I hope you have been enjoying the techniques to enhance your float so far! This week we are going to start learning to move around the body.

This technique is adapted from Swami Rama, and Elmer and Alyce Green, and brings together breath awareness and breathing rhythm, as well as focused awareness of various areas of the body.

With each breath, count a number and direct your total attention to a particular spot in your body; feel as if your entire being is in that spot.

 With your first breath and on the count of one, place your attention in the centre of your forehead. With the second breath, count two and concentrate on your throat.

 With three, move to your right shoulder. Then, with succeeding counts, move down your right arm (elbow, wrist, each finger) and back up the arm to the throat. Do the same with your left arm.

 Next, move to your chest, abdomen, pelvis, then down your right leg (hip, knee, ankle, each toe), back up the leg, across the pelvis, and down your left leg. Return to your abdomen and move back upward, ending at the forehead again. Depending on your exact route, this should take about sixty breaths.

This exercise only takes a few minutes, and by the time you have returned to the centre of your forehead you will be deeply relaxed.  As your attention shifts its focus from place to place, you may notice particular feelings or body sensations. In your mind’s eye, or through another sense that you are well acquainted with, you may also notice particular colours, or imagery. For example, as you notice tension dissipate, you might feel or even “see” it dissolve, or notice a warm glow of white light or other images/feelings may accompany the release. 

HAPPY FLOATING!

Breath awareness is a highly effective method to free the body from the chatter of the conscious mind.

By focusing your attention on your breathing, the interference of thoughts, images, and words through the mind are quietened.

During the float, the senses of sight, sound and even feeling, have been restricted. Because your ears are submerged, your body’s internal sounds can take on new-found epic proportions: the rhythmic beat of your heart may sound, the awareness of your breath through your lungs, flowing in and out. Whilst these things may be distracting to some, tuning into the body itself and simply being aware of its inner workings can provide a way to lessen the flow of thoughts. Breath awareness can really enhance the relaxation aspect of the float, particularly as breath has the ability to control our nervous system.

Abdominal Breathing

Relaxing your abdominal muscles is vital to correctly breathing into your belly, allowing it to expand and rise. Many people maintain a constant tension in their abdominals, which restricts their ability to breathe fully. By allowing these muscles to relax, taking in deep expanding breaths, you are able to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which creates physiological changes that allow us to feel relaxed and at ease.

Instead of “chest breathing” (expand and contract the chest and ribcage), try and focus on expanding and contracting the diaphragm and belly. Imagine your stomach being a balloon that you need to fill with air, bringing the breath down deeply into your belly. Shallow “chest” breathing uses only the top part of the lungs, and can keep us in a state of arousal. The top part of our lungs contain receptors that correlate to the stress response of the sympathetic nervous system, and can create feelings of stress, including anxiety.

Nose Breathing

A very popular breathing practice among floaters, and a great practice outside the tank too, is to focus your attention on the breath as it passes in and out of the nose. Michael Hutchinson in his book of floating suggests the following technique: “Feel the air pass into your nostrils as you inhale; focus on the coolness it brings to the tip of your nose between your nostrils. As you exhale, notice the warmth at the same spot. If you wish, count your inhalations, numbering each from one to ten; when you reach ten begin with one again. Should thoughts come into your awareness, don’t resist them but allow them to pass, and then return all your attention to your breathing”.

So the next time you come in for your float try using the abdominal and nose breathing method and let us know how it felt for you after your session.

Once you have made it past your first 5 floats, you will probably have a reference point for deep relaxation, as well as having a pretty good idea of what floating is about.  

I would like to share with you to some techniques and ideas to help get you into that deep place a little more quickly so that you can get the most out of your floatation sessions!

Before I introduce you to these techniques for floating, I would like to share with you an interesting finding of a study of floaters compared with other people using deep relaxation and behaviour modification techniques. In this study, “all methods of mental or physical self-regulation or self-control work more powerfully and effectively in the floatation tank than in any other environment”. This includes techniques such as meditation, autogenics, progressive relaxation, autosuggestion, guided imagery, self-hypnosis, visualisation, self-healing, prayer as well as free-flowing imagery.

So, over the next few weeks, we will be sharing with you some different ways of enhancing your floatation experience through methods other experienced floaters have used to great effect.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsfeed to keep receiving updates!

Have you ever tried to go to sleep, knowing you had to be well rested for the next day, only to have a sleepless night?

Or how about when you have a word on the tip of your tongue, and can’t quite seem to access it, only to forget about trying, so you remember it later almost by accident?

How about those times when you try really hard to lose weight, only to find that you have either gained or stayed the same, only to give up focusing on the weight, and then it almost magically drops off you?

Let me introduce you to Aldous Huxley’s Law of Reversed Effort.

“There is a Law of Reversed Effort. The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed.

Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent Unknown Quantity may take hold.

We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind, in which understanding may come to us.

- Aldous Huxley -

So how might this relate to floatation therapy you might ask?

Well, imagine you are lying in the warm tank and it’s your first float. You don’t know what to expect. You don’t even know what you’re “meant” to be doing, or thinking about for that matter. So you start thinking about that. You try and focus on your breath, but your mind is still active. You try and meditate, but still you seem to be more focused on your thoughts than before. You try and think about how you WANT to be feeling, and try and elicit relaxation that way, but its not working. You may even start to feel a little frustrated at the fact that the things you are trying you don’t seem to be relaxing you, and you are still in dialogue with your mind. You start to accept the fact that you are simply not relaxing, and just think “Oh well, forget it. I’m just going to lie here.” And in that moment, something almost magic happens. You chose to let go of having any particular experience, and without actually trying, you seem to find yourself in the place you were trying to get to all along!

Michael Hutchinson mentions this phenomenon in his “Book of Floating” where he compares a first-time floaters experience as being similar to being hooked up to a biofeedback machine for the first time: “The harder they try to achieve the desired state, the more it escapes them, until they finally learn – almost by accident – to let go, and the state just happens”.

First-time floaters are encouraged to enter their floatation session with no goals, no strategies, no expectation of any particular outcome and to simply allow themselves to “just be”. According to John Turner, a neuroendocrinologist who has conducted research into floatation therapy on hundreds of subjects “We’ve found that novice floaters usually need to float four or five times before they really begin to get in touch”.

So, if its your first, second or even fifth session in the tank… just lie back, relax and allow your mind and subconscious to drift to wherever it wants to go, finding its own path into a deep relaxation.

Stay tuned for our upcoming series of tips and ideas for enhancing your floatation experience!