#Float therapy professional

This solution, nearly saturated, is so buoyant that one can’t not float in it, even with effort. A REST tank is filled with about ten inches of water, into which a thousand pounds of Epsom salts have been dissolved. It is possible now to go lie in one after lunch, much as you might visit a spa-except that tanks, unlike spas, are intended not only to help the body but to serve the mind. Sensory-deprivation tanks, once popular with stoners, scientific geniuses, and the sorts of people who prefer to polish their own chakra crystals, are reentering our culture in more mainstream therapeutic forms. As the hour of my first immersion neared, though, I began to wonder whether I might find myself calmer in a place that did not mimic the exact experience of death.

“I can sit at a desk for an extremely long time!”) Floating, known as Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST), promises many lifestyle benefits, including lasting calm, heightened creative thought, and greater suppleness of skin.

#Float therapy professional

(“I have professional skills I do not understand!” I’d shout. I envisioned myself hauled from the tank like Jason Bourne out of the Mediterranean, technically alive but lacking memories of life. “Scared of what?” I asked, although by then my mind was running to extremes: the heavy air, the terror of enclosure, the risk of falling asleep and inhaling water. It hadn’t really occurred to me to be afraid of floating in a pitch-dark, top-sealed tank until a braver and better-adjusted friend said that she’d always felt a secret hankering to try it but was scared. This story originally published in August 2015.