What is Floating
Imagine yourself hovering effortlessly in a vast peaceful space...The worries of the day are very far away. Your mind is free to drift and tension slowly melts away. This is the beginning of floating. What happens next is uniquely individual and varies from a deep body/mind relaxation and rejuvenation to various stages of lucid dreaming or spiritual enlightenment.
While in the spa, you will be completely relaxed, suspended in a dense water solution of pure Epsom salt. This creates the effect of near zero gravity. Your body floats like a cork on the surface of the water. The air and water are maintained at skin temperature and the water is soft and silky to the touch
Typically, there is no sound or light, (though we can provide MP3 underwater music for an optional ambient soundscape and dimmed color light therapy that you can turn on/off as needed)
As you lay in absolute tranquility, every muscle is allowed to gradually relieve it’s functional tensions. Your entire body, including internal organs, muscles and bones will be, for the first time, completely rested and at ease.
Free from the functions of interpreting and processing light, sound, temperature, gravitational forces and other sensations, the brain is able to expand into areas ordinarily inaccessible except during deep meditation. Thus, a wonderfully freeing and opening process begins to take effect, stress is left behind, healing takes place more rapidly, learning and creativity is enhanced, sudden insights and inspirations may unfold and problems are more easily solved. Feelings of profound peace and joy are induced by the release of endorphins, the body’s natural mood elevators and pain reducers. A beautiful silence is experienced and a lightness of being that cannot be felt in any other way unfolds.
While floating, your skin will absorb all of the minerals found in the Dead Sea. Magnesium, potassium, sodium, calcium, bromide, iodine, sulfates and zinc are among the most predominate minerals found in the salts of the dead sea. These essential minerals naturally occur in our bodies but must be replenished, as they are lost throughout the day. The very best way to get these minerals into our bodies is to absorb them through the skin, and floating provides this medium. These minerals are known to treat., detoxify, and cleanse our bodies naturally, from the inside out.
After your float you’ll feel positively refreshed, rejuvenated and calm, a feeling that can last for days.
Why Should I Float?
A very effective stress reduction tool. Reduced sensory input (no light, no sound, no touch, no other people) combined with feeling of weightlessness and complete relaxation of every single muscle in your body allows the mind to drift into a peaceful and undisturbed state. People emerge from floating amazingly calm, grounded and happy. This state of being will linger for a week or longer.
"Floatation offers a relatively stress-free environment in which to escape temporarily from stressful external stimuli and free your system from its chronic state of arousal. This makes it a useful and life enhancing tool. But if that were all it did, floatation would be essentially a passive tool, and entering the spa would be little different from sitting quietly in a dark room. While the absence of stress is desirable in itself, it doesn't necessarily bring about the presence of its opposite, relaxation. Floatation goes far beyond the passive. Scientists have now proven that floating activates a physiological response that is parallel to, and as powerful as, the stressful
one of fight or flight. This response mobilizes the body's resources to bring about an active, alert, positive, and beneficial state of relaxation."
"Through all sorts of tests, including EMG (which measure muscle tension), EEG, blood pressure, and measurements of certain biochemicals, scientists have determined that the floatation spa can bring about a state of extraordinarily deep relaxation-probably deeper than is possible by any other means yet available except for certain drugs. This state of relaxation is in itself beneficial to health, since it allows the body to maintain its internal system of checks and balances, its homeostasis. That is, the body has its own highly effective methods of maintaining itself at an optimal level of well-being, and if allowed to operate freely, it will generally do so flawlessly. But certain mental attitudes can throw this delicate mechanism out of whack. Stress causes harm by its disruption of our natural biochemistry. For example, researchers have recently discovered that, under stress, Type A personalities secrete forty times as much cortisol and three times as much adrenaline as Type B men. Cortisol has been proven to suppress the immune system. Tests have shown that floating decreases cortisol. Excess adrenaline, and related biochemical’s such as noradrenalin and ACTH also cause our bodies to rev up in fight-or-flight response, and, ultimately, to wear out. Floating, through deep relaxation, lowers the levels of the harmful chemicals.
Deep relaxation is beneficial in another way. Because of what has been called the curare effect, and as explained by the Webber-Fechner Law, floating leads to increased sensory awareness; we simply feel our bodies better, more clearly, and as a result we are able to regulate them more effectively. As John V. Basmajian's experiments showed, we have the capacity to control the firing of a single motor neuron in the body, once we are made aware of that neuron.
Deep relaxation also leads to improved access to internal imagery. And awareness and control of mental imagery is the key to self regulation.