In this ongoing series, Pulse contributor Steve Morley explores the effects of sensory deprivation and reports on his experiences using the flotation tanks and other therapeutic resources at Murfreesboro’s Float Alchemy. (Previous installments can be found at boropulse.com/floativation).
As with anything you do on a repeated basis, you learn more about it, and get more comfortable with it (or you decide hey, this isn’t working for me, and I’m gonna bag it). I’ve certainly acquired a comfortable familiarity since beginning to visit Murfreesboro’s Float Alchemy every two to three weeks for an hour-long float session.
Happily, I’ve finally learned how to exit the tank without allowing salt water to drip from my hands, arms or hair into my eyes. Now I just take the small towel provided near the tank and slap it onto my skull, pushing back my wet hair as I prepare to stand and step out of the tank. Within seconds I’m carefully showering off the salt, and I’m out of the ocular caution zone. (Still, if I should slip up, there’s always that friendly little spray bottle of pure water nearby.)
One of the main changes I’ve made while in the tank is to stop using the small, Frisbee-like pillow provided. This foam ring is optional, because your head, like the rest of you, is going to float no matter what when resting atop water containing hundreds of pounds of epsom salts. The pillow can provide a sense of comfort for those who don’t like for their head to dip down too far into the water, though it may be more natural to let the head fall back. This was suggested to me a while back by local physical therapist Dr. Jen Dickens Massie.
So, as I’ve acquired the experience of an intermediate-to-advanced floater, I’ve certainly refined my routine and increased my comfort level. Conversely, though, that comfort has given me opportunities to notice areas in which I’m not completely comfortable. Now, that’s not the tank’s fault. As best I can tell, those 60 minutes of stillness (not a typical waking experience for me) create a state of inner quiet that allow me to notice things about my physiology I might be too distracted to notice otherwise.
Being a person whose breathing can often be shallow and not smoothly regulated, I attempt to focus on calm, deep breathing while in the tank. After my first few floats, I began to become aware of little irregularities. First, I noticed myself trying to suck air up into my chest from my diaphragm. Now, you can get a breath that way, but it puffs your chest out, feels tight, and requires more effort than necessary. It’s just not a calm feeling—and breathing, done well, should indeed feel calm, mainly involving movement in the area below the rib cage upon each inhalation.
On subsequent floats, now pillow-free with my head resting back in the water, this positioning led to another new realization in regard to breathing. Just as I would relax enough to slip into a pre-sleep state, a delayed breath would suddenly release from beneath my rib cage, pushing a puff of air and a drop or two of saliva forward with just enough force to bring me to full consciousness. Odd, I thought. It was like the breath had become stuck after inhaling, and I didn’t actually exhale until the air inside me insisted on making a beeline for the Nostril Expressway.
Let me emphasize that floating doesn’t necessarily have to prompt a personal expedition into one’s deep, distant past—you can float simply for a recreational and relaxing experience, for relief from physical pain, or even to ease the burden of carrying a baby during the latter months of pregnancy (and we’ll get into that next month). But my goals when I began floating were to see if it could help me foster greater inner calm, decrease physical tension and patterns of rigid movement, and aid me in learning to breathe more deeply and steadily.
Also, I wanted to see what it would feel like to float, to release my ongoing, inherent physical tension. As I’ve previously mentioned, I was born to a mother who had a low level of amniotic fluid, and as an adult I’d pondered whether a lack of buoyancy in the womb might be the reason I don’t know how to swim or float. My knotty muscles and I sink like a Breeko block.
There are few statistics on what happens to wee kiddos-en-route who gestate in the shallow end of the pool, but I’m beginning to understand that some of my physical quirks and particulars could be related to my formative experience in a womb that didn’t provide the cushioning and developmental benefits that a normal supply of amniotic fluid would permit.
My head swimming with thoughts about the birth experience and how it might affect a person well into adulthood, I reached out to locally based doula and birth educator Amanda Johnson of Gentle Voice Prenatal Support. While she was quick to clarify that her training does not include medical credentials, she was just as quick to demonstrate her considerable knowledge regarding the process of childbirth. I’m grateful that Johnson was willing to dive into the deep end with me and explore the possibility that my mother’s deficit of amniotic fluid may be related to the various difficulties I have encountered with tension, physical bearing, breathing, and more.
In short order, she presented some information that supported my suspicions, starting with the fact that amniotic fluid teaches babies how to breathe. “[The lack of fluid] could affect the way your lungs take in oxygen,” Johnson explained, “because all of that is learned from the amniotic fluid, and practicing with it in the womb.”
Johnson speculated that my lack of physical ease could perhaps hark back to an uncomfortable womb experience. “Our entire lives are shaped by our experiences. And the womb and amniotic fluid our are first homes,” Johnson affirmed. “If we don’t feel secure there—I am not sure how a baby feels being in too little fluid—there could be a connection to these issues as well.”
As I described my mental image of tumbling around inside Mom’s low-fluid womb, a bit like riding in the back of a pickup truck, Johnson laughed but quickly added, “That would be . . . not fun! It’s not like the uterus is a hard environment—it’s soft, pliable, it’s a muscle—but there’s going to be even more tumbling. The amniotic fluid is just a cushion . . . I don’t want to imagine a baby bouncing around without much fluid in there,” she admitted. “It seems very uncomfortable to me, just thinking about it.”
A strong believer in the benefits of floating, Johnson agreed that it’s possible I could find a degree of healing and restoration from the rough ride I endured in utero by using a float tank as one of my tools. Please check back for more of my conversation with Amanda Johnson and the next chapter of my therapeutic journey at Float Alchemy.
Until then, stay tuned, Murfreesboro, and may the freedom of the float be with you.
