Floating like a space otter

Floating. How much I love it. You step inside the float room and the warmth rises up to welcome you.  You close the door behind you, kneel down as if in prayer and turn, twist, lie back and let the water hold you. You have to let go, to trust entirely – it never lets you down. Turn off the lights and there you are, floating in absolute darkness, absolute silence.

Every float is different – every single one. Sometimes I lose all sense of where and when I am, who or why I am – I am cast adrift in time and space and it is just so blissful that it hurts to come back to here and now.

Sometimes I tumble down rabbit holes into other worlds and find healing or learning, shaman-style. Sometimes I feel an opening in my perception, as if I were seeing with different senses – and then I watch entranced by moving mandalas, sinuous circling spiraling labyrinths, fractal kaleidoscopes.

Today, however, my mind was busy. No matter how much I yearned for meditation, my thoughts kept spinning around, whirling mind games, playing tag, racing after one another, catching, clasping and then splintering off in different directions.
Then came the electric blue, that purest of colours, so lightning-bright it makes you gasp. It’s a colour that seems to have meaning, to hold some truth I can’t quite grasp.

Sea otters floated in my head, that sweetest of images, holding paws while they sleep, so they cannot lose one another on the swirling tides of the ocean. I imagined myself an otter then – a space otter, spinning slowly through galaxies, velvet-caressed by darkness, my arms outstretched, my fingers seeking…

 

I float at the Hands On clinic in Braunton, Devon.  If you want to read the nitty-gritty on floatation this page has all the (sensible) information you need.

Do try it.  Please.  It is magic.

 

Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

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