Creating Profound Change Through Floating and Inner Awareness

As we enter Spring, it's is a great time to be clearing out our 'stuff'. Whether that's clearing your home of unneeded clutter or sifting through the unconscious programs of the mind that no longer serve us, the cycles of nature can be a powerful tool to help us to come into alignment within our lives. Another powerful tool in that journey is floating.

From the day we are born, we are assigned labels - name, gender, weight - and so our programming begins. From how you should think, feel, who you should like, how you should react. Fast forward to adulthood and we are fed narratives by the media, big corporations and politicians. Our thoughts shape our reality and when our thoughts are in fact an expression of someone else's directive of how they think you should operate in the world, things get messy. In response to traumas, we create coping mechanisms which can easily slip into being our default reactions. We are habitual animals, and our habits can quickly become our personalities. When we stop questioning our habits, we lose choice in how we move through the world. And the version of the world that we see becomes fixed.

Floating offers a space where you can begin to notice and understand your patterns. Allowing you space to release unwanted behaviours and bring in new perspectives and choices, moving into a flow of responding rather than reacting. John C Lily, the inventor of floats tanks, wrote an entire book on this subject (Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer). He theorised that by gaining an understanding of our own programming and picking them apart, we are able to rewrite our programs in a way in which we choose. The float tank is the perfect environment for this.

The float tank is a space of awareness and presence. When we remove the distractions and noise that constantly pull our attention, we train a stronger connection between the mind and your internal world. Presence is, of course, a practice and we can't expect to excel at it immediately. You can't buy presence, you have to work at it. But the more time we spend in spaces that promote it, the more awareness filters through to the rest of your life. That could be through floating. meditation, yoga, breathwork, journaling etc.

I've noticed some people come floating expecting a profound epiphany or realisation. And for some, that certainly does happen. But as with all of life, the peak experiences are a lovely cherry on top, but it's in the subtleties of life that the real magic thrives. Maybe you notice a little tension in a certain part of the body, maybe you notice a particular thought. Where it can be easy to get frustrated or feel like you're not floating 'right', pay attention to the quiet signs and open up to following these signals to the root instead of shutting them down. There is currently a lot of emphasis around peak experiences in many spiritual circles, but a peak without integration is really just a form of bypassing the real work.

Life is a mirror. When we change our perspectives, the world around us reflects back. I encourage you this Spring to consider your own story. Whilst we don't necessarily get to choose our upbringing or our traumas, we have a choice in how we let them impact us. The ego loves to cling to suffering, so change can feel extremely unsafe and even impossible. But when we acknowledge this choice as a possibility, you lead yourself from a victim of your circumstances into a creator of your reality. If you truly want to let go, there's a whole world on the other side of that choice.

'We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are' Anaïs Nin