When I think of the soul, I think of a bright 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 kept, and the emotions that you bury away. The faint mantra you hear over and over in your head is the heartbeat to your soul. You must be still, quiet, and open enough to receive it, but it will forever change you once you do.
One of the ways I feel connected to my soul is through floating, also called sensory deprivation. Herman Melville, in his novel Moby-Dick, describes Ishmael deciding to go to sea when he “begins to grow hazy about the eyes” (18). The same goes for me; I go to the water but float within it to gain clarity, and to sustain my sanity.
Floating in a pod is like the Dead Sea but in a spa setting rather than being out in the never-ending sea. Once you enter your private room, there is a shower and a pod or a cabin like a small pool or tub that you enter. It contains around a thousand pounds of Epsom salt that allows the body to float effortlessly supine. The last time you floated was in your mother’s womb. From birth, you have been exposed to stimuli and are always turned 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 one to two 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, completely, and utterly relaxed in both body and mind. Enter back into the real world at your own risk; there have been many times I wish I could crawl back inside.
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 slips away. Sven Birkerts, in his essay “Emerson’s ‘The Poet’ — a Circling,” indicates that it is beneficial to our soul to have “complete openness to experience.” 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 whom you want to be. Ishmael says, “[M]]editation and water are wedded for ever” (Melville 19). How true that is when it comes to floating since it is a form of forced meditation. 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 interconnect. 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. It is priceless to get the opportunity to distinguish who you 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. The more you sit quietly in thought, the more you will hear what the soul will reveal.
During one of my most meaningful float sessions, there was nothing but bright red blood and white bones all around me, and that is all I could see. Flashing images of birth, death, laughter, and 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 organs, blood, bones, fascia, muscle, and skin. However, there is so much more to me than that.
In his essay, Birkerts agrees that the soul is “something greater than the contingent sum of his parts, his experiences.” 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. Do something for yourself to experience them rather than to say you did.
At a music festival in New York City, while dancing, feeling the music flowing through me, I looked around and saw people dancing not for themselves but staged for social media, or a girl taking 200 selfies of herself which were all the same. Am I part of this delusional world? Being in touch with your soul allows you to experience things and feel them deeply. Feel the cool raindrops as they slide down your face, or smell the sweet, sultry citrus scent of the peony bush as you walk your dog down the street.
When you are out to dinner, have a meaningful conversation with who you are with and savor the spicy Indian food bite by bite instead of snapping a picture to share with the world. The best gift you can give yourself and everyone else is focused attention. When wandering around a museum, some may see flowers in a vase but look closely, see how the light is shining through the open window, the bright colors of the petals that show remnants of water left behind, admire the immortality that the painting has.
It is crucial to feed your soul. Stop and ask yourself what do you want to do today? Sunday is the day to take for myself, and I do just that. Birkerts believes it is vital for us to experience things in our life that “gives us substance beyond all accumulations of the incidental and distracting.” 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, take a hike and revel in all the glorious colors nature paints before my eyes, learn a new skill that you are terrible at, or have a stimulating conversation about the philosophical questions of the world — these are all things my soul yearns for and craves. To hear it, you must tune in to the right frequency. There is no one way to do it or one single way to get there. We all have our own unique journeys through life.
The most important thing is that you eventually find your way. Floating did that for me. It was the portal to self-discovery, something I never knew I needed but now is essential. Your soul is like a compass guiding you along your way, but you must be knowledgeable enough to use it.
Birkerts exudes truth when he says, “[T]he technologicalized world has distracted us completely, made it hard believe that there is anything else besides.” Why is your data so important? It is the key to diverting your attention toward things you do not need. Stop worrying about 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 and delete all that from your mind. In our current world where people only read the headlines, go against the grain, and do a deep dive of discovery of interests you have, or a topic you want to know more about. Ishmael thinks “the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment” (Melville 22) is a crucial personal revelation we all must make on our journey of the soul. Stop and think before you buy something. Do you really need it, or did you mention it, and now it is flooding your eyes? Do you really like high-waisted jeans or is that what all the girls are wearing on reality tv? Separating yourself from all the influences surrounding you will allow you to discover who you are, what you want, and what makes you happy.
A cosmic shift in consciousness shattered many truths I clung so tightly to and made me realize that I do not know anything. My mind was cracked open wide illuminating what was important. That meaningful float transformed how I see the world. Once you know yourself, it enables you to see through new eyes. Time is too precious to waste mindlessly scrolling through other people’s lives rather than living your own. Herman Melville, Sven Birkerts, and I all agree that the soul is a critical part of the human condition, and our journey through life. Once your light shines, you see it in other people and all things. Artists that create from their soul, their authentic self, or their raw emotion tend to be better at evoking emotion in the audience. Finding an outlet for trauma or pent-up emotions can be liberating and healing. Once you look deep within you look deeply outward. Your soul reflects your truth, and while that road is less traveled for some, you will never be lost.
