When I think of the soul, it is a burning light amid darkness capable of leading you on your way. At times it can shine out of you onto others without as much as a word exchanged. It is where all your innermost desires are and the emotions felt that you buried away. The faint mantra you hear over and over in your head is the heartbeat to your soul. You must be still and quiet and open enough to it to receive it.
One of the ways I feel connected to my soul is through floating, also called sensory deprivation, or as I consider it, my monthly dose of clarity. Inside there is a room with a shower and a pod with water at the same temperature as your body, about 93 or 94 degrees. Floating in a pod is similar to the Dead Sea. It contains around a thousand pounds of Epsom salt that allows your body to float supine. The last time you floated was in your mother’s womb. From birth, you have been exposed to stimuli and are always on. While in the tank, you are cut off from sound, light, and gravity, isolating you from all sensory input. Most float sessions last from 1 to 2 hours, and some benefits of floating are relaxation, rest, pain relief, meditation, heightened levels of introspection, and improvement of sleep. It can also enhance awareness of one’s body, cause you to lose track of time, cause the brain to produce hallucinations, and improve creativity. Once the session is complete and you step out of the tank, you feel recharged and completely and utterly relaxed in both body and mind.
Like peeling away the layers to an onion, there are so many things we must strip away to connect with our soul, like social conditioning, the connection to devices, instant gratification, the expectations of who we should be, and all daily life distractions. When you step into the float tank, all that strips away. Naked in body and mind, it is total blackness as you enter the tank; there is nowhere to hide from your mind. Instead, you have no choice but to face your deepest darkest desires, look at the person you indeed are and envision who you want to be. Nothing ever stays the same, and it is crucial to grow towards who you hope to become through the guiding light of self-awareness from your soul.
There was nothing but bright red blood and white bones all around me, and that is all I could see in one session. Flashing images of birth, death, laughter, tears played like a movie reel in front of my closed eyes. While it was horrific, it was at the same time quite enlightening. The mantra that repeated over and over in my head was, “you are more than this; you are more than this.” Quite incredibly, our bodies consist of blood, bones, fascia, muscle, and skin. However, there is so much more to me than that. The innermost point at the core of my soul radiates nothing but love for myself and everything in the universe. These adventures from everyday life and consciousness allowed me to see how all living things are connected. To me, what truly matters most are experiences, not material things. Most material possessions are for everyone else, merely projections of whom we want people to believe us to be. It is priceless given the opportunity to distinguish who you truly are from whom you pretend to be. In an always-on world, it is helpful to disconnect. Turn off the voice in your head that never stops, the urge to check your phone for likes, the idea that doing nothing is wrong.
It is crucial to feed your soul. Stop and ask yourself what do you want to do today? Sunday is my day to take for myself, and I do just that. Whether I wander around a used bookstore breathing in the delicious vanilla scent of the pages, make pumpkin ravioli from scratch, create mosaic glass art while being inspired by a lecture from Manly P. Hall, or take a hike and revel in all the glorious colors nature paints before my eyes. The excitement that bubbles up inside when you go someplace new, learning a new skill, or having a stimulating conversation about the philosophical questions of the world are all things my soul yearns for and craves. To hear it, you must be in the present moment and listen.
Stop worrying about things you cannot control, what celebrities are doing, what your friends ate for lunch, who has the nicest car, the skinniest legs, what the president tweeted today, what is on sale at Target, unplug all that from your mind. Alternatively, focus on yourself and what makes you happy. Your soul reflects your truth, and while that road is less traveled for some, you will never be lost.
