Main Street Business

Because I am both the first-born son of a preacher and a writer, it was no surprise that I found myself afloat in a body-temperature pool of water on a Sunday morning in January when I might have been in church. That pool, about the size of Thoreau’s Walden Pond cabin, is nested beneath the rough-hewn beams of an old mill that is now the home of Mend, a sustainable spa and retail space that opened last summer just south of the bridge in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

I’d been inside the building before to interview the upstairs tenant, and I remembered its rustic charm. Centuries-old adze marks and saw lines suggest phantom walls of bygone enterprises, timeless characteristics that blend with the Native American flute music that now permeates the lower level, where Zen decor sets the tone for integrative health practices like massage and float therapy.

Writer’s note:

I’ll spend a lot of time in this article describing things like the building because concrete objects lend themselves to sensory descriptions. I can see the beams, hear the flute, smell the lavender, et cetera. I’m presenting the subject in terms we can all understand.

This is because I am hoping to stumble upon a way of describing float therapy in similarly concrete terms. It won’t be easy. Once past the material world, it becomes much more difficult to describe experiences that take place exclusively in the mind. For over a week now, I have been chatting up my float experience with anyone who will listen in an attempt to unlock a metaphor or two that will convey its transcendence. Nothing seems to compare. Readers of Kerouac will appreciate vacillating between realism and trippy hallucination, but my own literary tastes are usually more traditional. Bear with me.

To describe an experience

The challenge of describing a sensory deprivation experience that takes place at the boundaries of the physical world has flirted with me for a few years now, coyly waving from road signs and flitting through the literature of integrative health whenever a professional quarterback or, say, the Secretary of Health and Human Services mentions alternative therapies. Seeing that it is now an option nearby, I sensed that the time had come to see what it was all about.

On a frigid day in January, I met up with co-founder Erika Stubbs to tour the space and learn more about float in general. Like most Berkshire natives, her affect was both grounded and buoyant, alternating between the two as she described her own hard work in preparing such a Zen space. She guided me through the facility with evident pride for her work, pulling back literal curtains to reveal calming feng shui and describing the sustainable ethos that governed their decorating decisions. Reclaimed objects and sustainably harvested materials constitute the bulk of the decor, and nearly all of their retail products are earth-friendly. The consistency of their practice establishes a clear philosophy about connecting with one’s environment.

In the chamber, before floating

Nowhere is that more evident than in the float chamber. At the southern end of the building, Erika accessed the space and guided me into the humidity while she explained the process. Following a brief period of decompression that would allow my parasympathetic nervous system to adjust, I would shower to remove any oils and salts from my skin before entering the pool. The pool itself was filled with epsom salts and other minerals, keeping me buoyant, and the water would be heated to about 93 degrees – warm but not overheated. The whole process would take a little more than an hour.

I was aware of these protocols from my initial research investigations into float therapy. Although the evidence for transdermal absorption of magnesium (via the epsom salts) is scant, studies of float therapy support its use for the treatment of anxiety and stress. People who already practice mindfulness experience greater results, as if their openness avails them to its effects.

Following my brief orientation to the float chamber, Erika escorted me to a reception area where I received a warm neck pillow and my choice of teas, both of which had the effect of drawing me into a mindset that was more available to relaxation. As with many integrative practices, it was hard to say whether the act of stillness itself induced a calmer state or if my intention to arrive there paved the way for it to happen, but after fifteen minutes, my neck and shoulders had begun to relax. It helped that I had, just that morning, spent time contemplating a quotation from Jenny O’Dell’s book How to Do Nothing that proposes a “lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us” and a “movement downward into place.” I had landed in my chair, ready for the wider expansion to come.

Just you and the pool of dense water

Erika returned to escort me back to the float chamber and to review the instructions one last time. She pointed out where I could adjust the volume of the music, where to turn off the lights when I was ready, and how I could ask for assistance if needed. She outlined what I should expect throughout the timeframe: the initial novelty and adjustment would give way to boredom and ultimately, transcendence, as one pushes through the full hour. As a recent convert to cold showers and a longtime adherent of doing things the hard way, I found the promise reassuring.

The same essay that fed me the O’Dell quotation had also stoked my ascetic fires with some Kierkegaard that morning: “The more you limit yourself, the more resourceful you become” (thank you, Chris Hayes and my Sunday New York Times). I had left my phone in my coat pocket in preparation for the self-denial (I would be in water, after all), and once I had disrobed and showered, there was nothing left to limit. The next hour was just me and a pool of dense water.

Dense bordering on springy, actually. In the first few minutes, I adjusted to the sensation, pressing down on the water with my arms and allowing them to rise back to the surface. At some point, someone described to me the experience of floating in the Dead Sea, and I imagine it must feel like this. The water was like a bedsheet where the surface met my body, which, contrary to its wont in normal water, actually floated.

This was not exactly the sensory deprivation experience I had anticipated. I could look up at the black ceiling, hear the flutes, and feel the water. As my body drifted around the pool, I occasionally brushed up against the sides of the tank. I noticed that for some reason, I kept drifting to the southwest, a little closer to the speakers. I attached some significance to that, but it sounds a little druidic now.

Another state

After about twenty minutes of mentally noting such observations, though, something happened. I don’t think – or at least it is hard to believe – that I drifted off to sleep. What I experienced was more of a liminal space, flitting out of consciousness for seconds at a time. Perhaps my reptilian brain would not allow me to completely fall asleep in a pool of water. Perhaps being in water returned me to a womb-like state. I really don’t know, and my research hasn’t uncovered an explanation of the biological or neurological processes involved. It will be interesting to see what scientists discover when they develop a waterproof MRI machine.

I entered that state at around half an hour into the float. At forty-five minutes, I felt refreshed and somewhat restless, but following Erika’s advice, I resisted the urge to rise before the lights came back on, signaling the end of the suggested timespan. I was conscious for that last period in the spirit of Kierkegaard, restricting my impulse to get on with the day and be useful again. I was idle but not bored, and I suspect that the last few minutes may be the key to suppressing the apprehension that drives us to obsessively look for a screen whenever we encounter a moment of inactivity.

At sixty minutes, the lights came back on, and I rose from the pool. Anticipating this article, I conducted a body scan to assess the impact of the session, and I found myself searching for metaphors and analogies as means of comparing it to other experiences. Unlike massage, I was not vaguely sore. This was a much more comprehensive state of relaxation – I hesitate to use the word “bliss” for fear of overstating it, but if felt that good.

Ironically, the only sensation I can compare to it was the release that came to me after four days of backpacking on the Long Trail last summer, an experience that featured other kinds of deprivation. It took all of those four days, absent wifi access and deadlines, to shed the psychological weight I was carrying at the time. This took an hour. In the words of Chris Hayes, “we cannot escape our own mind; it follows us wherever we go. We can’t outrun the treadmill. Our only hope at peace is to force ourselves to step off whenever we can. To learn again to be still.”

To learn more, Mend is located at 81 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA. Call (413) 248-1048 or visit online at mendsustainablespa.com.