Read this review of one of La Casa’s satisfied clients about his first floatation experience:
A Floatation Experience.
By Lampoet516
Originally posted at Lampoetry.com
Setting aside all such questions of tank design, my initial adventure floating in brine was a wonderful experience. Other than a tumble in bed with a loved one, it’s hard to imagine a more pleasurable way to spend an hour – you will be liberated from the laws of gravity and cut adrift in the void right here in midtown Manhattan, all for the reasonable price of just $80 an hour. It’s an incredible deal — to be able to expand the range of your sense perception so far so fast and for such a reasonable hourly rate. Not only that but it’s completely legal.
Greg, who is the manager/caretaker of the tank at La Casa, explained to me that floatation is particularly well suited for those of us who meditate, because an hour of lying suspended in brine, deprived of sight and sound, opens up access to our interiority in ways that otherwise might take years to accomplish sitting cross-legged on the mat. Put it this way: by the end of my first hour, I had already sloughed off my skin and was just getting ready to ascend a shimmering column of light. Unfortunately before I could begin the ascent, there was a light tap on the door announcing that my hour was up.
I realize the better practice among spiritually minded folks is to be discrete when it comes to discussing personal Enlightenment. It can be irksome, to say the least, to hear some social media savvy sadhu blather on and on about their voyage of inner discovery. But please remember, this is floatation I’m talking about, not samadhi – it’s a straight up commercial transaction that’s open to any of us with sufficient cash or credit. So I hope you won’t mind if I provide a slightly more detailed description of what I saw and felt lying there in the murk.
As it turns out, one of the most striking aspects of floatation is the panorama it provides of darkness itself. Simply being in a blackout chamber ushers us into this landscape of vast tranquility – presenting a vista of emptiness that is as majestic and sweeping as an Ansel Adams photograph. Opening and closing your eyes makes no difference. Between the inner and outer landscape there appears not a hair’s breadth of difference as you find yourself relaxing into near perfect equilibrium. For those of us who often struggle to find balance when we meditate, this gift of darkness is a powerful discovery and a boon in itself.
And floatation supercharges the experience. There is really no physical sensation quite like it that I know of. It’s more peaceful and relaxing than sleep as I soon found myself breathing with extraordinary depth. You are awake and yet liberated from gravity and suspended from the conventions of every day existence in Cartesian space. But for the fact of my steady deep breathing, it reminded me of my earliest days, that is of life in the womb, except a floatation tank is not nearly so cramped or confining as the last few months in utero, when, at least to the best of my recollection, one always ended up feeling like a contortionist. Instead, floating makes you feel loose limbed, so much so your limbs drift apart and begin to detach from your torso. As you lie there suspended in darkness, it feels far too spacious to be womb-like; or rather it’s more like entering the womb of space-time itself.
Of course, all too soon the tap comes on the door announcing bath time is over. Yet as you emerge from the tank and gradually re-acclimate yourself to everyday reality, this wonderful sense of deep relaxation persists. I can’t promise that you will have attained the vertical lift of Steph Curry but in the case of someone far less nimble (such as myself) I nonetheless found myself continuing to float as I reclaimed the streets of midtown. Not unlike a figure in a Chagall painting, there I was buoyant and aloft, if not soaring, through the canyons of Manhattan, my limbs only tenuously attached. This is what it means to float. I hope you can find a tank nearby and discover the pleasures for yourself.