance to face it head on and try to come up with a better path."
But a fear of facing oneself shouldn't be a deterrent to any type of therapy. Sensory deprivation has become a popular exercise throughout the world, with validated positive results that extend into everyday life. Namely stress and anxiety reduction, but also as an adjunct for chronic physical pain.
Dr. Darren Weissman, a holistic physician who has floated weekly since 1986, explains, "I really feel that it's a result of floating and getting myself out of the way that I saw how all these multiple disciplines that activate the healing potentials of the body actually work together."
Floating isn't just about facing the negative aspects of life. It's also about being more aware of, and appreciating the good. Letting the little, good moments simmer -- instead of just moving to the next thing -- helps them feel (and actually become) more real.
As Dr. Weissman says, it "allows us to recognize our body's potentials. It opens us to a whole different level of awareness and of who we are. We start to notice things. It awakens consciousness."
Matt Frederickson, an avid user of floatation tanks, says, "Since I started doing it, I've become more calm, especially in my work life." A long-time sufferer of chronic neck, head, and back pain, Frederickson took his first float after hearing Joe Rogan's praise of the physical benefits of the isolation tank on Marc Maron's WTF podcast. "I thought it sounded interesting because I personally suffer from a lot of chronic pain, so that's what initially drew me to it."
Frederickson tried therapies for his chronic pain, a lot of which worked a little, but he's found that no other practice produces results as consistently effective as the isolation tank. But, like Rogan, he gets more out of it than he initially sought. "I still use it mainly for the pain," he says. "It really helps lessen that, but I think the secondary benefit, for me, would be the anxiety that's tied to the pain."
"I think people are very mentally attached to certain things and certain ways of living," Frederickson told me. "I work in the music industry, so I attend a lot of shows. I'm constantly seeing people on their phones or giving into different distractions at these concerts. They don't see there's a way out of that, to be in that present moment."
While generally praised by users, sensory deprivation is met with some mainstream hesitation. Whether that stems from the germ theory -- which Dr. Weissman assured me shouldn't be a worry -- claustrophobia, or even a fear of experiencing thoughts that might make us question ourselves, the floatation tank is a tool that waits patiently for those willing to give it a shot.
Most who've experienced isolation tanks admit that the idea of "letting go" and allowing your mind to relax takes time. Even Rogan admits that floating took some getting used to. "I remember thinking, this is something I'll have to get comfortable with." But with practice comes success.
Ultimately the tank can create an optimal environment, but once inside the onus remains on the person as to where they go.
Originally published in The Atlantic:
It hadn’t really occurred to me to be afraid of floating in a pitch-dark, top-sealed tank until a braver and better-adjusted friend said that she’d always felt a secret hankering to try it but was scared. “Scared of what?” I asked, although by then my mind was running to extremes: the heavy air, the terror of enclosure, the risk of falling asleep and inhaling water. I envisioned myself hauled from the tank like Jason Bourne out of the Mediterranean, technically alive but lacking memories of life. (“I have professional skills I do not understand!” I’d shout. “I can sit at a desk for an extremely long time!”) Floating, known as Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST), promises many lifestyle benefits, including lasting calm, heightened creative thought, and greater suppleness of skin. As the hour of my first immersion neared, though, I began to wonder whether I might find myself calmer in a place that did not mimic the exact experience of death.
Sensory-deprivation tanks, once popular with stoners, scientific geniuses, and the sorts of people who prefer to polish their own chakra crystals, are reentering our culture in more mainstream therapeutic forms. It is possible now to go lie in one after lunch, much as you might visit a spa—except that tanks, unlike spas, are intended not only to help the body but to serve the mind. A REST tank is filled with about ten inches of water, into which a thousand pounds of Epsom salts have been dissolved. This solution, nearly saturated, is so buoyant that one can’t notfloat in it, even with effort. And the water is exactly at body temperature, obscuring the normal sensation of having discrete limbs in space; the floater’s ears sink just below the water line, leaving only two senses—smell and taste—untouched. Most people have not spent time without sight, sound, and feeling since leaving the womb. A good part of the intrigue of floatation tanks surrounds the question of the brain’s response in such bizarre conditions.
I hoped to try it without venturing too far from home, literally or figuratively. I’d been ill at ease of late—grumpy, impatient, exasperated with work—but a brand-new, upscale floatation center, Lift / Next Level Floats, had just opened in New York, apparently to cater to people as circumspect and world-weary as I. It sounded promising. One afternoon, after some mind-numbing phone calls, I went to Lift, near downtown Brooklyn, for my soak. The founders, Gina Antioco andDavid Leventhal, met me in their light-filled, loft-like lounge. They offered tea.
“We wanted to create an environment that had mass appeal,” Antioco, who wore shorts and a T-shirt, explained. She used to be a catering manager who suffered from insomnia; she tried sensory-deprivation floating as a solution. At a floating conference in Portland, in 2013, she met Leventhal, a wiry middle-aged man with Clubmaster glasses. For years, he’d been a partner at a law firm. Then he decided that he wanted to float. “The industry has just had an amazing resurgence,” Leventhal said. “A lot of centers in the past have bootstrapped themselves—they’re scrappy and ingenious.” In Lift, which has so far floated some eight hundred New Yorkers, they were aiming to catch the upper mainstream of the market—people who might have qualms about floating in a stranger’s apartment, which is traditionally how many centers ran—and to create a business that could be expanded elsewhere if its popularity grew.
Today, the science of floatation tanks is mostly honorable yet hazy. Their invention is attributed to John C. Lilly, the postwar researcher best known for his important but nutty research on dolphins. (Lilly, a neuroscientist, became convinced that the dolphin brain represented a supreme intelligence that humans could employ to solve a range of problems; he constructed cohabitation quarters—water-filled living rooms, basically—so that he and colleagues could live with the animals and cultivate what he hoped would become a common language.) Lilly was working for the National Institute of Mental Health when he invented floatation tanks, in the fifties, ostensibly with the goal of isolating the brain from normal perceptual experience. Later, in the sixties and seventies, he started experimenting with sensory deprivation under the effects of LSD and ketamine.
Floatation tanks fell out of fashion suddenly after the eighties—a casualty, according to Leventhal, of AIDS panic, since the tanks scared people unsure of how the illness spread. In recent years, they have regained a following, and, at the moment, the case for certain benefits is compelling. Under examination, floatation therapy has turned up encouraging results in reducing blood pressure and cortisol levels, reducing blood lactate levels after intense exercise, and other physiological improvements. It’s been shown to help manage anxiety, and it appears to be useful in dealing with addiction (although their waterless cousins, sensory-deprivation chambers, have seemed slightly more effective). One study found that competitive archers who floated for forty-five minutes before shooting arrows generally shot those arrows better than archers who did not.
I was personally interested in weirder stuff. Richard Feynman, the quantum physicist known for his lucid mind and zesty style, once met John Lilly after a lecture and began using tanks; in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he describes undergoing about a dozen long floats. For the first two, he felt nothing much. From the third on, though, he had hallucinations. “I had many types of out-of-the-body experiences,” he wrote. “One time, for example, I could ‘see’ the back of my head, with my hands resting against it. When I moved my fingers, I saw them move, but between the fingers and the thumb I saw the blue sky. Of course that wasn’t right; it was a hallucination. But the point is that as I moved my fingers, their movement was exactly consistent with the motion that I was imagining that I was seeing.”
Antioco and Leventhal said that their clients also had “experiences” in the tank, though they were vague on what the range of those experiences could be. Some people had become intensely aware of their heartbeats. A few felt odd aches in their bodies—points of tension that they didn’t realize they had. Some effects had been stranger. “After sixty minutes in the tank, someone came out, and I asked him how it was. He couldn’t talk, but he was all smiles. I asked him again and he still couldn’t talk, but he had this infectious, giddy laugh,” Leventhal said.
Their spa contains two kinds of tanks: One is basically a high-ceilinged, vault-like room with water in the bottom. This is the tank recommended for people with fears of claustrophobia. The other is a more traditional model, the Evolution Float Pod. It has a lid. Leventhal mentioned that the New England Patriots had bought two such tanks for their locker room, which assuaged some of my fears: If a linebacker could fit comfortably in the pod, I thought, I probably could as well. I wanted the “authentic” tank experience, too—the one that Lilly and Feynman had undergone.
I shared my fears of falling asleep and drowning. Antioco and Leventhal told me that this would be virtually impossible. The water is shallow and so salty that it stings the eyes, they said; if I fell asleep and rolled, I would immediately be stunned awake by the solution. In the history of floatation, they told me, there had been only one drowning in the tank—and that was of somebody who had physically paralyzed himself with ketamine. “Experiment with different body positions,” Leventhal told me. “My favorite is to put my arms above or even behind my head.” I followed him into my small, private floatation room, lined with tile. He showed me around, wished me luck, and shut the door, leaving me alone to soak.
The floatation tank appeared more welcoming than I’d expected. It was white and sleek, and it gaped amiably, like a big clam. Far from being sepulchral, it was huge—almost the width of my arm span, I guessed—and comfortably rounded. The lid domed up to make quite a lot of head space: I am six feet tall, but I discovered I could comfortably sit up in the tank when it was closed. As I showered, the water in the tank turned oscillating colors, like the backsplash in a European disco. I was scheduled for an hour—a long time for a bath, maybe, but a short time by the standards of a REST tank, where the temperature holds steady and the salt means that your skin won’t prune. Antioco told me that, sometime this fall, she plans to do an all-night float.
I got in. On Leventhal’s advice, I’d taken a small face towel in with me, to keep the salty water from dripping into my eyes when I sat up, and I hung it on the hinge joint of the lid. I put in the earplugs that Lift provides—not required, but swimmer’s ear is common—and shut the lid over me. I hit a button to begin, and lay back in the water. Slowly, the colored lights dimmed, and then the lights in the room, visible through the hinge of the lid, dimmed, too. It was pitch dark.
For three or four minutes, I had a vague feeling of panic. I was not afraid of anything much, and yet floating in the dark was so disorienting that I felt the need to reassure myself by touch. I felt the floor of the tank, only a few inches below; from time to time I’d reach out sideways and grab hold of the lid hinge. I’d begun to drift. Occasionally, I bumped a wall. Ethnic-sounding flute music had started playing; for a moment it was welcome, as another orienting detail, but eventually I groped for the big rubber button that would turn it off. Now it was quiet, too.
Many people are afraid of lulls in conversation; other people are afraid of silences in their own brains. As my body fell into a physical calm, my mind began to behave like a hammy actor in an empty theater. I did not hear my heartbeat, as those other people had. Was that a problem? my mind wondered. Should I hear it? Was I dying? Then there was the ache in my left shoulder. What was that about? And did I still feel my hands? I did. Was that OK? Finally, how high was the waterline on my cheeks, really? Should I be worrying about it trickling into my eyes?
So far, I did not feel particularly calm.
When I’d figured out my body, more or less, I found myself indulging in the most egregious of writerly tics: I started writing sentences in the dark. How would I describe this experience? my mind wondered. Although I wasn’t having any real hallucinations, I was seeing ghostly drifting geometric forms against the dark before me. In the outer fields of my vision I saw ripples—very faint, and indigo in hue, as if my brain were trying to make some visual image to match my sensory perceptions. I began to think of how I might describe these faint illusions. Most of all, they put me in mind of the Northern Lights, which I had seen once standing on a hill, in downtown Reykjavík, in late September. “Faint and pale and flickering, just like the Northern Lights at midnight”—that was the right phrase, I thought. The description was precise, and the phonetic voice-leading was musical, the A sound carrying from faint to pale, which broke the F alliteration just enough, and then the strong through-tone of like, lights, midnight . . .
I shook myself out of this pointless reverie—the normal drone of creative thought that I had wanted to escape. I began trying to think about my wrists. I could no longer feel the boundaries of my arms or hands, but I could feel my wrists, which floated at my sides. They seemed bizarrely heavy. Why? I thought of Leventhal, and tried putting my arms above my head.
I noticed that I hadn’t lost my sense of smell—far from it. For cleanliness, the water in the tank is micro-filtered between uses and treated with bromine. To distract myself from the chemical scent, I tried an exercise that Feynman had described. “I tried to think of very early memories. I kept saying to myself, ‘It’s gotta be earlier; it’s gotta be earlier’—I was never satisfied that the memories were early enough,” he wrote.
I acquired language young, and can normally recall—or seem to recall—moments and dialogue almost back to the time of my first words. What surprised me when I tried Feynman’s exercise, though, was the vividness with which memories came in the tank. Faint snapshot-like images (that blue door in a motel in Carmel or Monterey, where my grandparents had made peach Jell-O in a hurry using ice; the old back door into the yard of my parents’ house, before it was remodeled decades ago), were so clear now I could almost have written whole paragraphs describing them. Little licks of hazily remembered dialogue seemed to crystalize into full scenes. I can’t say that I remembered more, but I remembered everything much better. It was as if I had a telescope back into my own history, and the normal fuzzy light pollution of the atmosphere, the distractions of time and the moment, had been blocked, leaving the image sharp and pure. Like Feynman, I kept willing myself backward—further, deeper. I was surprised how immediate it seemed.
Suddenly, an electronic voice began to speak, and the lights in the tank came up. I blinked, bleary; an hour had apparently passed, though it had not seemed long enough at all. I got out, showered with fragrant soap and vinegar, to help dissolve the crystalizing salt, and wandered out into the hallway, which was bright with daylight. I had a couple more calls to take that afternoon, and chores to run, but they no longer felt as tedious. The immersion had done what I had hoped: I’d found a way of rediscovering my mind.
